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Host of Lex Fridman Podcast. Research Scientist at MIT, working on human-AI interaction, robotics, and machine learning.

#488 – Infinity, Paradoxes that Broke Mathematics, Gödel Incompleteness & the Multiverse – Joel David Hamkins

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Joel David Hamkins is a mathematician and philosopher specializing in set theory, the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of infinity, and he’s the #1 highest-rated user on MathOverflow. He is also the author of several books, including Proof and the Art of Mathematics and Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics. And he has a great blog called Infinitely More.
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OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(01:58) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
(15:40) – Infinity & paradoxes
(1:02:50) – Russell’s paradox
(1:15:57) – Gödel’s incompleteness theorems
(1:33:28) – Truth vs proof
(1:44:52) – The Halting Problem
(2:00:45) – Does infinity exist?
(2:18:19) – MathOverflow
(2:22:12) – The Continuum Hypothesis
(2:31:58) – Hardest problems in mathematics
(2:41:25) – Mathematical multiverse
(3:00:18) – Surreal numbers
(3:10:55) – Conway’s Game of Life
(3:13:11) – Computability theory
(3:23:04) – P vs NP
(3:26:21) – Greatest mathematicians in history
(3:40:05) – Infinite chess
(3:58:24) – Most beautiful idea in mathematics

Transcript for Infinity, Paradoxes, Gödel Incompleteness & the Mathematical Multiverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #488

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #488 with Joel David Hamkins.
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Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:00:00)
The following is a conversation with Joel David Hamkins, a mathematician and philosopher specializing in set theory, the foundation of mathematics, and the nature of infinity. He is the number one highest rated user on MathOverflow, which I think is a legendary accomplishment. MathOverflow, by the way, is like StackOverflow but for research mathematicians. He is also the author of several books, including Proof in The Art of Mathematics and Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics. And he has a great blog, infinitelymore.xyz. This is a super technical and super fun conversation about the foundation of modern mathematics and some mind-bending ideas about infinity, nature of reality, truth, and the mathematical paradoxes that challenged some of the greatest minds of the 20th century.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:02)
I have been hiding from the world a bit, reading, thinking, writing, soul-searching, as we all do every once in a while. But mostly, just deeply focused on work and preparing mentally for some challenging travel I plan to take on in the new year. Through all of it, a recurring thought comes to me, how damn lucky I am to be alive and to get to experience so much love from folks across the world. I want to take this moment to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything, for your support, for the many amazing conversations I’ve had with people across the world. I got a little bit of hate and a whole lot of love, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m grateful for all of it. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:00)
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find ways to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here’s Joel David Hamkins.

Infinity & paradoxes

Lex Fridman
(00:02:17)
Some infinities are bigger than others. This idea from Cantor at the end of the 19th century, I think it’s fair to say, broke mathematics before rebuilding it. I also read that this was a devastating and transformative discovery for several reasons. So one, it created a theological crisis, because infinity is associated with God, how could there be multiple infinities? Also, Cantor was deeply religious himself. Second, there’s a kind of mathematical civil war. The leading German mathematician, Kronecker, called Cantor a corrupter of youth and tried to block his career.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:57)
Third, many fascinating paradoxes emerged from this, like Russell’s paradox, about the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves, and those threatened to make all of mathematics inconsistent. Finally, on the psychological and personal side, Cantor’s own breakdown. He literally went mad, spending his final years in and out of sanatoriums, obsessed with proving the continuum hypothesis. So laying that all out on the table, can you explain the idea of infinity, that some infinities are larger than others, and why was this so transformative to mathematics?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:03:35)
Well, that’s a really great question. I would want to start talking about infinity and telling the story much earlier than Cantor actually, because, I mean, you can go all the way back to Ancient Greek times when Aristotle emphasized the potential aspect of infinity as opposed to the impossibility, according to him, of achieving an actual infinity. Archimedes’ method of exhaustion where he is trying to understand the area of a region by carving it into more and more triangles, say, and sort of exhausting the area and thereby understanding the total area in terms of the sum of the areas of the pieces that he put into it. And it proceeded on this kind of potential understanding of infinity for hundreds, thousands of years.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:04:25)
Almost all mathematicians were potentialists only and thought that it was incoherent to speak of an actual infinity at all. Galileo is an extremely prominent exception to this, though he argued against this sort of potentialist orthodoxy in The Dialogue of Two New Sciences. Really lovely account there that he gave. In many ways, Galileo was anticipating Cantor’s developments, except he couldn’t quite push it all the way through and ended up throwing up his hands in confusion, in a sense. The Galileo paradox is the idea or the observation that if you think about the natural numbers, I would start with zero, but I think maybe he would start with one.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:05:17)
The numbers one, two, three, four, and so on, and you think about which of those numbers are perfect squares. So zero squared is zero and one squared is one and two squared is four, three squared is nine, 16, 25, and so on. And Galileo observed that the perfect squares can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with all of the numbers. I mean, we just did it. I associated every number with its square. And so it seems like on the basis of this one-to-one correspondence that there should be exactly the same number of squares, perfect squares, as there are numbers, and yet there are all the gaps in between the perfect squares, right?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:06:03)
And this suggests that there should be fewer perfect squares, more numbers than squares because the numbers include all the squares plus a lot more in between them, right? And Galileo was quite troubled by this observation because he took it to cause a kind of incoherence in the comparison of infinite quantities, right? Another example is, if you take two line segments of different lengths, and you can imagine drawing a kind of foliation, a fan of lines that connect them. So the endpoints are matched from the shorter to the longer segment, and the midpoints are matched and so on. So spreading out the lines as you go. And so every point on the shorter line would be associated with a unique, distinct point on the longer line in a one-to-one way.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:06:57)
And so it seems like the two line segments have the same number of points on them because of that, even though the longer one is longer. And so it makes, again, a kind of confusion over our ideas about infinity. Also, with two circles, if you just place them concentrically and draw the rays from the center, then every point on the smaller circle is associated with a corresponding point on the larger circle, in a one-to-one way. And again, that seems to show that the smaller circle has the same number of points on it as the larger one, precisely because they can be put into this one-to-one correspondence.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:07:36)
Now, of course, the contemporary attitude about this situation is that those two infinities are exactly the same, and that Galileo was right in those observations about the equinumerosity. The way we would talk about it now is to appeal to what I call the Cantor-Hume principle, or some people just call it Hume’s principle, which is the idea that if you have two collections, whether they’re finite or infinite, then we want to say that those two collections have the same size, they’re equinumerous, if and only if there’s a one-to-one correspondence between those collections. And so Galileo was observing that line segments of different lengths are equinumerous, and the perfect squares are equinumerous with the whole…
Joel David Hamkins
(00:08:17)
All of the natural numbers, and any two circles are equinumerous and so on. The tension between the Cantor-Hume principle and what could be called Euclid’s principle, which is that the whole is always greater than the part, is a principle that Euclid appealed to in the Elements. Many times when he’s calculating area and so on, he wants… It’s a kind of basic idea that if something is just a part of another thing, then the whole is greater than the part. And so what Galileo was troubled by was this tension between what we call the Cantor-Hume principle and Euclid’s principle.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:08:59)
It really wasn’t fully resolved, I think, until Cantor. He’s the one who really explained so clearly about these different sizes of infinity and so on in a way that was so compelling. So he exhibited two different infinite sets and proved that they’re not equinumerous; they can’t be put into one-to-one correspondence. It’s traditional to talk about the uncountability of the real numbers. So Cantor’s big result was that the set of all real numbers is an uncountable set. Maybe if we’re going to talk about countable sets, then I would suggest that we talk about Hilbert’s Hotel, which really makes that idea perfectly clear.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:39)
Yeah, let’s talk about Hilbert’s Hotel.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:09:41)
Hilbert’s Hotel is a hotel with infinitely many rooms. Each room is a full floor suite. So there’s floor zero… I always start with zero because for me, the natural numbers start with zero, although that’s maybe a point of contention for some mathematicians. The other mathematicians are wrong.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:58)
Like I mentioned, I’m a programmer, so starting at zero is a wonderful place to start.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:10:01)
Exactly. So there’s floor zero, floor one, floor two, or room zero, one, two, three, and so on, just like the natural numbers. So Hilbert’s Hotel has a room for every natural number, and it’s completely full. There’s a person occupying room N for every N. But meanwhile, a new guest comes up to the desk and wants a room. “Can I have a room, please?” And the manager says, “Hang on a second, just give me a moment.” You see, when the other guests had checked in, they had to sign an agreement with the hotel that maybe there would be some changing of the rooms during their stay.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:10:39)
And so the manager sent a message up to all the current occupants and told every person, “Hey, can you move up one room, please?” So the person in room five would move to room six, and the person in room six would move to room seven and so on. And everyone moved at the same time. Of course, we never want to be placing two different guests in the same room, and we want everyone to have their own private room. But when you move everyone up one room, then the bottom room, room zero, becomes available, of course. So he can put the new guest in that room. So even when you have infinitely many things, then the new guest can be accommodated. And that’s a way of showing how the particular infinity of the occupants of Hilbert’s Hotel, it violates Euclid’s principle.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:11:25)
It exactly illustrates this idea because adding one more element to a set didn’t make it larger, because we can still have a one-to-one correspondence between the total new guests and the old guests by the room number, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:11:40)
So to just say one more time, the hotel is full.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:11:45)
The hotel is full.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:46)
And then you could still squeeze in one more, and that breaks the traditional notion of mathematics and breaks people’s brains about when they try to think about infinity, I suppose. This is a property of infinity.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:11:59)
It’s a property of infinity that sometimes when you add an element to a set, it doesn’t get larger. That’s what this example shows. But one can go on with Hilbert’s Hotel, for example. I mean, maybe the next day, 20 people show up all at once. We can easily do the same trick again, just move everybody up 20 rooms. Then we would have 20 empty rooms at the bottom, and those new 20 guests could go in. But on the following weekend, a giant bus pulled up, Hilbert’s bus. And Hilbert’s bus has, of course, infinitely many seats. There’s Seat Zero, Seat One, Seat Two, Seat Three, and so on. So one wants to… You know, all the people on the bus want to check into the hotel, but the hotel is completely full. So what is the manager going to do?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:12:50)
And when I talk about Hilbert’s Hotel in class, I always demand that the students provide the explanation of how to do it. So maybe I’ll ask you. Can you tell me, yeah, what is your idea about how to fit them all in the hotel, everyone on the bus, and also the current occupants?
Lex Fridman
(00:13:08)
You separate the hotel into even and odd rooms, and you squeeze in the new Hilbert bus people into the odd rooms, and the previous occupants go into the even rooms.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:13:20)
That’s exactly right. So, I mean, that’s a very easy way to do it. If you just tell all the current guests to double their room number, so in Room N, you move to Room 2 times N. So they’re all going to get their own private room, the new room, and it will always be an even number because 2 times N is always an even number. And so all the odd rooms become empty that way. And now we can put the bus occupants into the odd-numbered rooms.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:42)
And by doing so, you have now shoved an infinity into another infinity.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:13:47)
That’s right. So what it really shows, I mean, another way of thinking about it is that, well, we can define that a set is countable if it is equinumerous with a set of natural numbers. And a kind of easy way to understand what that’s saying in terms of Hilbert’s Hotel is that a set is countable if it fits into Hilbert’s Hotel, because Hilbert’s Hotel basically is the set of natural numbers in terms of the room numbers. So to be equinumerous with a set of natural numbers is just the same thing as to fit into Hilbert’s Hotel. And so what we’ve shown is that if you have two countably infinite sets, then their union is also countably infinite. If you put them together and form a new set with all of the elements of either of them, then that union set is still only countably infinite.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:14:34)
It didn’t get bigger. And that’s a remarkable property for a- a notion of infinity to have, I suppose. But if you thought that there was only one kind of infinity, then it wouldn’t be surprising at all, because if you take two infinite sets and put them together, then it’s still infinite. And so if there were only one kind of infinity, then it shouldn’t be surprising- … that the union of two countable sets is countable. So there’s another way to push this a bit harder, and that is when when Hilbert’s train arrives, and Hilbert’s train has infinitely many train cars- … and each train car has infinitely many seats.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:15:13)
And so we have an infinity of infinities of the train passengers together with the current occupants of the hotel, and everybody on the train wants to check in to Hilbert’s Hotel. So the manager can, again, of course, send a message up to all the rooms telling every person to double their room number again. And so that will occupy all the even-numbered rooms again and free up again the odd-numbered rooms. So somehow, we want to put the train passengers into the odd-numbered rooms. And so while every train passenger is on some car, let’s say Car C and Seat S, somehow, we have to take these two coordinates, you know, C, S, the car number and the seat number, and produce from it an odd number in a one-to-one way. And that’s actually not very difficult.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:16:10)
In fact, one can just use, say… An easy way to do it is to just use the number 3 to the C times 5 to the S. 3 to the C, 3 to the car number, so 3 x 3 x 3, you know, the number of the car. You multiply 3 by itself the number of the train car, and then you multiply 5 by itself the seat number of times, and then you multiply those two numbers together. So 3 to the C times 5 to the S. That’s always an odd number, because the prime factorization has only 3s and 5s in it. There’s no 2 there. So therefore, it’s definitely an odd number, and it’s always different because of the uniqueness of prime factorization. So every number can be factored uniquely into primes. So if you have a number of that form, then you can just factor it, and that tells you the exponent on 3 and the exponent on 5.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:17:06)
And so you know exactly which person it was, which car they came from, and which seat they came from.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:10)
And prime factorization is every single number can be decomposed into the atoms of mathematics, which is the prime numbers. You can multiply them together to achieve that number.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:17:23)
That’s, uh-
Lex Fridman
(00:17:23)
And that’s prime factorization. You’re showing 3 and 5 are both prime numbers, odd. So through this magical formula, you can deal with this train, an infinite number of cars, with each car having an infinite number of seats.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:17:41)
Exactly right. We’ve proved that if you have countably many countable sets, then the union of those sets, putting all those sets together into one giant set, is still countable. You know, because the train cars are each countable, plus the current hotel. It’s sort of like another train car, if you want to think about it that way. The current occupants of the hotel could, you know, have the same number as any of the train cars. So putting countably many countable sets together to make one big union set is still countable. It’s quite remarkable, I think. When I first learned this many, many years ago, I was completely shocked by it and transfixed by it.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:18:20)
It was quite amazing to me that this notion of countable infinity could be closed under this process of infinitely many infinities adding up still to the very same infinity, which is a strong instance, a strong violation of Euclid’s principle once again, right? So, the new set that we built is… has many more elements than the old set in the sense that there’s additional elements, but it doesn’t have many more elements in terms of its size because it’s still just a countable infinity and it fits into Hilbert’s Hotel.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:53)
Have you been able to sort of internalize a good intuition about countable infinity? ‘Cause that is a pretty weird thing. You can have a countably infinite set of countably infinite sets, and you can shove it all in and it still is a countable infinite set.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:19:11)
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, I guess, of course when you work with these notions that the argument of Hilbert’s Hotel becomes kind of clear, there are many, many other ways to talk about it too. For example, let’s think about, say, the integer lattice, the grid of points that you get by taking pairs of natural numbers, say, so the upper right quadrant of the integer lattice, yeah? So there’s the, you know, row zero, row one, row two and so on, column zero, column one, column two and so on, and each row and column has a countable infinity of points on it, right? So those dots, if you think about them as dots, are really the same as the train cars if you think about each column in the integer lattice, it’s a countable infinity.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:20:01)
It’s like one train car and then there’s the next train car next to it, and then the next column next to that, the next train car. And so… But if we think about it in this grid manner, then I can imagine a- a kind of winding path winding through these grid points, like up and down the diagonals- … winding back and forth. So I start at the corner point and then I go down, up and to the left, and then down and to the right, up and to the left, down and to the right, and so on, in such a way that I’m gonna hit every grid point in- on this path. So, this gives me a way of assigning room numbers to the points.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:20:38)
Because every grid point is going to be the Nth point on that path for some N. And that gives a correspondence between the grid points and the natural numbers themselves. So it’s a kind of different picture. I mean, before we used this 3 to the C, 5 times 5 to the S, which is a kind of, you know, overly arithmetic way to think about it. But there’s a kind of direct, you know, way to understand that it’s still a countable infinity when you have countably many countable sets because you can just start putting them on this list. And as long as you give each of the infinite collections a chance to add one more person to the list, then you’re going to accommodate everyone in any of the sets in one list.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:20)
Yeah, it’s a really nice visual way to think about it. You just zigzag your way across the grid to make sure everybody’s included, that gives you kind of an algorithm for including everybody. So can you speak to the uncountable infinities?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:21:33)
Yeah, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:33)
What are the integers and the real numbers-
Joel David Hamkins
(00:21:35)
Correct
Lex Fridman
(00:21:36)
… and what is the line that Cantor was able to find?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:21:38)
Maybe there’s one more step I want to insert before doing that.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:43)
Right
Joel David Hamkins
(00:21:43)
which is the rational numbers. So we did pairs of natural numbers. Right? That’s the train car, basically. But maybe it’s a little bit informative to think about the rational, the fractions, the set of fractions, or rational numbers, because a lot of people maybe have an expectation that maybe this is a bigger infinity because the rational numbers are densely ordered; between any two fractions you can find another fraction, right? The average of two fractions is another fraction. And so sometimes people, it seems to be a different character than the integers, which are discretely ordered, right? From any integer, there’s a next one and a previous one and so on, but that’s not true in the rational numbers. And yet, the rational numbers are also still only a countable infinity.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:22:35)
And the way to see that is actually it’s just exactly the same as Hilbert’s train again, because every fraction consists of two integers, the numerator and the denominator. And so if I tell you two natural numbers, then you know what fraction I’m talking about. I mean, plus the sign issue, I mean if it’s positive or negative. But if you just think about the positive fractions, then you know, you have the numbers of the form P over Q, where Q is not zero. So you can still do 3 to the P times 5 to the Q; the same idea works with the rational numbers. So this is still a countable set. And you might think, well, every set is going to be countable because there’s only one infinity.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:23:21)
I mean if that’s a kind of perspective maybe that you’re adopting, but it’s not true, and that’s the profound achievement that Cantor made is proving that the set of real numbers is not a countable infinity. It’s a strictly larger infinity, and therefore there’s more than one concept of infinity, more than one size of infinity.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:40)
So let’s talk about the real numbers. What are the real numbers? Why do they break infinity?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:23:44)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:44)
The countable infinity.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:23:45)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:46)
Looking it up on Perplexity, real numbers include all the numbers that can be represented on the number line, encompassing both rational and irrational numbers. We’ve spoken about the rational numbers, and the rational numbers, by the way, are, by definition, the numbers that can be represented as a fraction of two integers.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:24:05)
That’s right. So with the real numbers, we have the algebraic numbers. We have of course all the rational numbers. The integers and the rationals are all part of the real number system, but then also we have the algebraic numbers like the square root of 2 or the cube root of 5 and so on. Numbers that solve an algebraic equation over the integers, those are known as algebraic numbers. It was an open question for a long time whether that was all of the real numbers or whether there would exist numbers that are the transcendental numbers. The transcendental numbers are real numbers that are not algebraic.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:38)
And we won’t even go to the surreal numbers, about which you have a wonderful blog post. We’ll talk about that a little bit later.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:24:43)
Oh, great. So it was Liouville who first proved that there are transcendental numbers, and he exhibited a very specific number that’s now known as the Liouville constant, which is a transcendental number. Cantor also famously proved that there are many, many transcendental numbers. In fact, it follows from his argument on the uncountability of the real numbers that there are uncountably many transcendental numbers. So most real numbers are transcendental.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:12)
And again, going to Perplexity, “Transcendental numbers are real or complex numbers; they are not the root of any non-zero polynomial with integer or rational coefficients. This means they cannot be expressed as solutions to algebraic equations with integer coefficients, setting them apart from algebraic numbers.”
Joel David Hamkins
(00:25:29)
That’s right. So some of the famous transcendental numbers would include the number pi, you know, the 3.14159265 and so on. So that’s a transcendental number. Also, Euler’s constant, the e, like e to the x, the exponential function.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:47)
So you could say that some of the sexiest numbers in mathematics are all transcendental numbers?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:25:51)
Absolutely. That’s true. Yeah, yeah. Although, you know, I don’t know, square root of two is pretty.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:56)
Square root. All right. So it depends. Let’s not. Beauty can be found in-
Joel David Hamkins
(00:26:00)
That’s right
Lex Fridman
(00:26:00)
…in all the different kinds of sets, but yeah.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:26:02)
That’s right. And if you have a kind of simplicity attitude, then, you know, zero and one are looking pretty good too, so… And they’re definitely not.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:07)
Sorry to take that tangent, but what is your favorite number? Do you have one?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:26:10)
Oh, gosh. You know-
Lex Fridman
(00:26:12)
Is it zero?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:26:13)
Did you know there’s a proof that every number is interesting? You can prove it, because…
Lex Fridman
(00:26:22)
Yeah? What’s that proof look like?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:26:23)
Yeah, okay.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:23)
How do you even begin?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:26:24)
I’m gonna prove to you-
Lex Fridman
(00:26:25)
Okay
Joel David Hamkins
(00:26:26)
… that every natural number is interesting.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:28)
Okay.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:26:29)
Yeah. I mean, zero’s interesting because, you know, it’s the additive identity, right? That’s pretty interesting. And one is the multiplicative identity, so when you multiply it by any other number, you just get that number back, right? And two is, you know, the f- the first prime number. That’s super interesting, right? Okay. So… …One can go on this way and give specific reasons, but I want to prove as a general principle that every number is interesting. And this is the proof. Suppose, toward contradiction, that there were some boring numbers. Okay?
Lex Fridman
(00:27:03)
Okay.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:27:04)
But if, if there was an uninteresting number- … then there would have to be a smallest uninteresting number. But that’s a contradiction, because the smallest uninteresting number is a super interesting property to have. So therefore-
Lex Fridman
(00:27:23)
Ah, that’s good
Joel David Hamkins
(00:27:24)
…there cannot be any boring numbers.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:26)
I’m going to have to try to find a hole in that proof, because there’s a lot of baked in in the word interesting, but yeah, that’s beautiful.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:27:33)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:34)
That doesn’t say anything about the transcendental numbers, about the real numbers that you just…
Joel David Hamkins
(00:27:38)
That’s right
Lex Fridman
(00:27:38)
… proved from just-
Joel David Hamkins
(00:27:39)
That’s right
Lex Fridman
(00:27:39)
… four natural numbers.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:27:40)
Yeah. Okay, so should we get back to Cantor’s argument, or?
Lex Fridman
(00:27:42)
Sure.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:27:42)
Okay.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:43)
You’ve masterfully avoided the question. Well, you basically said, “I love all numbers.”
Joel David Hamkins
(00:27:47)
Yeah, basically.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:48)
Is that what you said? Okay. All right.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:27:49)
That was my intention.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:49)
Back to Cantor’s argument. Let’s go.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:27:51)
Okay, so Cantor wants to prove that the infinity of the real numbers is different and strictly larger than the infinity of the natural numbers. So the natural numbers are the numbers that start with zero and add one successively, so zero, one, two, three, and so on. And the real numbers, as we said, are the numbers that come from the number line, including all the integers and the rationals and the algebraic numbers and the transcendental numbers and all of those numbers altogether. Now obviously, since the natural numbers are included in the real numbers, we know that the real numbers are at least as large as the natural numbers. And so the claim that we want to prove is that it’s strictly larger.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:28:36)
So suppose that it wasn’t strictly larger, then they would have the same size. But to have the same size, remember, means by definition that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between them. So we suppose that the real numbers can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. So therefore, for every natural number N, we have a real number, let’s call it R sub N. R sub N is the Nth real number on the list. Basically, our assumption allows us to think of the real numbers as having been placed on a list, R1, R2, and so on. Okay, and now I’m going to define the number Z, and it’s going to be… The integer part is going to be a zero, and then I’m going to put a decimal place, and then I’m going to start specifying the digits of this number Z, D1, D2, D3, and so on.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:29:28)
And what I’m going to make sure is that the Nth digit after the decimal point of Z is different from the Nth digit of the Nth number on the list.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:29:40)
Okay? So, to specify the Nth digit of Z, I go to the Nth number on the list, R sub N, and I look at its Nth digit after the decimal point. And whatever that digit is, I make sure that my digit is different from it. Okay? And then I want to do something a little bit more, and that is I’m going to make it different in a way that I’m never using the digits zero or nine. I’m just always using the other digits and not zero and. It would form a kind of diagonal going down and to the right, and for that reason, this argument is called the diagonal argument because we’re looking at the Nth digit of the nth number, and those exist on a kind of diagonal going down. And we’ve made our number Z so that the Nth digit of Z is different from the Nth digit of the nth number.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:30:58)
But now it follows that Z is not on the list because Z is different from R1 because, well, the first digit after the decimal point of Z is different from the first digit of R1 after the decimal point. That’s exactly how we built it. And the second digit of Z is different from the second digit of R2 and so on. The Nth digit of Z is different from the Nth digit of R7 for every end. So therefore, Z is not equal to any of these numbers R7. But that’s a contradiction because we had assumed that we had every real number on the list, but yet here is a real number Z that’s not on the list, okay? And so that’s the main contradiction.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:43)
And so it’s a kind of proof by construction.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:31:45)
Exactly. So, given a list of numbers, Cantor is proving… It’s interesting that you say that, actually, because there’s a kind of philosophical controversy that occurs in connection with this observation about whether Cantor’s construction is constructive or not. Given a list of numbers, Cantor gives us a specific means of constructing a real number that’s not on the list, is a way of thinking about it. There’s this one aspect, which I alluded to earlier, but some real numbers have more than one decimal representation, and it causes this slight problem in the argument. For example, the number one, you can write it as 1.0000 forever, but you can also write it as 0.999 forever. Those are two different decimal representations of exactly the same number.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:38)
You beautifully got rid of the zeros and the nines. Therefore, we don’t need to even consider that, and the proof still works.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:32:44)
Exactly, because the only kind of case where that phenomenon occurs is when the number is eventually zero or eventually nine. Since our number Z never had any zeros or nines in it, it wasn’t one of those numbers. So actually, in those cases, we didn’t need to do anything special to diagonalize. The mere fact that our number has a unique representation already means that it’s not equal to those numbers. So maybe it was controversial in Cantor’s day, more than 100 years ago, but I think it’s most commonly looked at today as, you know, one of the initial main results in set theory, and it’s profound and amazing and insightful and the beginning point of so many later arguments.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:33:24)
And this diagonalization idea has proved to be an extremely fruitful proof method, and almost every major result in mathematical logic is using in an abstract way the idea of diagonalization. It was really the start of so many other observations that were made, including Russell’s paradox and the halting problem and the recursion theorem. So many other principles are using diagonalization at their core.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:56)
Can we just step back a little bit?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:33:58)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:58)
This infinity crisis led to a kind of rebuilding of mathematics. So it’d be nice if you lay out the things it resulted in. One is set theory became the foundation of mathematics. All mathematics could now be built from sets, giving math its first truly rigorous foundation. The axiomatization of mathematics, the paradoxes forced mathematicians to develop ZFC and other axiomatic systems, and mathematical logic emerged. Gödel, Turing, and others created entirely new fields. So, can you explain what set theory is and how does it serve as a foundation of modern mathematics, and maybe even the foundation of truth?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:34:43)
That’s a great question. Set theory really has two roles that it’s serving. There are two ways that set theory emerges. On the one hand, set theory is its own subject of mathematics, with its own problems and questions and answers and proof methods. So really, from this point of view, set theory is about the transfinite recursive constructions or well-founded definitions and constructions. Those ideas have been enormously fruitful, and set theorists have looked into them and developed so many ideas coming out of that. But set theory has also happened to serve in this other foundational role. It’s very common to hear things said about set theory that really aren’t taking account of this distinction between the two roles that it’s serving.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:35:38)
It’s its own subject, but it’s also serving as a foundation of mathematics. So in its foundational role, set theory provides a way to think of a collection of things as one thing. That’s the central idea of set theory. A set is a collection of things, but you think of the set itself as one abstract thing. So when you form the set of real numbers, then that is a set. It’s one thing. It’s a set, and it has elements inside of it. So it’s sort of like a bag of objects. A set is kind of like a bag of objects. So we have a lot of different axioms that describe the nature of this idea of thinking of a collection of things as one thing itself, one abstract thing.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:20)
And axioms are, I guess, facts that we assume are true, based on which we then build the ideas of mathematics. So there’s a bunch of facts, axioms about sets that we can put together, and if they’re sufficiently powerful, we can then build on top of that a lot of really interesting mathematics.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:36:42)
Yeah, I think that’s right. So, the history of the current set theory axioms, known as the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms, came out in the early 20th century with Zermelo’s idea. The history is quite fascinating because Zermelo in 1904 offered a proof that what’s called the axiom of choice implies the well-order principle. So he described his proof, and that was extremely controversial at the time. There was no theory, there weren’t any axioms there. Cantor was not working in an axiomatic framework. He didn’t have a list of axioms in the way that we have for set theory now, and Zermelo didn’t either. And his ideas were challenged so much with regard to the well-order theorem—
Joel David Hamkins
(00:37:29)
that he was pressed to produce the theory in which his argument could be formalized, and that was the origin of what’s known as Zermelo set theory.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:39)
And going to Perplexity, the axiom of choice is a fundamental principle in set theory which states that for any collection of non-empty sets, it is possible to select exactly one element from each set, even if no explicit rule to make the choices is given. This axiom allows the construction of a new set containing one element from each original set, even in cases where the collection is infinite or where there is no natural way to specify a selection rule. So this was controversial, and this was described before there’s even a language for axiomatic systems.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:38:14)
That’s right. So on the one hand, the axiom of choice principle is completely obvious that we want this to be true, that it is true. A lot of people take it as a law of logic. If you have a bunch of sets, then there’s a way of picking an element from each of them. There’s a function. If I have a bunch of sets, then there’s a function that when you apply it to any one of those sets, gives you an element of that set. It’s a completely natural principle. It’s called the axiom of choice, which is a way of anthropomorphizing the mathematical idea. It’s not like the function is choosing something. It’s just that if you were to make such choices, there would be a function that consisted of the choices that you made.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:39:01)
And the difficulty is that when you can’t specify a rule or a procedure by which you’re making choices, then it’s difficult to say what the function is that you’re asserting exists. You want to have the view that, well, there is a way of choosing. I don’t have an easy way to say what the function is, but there definitely is one. This is the way of thinking about the axiom of choice.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:28)
So we’re going to say the three letters of ZFC may be a lot in this conversation. You already mentioned—
Joel David Hamkins
(00:39:33)
Right
Lex Fridman
(00:39:33)
Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. The Z and the F and the C in that come from this axiom of choice.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:39:41)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:42)
So ZFC sounds like a super technical thing, but it is the set of axioms that’s the foundation of modern mathematics.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:39:49)
Yeah, absolutely. So one should be aware also that there are huge parts of mathematics that pay attention to whether the axiom of choice is being used, and they don’t want to use the axiom of choice, so they work out the consequences that are possible without the axiom of choice or with weakened forms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, and so on. And there’s quite a vibrant amount of work in that area. But going back to the axiom of choice for a bit, it’s maybe interesting to give Russell’s description of how to think about the axiom of choice. So Russell describes this rich person who has an infinite closet.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:40:31)
In that closet, he has infinitely many pairs of shoes, and he tells his butler, “Please go and give me one shoe from each pair.” And the butler can do this easily because for any pair of shoes, he can just always pick the left shoe. There’s a way of picking that we can describe. We always take the left one or always take the right one, or take the left one if it’s a red shoe and the right one if it’s a brown shoe, you know. We can invent rules that would result in these kinds of choice functions so we can describe explicit choice functions. For those cases, you don’t need the axiom of choice to know that there’s a choice function.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:41:14)
When you can describe a specific way of choosing, then you don’t need to appeal to the axiom to know that there’s a choice function. But the problematic case occurs when you think about the infinite collection of socks that the person has in their closet. And if we assume that socks are indistinguishable within each pair, you know, they match each other, but they’re indiscernible, then the butler wouldn’t have any kind of rule for which sock in each pair to pick. And so it’s not so clear that he has a way of producing one sock from each pair, right?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:41:56)
So that’s what’s at stake, is the question of whether you can specify a rule by which the choice function, you know, a rule that it obeys that defines the choice function, or whether there’s sort of this arbitrary choosing aspect to it. That’s when you need the axiom of choice to know that there is such a function. But of course, as a matter of mathematical ontology, we might find attractive the idea that, well, look, I mean, not every way of choosing the socks has to be defined by a rule. Why should everything that exists in mathematical reality follow a rule or a procedure of that sort? If I have the idea that my mathematical ontology is rich with objects, then I think that there are all kinds of functions and ways of choosing.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:42:45)
Those are all part of the mathematical reality that I want to be talking about, and so I don’t have any problem asserting the axiom of choice. Yes, there is a way of choosing, but I can’t necessarily tell you what it is. But in a mathematical argument, I can assume that I fix the choice function because I know that there is one. So it’s a… The philosophical difference between working when you have the axiom of choice and when you don’t is the question of this constructive nature of the argument. So if you make an argument and you appeal to the axiom of choice, then maybe you’re admitting that the objects that you’re producing in the proof are not going to be constructive. You’re not going to be able to necessarily say specific things about them.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:43:30)
But if you’re just claiming to make an existence claim, that’s totally fine. Whereas if you have a constructive attitude about the nature of mathematics, and you think that mathematical claims maybe are only warranted when you can provide an explicit procedure for producing the mathematical objects that you’re dealing with, then you’re probably going to want to deny the axiom of choice and maybe much more.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:51)
Can we maybe speak to the axioms that underlie ZFC? So ZFC, or Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice, as we mentioned, is the standard foundation for most modern mathematics. It consists of the following main axioms: axiom of extensionality, axiom of empty set, axiom of pairing, axiom of union, axiom of power set, axiom of infinity, axiom of separation, axiom of replacement, axiom of regularity, and axiom of choice. Some of these are quite basic, but it would be nice to give people a sense…
Joel David Hamkins
(00:44:28)
Sure
Lex Fridman
(00:44:28)
of what it means to be an axiom. Like, what kind of basic facts we can lay on the table on which we can build some beautiful mathematics.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:44:37)
Yeah, so the history of it is really quite fascinating. So, Zermelo introduced most of these axioms, as part of what’s now called Zermelo set theory, to formalize his proof from the axiom of choice to the well-order principle, which was an extremely controversial result. So in 1904, he gave the proof without the theory, and then he was challenged to provide the theory. And so in 1908, he produced the Zermelo set theory and gave the proof that in that theory, you can prove that every set admits a well ordering. And so the axioms on the list, these things like extensionality, express the most fundamental principles of the understanding of sets that he wanted to be talking about. So for example, extensionality says if two sets have the same members, then they’re equal.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:45:26)
So it’s this idea that the sets consist of the collection of their members, and that’s it. There’s nothing else that’s going on in the set. So it’s just if two sets have the same members, then they are the same set. So it’s maybe the most primitive axiom in some respect.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:44)
Well, there’s also, just to give a flavor, there exists a set with no elements called the empty set. For any two sets, there’s a set that contains exactly those two sets as elements. For any set, there’s a set that contains exactly the elements of the elements of that set, so the union set. And then there’s the power set. For any set, there’s a set whose elements are exactly the subsets of the original set, the power set. And the axiom of infinity, there exists an infinite set, typically a set that contains the empty set and is closed under the operation of adding one more element. Back to our hotel example.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:46:22)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:23)
And there’s more, but it’s kind of fascinating to put yourself in the mindset of people at the beginning of this, of trying to formalize set theory. It’s fascinating that humans can do that.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:46:37)
I read some historical accounts by historians about that time period, specifically about Zermelo’s axioms and his proof of the well-order theorem. And the historians were saying, never before in the history of mathematics has a mathematical theorem been argued about so publicly and so vociferously as that theorem of Zermelo’s. And it’s fascinating also because the axiom of choice was widely regarded as a kind of, you know, basic principle at first, but then people were very suspicious of the well-order theorem because no one could imagine a well ordering, say, of the real numbers. And so this was a case when Zermelo seemed to be, from principles that seemed quite reasonable, proving this obvious untruth. And so people, mathematicians, were objecting.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:47:30)
But then Zermelo and others actually looked into the mathematical papers and so on of some of the people who had been objecting so vociferously, and found, in many cases, that they were implicitly using the axiom of choice in their own arguments, even though they would argue publicly against it. Because it’s so natural to use it, because it’s such an obvious principle in a way. I mean, it’s easy to just use it by accident if you’re not critical enough and you don’t even realize that you’re using the axiom of choice. That’s true now, even. People like to pay attention to when the axiom of choice is used or not used in mathematical arguments, up until this day. It used to be more important.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:48:13)
In the early 20th century it was very important because people didn’t know if it was a consistent theory or not, and there were these antinomies arising, and so there was a worry about consistency of the axioms. But then, of course, eventually, with the result of Gödel and Cohen and so on, this consistency question specifically about the axiom of choice sort of falls away. We know that the axiom of choice itself will never be the source of inconsistency in set theory. If there’s inconsistency with the axiom of choice, then it’s already inconsistent without the axiom of choice. So it’s not the cause of inconsistency. And so in that…
Joel David Hamkins
(00:48:49)
from that point of view, the need to pay attention to whether you’re using it or not from a consistency point of view is somehow less important. But still, there’s this reason to pay attention to it on the grounds of these constructivist ideas that I had mentioned earlier.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:05)
And we should say, in set theory, consistency means that it is impossible to derive a contradiction from the axioms of the theory. So it means that there are no contradictions. That’s a…
Joel David Hamkins
(00:49:15)
That’s right
Lex Fridman
(00:49:15)
a consistent axiomatic system is that there are no contradictions.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:49:19)
A consistent theory is one for which you cannot prove a contradiction from that theory.

Russell’s paradox

Lex Fridman
(00:49:23)
Maybe a quick pause, a quick break, quick bathroom break. You mentioned to me offline we were talking about Russell’s paradox and that there’s another kind of anthropomorphizable proof of uncountability. I was wondering if you can lay that out.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:49:41)
Oh yeah, sure. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:42)
Both Russell’s paradox and the proof.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:49:44)
Right. So we talked about Cantor’s proof that the real numbers, the set of real numbers is an uncountable infinity, it’s a strictly larger infinity than the natural numbers. But Cantor actually proved a much more general fact, namely that for any set whatsoever, the power set of that set is a strictly larger set. So the power set is the set containing all the subsets of the original set. So if you have a set and you look at the collection of all of its subsets, then Cantor proved that this is a bigger set. They’re not equinumerous. Of course, there’s always at least as many subsets as elements because for any element, you can make the singleton subset that has only that guy as a member, right? So there’s always at least as many subsets as elements.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:50:36)
But the question is whether it’s strictly more or not. And so Cantor reasoned like this. It’s very simple. It’s a kind of distilling the abstract diagonalization idea without being encumbered by the complexity of the real numbers. So we have a set X and we’re looking at all of its subsets. That’s the power set of X. Suppose that X and the power set of X have the same size, suppose towards contradiction, they have the same size. So that means we can associate to every individual of X a subset. And so now let me define a new set. I mean, another set, I’m going to define it. Let’s call it D. And D is the subset of X that contains all the individuals that are not in their set.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:51:28)
Every individual was associated with a subset of X, and I’m looking at the individuals that are not in their set. Maybe nobody’s like that. Maybe there’s no element of X that’s like that, or maybe they’re all like that, or maybe some of them are and some of them aren’t. It doesn’t really matter for the argument. I defined a subset D consisting of the individuals that are not in the set that’s attached to them, but that’s a perfectly good subset. And so because of the equinumerosity, it would have to be attached to a particular individual, you know? And- Let’s call that person, it should be a name starting with D, so Diana.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:52:10)
And now we ask, is Diana an element of D or not? But if Diana is an element of D, then she is in her set. So she shouldn’t be because the set D was the set of individuals that are not in their set. So if Diana is in D, then she shouldn’t be. But if she isn’t in D, then she wouldn’t be in her set. And so she should be in D. That’s a contradiction. So therefore, the number of subsets is always greater than the number of elements for any set. And the anthropomorphizing idea is the following. I’d like to talk about it this way. For any collection of people, you can form more committees from them than there are people, even if you have infinitely many people.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:53:03)
Suppose you have an infinite set of people, and what’s a committee? Well, a committee is just a list of who’s on the committee basically, the members of the committee. So there’s all the two-person committees and there’s all the one-person committees and there’s the universal, the worst committee, the one that everyone is on. Okay. The best committee is the empty committee. With no members and never meets and so on. Or is the empty committee meeting all the time? I’m not sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:29)
Yeah. That’s… wow, that’s a profound question. And does a committee with just one member meet also?
Joel David Hamkins
(00:53:35)
Yeah. Maybe it’s always in session. I don’t know. So the claim is that there are more committees than people. Okay. Suppose not. Well, then we could make an association between the people and the committees. So we would have a kind of… every committee could be named after a person in a one-to-one way. And I’m not saying that the person is on the committee that’s named after them or not on it, whatever. Maybe sometimes that happens, sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. But let’s form what I call committee D, which consists of all the people that are not on the committee that’s named after them.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:54:16)
Okay. Maybe that’s everyone, maybe it’s no one, maybe it’s half the people. It doesn’t matter. That’s a committee, it’s a set of people. And so it has to be named after someone. Let’s call that person Daniella. So now we ask, is Daniella on the committee that’s named after her? Well, if she is, then she shouldn’t be because it was the committee of people who aren’t on their own committee. And if she isn’t, then she should be. So again, it’s a contradiction. So when I was teaching at Oxford, one of my students came up with the following different anthropomorphization of Cantor’s argument. Let’s consider all possible fruit salads. We have a given collection of fruits.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:55:07)
You know, apples and oranges and grapes, whatever. And a fruit salad consists of some collection of those fruits. So there’s the banana, pear, grape salad and so on. There’s a lot of different kinds of salad. Every set of fruits makes a salad, a fruit salad. Okay… And we want to prove that for any collection of fruits, even if there are infinitely many different kinds of fruit, for any collection of fruits, there are more possible fruit salads than there are fruits. So if not, then you can put a one-to-one correspondence between the fruits and the fruit salads, so you could name every fruit salad after a fruit. That fruit might not be in that salad, it doesn’t matter. We’re just… it’s a naming, a one-to-one correspondence.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:55:53)
And then, of course, we form the diagonal salad, which consists… Of all the fruits that are not in the salad that’s named after them. And that’s a perfectly good salad. It might be a kind of diet salad, if it was the empty salad, or it might be the universal salad…
Joel David Hamkins
(00:56:12)
which had all fruits in it, if all the fruits were in it. Or it might have just some and not all. So that diagonal salad would have to be named after some fruit. So let’s suppose it’s named after durian, meaning that it was associated with durian in the one-to-one correspondence. And then we ask, well, is durian in the salad that it’s named after? And if it is, then it shouldn’t be. And if it isn’t, then it should be. And so it’s, again, the same contradiction. So all of those arguments are just the same as Cantor’s proof that the power set of any set is bigger than the set.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:56:48)
And this is exactly the same logic that comes up in Russell’s paradox, because Russell is arguing that the class of all sets can’t be a set because if it were, then we could form the set of all sets that are not elements of themselves. So basically, what Russell is proving is that there are more collections of sets than elements. Because we can form the diagonal class, you know, the class of all sets that are not elements of themselves. If that were a set, then it would be an element of itself if and only if it was not an element of itself. It’s exactly the same logic in all four of those arguments. So there can’t be a class of all sets, because if there were, then there would have to be a class of all sets that aren’t elements of themselves.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:57:40)
But that set would be an element of itself if and only if it’s not an element of itself, which is a contradiction. So this is the essence of the Russell paradox. I don’t call it the Russell paradox. Actually, when I teach it, I call it Russell’s theorem. There’s no universal set. And it’s not really confusing anymore. At the time, it was very confusing, but now we’ve absorbed this nature of set theory into our fundamental understanding of how sets are, and it’s not confusing anymore. I mean, the history is fascinating though, about the Russell paradox, because before that time, Frege was working on his monumental work undertaking, implementing the philosophy of logicism, which is the attempt to reduce all of mathematics to logic.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:58:30)
So Frege wanted to give an account of all of mathematics in terms of logical notions, and he was writing this monumental work and had formulated his basic principles. And those principles happened to imply that for any property whatsoever, you could form the set of objects with that property. This is known as the general comprehension principle. And he was appealing to the principles that support that axiom throughout his work. I mean, it was really… It wasn’t just an incidental thing, he was really using this principle.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:59:11)
And Russell wrote him a letter when he observed the work in progress, that there was this problem, because if you accept the principle that for any property whatsoever you can make a set of objects with that property, then you could form the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. That’s just an instance of the general comprehension principle. And… But the set of all sets that aren’t elements of themselves can’t be a set, because if it were, then it would be an element of itself if and only if it’s not a member of itself, and that’s a contradiction. And so Russell wrote this letter to Frege, and it was just at the moment when Frege was finishing his work. It was already at the publishers and, you know, in press basically. But it’s completely devastating.
Joel David Hamkins
(00:59:58)
I mean, it must have been such a horrible situation for Frege to be placed in, because he’s finished this monumental work, you know, years of his life dedicated to this, and Russell finds this basically one-line proof of a contradiction in the fundamental principles of the thesis that completely destroys the whole system. And Frege had put in the appendix of his work a response to Russell’s letter in which he explained what happened, and he wrote very gracefully, “Hardly anything more unwelcome can befall a scientific writer than to have one of the foundations of his edifice shaken after the work is finished. This is the position into which I was put by a letter from Mr.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:00:46)
Bertrand Russell as the printing of this volume was nearing completion.” And then he goes on to explain the matter, it concerns his basic law five and so on.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:54)
It’s heartbreaking. I mean, there’s nothing more traumatic to a person who dreams of constructing mathematics all from logic, to get a very clean, simple contradiction. I mean, that’s just…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:01:08)
You devote your life to… This work, and then it’s shown to be contradictory, and that must have been heartbreaking.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:16)
What do you think about the Frege project, the philosophy of logic, the dream of the power of logic… To construct a mathematical universe?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:01:24)
So, of course, the project of logicism did not die with Frege, and it was continued, and, you know, there’s a whole movement, the neologicists and so on, in contemporary times even. But my view of the matter is that really, we should view the main goals of logicism are basically completely fulfilled in the rise of set-theoretic foundationalism. I mean, when you view ZFC as the foundation of mathematics, and in my view, the principles of ZFC are fundamentally logical in character, including the axiom of choice, as I mentioned, as a principle of logic. This is a highly disputed point of view, though, because a lot of people take even the axiom of infinity as mathematical, inherently mathematical and not logical and so on.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:02:14)
But I think if you adopt the view that the principles of ZFC have to do with the principles of abstract, you know, set formation, which is fundamentally logical in character, then it’s complete success for logicism. So the fact that set theory is able to serve as a foundation means that mathematics can be founded on logic.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems

Lex Fridman
(01:02:35)
I think this is a good moment to talk about Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. So, can you explain them and what do they teach us about the nature of mathematical truth?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:02:47)
Absolutely. It’s one of the most profound developments in mathematical logic. I mean, the incompleteness theorems are when mathematical logic, in my view, first became sophisticated. It’s a kind of birth of the subject of mathematical logic. But to understand the theorems, you really have to start a little bit earlier with Hilbert’s program because at that time, you know, with the Russell Paradox and so on, there were these various contradictions popping up in various parts of set theory and the Burali-Forti paradox and so on. And Hilbert was famously supportive of set theory.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:03:25)
I mean, there’s this quote of him saying, “No one shall cast us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.” And what I take him to mean by that is he was so captured by the idea of using set theory as a foundation of mathematics, and it was so powerful and convenient and unifying in a way that was extremely important. And he didn’t want to give that up, despite the danger of these paradoxes, these contradictions, basically, is how some people viewed them. And so, it’s…
Lex Fridman
(01:03:58)
This minefield of paradoxes. Yeah.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:04:00)
Right. A minefield. That’s a really good way of describing the situation. And so Hilbert said, “Well, look, we have to fix this problem, you know. We want to use the set theory foundations, but we want to do it in a way that is trustworthy and reliable. We can’t allow that the foundations of mathematics are in question, you know.” This is a kind of attitude, I think, that underlies Hilbert and the Hilbert program. And so he proposed, “Look, we’re going to have this strong theory, this set theory that we want to be proving our theorems in. But on the one hand, we want it to be as strong as possible.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:04:40)
We would like it to answer all the questions.” There’s another famous quote of Hilbert in his retirement address where he proclaims, “Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen,” so, “We must know, we will know,” in which he’s very optimistic about the ability of mathematics to answer all of the questions of mathematics that we have posed. We have all these problems we want to solve, and he is saying, “We’re going to do it. We’re going to solve all these problems.” So we want to propose this strong theory, and one has the sense that he had in mind set theory in which all the questions are going to be answered. Okay?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:05:21)
But secondly, we want to combine that with a very weak arithmetic, purely finitistic theory; we want to prove that the reasoning process of the strong theory is safe. Okay? So in order to make sense of that point of view, you basically have to invent the philosophy of formalism where we can look at what a proof is, what is the nature of mathematical reasoning. And on Hilbert’s way of thinking about this, a proof is basically itself a finitistic kind of object. It’s a sequence of… If you think about the nature of what a proof is, it’s a sequence of assertions which can be viewed as sort of sequences of symbols that conform with certain rules of logical reasoning. And this is a formalist way of understanding the nature of proof.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:06:16)
So we think about a proof in a kind of syntactic, formal way. Even though the contents of those statements might be referring to infinite uncountable objects, the statements themselves are not infinite uncountable objects. The statements themselves are just finite sequences of symbols.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:33)
So when you kind of think of proof as… Maybe it’s fair to say almost, like, outside of math? It’s, like, tools operating on math. And then for Hilbert, he thought proof is inside the axiomatic system. Something like this.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:06:45)
Yeah, that’s helpful.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:46)
That’s wild.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:06:48)
The main thing about formalism is that you think of the process of doing mathematics. You divorce it from the meaning of the mathematical assertions, right? So the meaning of the mathematical assertions that you make in this infinitary theory has to do with these huge uncountable infinities and so on, possibly. And that’s a very sort of uncertain realm, maybe, and the source of the paradoxes and so on in some people’s minds. But the reasoning process itself consists of writing down sequences of symbols on your page and, you know, undertaking an argument with them which is following these finitary rules. And so, if we divorce the meaning of the symbols from just the process of manipulating the symbols, it’s a way of looking at the nature of mathematics as a kind of formal game in which…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:07:43)
the meaning may be totally absent. I don’t think it’s necessarily part of the formalist view that there is no meaning behind, but rather it’s emphasizing that we can divorce the meaning of the sentences from the process of manipulating those sentences. And then Hilbert wanted to prove in this purely finitary theory that if we follow the rules of that game, we’re never going to get a contradiction. So those were the two aims of the Hilbert program: to found the strong infinitary theory, probably set theory, which is going to answer all the questions. And then secondly, prove in the finitary theory that the strong theory is safe. In other words, consistent, yeah?
Lex Fridman
(01:08:31)
What does the word “finitary” in finitary theory mean?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:08:34)
Yeah. Well, this is, of course, philosophically contentious, and people have different ideas about what exactly it should mean. And so there’s hundreds of papers on exactly that question. But I like to take it just kind of informally. I mean, it means that we’re talking about finite sequences of symbols, and we’re going to have a theory, you know, finite strings of symbols. And a finitary theory would be one whose subject matter is about those kinds of things so that we can conceivably argue about the nature of these finite strings.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:09:05)
So a- a proof is just a finite sequence of statements, so that every statement is either one of the axioms or follows by the laws of logic from the earlier statements in some specified manner, like using modus ponens or some other law of logic like that. And such that the last line on the list is, you know, the theorem that you’re proving. So that’s what a proof is in this kind of way of thinking.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:09:29)
To take a specific example, I mean, I always conceive of the, perhaps the most natural finitary theory that one would be called upon to exhibit would be Peano arithmetic, the theory of Peano arithmetic, which is a first order theory of the nature of arithmetic. But okay, so some people say, “Well, Peano arithmetic has these strong first order induction axioms, and there’s much, much weaker versions of arithmetic, like I-sigma-naught or I-sigma-1 and so on, which are even more finitary than Peano arithmetic.” So different philosophical positions take different attitudes about what does it take to be finitary? How finitary do you have to be to be truly finitary?
Lex Fridman
(01:10:10)
So according to Perplexity, Peano arithmetic is a foundational system for formalizing the properties and operations of natural numbers using a set of axioms called the Peano axioms. Peano arithmetic provides a formal language and axioms for arithmetic operations, such as addition and multiplication over the natural numbers. The axioms define the existence of a first natural number, usually zero or one; the concept of successor function, which generates the next natural number; rules for addition and multiplication built from these concepts; the principle of induction allowing proofs around all natural numbers. And it goes on. So it’s a very particular kind of arithmetic that is a finitary.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:10:51)
You know, I view it as finitary, but this is a contentious view. Not everyone agrees with that. That’s what I was trying to hint at.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:58)
Okay. I got it. All right.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:10:58)
Peano arithmetic is one of the hugely successful theories of the natural numbers and elementary number theory. Essentially, all of classical number theory, whatever kind of theorems you want to be proving about the prime numbers or factorization or any kind of finitary reasoning about finite combinatorial objects, all of it can be formalized in Peano arithmetic. That’s the basic situation. Of course, one has to qualify those statements in light of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, but for the most part, the classical number theoretic analysis of the finite numbers is almost entirely developable inside Peano arithmetic.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:11:45)
So if we go back to the Hilbert program, Hilbert has these two goals: produce a strong theory which is going to answer all the questions, and then prove by purely finitary means that that theory will never lead into contradiction. And one can think about, well, the incompleteness theorem should be viewed as a decisive refutation of the Hilbert program. It defeats both of those goals decisively, completely. But before explaining that, maybe one should think about, you know, what if Hilbert had been right? What would be the nature of mathematics in the world that Hilbert is telling us to search for?
Lex Fridman
(01:12:24)
And if I may, going to Perplexity’s definition of Hilbert’s program, it was David Hilbert’s early 20th-century project to give all of classical mathematics a completely secure finitary foundation. In essence, the goal was to formalize all of mathematics in precise axiomatic systems and then prove using only very elementary finitary reasoning about symbols that these systems are free of contradiction.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:12:51)
Right, exactly right. Let’s imagine what it would be like if he had been right. So we would have this finitary theory, and it would prove that the strong theory was free of contradiction. So we could start enumerating proofs from the strong theory. I mean, right now, we can write a computer program that would systematically generate all possible proofs from a given theory. And so we could have this theorem enumeration machine that just spit out theorems all day long in such a manner that every single theorem would eventually be produced by this device. And so if you had a mathematical question of any kind, you could answer it by just waiting for either the answer to come out yes or the answer to come out no.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:13:51)
So the nature of mathematical investigation in Hilbert’s world is one of just turning the crank of the theorem enumeration machine. Devoid of creative thinking or imagination, it’s just getting the answer by rote procedure. So Hilbert, in effect, is telling us, with his program, that the fundamental nature of mathematics is rote computation. I mean, the way I think about the Hilbert program seems extremely attractive in the historical context of being worried about the antinomies, the inconsistencies, and so how can we kind of block them. And so-
Joel David Hamkins
(01:14:31)
It seems natural, first of all, to have a strong theory that’s going to answer all the questions, because the idea of logical independence and pervasiveness that we now know exists just wasn’t, you know, there was no known… They didn’t know anything like that happening ever. And so it’s natural to think that it wouldn’t happen, and also that they would be able to guard against this inconsistency. So it seems like the goals of the Hilbert program are quite natural in that historical context. But, you know, when you think a little more about what the nature of it would be like, it shows you this kind of rote procedure.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:15:09)
And now you’re saying, well, that doesn’t seem so unlikely maybe, in the light of increasing computer power and so on, it’s actually maybe turning into our everyday experience, where the machines are calculating more and more for us and in a way that could be alarming. Okay, but to talk about the alternative to the Hilbert point of view, I mean, if he’s wrong, then what is the nature of mathematical reality? Well, it would mean that we couldn’t ever maybe, for the first goal, we couldn’t ever write down a theory that answered all the questions. So we would always be in a situation where our best theory, even the infinitary theories, would have questions that they stumble with and are unable to answer. Independence would occur.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:16:02)
But then also, because of the failure of the second goal, we would also have to be constantly worrying about whether our theories were consistent or not, and we wouldn’t have any truly convincing means of saying that they were free from contradiction. And the fact of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem shows that that is exactly the nature of mathematical reality, actually. Those are the two incompleteness theorems. So the first incompleteness theorem says you cannot write down a computably axiomatizable theory that answers all the questions. Every such theory will be incomplete, assuming it includes a certain amount of arithmetic. And secondly, no such theory can ever prove its own consistency.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:16:47)
So not only is it the case that the finitary theory can’t prove the consistency of the strong infinitary theory, but even the infinitary theory can’t prove its own consistency, right? That’s the second incompleteness theorem. And so it’s, in that sense, a decisive takedown of the Hilbert program, which is really quite remarkable, the extent to which his theorem just really answered that whole puzzle. It’s quite amazing. There’s another aspect, kind of easy to think about. I mean, if you’re wondering about theories that prove their own consistency, then would you trust a theory that proves of itself that it’s consistent? I mean, that’s like…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:17:35)
It’s like the used car salesman telling you, “Oh, I’m trustworthy.” I mean, it’s not a reason to trust the used car salesman, is it? Just because he says that. So similarly, if you have a theory that proves its own consistency, well, I mean, even an inconsistent theory would prove its own consistency. And so it doesn’t seem to be a logical reason to believe in the consistency, if you have a theory that proves itself consistent.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:59)
Just for clarification, you used the word theory. Is it, in this context, synonymous with axiomatic system?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:18:07)
Right. So in mathematical logic, “theory” is a technical term. And it means any set of sentences in a formal language. And so if you say “axiomatic system,” it’s basically synonymous to my usage with theory. So a theory means, you know, the consequences of a set of axioms or… People are sometimes unclear on whether they just mean the axioms or the consequences of the axioms, but…
Lex Fridman
(01:18:29)
So theory includes both the axioms and the consequences of the axioms, and you use it interchangeably and the context is supposed to help you figure out which of the two you’re talking about? The axioms or the consequences? Or maybe to you, they’re basically the same?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:18:44)
Yeah, well, they’re so closely connected, although, you know, all the features aren’t the same. So if you have a computable list of axioms for a theory, then you can start enumerating the consequences of the axioms, but you won’t be able to computably decide whether a given statement is a consequence or not. You can enumerate the consequences, so you can semi-decide the consequences, but you won’t be able to decide yes or no whether a given statement is a consequence or not. So it’s the distinction between a problem being computably decidable and a problem being computably enumerable, which was made clear following the work of Turing and others that came from that. I mean, it…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:19:30)
So that’s one difference between the list of axioms of the theory and the theory itself. The axioms could be… You can decide, maybe computably, whether something is an axiom or not, but that doesn’t mean that you can decide computably whether or not something is a theorem or not. Usually, you only get to decide the positive instances. If something is a theorem, you will eventually come to recognize that, but if something isn’t a theorem, maybe at no point will you be able to say, “No, that’s not a theorem.”
Lex Fridman
(01:19:56)
And that’s of course connected to the halting problem- … and all of these-… all of these contradictions and paradoxes are all nicely beautifully interconnected.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:20:04)
That’s right. Absolutely.

Truth vs proof

Lex Fridman
(01:20:06)
So, can we just linger on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:20:09)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:09)
You mentioned the two components there. You know, there are so many questions to ask. Like, what is the difference between provability and truth? What is true and what is provable? Maybe that’s a good line to draw.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:20:21)
Yeah, this is a really core distinction that it’s fascinating to me to go back and read even the early 20th-century people before Gödel and Tarski, and they were totally sloppy about this distinction between truth and proof. It wasn’t clear at all until Gödel, basically. Although even as late as Bourbaki has a kind of confusion in this foundational work, so this standard graduate-level textbooks used in France in the presentation of logic, they are conflating truth and proof. To be true for them means to be provable. So in the early days, maybe it wasn’t clear enough that the concept of truth needed a mathematical investigation or analysis. Maybe it was already taken to be fully clear.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:21:19)
But because of the incompleteness theorem, we realized that actually there are quite subtle things happening, right? And so why don’t we talk about this distinction a bit? To me, it’s absolutely core and fundamental to our understanding of mathematical logic now.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:21:34)
…this distinction between truth and proof. So truth is on the semantic side of the syntax-semantics dichotomy. Truth has to do with the nature of reality. I mean, okay, when I talk about reality, I’m not talking about physical reality. I’m talking about mathematical reality. So we have a concept of something being true in a structure, a statement being true in a mathematical structure. Like maybe you have the real field or something, and you want to know, does it satisfy this statement or that statement? Or you have a group of some kind, or maybe you have a graph. This is a particular kind of mathematical structure that has a bunch of vertices and edges, and you want to know, does this graph satisfy that statement?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:22:19)
And Tarski gave this absolutely wonderful account of the nature of truth in what’s now known as the disquotational theory of truth. And what Tarski says is the sentence, quote, “Snow is white,” unquote, is true if and only if snow is white. And what he means by that is… Look, to say truth is a property of an assertion, so we can think of the assertion as it syntactically. So the sentence is true if and only if the content of the sentence is the case, you know? So the sentence, “Snow is white,” you know, in quotations, is true. That just means that snow is white, and that’s why it’s called the disquotational theory because we remove the quotation marks.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:23:16)
…from the assertion, right? And you can use this idea of disquotation to give a formal definition of truth in a mathematical structure of a statement in a formal language. So for example, if I have a formal language that allows me to make atomic statements about the objects and relations of the structure, and I can build up a formal language with, you know, with the logical connectives of and, and or, and implies, and not, and so on, and maybe I have quantifiers, right? Then, for example, to say that the structure satisfies phi and psi, that that single statement, phi and psi, I’m thinking of that as one statement, just means that it satisfies phi and it satisfies psi. And if you notice what happened there, I…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:24:06)
At first, the “and” was part of the sentence inside the sentence, but then in the second part, I was using the word “and” to refer to the conjunction of the two conditions. So…
Lex Fridman
(01:24:17)
Yeah, it has the disquotation.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:24:18)
Yeah, it has the disquotation. And so this idea can be done for all the logical connectors and quantifiers and everything. You’re applying Tarski’s idea of disquotation, and it allows you to define by induction the truth of any assertion in a formal language inside any mathematical structure. And so to say that a sentence is true, first of all, it’s ambiguous unless you tell me which structure you’re talking about it being true in. And so maybe we have in mind the standard model of arithmetic or something with the natural numbers and the arithmetic structure, and I want to know is a given statement true in that structure. Then we have a formal definition of what that means according to the Tarski recursive definition of truth. Okay, that’s truth.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:25:04)
Proof, on the other hand, is, you know, in this Hilbert way of thinking, we can develop proof theory. What is a proof for a mathematician, for a mathematical logician? A proof is a certain sequence or arrangement of sentences in the formal language that accord with the logical rules of a proof system. So there are certain modes of reasoning that are allowed. So if you know A and you know A implies B in the proof, then at a later step you’re allowed to write B as a consequence. So if you know A and you know A implies B, those are both two statements that are known, then you can deduce B as a consequence according to the rule of modus ponens. This is the rule of modus ponens. And, you know, there are a lot of other rules. Some people would call this implication elimination.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:25:56)
There are different kinds of proof systems. There are a lot of different formal proof systems that exist that are studied by the proof theorists, and all of them have the property that they’re sound, which means that if the premises of the argument are all true in a structure and you have a proof to get a conclusion, then the conclusion is also true in that structure. So that’s what it means to be sound. That proofs preserve truth. They’re truth-preserving arguments. Okay? But also the proof systems are also generally complete.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:26:35)
They’re both sound and complete, and complete means that whenever a statement is a consequence, a logical consequence of some other statements, which means that whenever the assumptions are true, then the consequence is also true in the structure. So whenever you have a logical consequence, then there is a proof of it. Okay? And the proof systems generally have both of those properties; they’re sound and complete. There’s a third property, a lot of logicians talk about sound and complete this, sound and complete that. But actually, there’s a hidden third adjective that they should always be talking about in any such case, which is that you should be able to recognize whether or not something is a proof or not.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:27:19)
So there’s a computable aspect to the proof systems. We want to be able to recognize whether something is a proof. It should be computably decidable whether a given sequence of statements is a proof or not. So we don’t want a proof system in which someone claims to have a proof, but we can’t check that fact whether it’s a proof or not. We want to be able to, you know, to correctly adjudicate all claims to having a proof.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:46)
Yeah, a mathematician comes to mind that said he has a proof, but the margins are too small…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:27:51)
That’s right
Lex Fridman
(01:27:51)
… to continue.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:27:52)
Exactly. So…
Lex Fridman
(01:27:53)
So that doesn’t count as a proof.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:27:55)
Yeah. So generally, all the classical proof systems that are used are sound and complete, and also computably decidable in the sense that we can decide whether something is a proof or not.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:04)
So what is, again, the tension between truth and proof? Which is more powerful, and how do the two interplay with the contradictions that we’ve been discussing?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:28:15)
Right. So the incompleteness theorem is the question whether we could, say, write down a theory for arithmetic. Say, for the standard model of arithmetic where we have the natural numbers and plus and times and zero, one, and less than, and so on. In that formal language, we can express an enormous number of statements about the nature not only of arithmetic, but actually by various coding methods, we can express essentially all of finite mathematics in that structure. So the question would be, can we write down a computable list of axioms that will answer all those questions by proof? In other words, we want to have a complete theory, a theory of arithmetic that proves all and only the true statements. That would be the goal. Hilbert would love that.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:29:03)
I mean, that would be supportive of Hilbert’s program to have such a complete theory of arithmetic, and Godel proved that this is impossible. You cannot write down a computable list of axioms that is complete in that sense. There will always be statements… if the theory is consistent, there will always be statements that you cannot prove and you cannot refute. So they are independent of that theory.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:26)
How traumatic is that, that there’s statements that are independent from the theory?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:29:30)
I mean, my view is that, yeah, this isn’t traumatic at all. This is rather completely eye-opening in terms of our understanding of the nature of mathematical reality. I mean, we’re not… we understand this profound fact about our situation with regard to mathematical truth. The incompleteness theorem tells us, look, we just can’t write down a list of axioms that is going to be consistent and it’s going to answer all the questions. It’s impossible. And so I don’t think of it as trauma. I just think, look, this is the nature of mathematical reality, and it’s good that we know it, and so now we need to move on from that and, you know, do what we can in light of that.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:19)
Is it fair to say that in general it means if I give you a statement, you can’t know if your axiomatic system would be able to prove it?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:30:31)
That’s right. In general, you cannot… the provability problem, we can formulate it as a decision problem. Given a theory and given a statement, is that statement a consequence of that theory? Yeah. This is one of the most famous decision problems. In fact, the very first one, because it’s equivalent to the Hilbert-Ackermann Entscheidungsproblem, which is also appearing in the title of Turing’s 1936 paper that was so important for computability theory. So it’s a formulation of the Entscheidungsproblem. Does a given theory have a given statement as a logical consequence?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:31:08)
Which, because of Godel’s completeness theorem, not his incompleteness theorem, but his earlier completeness theorem, Godel had proved that the proof systems that they studied did have this completeness property that I mentioned. So provability is the same as logical consequence, so… and this is an undecidable decision problem. Turing proved, and we now know it’s equivalent to the halting problem.

The Halting Problem

Lex Fridman
(01:31:30)
Can you describe the halting problem? Because it’s a thing that shows up in a very useful and, again, traumatic way through a lot of computer science, through a lot of mathematics.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:31:39)
Yeah. The halting problem is expressing a fundamental property of computational processes. So given a program, or maybe we think of it as a program together with its input, but let me just call it a program. So given a program, we could run that program, but I want to pose it as a decision problem. Will this program ever complete its task? Will it ever halt? And the halting problem is the question, given a program, will it halt? Yes or no? And of course, for any one instance, the answer’s either yes or no. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about whether there’s a computable procedure to answer all instances of this question.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:32:23)
So it’s a decision problem given as a scheme of instances for all possible programs that you could ask about. What I want to know is, is there a computable procedure that will answer those questions? And it turns out the answer’s no. The halting problem is computably undecidable. There is no computable procedure that will correctly answer all instances of whether a given program will halt. And of course, we can get half the answers in the sense that you give me a program and you say, “Will this halt?” And I could take that program and I could run it.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:32:59)
And I could keep running it, and maybe in a week, it would halt. And at that time, I could say, “Yes, it halted.” So I can get the yes answers correctly for halting, all the yes answers. But the problem is if it didn’t halt yet, like maybe I waited, you know, a thousand years and it still hasn’t halted, I don’t seem entitled to say, “No, it’s not going to halt” yet, because maybe in a thousand and one years, it’ll halt. And so at no point can I seem to say no. In order to say, “No, it won’t ever halt,” it seems like I would have to really understand how the program worked and what it was doing. So giving the yes answers was sort of trivial. You didn’t have to understand it; you just needed to run it, which is a kind of rote task.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:33:48)
But to give the no answers, you need to have a kind of deep insight into the nature of the program and what it’s doing in such a way that you would understand it and be able to see, “Oh, no, I can see this program is never going to halt.” Because, you know, it’s a much more difficult task to say, “No, it won’t halt,” than it is to say, “Yes, it halted because I ran it and it halted.” And it turns out to be impossible to have a computable procedure that gives the no answers, you know? And the argument is not very difficult. Should we do it?
Lex Fridman
(01:34:18)
Yes, let’s do it.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:34:19)
Okay. Suppose toward contradiction, I mean, all these proofs are by contradiction, and this argument is going to be a diagonal argument in the same style as the Russell argument and the Cantor argument and Godel’s argument that we haven’t talked about yet. So many diagonal arguments come in. So suppose towards contradiction that we had a procedure for determining whether a given program halted on a given input. Now, let me describe. I’m going to use that procedure as a subroutine in the following process. And my process, let’s call it Q, process Q, and it takes as input a program P, okay? And the first thing it does is it asks that subroutine, “Hey, would P halt if I ran it on P itself?” Okay. That’s the diagonal part, because we’re applying P to P, right?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:35:14)
Okay, so I’m describing program Q, and program Q takes as input P, which is itself a program. And the first thing it does is it asks the halting subroutine program, “Would P halt on P?” And if the answer comes back from the subroutine, “Yeah, that would halt,” then what I do in program Q is I immediately jump into an infinite loop. So I don’t halt. If P halts on P, I don’t halt. But if the answer came back, “No, P is never going to halt on P,” then I halt immediately. Okay, and that’s it. I’ve described what Q does.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:35:53)
And the thing about Q is that Q’s behavior on P was the opposite of P’s behavior on P. I mean, that’s how we designed Q specifically so that Q on P had the opposite behavior as P on P. Okay, so now, of course, what do we do? Well, the same thing that Russell did, and so forth, and Cantor, we ask, “Well, what would Q do on Q?” And because of this opposite behavior, Q would halt on Q if and only if Q does not halt on Q, which is a contradiction, because Q has to have the opposite behavior on Q than Q does, but that’s just contradictory.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:38)
What a beautiful proof. Simple.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:36:39)
It’s absolutely beautiful. I agree. It’s following the same logic of Russell and Cantor. I mean, going back to Cantor basically, because Russell is also quoting Cantor in his letter to Frege. Therefore, the conclusion is that the halting problem is not computably decidable. Now we can immediately prove Godel’s theorem using this, actually. It’s an immediate consequence. So why don’t we just do that? I view this as the simplest proof of Godel’s theorem. You don’t need the Godel sentence to prove Godel’s theorem. You can do it with the halting problem. So suppose that we could write down a computable axiomatization of all of the true facts of elementary mathematics, meaning arithmetic and finite combinatorial things such as Turing machine computations and so on.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:37:35)
So in fact, all those finite combinatorial processes are formalizable inside arithmetic with the standard arithmetization coding process. But let me just be a little bit informal and say suppose we could write down a complete theory of elementary finite mathematics. So we have an axiomatization of that theory. Then we could produce all possible theorems from those axioms in the way that I was describing earlier with Hilbert’s program. If we had a complete theory of elementary mathematics, we could construct a theorem enumeration machine that produced all the theorems and only the theorems from that theory. So now, I have this theorem enumeration device on my desk, and I announce that I’m open for business to solve the halting problem.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:38:25)
So you give me a program and input that you want to run that program on, and I’m going to answer the halting problem. The way I’m going to do it is I’m just going to wait for the statement coming out of the theorem enumeration device that asserts either that P does halt on that input, or I wait for the statement that P does not halt on that input. But one of them’s going to happen because it was a complete theory that was enumerating all the true statements of elementary mathematics. So therefore, if I had such a system, I could solve the halting problem, but we already proved that you cannot solve the halting problem, so therefore you cannot have such a complete theory of arithmetic. So that proves Godel’s theorem.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:05)
Maybe to take a little bit of a tangent, can you speak… You’ve written a wonderful book about proofs and the art of mathematics. So what can you say about proving stuff in mathematics? What is the process of proof? What are the tools? What is the art? What is the science of proving things in mathematics?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:39:22)
This is something that I find so wonderful to teach young mathematicians who are learning how to become mathematicians and learning about proof, and I wrote that book when I was teaching such a proof-writing class in New York.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:39:37)
Many universities have such a course, the proof-writing course, which is usually taken by students who have learned some mathematics. Usually, they’ve completed maybe the calculus sequence and are making the kind of transition to higher mathematics, which tends to involve much more proof, and it’s a kind of challenging step for them. So many math departments have this kind of course on proof-writing where the students would get exposed to how to write proofs. I wasn’t happy with most of the other books that exist for those kind of courses, and the reason was that they were so often so dull because they would concentrate on these totally uninteresting parts of what it’s like to write a proof, these kind of mechanistic procedures about how to write a proof.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:40:28)
You know, if you’re going to prove an implication, then you assume the hypothesis and argue for the conclusion, and so on. All of that is true and fine, and that’s good to know, except if that’s all that you’re saying about the nature of proof, then I don’t think you’re really learning very much. So I felt that it was possible to have a much better kind of book, one that was much more interesting and that had interesting theorems in it that still admitted elementary proof. So I wrote this book and tried to fill it with all of the compelling mathematical statements with very elementary proofs that exhibited lots of different proof styles in it. So, I found that the students appreciated it a lot.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:12)
We should say, “We dedicate the book to my students, may all their theorems be true, proved by elegant arguments that flow effortlessly from hypothesis to conclusion while revealing fantastical mathematical beauty.” Is there some interesting proofs that maybe illustrate, for people outside of mathematics or for people who just take math classes…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:41:37)
Right
Lex Fridman
(01:41:37)
…in high school and so on?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:41:39)
Yeah, let’s do a proof. There’s one in the book. We can talk about it. I think it’s a nice problem. It’s in discrete math, yeah, the 5.1, that one, more pointed at than pointing. Okay. So this is the following problem. Suppose you’re gathered with some friends, you know, in a circle, and you can point at each other however you want, or yourself, whatever, it doesn’t matter, and you can point at more than one person, you know, use all your fingers or your feet or whatever you want. So maybe you point at three of your friends or something and they point at two or three of their friends or whatever, and one person is pointing at 10 people and somebody isn’t pointing at anybody maybe, and various people are pointed at also, right?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:42:20)
So the question is, could we arrange a pattern of pointing so that everyone was more pointed at than they are pointing at others? So in other words, maybe there’s seven people pointing at me, but I’m only pointing at five people and maybe there’s, you know, 20 people pointing at you, but you’re only pointing at 15 people or something like that, right? So I want to know. There’s a similar question on Twitter. For a group of people on Twitter, could you arrange that everyone has more followers than following? Yeah, it’s the same question. Mathematically, it’s identical. Although, I don’t know, it’s not identical, because I said you could point at yourself, and I think that’s not… Can you follow yourself?
Lex Fridman
(01:43:09)
No, I don’t think so, no.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:43:10)
I don’t think you can. Okay. So can you arrange it so that everyone is more pointed at than pointing? In my book, I give a couple of different proofs of this. I think I give an induction proof and then there’s another proof. I think there’s three different proofs in there. But why don’t we just talk about my favorite proof? Suppose it were possible to arrange that we’re all more pointed at than pointing, okay? Now what we’re going to do, we’re going to agree, we’re going to give a dollar to everyone that we’re pointing at.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:43:40)
Okay? So what happens? Everybody made money, because I was pointed at by more people than I’m pointing, so I got $10 but I only paid out $7. And similarly, you got paid $20 but you only paid out $15. So if everyone is more pointed at than pointing, then everyone makes money. But it’s obviously impossible for us to make money as a group by just trading money with ourselves. And therefore, it can’t be possible that we’re all more pointed at than pointing. And this proof illustrates something. It’s one of my habits that I suggest in the book: to anthropomorphize your mathematical ideas. So,
Joel David Hamkins
(01:44:22)
you should imagine that the mathematical objects that are playing a role in your question are people, or active, somehow, animals or something that maybe have a will and a goal and so on. This is this process of anthropomorphizing. And it often makes the problems easier to understand, because we all are familiar with the fact that it’s difficult to make money, and the proof is totally convincing because of our knowledge that we can’t make money as a group by trading dollars between us, without any new money coming into the group.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:45:01)
But that by itself is actually a difficult mathematical claim. I mean, if someone had to prove that you can’t make money by trading within a group, you know, it can’t be that everyone in the group makes money just by shifting money around in the group. Maybe you think that’s obvious, and it is obvious if you think about money. But if you had asked the question about mathematical functions of a certain kind and so on, then maybe it wouldn’t be as clear as it is when you’re talking about this money thing, because we can build on our human experience about the difficulty of getting money and other resources. It doesn’t have to be money; it could be candy, whatever. You know, we just know that you can’t easily get more things in that kind just by trading within a group.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:48)
And we should say that sometimes the power of proof is such that the non-obvious can be shown, and then over time that becomes obvious. So, in the context of- money or social systems, there’s a bunch of things that are non-obvious. And the whole point is that proof can guide us to the truth, to the accurate description of reality. We just proved a property of money.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:46:14)
It’s interesting to think about, well, what if there were infinitely many people in your group? Then it’s not true anymore. The theorem fails. In fact, you can arrange that everyone is strictly more pointed than pointing. And also, if everyone has even just one dollar bill-
Joel David Hamkins
(01:46:35)
then you can arrange that afterwards everyone has infinitely many dollar bills. Because in terms of cardinality, that’s the same. It’s just, say, countable infinity in each case. If you had countably many friends and everyone has one dollar bill, then you can arrange a pattern of passing those dollar bills amongst each other so that afterwards everyone has infinitely many dollar bills. What you need is for each person to be attached to, you know, one of the train cars or something. So, think of everyone as coming from Hilbert’s train, but also think of them as fitting into Hilbert’s Hotel. So, just have everyone on the Nth car give all their money to the person who ends up in the Nth room. So, they each give one dollar to that person.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:47:16)
So afterwards, that person has infinitely many dollars, but everyone only paid out one dollar. So it’s a way of making it happen.

Does infinity exist?

Lex Fridman
(01:47:23)
To what degree, sticking on the topic of infinity, should we think of infinity as something real?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:47:33)
That’s an excellent question. I mean, a huge part of the philosophy of mathematics is about this kind of question, that what is the nature of the existence of mathematical objects, including infinity? But I think asking about infinity specifically isn’t that different than asking about the number five. What is- what does it mean for the number five to exist? What are the numbers really, right?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:47:58)
This, this is maybe one of the fundamental questions of mathematical ontology. I mean, there’s many different positions to take on the question of the nature of the existence of mathematical objects or abstract objects in general. And there’s a certain kind of conversation that sometimes happens when you do that. And it goes something like this: sometimes people find it problematic to talk about the existence of abstract objects such as numbers, and there seems to be a kind of wish that we could give an account of the existence of numbers or other mathematical objects or abstract objects that was more like, you know, the existence of tables and chairs and rocks and so on.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:48:42)
And so there seems to be this desire to reduce mathematical existence to something, you know, that we can experience physically in the real world. But my attitude about this attempt is that it’s very backward, I think, because I don’t think we have such a clear existence of the nature of physical objects, actually. I mean, we all have experience about existing in the physical world, as we must, because we do exist in the physical world, but I don’t know of any satisfactory account of what it means to exist physically.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:49:28)
I mean, if I ask you, say, “Imagine, you know, a certain kind of steam locomotive,” you know, and I describe the engineering of it and the weight of it and the nature of the gear linkages, and, you know, and I show you schematic drawings of the whole design and so on, and, you know, we talk in detail about every single detailed aspect of this steam locomotive. But then suppose after all that conversation, I say, “Okay, now I would like you to tell me what would it mean for it to exist physically, I mean, as opposed to just being an imaginary steam locomotive?” Then what, what could you possibly say about it? I mean, except by saying, “Oh, I just mean that it exists in the physical world.” But what does that mean? That’s the question, right? It’s not an answer to the question.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:50:18)
That is the question. So I don’t think that there’s anything sensible that we can say about the nature of physical existence. It is a profound mystery. In fact, it becomes more and more mysterious the more physics we know. I mean, back in, say, Newtonian physics, one had a picture of the nature of physical objects as, you know, little billiard balls or something, or maybe they’re infinitely divisible or something like that. Okay, but then this picture is upset with the atomic theory of matter. But then that picture’s upset when we realize that the atoms actually can be split and consist of electrons and protons and neutrons and so on.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:50:56)
But then that picture’s upset when we realize that those things themselves are built out of quarks and leptons and so on, and who knows what’s coming. And furthermore, all of those things, the nature of their existence is actually as wave functions in some cloud of probability and so on. And so it just becomes more and more mysterious the more we learn, and not at all clarifying. And so the nature of what it means to say that there’s an apple on my desk, and to give an account of what that physical existence really is at bottom, I think, is totally absent. Whereas we do seem to have a much more satisfactory account of the nature of abstract existence. I mean, I can talk about the nature of the empty set.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:51:43)
You know, this is the predicate which is never true or something like that. I can talk about those kind of logical properties or the singleton of the empty set and so on. I mean, of course, it’s very difficult if you go very far with it, but the point is that it doesn’t get more and more mysterious. The more that you say, it becomes only more and more clear. And so it seems to me that we don’t really have any understanding of what the physical world is as opposed to the abstract world, and it’s the abstract world where existence is much more clear.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:19)
It is very true that we don’t know anything about the soda bottle or the steam locomotive just because we can poke at it. Again, we anthropomorphize, and that actually gets us into trouble sometimes because I’m not feeling the quantum mechanics when I’m touching it.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:52:34)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:34)
And therefore, it’s easy to forget and feel like this is real and mathematical objects are not, but you’re making the opposite argument. When you draw a distinction between numerals and numbers, which numerals are the representation of the number on the page and so on, could you say that a number is real? Do numbers exist?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:52:57)
I happen to think so. I mean, I’m on the side of realism in mathematics, and I think that these abstract objects do have a real existence in a way that we can give an account of, in a way I just tried to describe.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:10)
So, like, you would describe it as the size of a set with four elements in it?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:53:14)
Well, there are different ways to understand the nature of four. I mean, actually, this gets into the question of structuralism, which is maybe a good place to talk about it.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:24)
What is structuralism?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:53:25)
Structuralism is a philosophical position in mathematics, or the philosophy of mathematics, by which one emphasizes that what’s important about mathematical objects is not what they’re made out of or what their substance or essence is, but rather how they function in a mathematical structure. And so, what I call the structuralist attitude in mathematics is that we should only care about our mathematical structures up to isomorphism.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:53:53)
If I have a mathematical structure of a certain kind and I make an exact copy of it using different individuals to form the elements of that structure, then the isomorphic copy is just as good mathematically, and there’s no important mathematical difference that would ever arise from working with this isomorphic copy instead of the original structure. And so, therefore, that’s another way of saying that the substance of individuals in a mathematical structure is irrelevant with regard to any mathematical property of that structure. And so…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:54:33)
So to ask a question like, “What is the number four really?” is an anti-structuralist thing, because if you have a structure, say, the natural numbers, with all the numbers in it, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, then I could replace the number four with something else, like, you know, this bottle of water could play the role of the number four in that structure, and it would be isomorphic. And it wouldn’t matter at all for any mathematical purpose to use this alternative mathematical system, you know? That’s to say that we don’t care what the number four is really. That is irrelevant. What…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:55:12)
The only thing that matters is what are the properties of the number four in a given mathematical system, and recognizing that there are other isomorphic copies of that system, and the properties of that other system’s number four are going to be identical to the properties of this system’s number four with regard to any question that’s important about the number four. But those questions won’t be about essence. So in a sense, structuralism is anti-essential in mathematics.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:42)
So is it fair to think of numbers as a kind of pointer to a deep underlying structure?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:55:48)
Yeah, I think so, because I guess part of the point of structuralism is that it doesn’t make sense to consider mathematical objects or individuals in isolation. What’s interesting and important about mathematical objects is how they interact with each other and how they behave in a system, and so maybe one wants to think about the structural role that the objects play in a larger system, a larger structure. There’s a famous question that Frege had asked actually when he was looking into the nature of numbers, because in his logicist program, he was trying to reduce all of mathematics to logic.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:56:26)
And in that process, he was referring to the Cantor-Hume principle that, whenever two sets are equinumerous, then they have the same number of elements, if and only if. And he founded his theory of number on this principle, but he recognized that there was something that dissatisfied him about that situation, which is that the Cantor-Hume principle does not seem to give you criteria for which things are numbers. It only tells you a kind of identity criteria for when are two numbers equal to each other. Well, two numbers are equal just in case the sets of those sizes are equinumerous, so that’s the criteria for number identity. But it is not a criteria for what is a number.
Joel David Hamkins
(01:57:12)
And so this problem has become known as the Julius Caesar problem because Frege said we don’t seem to have any way of telling from the Hume principle whether Julius Caesar is a number or not. So he’s asking about the essence of number and whether… Of course, one has a sense that he picked maybe what he was trying to present as a ridiculous example… …Because maybe you have the idea that, well, obviously Julius Caesar is not a number, and there’s a lot of philosophical writing that seems to take that line also, that obviously the answer is that Julius Caesar is not a number. But the structuralists disagree with that position. The structuralist attitude is, “Look, you give me a number system. If Julius Caesar isn’t a number, then I can just…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:58:01)
Let’s take the number 17 out of that system and plug in Julius Caesar for that role, and now I’ve got a new number system, and now Julius Caesar happens to be the number 17.” And that’s totally fine, you know. So the point of structuralism is that the question of whether Julius Caesar is a number or not is irrelevant to mathematics. It is irrelevant because it is not about structure, it’s about this essence of the mathematical objects. So that’s the structuralist criticism of Frege’s point.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:35)
You’ve kind of made the case that you can say more concrete things about the existence of objects in mathematics than you can in our physical reality, about which to us human brains, things are obvious or not. So what’s more real, the reality we see with our eyes or the reality we can express in mathematical theorems?
Joel David Hamkins
(01:58:59)
I’m not quite sure. I mean… I live entirely in the platonic realm, and I don’t really understand the physical universe at all. So I don’t have strong views.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:13)
Let’s talk about the platonic realm. Is it… Like, because you live there, is it real? Or-
Joel David Hamkins
(01:59:19)
Oh yeah, totally, yeah. This is the realist position in mathematics is that abstract objects have a real existence. And okay, what’s meant by that is that there’s some sense of existence in which those objects can be regarded as real.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:32)
How should we think about that? How should we try to visualize that? What does it mean to live amongst abstract objects? Because life is finite. We’re all afraid of death. We fall in love with other physical manifestations of objects. And you’re telling me that maybe reality actually exists elsewhere, and this is all just a projection…
Joel David Hamkins
(01:59:59)
Well, I mean-
Lex Fridman
(01:59:59)
…from the abstract realm?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:00:02)
Do abstract objects exist in a place and at a time? That’s very debatable, I think.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:07)
Right. And what does place and time mean?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:00:08)
All time, yeah, so…
Lex Fridman
(02:00:10)
So what’s more real: physics or the mathematical Platonic space?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:00:16)
Well, the mathematical Platonic realm is… I’m not sure I would say it’s more real, but I’m saying we understand the reality of it in a much deeper and more— …a more convincing way. I don’t think we understand the nature of physical reality very well at all, and I think most people aren’t even scratching the surface of the question as I intend to be asking it. So, you know, obviously we understand physical reality. I mean, I knock on the table— …and so on, and we know all about what it’s like to, you know, have a birthday party or to drink a martini or whatever. And so we have a deep understanding of existing in the physical world. But maybe understanding is the wrong word. We have an experience of living in the world—
Lex Fridman
(02:01:01)
Yeah, experience.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:01:01)
…and riding bicycles and all those things, but I don’t think we actually have an understanding at all, I mean, very, very little of the nature of physical existence. I think it’s a profound mystery. Whereas I think that we do have something a little better of an understanding of the nature of mathematical existence and abstract existence. So that’s how I would describe the point.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:26)
Somehow it feels like we’re approaching some deep truth from different directions, and we just haven’t traveled as far in the physics world as we have in the mathematical world.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:01:41)
Maybe I could hope that someone will give, you know, the convincing account, but it seems to be a profound mystery to me. I, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to give an account of physical existence.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:52)
Yeah, I wonder, like a thousand years from now as physics progresses- … what this same conversation would look like.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:01:59)
Right. That would be quite interesting.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:00)
Do you think there’s breakthroughs a thousand years from now on the mathematics side? ‘Cause we’ve just discussed, and we’ll return to a lot of turmoil a century ago. Do you think there’s more turmoil to be had?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:02:14)
It’s interesting to me because I have my feet in two worlds: mathematics and philosophy, and to compare the differences between these subjects. One of the big cultural differences is towards the idea of progress in the subject, because mathematics has huge progress. We simply understand the mathematical ideas much, much better, continually improving our understanding, and there’s growth in knowledge. We understand the nature of infinity now better than they did 100 years ago. I mean, definitely better. And they understood it better 100 years ago than they did, you know, for the previous thousands of years, and so on.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:02:57)
So, in almost every part of mathematics, there’s improved understanding of the core issues, so much so that the questions at hand become totally different, and the field sort of moves on to more difficult, interesting questions. Whereas in philosophy, that’s a little bit true that there’s progress. But meanwhile, it’s also true that there are these eternal questions that have been with us for thousands of years, and in fact, so much so that you can find a lot of philosophers arguing the important contribution of philosophy is in asking the questions rather than answering them, because it’s hopeless to answer them. I mean, the nature of these deep philosophical questions is so difficult. Less of a sense of progress is what I’m trying to say.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:03:48)
I don’t see any reason to think that the progress in mathematics, in the growth in our mathematical understanding and knowledge, won’t simply continue. And so, a thousand years from now, maybe the mathematics that they will be doing at that time would probably be completely unrecognizable to me. I maybe wouldn’t even begin to understand what they’re talking about, even without sort of witnessing the intervening developments. So if you bring someone from ancient times to today, they maybe wouldn’t even understand what we’re talking about with some of the questions. But I feel that, you know, if Archimedes came and we were able to communicate, I think I would be able to tell him about some of the things that are going on in mathematics now, and maybe, you know…
Joel David Hamkins
(02:04:43)
Or anyone from that time, I mean. So I think it is possible to have this kind of progress, even when the subject kind of shifts away from the earlier concerns as a result of the progress, basically.

MathOverflow

Lex Fridman
(02:04:57)
To take a tangent on a tangent, since you mentioned philosophy, maybe potentially more about the questions, and maybe mathematics is about the answers, I have to say you are a legend on MathOverflow, which is like Stack Overflow but for math. You’re ranked number one all time on there with currently over 246,000 reputation points. How do you approach answering difficult questions on there?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:05:24)
Well, MathOverflow has really been one of the great pleasures of my life. I’ve really enjoyed it. And I’ve learned so much from interacting on MathOverflow. I’ve been on there since 2009, which was shortly after it started. I mean, it wasn’t exactly at the start, but a little bit later. And I think it gives you the stats for how many characters I typed, and I don’t know how many million it is, but this enormous amount of time that I’ve spent thinking about those questions, and it has really just been amazing to me.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:06)
How do you find the questions that grab you and how do you go about- … answering them?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:06:11)
So, I’m interested in any question that I find interesting. So… And it’s not all questions. Sometimes certain kinds of questions just don’t appeal to me that much.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:21)
So you go outside of set theory as well?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:06:23)
When I first joined MathOverflow, I was basically one of the few people in logic who was answering. I mean, there were other people who know some logic, particularly from category theory and other parts of mathematics that aren’t in the most traditional parts of logic, but they were answering some of the logic questions. So I really found myself able to make a contribution in those very early days by engaging with the logic-related questions. But there weren’t many logic people asking questions either. But what I found was that there was an enormous amount of interest in topics that were logic-adjacent.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:07:04)
So a question would arise, you know, in group theory, but it had a logic aspect or an analysis or whatever, and there would be some logic angle on it. And what I found was that I was often able to figure out an answer by learning enough about that other subject matter. This is what was so rewarding for me, is because basically I had to learn enough. My main expertise was logic, but someone would ask a question, you know, that was about, say, the axiom of choice in this other subject matter or the continuum hypothesis or something like that in the other subject matter. And I would have to learn enough about that other subject and the context of the question in order to answer, and I was often able to do that. And so I was quite happy to do that.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:07:50)
And also I learned a lot by doing that, because I had to learn about these other problem areas. And so it really allowed me to grow enormously as a mathematician.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:01)
To give some examples of questions you’ve answered: What are some reasonable sounding statements that are independent of ZFC? What are the most misleading alternate definitions in taught mathematics? Is the analysis as taught in universities in fact the analysis of definable numbers? Solutions to the continuum hypothesis? Most unintuitive application of the axiom of choice? Non-trivial theorems with trivial proofs? Reductio ad absurdum or the contrapositive? What is a chess piece mathematically? We should say you worked quite a bit on infinite chess, which we should definitely talk about. It’s awesome. You’ve worked on so many fascinating things. Has philosophy ever clarified mathematics? Why do we have two theorems when one implies the other?

The Continuum Hypothesis

Lex Fridman
(02:08:48)
And, of course, just as an example, you’ve given a really great, almost historical answer on the topic of the continuum hypothesis. Maybe that’s a good place to go. We’ve touched on it a little bit, but it would be nice to lay out what is the continuum hypothesis that Cantor struggled with. And I would love to also speak to the psychology of his own life story, his own struggle with it. The human side of mathematics is also fascinating. So what is the continuum hypothesis?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:09:16)
The continuum hypothesis is the question that arises so naturally whenever you prove that there’s more than one size of infinity. So Cantor proved that the infinity of the real numbers is strictly larger than the infinity of the natural numbers. But immediately when you prove that, one wants to know, “Well, is there anything in between?” I mean, what could be a more natural question to ask immediately after that? And so Cantor did ask it, and he spent his whole life thinking about this question. The continuum hypothesis is the assertion that there is no infinity in between the natural numbers and the real numbers. And, of course, Cantor knew many sets of real numbers. Everything in between…
Joel David Hamkins
(02:10:01)
I mean, everything that’s in that interval would be equinumerous with some set of real numbers. But we know lots of sets of real numbers. I mean, there are all these various closed sets, Cantor sets, and so on. There’s Vitali set. We have all kinds of sets of real numbers. And so you might think, “Well, if the continuum hypothesis is false, then we’ve probably seen the set already. We just have to prove that it’s strictly in between.” But it turned out that for all the sets that anyone ever could define or pick out or observe, for all the sets of real numbers, it was always the case either that they were countable, in which case they’re equinumerous with the natural numbers or else finite, or they were fully equinumerous with the whole real line.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:10:44)
And so they were never strictly in between. I mean, you’re in this situation and you have hundreds, thousands of sets that are candidates to be in between, but in every single case, you can prove it’s on one side or the other and not strictly in between. And so in every situation where you’re able to figure out whether it’s in between or not, it’s always never strictly in between.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:09)
Now, Cantor was obsessed with this.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:11:11)
I think he was. Yeah, I’m not a historian, so I don’t know the exact history.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:15)
Well, everything I’ve seen, it seems to be the question that broke him, huh? I mean, just struggling with different opinions on the hypothesis within himself and- …desperately chasing, trying to prove it.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:11:29)
So he had a program for proving it, which has been affirmed in a certain respect. Of course, the continuum hypothesis holds for open sets. That’s easy to see. If you have an open interval, then this is fully equinumerous with the whole real line. Any interval is equinumerous with the whole line because all you would need is a function, you know, like the arctangent function or something that maps the whole real line into an interval. And that’s a one-to-one function. So we know the open sets have the property that they’re non-trivial open sets are all fully equinumerous with the whole real line. So never strictly in between. But remarkably, Cantor proved it also for the closed sets, and that is using what’s called the Cantor-Bendixson theorem.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:12:15)
So it’s quite a remarkable result. It’s definitely not obvious. And this theorem actually was the origin of the ordinals. Cantor had to invent the ordinals in order to make sense of his Cantor-Bendixson process.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:31)
Can you define the open and the closed set in this context?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:12:34)
Oh, yeah. Sure. So a set of reals is open if every point that it contains is surrounded by a little interval of points, the whole tiny little interval. But that tiny little interval is already just by itself equinumerous with the whole line. So that’s why that question is sort of easy for open sets. A closed set is a complement of an open set, and there are a lot of closed sets that are really complicated, of varying sizes. So of course, any closed interval is a closed set, but it’s not only those. There are also things like the Cantor set, which you get by omitting middle thirds. Maybe some people have seen this construction. Or you can imagine sort of randomly taking a lot of little tiny open intervals, you know, all over the line and so on.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:13:18)
So that altogether would be an open set, and the complement of it would be a closed set. So you can imagine just kind of tossing down these open intervals, and what’s left over is the closed set. Those sets can be quite complicated, and they can have isolated points, for example, if the two open intervals were just kissing and leaving only the one point between them. But also you could have sequences that are converging to a point that would also be a closed set, or convergent sequences of convergent sequences and so on. That would be a closed set also.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:50)
The Cantor set is constructed by iteratively removing open intervals, middle thirds, like you mentioned, from the interval, and trying to see can we do a thing that- that goes in between?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:14:00)
Right. So the question would be, “Can you produce a set that has an intermediate size-” …an intermediate cardinality, right?” And Cantor proved with the closed set, “No, it’s impossible. Every closed set is either countable or equinumerous with the whole real line.”
Joel David Hamkins
(02:14:18)
And what the Cantor program for solving the continuum hypothesis was, was a sort of working up. So you did it for open sets and for closed sets, and you sort of work up. Maybe he wants to go into what are called the Borel sets, which are sort of combinations of open and closed sets. And there’s a vast hierarchy of Borel complexity. And it turns out that the continuum hypothesis has been proved also for the Borel sets in this hierarchy. And, but then one wants to go beyond. What about more complicated sets? So there’s this hierarchy of complexity for sets of real numbers.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:14:53)
And Cantor’s idea was to sort of work your way up the hierarchy by proving that the continuum hypothesis was more and more true for those more and more complicated sets, based on our understanding of the earlier cases. And that has been carried out to a remarkable degree. It turns out that one needs, one begins to need large cardinal assumptions though in order to get to the higher realms, even at the level of projective hierarchy, which are sets that you can define by using quantifiers over the real numbers themselves. So you get this hierarchy on top of the Borel hierarchy, the hierarchy of projectively definable sets.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:15:35)
And it turns out that if you have enough large cardinals, then the projective sets also are always either countable or equinumerous with the whole real line. And then one can try to go beyond this and so on. So I view all of those results, which came, you know, in the past 50 years, the later ones, as fulfilling this Cantor idea that goes back, you know, 120 years to his idea that we would prove the continuum hypothesis by establishing more and more instances for greater and greater complexity of sets. But of course, even with what we know now, it hasn’t fully succeeded and it can’t because the hierarchy of complexity doesn’t include all sets of real numbers. Some of them are sort of transcending this hierarchy completely in a way.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:16:27)
And so the program can’t ever fully be successful, especially in light of the independence result.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:34)
Yeah. Well, spoiler alert, can you go to the independence result?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:16:38)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:39)
So what does that mean? So the continuum hypothesis was shown to be independent from the ZFC axioms of mathematics?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:16:46)
Right. So the ZFC axioms were the axioms that were put forth first by Zermelo in 1908 in regard to his proof of the well-order theorem using the axiom of choice. That wasn’t fully ZFC. At that time, it was just Zermelo theory because he sort of… There was a kind of missing axiom, the replacement axiom and the foundation axiom were added later, and that’s what makes the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiomatization, which became sort of standard. Actually, there’s another aspect, which is Zermelo’s original theory allowed for the existence of ur-elements, or these atoms, mathematical objects that are not sets but out of which we build the set theoretic universe, whereas set theorists today generally don’t use ur-elements at all.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:17:34)
I argue that it’s really the philosophy of structuralism that leads them to omit the ur-elements because it turns out that if you adopt ZFC axioms with ur-elements, ZFCU it’s called, or ZFA, then any structure that exists, any mathematical structure that exists in that set theoretic universe with the atoms is isomorphic to a structure that doesn’t use the atoms at all. And you don’t need the atoms if you’re a structuralist because you only care about the structures up to isomorphism anyway, and the theory is simply more elegant and clear without the atoms. They’re just not needed. And so that’s why today when we talk about set theory, generally we talk about the atom-free version, and ZFC has no ur-elements. Okay. So we formulate the ZFC axioms of set theory.

Hardest problems in mathematics

Joel David Hamkins
(02:18:26)
These are expressing the main principle ideas that we have about the nature of sets and set existence. And Cantor had asked about the continuum hypothesis in the late 19th century, and it remained open, totally open until 1938.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:50)
We should mention, I apologize, that it was the number one problem in the Hilbert’s 23 set of problems formulated at the beginning of the century.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:18:59)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:59)
Maybe you can comment on why he put that as number one.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:19:02)
So, right. So Hilbert had introduced at his famous address at the turn of the century this list of problems that he thought could guide or were important to consider in the coming century of mathematics. I mean, that’s how people talk about it now, although I’m not sure at all… Of course, I can’t really speak for Hilbert at all, but if you were a very prominent mathematician, I find it a little hard to believe that Hilbert would have conceived of his list in the same way that we now take his lists. I mean, having observed the century unfold, we know that that list of 23 problems did in fact guide whole research programs, and it was extremely important and influential.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:19:46)
But at the time, Hilbert would have no reason to think that that would be true, and he was just giving a lecture and had a list of problems that he thought were very important. And so I would find it more reasonable to think that he was just making a list of problems that he thought were extremely interesting and important and fundamental in a way without the heavy burden of guiding this 20th century research. Although it turns out that, in fact, that’s exactly what they did.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:20:18)
And we already discussed Hilbert’s views on the nature of set theory and the fundamental character, that quote where he said, “No one will cast us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.” So I think Hilbert was convinced by Cantor on the importance and the fundamental nature of the continuum hypothesis for the foundations of mathematics, which was a critically important development for the unity of mathematics. I mean, before set theory emerged as a foundation of mathematics, there were… you know, there are different subjects in mathematics. There’s algebra and there’s analysis, real analysis, and topology and geometry, and so on. There’s all these disparate subjects with their own separate axioms, right?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:21:03)
And, but sometimes it happens, like when you’re proving, say, the fundamental theorem of algebra, you know, that the complex numbers are an algebraically closed field that you can solve any polynomial equation in. But the proof methods for that theorem come from other parts of mathematics, you know, those topological proofs and so on. And so how does that work? I mean, if you have totally different axiom systems, but you’re using results from one subject in another subject, it’s somehow incoherent unless there’s one underlying subject. So the unity of mathematics was provided by the existence of a mathematical foundation like set theory. And at the time, it was set theory.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:21:47)
And so it’s critically important to be able to have a single theory in which one views all of mathematics as taking place to resolve that kind of transfer and borrowing phenomenon that was definitely happening. So that must have been part of Hilbert’s thinking about why it’s so important to have a uniform foundation, and set theory was playing that role at the time. Now, of course, we have other possible foundations coming from category theory or type theory, and there’s univalent foundations now. So there are competing foundations now. There’s no need to just use one set theoretic foundation.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:22:25)
Although set theory continues to, in my view, have an extremely successful metamathematical analysis as a foundation, I think is much more successful than set theory for any of those other foundations, but it’s much less amenable to things like computer proof and so on, which is part of the motivation to find these alternative foundations. So, yeah, just to talk about Hilbert, I think he was motivated by the need for unifying foundation of mathematics and set theory was playing that role, and the continuum hypothesis is such a core fundamental question to ask, so it seems quite natural that he would put it on the list. There were other logic-related questions, though, like Hilbert’s tenth problem is also related to logic.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:23:08)
This is the question about Diophantine equations, and he asked to provide an algorithm to decide whether a given Diophantine equation has a solution in the integers. So a Diophantine equation is just… I mean, it’s a, maybe a fancy way of talking about something that’s easy to understand, a polynomial equation, except it’s not just one variable, many variables. So you have polynomials in several variables over the integers, and you want to know, can you solve it? So the problem is, as stated by Hilbert, provide an algorithm for answering the question whether a given polynomial equation has a solution in the integers. So he’s sort of presuming that there is an algorithm, but he wants to know what it is. What is the algorithm?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:23:55)
But the problem was solved by proving that there is no algorithm. It’s an undecidable problem, like the halting problem. There is no computable procedure that will correctly decide whether a given polynomial equation has a solution in the integers. So that’s quite a remarkable development, I think. So there were also a few other logic-related questions on the list.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:20)
And so eventually, the continuum hypothesis was shown to be independent from ZFC axioms, as we’ve mentioned. So what… How does that make you feel? What is independence and what does that mean?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:24:30)
But once you tell the story, the historical story-
Lex Fridman
(02:24:32)
Yes
Joel David Hamkins
(02:24:32)
… is really quite dramatic-
Lex Fridman
(02:24:34)
Yeah, that’s great
Joel David Hamkins
(02:24:34)
I think. Because Cantor poses the question in the late 19th century. And then it’s totally open. Hilbert asks about it, you know, at the turn of the 20th century. Nobody has any clue. There’s no answer coming. Until 1938, this is four decades later, right? So a long time, and Godel, Kurt Godel proved half of it. What he proved is that if the axioms of set theory are consistent, then there is a set theoretic world where both the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis are true. So what he’s doing is showing, this is called the constructible universe, Godel’s L. So he solved this… this is the same result where he answers the safety question of the axiom of choice, but also for the continuum hypothesis. They’re true in the same set theoretic universe we get.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:25:38)
So if ZF, without the axiom of choice, is consistent, then so is ZFC plus the continuum hypothesis is the result, 1938. It’s such a beautiful argument. It’s just incredible, I think, because he’s building an alternative mathematical reality. That’s the structure of the proof is that, okay, if there’s any mathematical reality, if there’s any set theoretic world, then we’re going to build another one, a separate one, a different one, maybe different. Maybe it’s the same as the original one. It could be. If we started already in the one that he built, then it would be the same. But there’s no reason to assume it was the same.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:26:15)
So he has this kind of model construction method to build this alternative set theoretic reality, the constructible universe, and then he proves that the axiom of choice is true there and also the continuum hypothesis is true there, and it’s just amazing. Really beautiful argument. Okay, so then for the other part of the independence, that’s only half of it, because Godel shows basically that you can’t refute the continuum hypothesis, but that’s not the same thing as proving that it’s true. He showed that if set theory is consistent without the continuing hypothesis, then it’s consistent with the continuing hypothesis. So that’s not the same thing as proving that it’s true. Yeah.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:26:59)
And then it didn’t come until 1963 when Paul Cohen invented the method of forcing and proved that if there’s a model of set theory, then there’s a model of set theory in which the continuum hypothesis is false. So Cohen also is giving us this extremely powerful tool for building alternative mathematical realities, is how I think about it. He’s explained to us how to take any set theoretic world and build another different one in which the continuum hypothesis is false. The forcing extension.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:37)
It’s such a fascinating technique, a tool of forcing. Maybe I’m anthropomorphizing it, but it seems like a way to escape one mathematical universe into another, or to expand it or to alter it. So you travel between mathematical universes. Can you explain the technique of forcing?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:27:57)
Yeah, exactly. It’s all those things. It’s so wonderful. I mean, that’s exactly how I think about it. I mean…

Mathematical multiverse

Lex Fridman
(02:28:03)
And we should mention, maybe this is a good place to even give a bigger picture. One of your more controversial ideas in mathematics, as laid out in the paper, “The Set-Theoretic Multiverse,” you describe that there may not be one true mathematics, but rather multiple mathematical universes, and forcing is one of the techniques that gets you from one to the other, so… Can you explain the whole shebang? The whole…
Joel David Hamkins
(02:28:27)
Yeah, sure, let’s get into it. So the lesson of Cohen’s result and Gödel’s result and so on, these producing these alternative set theoretic universes. We’ve observed that the continuum hypothesis is independent and the axiom of choice is independent of the other axioms, but it’s not just those two. We have thousands of independence results. Practically every non-trivial statement of infinite combinatorics is independent of ZFC. I mean, this is the fact. It’s not universally true. There are some extremely difficult prominent results where people proved things in ZFC, but for the most part, if you ask a non-trivial question about infinite cardinalities, then it’s very likely to be independent of ZFC.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:29:15)
And we have these thousands of arguments, these forcing arguments that are used to establish that. And so how should we take that? I mean, on the one hand, if you have a theory and it doesn’t answer any of the questions that you’re interested in, okay, so what does that mean? If you’re following what I call the universe view or the monist view, you might naturally say, “Well, look, ZFC is a weak theory, and there’s the true set theoretic reality out there, and we need a better theory because the current theory isn’t answering the questions. Everything’s independent.” And so that seems like a quite reasonable thing to take if you think that there is…
Joel David Hamkins
(02:29:59)
that every set theoretic question has a definite answer, and there’s a unique set theoretic truth or a unique fact of the matter, right? This is the universe view.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:09)
And by the way, to reiterate, independent means it cannot be proved or disproved within this axiomatic system, within this theory.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:30:16)
Right, exactly. So to be independent means you can’t prove it, and also you can’t prove that it’s false. You can’t refute it.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:22)
And you’re saying that’s why the statement is so traumatic or sad, that most of the interesting stuff, as you said, has been shown to be independent. Of ZFC.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:30:31)
But that’s an interesting way to put it, I think, because it reminds me of this… When I was a graduate student in Berkeley, there was another graduate student who was working with a non-logic professor in C*-algebras or something like this. So it’s a part of analysis or functional analysis, and they were looking at a question, and it turned out to be independent of ZFC, right? And the attitude of this other professor was that, “Oh, I guess I asked the wrong question.” But my attitude and the attitude of all the set theorists was when you ask a question that turns out to be independent, then you asked exactly the right question because this is the one… You know, it’s carving nature at its joints.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:31:18)
You’re adjudicating the nature of set theoretic reality by finding these two realms. You find one of these dichotomies. You know, there are the worlds where it’s true and the worlds where it’s false. And so when you ask that question, that’s to be celebrated. It means you asked exactly the right, interesting, fascinating question. So it’s not a kind of bleak thing that you can’t prove it and you can’t refute it, and that’s such a disaster. Rather, it means that you found this cleavage in mathematical reality, and it’s good to know about those when they happen, you know?
Lex Fridman
(02:31:52)
Carving nature at its joints. So what can you do about the things that are shown to be independent from ZFC?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:32:00)
Right. So…
Lex Fridman
(02:32:00)
What are the techniques?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:32:01)
So one thing is that because of the incompleteness theorem, we know that there’s going to be… For any theory that we can write down, there’s going to be true things we can’t prove in it. So those things are going to be independent. And so we’re already aware of the fact that there will always be these independent phenomena for any theory that we write. And furthermore, some of those theories we won’t even be able to prove that they’re consistent, you know, like the consistency of their own theory. So that’s called the consistency-strength hierarchy.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:32:37)
So it’s a direct consequence of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem that for any theory we can write down, then towering over it is this incredibly tall tower of consistency strength, where the strength in theories aren’t just adding another axiom, but they’re adding another axiom even whose consistency was not provable in the previous layers of the hierarchy. And so how lucky we are to find the large cardinal axioms that instantiate exactly this feature of increasing consistency strength, this unending and extremely tall hierarchy of consistency strength of axioms. And it exactly fulfills the prediction that Gödel’s theorem makes about that kind of thing.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:33:28)
Except, the axioms in the large cardinal hierarchy aren’t, you know, metalogical self-referential statements of the form that sometimes arise in the Gödel analysis, but rather they’re professing existence of big infinities, these large cardinal axioms. And so it’s such a welcome development, and yet it’s also known that the continuum hypothesis is independent of all of the known large cardinal axioms. So none of the large cardinal axioms can settle the continuum hypothesis. So the independence phenomenon is still there for things like the continuum hypothesis and the cardinal combinatorics that I mentioned.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:17)
So you’re building this incredible hierarchy of axiomatic systems that are more powerful than ZFC.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:34:24)
More powerful than ZFC and then more powerful than that, more powerful than that, and so on. It keeps going forever, and it will never be finished.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:32)
And still, to this day, the continuum hypothesis does not…
Joel David Hamkins
(02:34:36)
It’s not settled by any of the large cardinal axioms.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:39)
Wow. Wow. How does that make you feel? Will it ever be settled?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:34:47)
Well, it’s part of my multiverse view, I guess. We started by describing the universe view, which is the view that there are facts about all of these questions, and it will turn out—if you’re a universe view person, which I’m not, but if you are—then you will hold that there is a right answer to the continuum hypothesis question, and there’s a right answer to the large cardinal questions, and so on. And that what we should be aiming to do is figure out this one true set theory. In contrast, I take the developments of set theory over the past half-century or more as evidence that there isn’t such a unique set-theoretic reality.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:35:33)
Rather, what we’ve been doing for decades now is producing more and more alternative set-theoretic universes in which the fundamental truths differ from one to the other. And that is the answer to the continuum hypothesis question: the fact that given any model of set theory, there’s a forcing extension where the continuum hypothesis is true, and another one where it’s false. You can sort of turn it on and off like a light switch. And that’s the fundamental nature of the continuum hypothesis, that you can have it or you can have the negation as you like within a very closely related set-theoretic world. Wherever you happen to be living, there’s a closely related one where CH is true, where the continuum hypothesis is true, and one where it’s false.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:36:23)
And that itself is a kind of answer. It’s not a singularist answer, a universe view answer. It’s a pluralist answer. And this led me to my views on the multiverse view of set theory and pluralist truth, namely the fundamental nature of set-theoretic truth has this plural character in that there isn’t a singular meaning to the fundamental terms, but rather there’s this choice of alternative set-theoretic universes that have different truths.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:55)
So what does the multiverse view of mathematics enable you to do? What does it empower you to do, and what are the limitations? What are the things it breaks about mathematics as a field, as a space of knowledge, and what does it enable?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:37:10)
First of all, I guess one should say that these different philosophical positions that you might take in the philosophy of set theory, like the multiverse view or the universe view, we don’t ever disagree about the mathematics. We’re all agreeing on what the theorems are. It’s a question of philosophical perspective on the underlying meaning or the context, or really what is a philosophy of mathematics for? And I mean, if you look back in history, for example, to the time of calculus with Newton and Leibniz, right?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:37:44)
They famously developed the ideas of calculus using their concepts of infinitesimals, and those foundations were roundly mocked by Bishop Berkeley and so on, who talked about, you know, “What are these same evanescent increments? And shall we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?” But the foundations really were kind of completely suspect, I think, at the time. And the foundations of infinitesimal calculus really only became rigorous in the 1950s or so with the development of non-standard analysis and Robinson’s work. Okay, so the point I’m trying to make is that, do you need a robust, rigorous foundation of mathematics to make enduring insights in mathematics?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:38:34)
And the answer, regrettably, is apparently not because in calculus, even with that lousy, creaky foundation of infinitesimals not even well understood that Newton and Leibniz had, they proved all the fundamental theorems of calculus and, you know, they had all the main insights in those early days with that extremely bad foundation. And so that shows you something about the relevance of the kind of foundational views on mathematics and how important they are for mathematical developments and progress and insight. I mean, because I view those early mathematical developments in calculus as genuinely mathematical and extremely important and insightful, even though the foundations weren’t any good by contemporary perspectives. Okay. So, rather…
Joel David Hamkins
(02:39:32)
So when it comes to the philosophy of set theory and the dispute between the universe view and pluralism, my view is that the choice of the philosophical perspective doesn’t actually have to do with the mathematical developments directly at all. Rather, it tells us, “Where should set theory go? What kind of set theory should we be looking at? What kind of questions should we be asking?” So if you have a universe mentality, the universe view, then you’re going to be pushed to try to find and articulate the nature of the one true set-theoretic universe. And I think that remark is really well borne out by the developments with Hugh Woodin, who’s one of the most prominent mathematicians and philosophers with the universe view and his theory of ultimate L and so on. And he’s really striving.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:26)
Who was also your advisor.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:40:28)
He was also my supervisor, yeah, my graduate supervisor.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:30)
Which is a personal story as well.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:40:32)
This fundamental dispute, yeah, on this question. But he is a very strong and successful research program, sort of trying to give legs to finding the nature of the one true set-theoretic universe. And it’s driving the questions that he’s asking and the mathematical programs that he’s pursuing. Whereas if you have a pluralist view, as I do, then you’re going to be led and attracted to questions that have to do with the interaction of different set-theoretic universes, or maybe you want to understand the nature of how are the models of set theory related to their forcing extensions and so on. And so this led to things that I call, say, set-theoretic potentialism, where you think about a set-theoretic universe in a potentialist way.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:41:21)
Not in the sense of potential infinity directly, because all of these universes have infinite sets inside them already, but they’re potentialist in the sense that we could have more sets. The universe could be wider and taller and so on, by forcing or by extending upward. And so we want to understand the nature of this realm of set-theoretic universes. And that’s quite some exciting work. And so with Benedikt Loewe and I, we proved some theorems on the modal logic of forcing and set-theoretic potentialism under end extension. I’ve done a bunch of work on this topic. And also I mounted, together with Gunter Fuchs and Jonas Riets, who was one of my own PhD students, the topic of set-theoretic geology, which is studying…
Joel David Hamkins
(02:42:11)
It’s taking the metaphor of forcing. I mean, in forcing, you have the ground model and the forcing extension. And when I was first working with Jonas, he said, “I want to undo forcing. I want to go backward.” And I at first said, “But Jonas, it doesn’t work that way. You start in the model, in the ground model, and you go out, you go to the bigger one. You know, that’s how forcing works.” And he said, “No, no, I want to go backward.” And so he was quite persistent, actually. And so finally, I said, “Okay, let’s do it.” Let’s take it seriously.” And so we sat down and started thinking more precisely and carefully and deeply about the nature of taking a set-theoretic universe and seeing where did it come from by forcing, which was a new way of thinking about forcing at the time.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:58)
Like reverse-engineering the forcing?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:43:00)
Yeah, something like that. Forcing is a way of producing a new universe. And so you could start somewhere and go to that new universe, or you could look where you are and say, “Well, look, I got here by doing that already in the past.”
Joel David Hamkins
(02:43:12)
So we defined models of the bedrock model and ground, sort of undoing the forcing. And really, it was quite fruitful. And I view this as part of the pluralist perspective, except the difference is that set-theoretic geology is amenable to the universe view. So even though the work was inspired by this philosophical view on the multiverse view, nevertheless, the central ideas of geology have now been picked up by the people with the research program in the universe view, because it turns out that set-theoretic geology is helping them or us to discover the nature of the one true universe relates to its mantle. There’s this concept of the set-theoretic mantle that I had introduced in a way that is extremely interesting.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:44:01)
And so it’s historically quite funny, I think, because this research program that grew entirely out of the pluralist point of view ended up being picked up by the universe point of view research program in a way that is quite important.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:20)
Can you prove something in the world that you arrived at through forcing and then take some of that back to the ground model?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:44:30)
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a really powerful argument method, actually. People often want to do that. Suppose you’re in some set-theoretic context. You know, you could think about it as living in a set-theoretic universe, and you want to prove something in that universe only. But maybe one way to do it is to first construct this forcing extension and then use the features about this forcing extension to realize that certain things must have already been true in the ground model. And then you throw the forcing extensions away and you-
Lex Fridman
(02:45:01)
Oh, cool
Joel David Hamkins
(02:45:01)
Yeah. So this can happen. To pick a more elementary example, if you think about the early days of people reasoning with the complex numbers before they really understood them. So they would have these algebraic equations that they’re trying to solve. They would have the tools and methods of doing it, but then in the course of, you know, they would have to do things to the polynomial and change the factors and so on, and produce other polynomials and solve them and so on. Sometimes, they could produce solutions. In the middle of their construction, they were led to, like, the square root of minus five or something in the construction. And they didn’t have any meaning for that, but they would just do it symbolically, you know.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:45:48)
And eventually, it would turn out, because of the methods that they had, they would combine and they would cancel and so on, and all the complex parts would cancel out and they’d end up with this actual answer, you know, three plus square root of 17 or whatever. And they could check it and it worked. It was a solution of the original equation. And so it must have been bewildering to them because they would start with this question purely in the real numbers, an algebraic question, and they would march on their method and proceed through the land of nonsense, you know, with these square roots of negative numbers and then end up with an answer that was real again that they could verify was correct.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:46:29)
And so I view this kind of forcing argument that I was just describing in a similar way. You start in set theory and you go to this land of nonsense in the forcing extension, this imaginary world. And you argue and you come back. I mean, you make a consequence in the ground model, and it’s such a beautiful way of arguing.

Surreal numbers

Lex Fridman
(02:46:47)
So speaking of the land of nonsense, I have to ask you about surreal numbers, but first, I need another bathroom break. All right, we’re back, and there’s this aforementioned wonderful blog post on the surreal numbers and that there’s quite a simple surreal number generation process that can basically construct all numbers. So maybe this is a good spot to ask what are surreal numbers and what is the way we can generate all numbers?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:47:20)
So the surreal number system is an amazing, an amazingly beautiful mathematical system that was introduced by John Conway.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:30)
Rest in peace, one of the great mathematicians ever on this earth.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:47:33)
Yes, absolutely. And I really admire his style of mathematical thinking and working in mathematics and the surreal number system is a good instance of this. So the way I think about the surreal numbers system is what it’s doing is providing us a number system that unifies all the other number systems. So it extends the real numbers. Well, not only does it extend the integers, the natural numbers, the rational numbers, and the real numbers, but also the ordinals and the infinitesimals. So they’re all sitting there inside the surreal numbers, and it’s this colossal system of numbers. It’s not a set even. It’s a proper class, it turns out, because it contains all the ordinal numbers.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:48:19)
But it’s generated from nothing by a single rule, and the rule is, so we’re going to generate the numbers in stages, in a transfinite sequence of stages. And at every stage, we take the numbers that we have so far and in all possible ways, we divide them into two sets, a lower set and an upper set, or a left set and a right set. So we divide them into these two sets so that everything in the left set is less than everything in the right set, and then at that moment, we create a new number that fits in the gap between L and R. Okay? That’s it. That’s all we do. So let me say it again.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:49:05)
The rule is we proceed in stages, and at any stage, in all possible ways, we divide the numbers we have into two collections, the left set and the right set, so that everything in the left set is less than everything in the right set. And we create a new number, a new surreal number that will fit in that gap. Okay. So for example, we could start… Well, at the beginning, we don’t have any numbers. We haven’t created anything yet, and so, we could take nothing and we could divide it into two sets, the empty lower set and the empty upper set. I mean, the two empty sets. And everything in the empty set is less than everything in the empty set because that’s a vacuous statement.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:49:48)
So we’re, we satisfy the conditions and we apply the number generation rule, which says we should create a new number. And this is what I call the big bang of numbers, the surreal genesis when the number zero is born. Zero is the firstborn number that is bigger than everything in the empty set and less than everything in the empty set. Okay, but now we have this number zero, and so therefore, we now can define new gaps. Because if we put zero into the left set and have an empty right set, then we should create a new number that’s bigger than zero and less than everything in the empty set, and that number is called the number one.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:50:30)
And similarly, at that same stage, we could have put zero into the right set, and so that would be the firstborn number that’s less than zero, which is called minus one. So now we have three numbers, minus one, zero, and one, and they have four gaps because there could be a number below minus one or between minus one and zero or between zero and one or above one, and so we create those four new numbers. The first number above one is called two. The first number between zero and one is called 1/2, and then on the negative side, we have minus 1/2 and minus two and so on. So now we have, what is that, seven numbers. So there’s eight gaps between them.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:51:10)
So at the next birthday, they call them, the next stage will be born all the numbers between those gaps, and then between those and between those and so on. And as the days progress, we get more and more numbers. But those are just the finite birthdays, because as I said, it’s a transfinite process. So at day omega, that’s the first infinite day, we’re going to create a lot of new surreal numbers. So every real number will be born at that stage, because every real number fills a gap in the previously born rational numbers that we had just talked about. It’s not all the rationals, because actually the rational numbers that are born at the finite stages are just the rationals whose denominator is a power of two, it turns out. Those are called the dyadic rationals.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:51:57)
So the real numbers are all born on day omega, but also some other numbers are born on day omega. Namely, the ordinal omega itself is the firstborn number that’s bigger than all those finite numbers, and minus omega is the firstborn number that’s less than all those finite numbers. But also, we have the number epsilon, which is the firstborn number that’s strictly bigger than zero and strictly less than all the positive rational numbers. So that’s going to be an infinitesimal number in that gap, and so on. On day omega plus one, we get more numbers, and then omega plus two and so on. And the numbers just keep coming forever. So, this is how you build the surreal number system.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:52:39)
And then it turns out you can define the arithmetic operations of addition and multiplication in a natural way that is engaging with this recursive definition. So we have sort of recursive definitions of plus and times for the surreal numbers. And it turns out you can prove that they make the surreal numbers into what’s called an ordered field. So they satisfy the field axioms, which means that you have distributivity and commutativity of addition and multiplication, and also you have reciprocals for every non-zero number. You can divide by the number. So you can add and multiply and divide and subtract. And furthermore, you can take square roots.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:53:21)
And furthermore, every odd degree polynomial has a root, which is true in the real numbers, because if you think about, say, a cubic or a fifth degree polynomial, then you know it’s going to cross the axis, because it has opposite behaviors on the two infinities, because it’s an odd degree polynomial. So on the positive side, it’s going to the positive infinity. On the negative side, it would be going to minus infinity. So it has to cross. So we know in the real numbers, every odd degree polynomial has a root. And that’s also true in the surreal numbers. So that makes it what’s called a real closed field which is a very nice mathematical theory. So it’s really quite interesting how we can find copies of all these other number systems inside the surreal numbers.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:09)
But the surreal numbers are fundamentally discontinuous as you’re worried about. What are the consequences of this?
Joel David Hamkins
(02:54:14)
Right. So the surreal numbers have a property that they form a non-standard model of the real field, which means that they provide a notion of infinitesimality that one can use to develop calculus on the grounds of Robinson’s non-standard theory that I had mentioned earlier. But they don’t have the least upper bound property for subcollections. There’s no set of surreal numbers, no non-trivial set of surreal numbers has at least upper bound, and there are no convergent sequences in the surreal numbers. And so for the sort of ordinary use in calculus based on limits and convergence, that method does not work in the surreal numbers at all. So that’s what I mean when I say the surreal numbers are fundamentally discontinuous. They have a fundamental discontinuity going on.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:55:07)
But you can still do calculus with them, because you have infinitesimals if you use these non-standard methods, the infinitesimal based methods to calculus. And people do that. I once organized a conference in New York, and we had John Conway as a speaker at that conference. And there was a question session, and someone asked him, I mean, it’s a bit of a rude question, I think, but they asked it and the question was, “What is your greatest disappointment in life?” I mean, I would never ask a question like that at a conference in a very public setting.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:55:41)
But Conway was extremely graceful and he answered by saying that, “The surreal numbers…” Not the numbers themselves, but the reception of the surreal numbers, because he had ambition that the surreal numbers would become a fundamental number system used throughout mathematics and science, because it was able to do non-set analysis, it was able to do calculus, it unified the ordinals and so on. And it’s such a unifying, amazing structure, beautiful structure with elegant proofs and sophisticated ideas all around it. And he was disappointed that it never really achieved that unifying status that he had the ambition for. And this, he mentioned as his greatest disappointment.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:32)
Yeah, Donald Knuth tried to celebrate it, but it never quite took hold.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:56:36)
So I don’t want to give the impression, though, that the surreal numbers are not widely studied, because there are thousands of people who are…
Lex Fridman
(02:56:41)
Sure
Joel David Hamkins
(02:56:42)
…studying it. In fact, Philip Ehrlich, who is one of the world experts on the surreal numbers, mentioned to me once that Conway was his own worst enemy with regard to that very issue because in the Conway style, everything is a game. And he treated the surreal numbers as a kind of plaything, a toy, and maybe that makes people not take it seriously. Although my view is that it is extremely serious and useful and profound, and I’ve been writing a whole series of essays on the surreal numbers for my Substack at Infinitely More. And I just find the whole subject so fascinating and beautiful. I mean, it’s true. I’m not applying it in engineering, which maybe was part of this Conway ambition.

Conway’s Game of Life

Lex Fridman
(02:57:30)
And I just wanted to, before I forget, mention Conway turning everything into a game. It is a fascinating point that I didn’t quite think about, which I think the Game of Life is just an example of exploration of cellular automata. I think cellular automata is one of the most incredible, complicated, fascinating… It feels like an open door into a world we have not quite yet explored. And it’s such a beautiful illustration of that world, the Game of Life, but calling it a game… Maybe life balances it, because that’s your powerful word, but it’s not quite a game. It’s a fascinating invitation to an incredibly complicated and fascinating mathematical world.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:09)
I think every time I see cellular automata and the fact that we don’t quite have mathematical tools to make sense of that world, it fills me with awe. Speaking of a thousand years from now, it feels like that is a world we might make some progress on.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:58:23)
The Game of Life is a sort of playground for computably undecidable questions because, in fact, you can prove that the question of whether a given cell will ever become alive is computably undecidable. In other words…
Lex Fridman
(02:58:39)
Yeah
Joel David Hamkins
(02:58:39)
…given a configuration, and you ask, “Will this particular cell ever, you know, be alive—” …in the evolution?” And you can prove that that question is equivalent to the halting problem. It’s computably undecidable. It’s semi-decidable in the sense that if it will become alive, then you will know it at a finite stage because you could just run the Game of Life algorithm and let it run. And if it ever did come alive, you could say, “Yeah, it was alive.” But if you’ve run it for a thousand years and it hasn’t come alive yet, then you don’t necessarily seem to have any basis for saying, “No, it won’t ever come alive,” if the behavior was very complicated.
Joel David Hamkins
(02:59:18)
Maybe if you have a complete understanding of the evolution of the behavior, then you can say no, but you can prove you won’t always have that understanding— …precisely because the problem is equivalent to the halting problem.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:28)
And nevertheless, when you sit back and look and visualize the thing, some little mini cellular automata civilizations are born and die quickly, and some are very predictable and boring, but some have this rich, incredible complexity. And maybe that speaks to a thing I wanted to ask on the halting problem and decidability. You’ve mentioned this thing where if you understand the program deeply, you might be able to say something. So can we say something interesting about, maybe, how many programs, statistically, we know something about in terms of whether they halt or not? Or what does it mean to understand a program deeply enough—

Computability theory

Joel David Hamkins
(03:00:09)
Right
Lex Fridman
(03:00:09)
…to be able to make a prediction?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:00:11)
The main lesson of computability theory, in my view, is that it’s never the case that you can have a thorough understanding of the behavior of a program by looking at the program, and that the content of what you learn from a program, I mean, in the most general case, is always obtained just by running it and looking at the behavior. And the proof of that is there’s a theorem called Rice’s Theorem, which makes that idea completely robust. But I want to just take a little detour towards another question riffing on something that you just said. Namely, one can ask the question, what is the behavior of a random program? So you have some formal computing language, you know, and you want to look at the collection of all programs of a certain size.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:01:06)
Maybe there are only finitely many. And can you say something about the behavior of a randomly chosen one, like with a certain likelihood it will have a certain behavior? And the answer turns out to be extremely interesting. Once, years ago, Alexey Myasnikov asked me a question. He had this concept of a decision problem with a black hole, and what that means is it’s a decision problem which is possibly difficult in the worst case, but the difficulty was concentrated in a very tiny region called the black hole. And outside of that black hole, it was very easy.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:01:42)
And so, for example, this kind of problem is a terrible problem to use if you’re basing your encryption scheme. You don’t want to use a black hole problem because if someone can rob the bank 95% of the time, then that’s not what you want, or even any nontrivial percent of the time is too dangerous. So you don’t want to use problems that are almost every case is easily solved as the basis of your encryption. And the question Alexey asked me was, “Does the halting problem have a black hole?”
Joel David Hamkins
(03:02:17)
And so if we take, say, the standard model of Turing machines—it’s one-way infinite tape with zeros and ones on the tape and so on, the head moving back and forth, and it stops when it gets into the halt state—then it turns out we proved that there is a black hole. And what that means is there’s a computer procedure that decides correctly almost every instance of the halting problem. Even though the halting problem is not decidable, we can decide almost every instance. So more precisely, there’s a collection of Turing machine programs such that we can easily decide whether a program’s in that collection or not. And for the programs in the collection, we can decide the halting problem for those programs easily.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:03:03)
And furthermore, almost every program is in the collection in the sense that as the number of states becomes large, the proportion of programs in the collection goes to 100%. So the asymptotic density of the programs is one. And the proof was quite fascinating because it’s one of these situations where the theorem sounds really surprising, I think, to many people when I first tell it, I mean, to computability experts. Then it’s sort of intriguing to think that you can solve almost every instance of a halting problem. But then when they hear the proof, it’s completely a letdown. Unfortunately, nobody likes the theorem after the proof.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:03:47)
And so the proof is so simple, though. If you know how a Turing machine operates, there’s this infinite paper tape on which the machine writes zeros and ones, and the head moves back and forth according to rigid instructions. And the instructions are all of the form: if the machine is in such and such a state and it’s reading such and such a symbol on the tape, then it should write this symbol on the tape, it should change to this new state specified, and it should either move left or right as specified. So a program consists of instructions like that. If you look at a program, one of the states is the halt state, and that’s when the program halts.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:04:30)
But you can calculate how many programs don’t have any instruction that transitions to the halt state. You can easily calculate the proportion. And in the limit, it goes to 1 over E squared, 13 and a half percent. If you calculate the limit, the proportion of programs with end states that don’t ever halt because they don’t have any instruction saying halt— —those programs obviously never halt because they can’t halt. They don’t have any instruction that says halt.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:04)
So 13% of programs, you could say—
Joel David Hamkins
(03:05:06)
13%, you can say they don’t halt because you just look at them and you can understand them.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:10)
There’s no halt state.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:05:11)
They never change to the halt state, so they can’t halt.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:13)
I mean, that nevertheless is beautiful to know. To show.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:05:17)
So that’s a kind of trivial reason for non-halting. And when I first made that observation, I thought, “Okay, this is the proof strategy.” Because I wanted to say at first the goal was, “Look, that’s a stupid reason for a program not to halt. And I just want to pile up as many stupid reasons as I can think of—” —until it gets more than 50%, and then I can say most.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:43)
That was brilliant.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:05:43)
Yeah, that was my goal.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:44)
I love this.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:05:45)
Yeah, so we thought more about it, though, and we hit the jackpot because we found one gigantic stupid reason that converged to 100%, in the limit. And so, the stupid reason for a program not to halt is that, well, if you think about the behavior: the head is sitting there. It’s on the leftmost cell of the tape at the very beginning. It’s in the start state, and the head is following an instruction. And the instruction says, “When you’re in the start state,” which it is, “and you’re reading something on the tape, then you should write something and you should change to a new state, and you should either move left or right.” But half of them move left. But if you move left and you are already at the end, then the head falls off.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:06:32)
And so the computation stops because the head fell off the tape. That’s a pretty stupid reason. Okay, but that’s half of them already, just like that. And then some of them went right and they changed to a new state. And amongst those, the new state, half of those ones are going left and half are going right from that place. And then most of those are changing to a new state. When there are a lot of states, it’s very likely that the next state that you transition to is new. And so you get this random walk behavior, if you know what that means, where half go left and half go right at each step.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:07:04)
And there’s a theorem due to Pólya, which is called the Pólya recurrence theorem, which says when you have a random walk, a one-dimensional random walk, then it’s very likely to come back to where you started. And when that happens for us, then half of them from that place fall off on the next step. And so you can show, using this kind of analysis, that the probability one behavior of a random Turing machine is that the head falls off the tape before it repeats a state. And that is the stupid proof that shows how to solve the halting problem.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:07:40)
Because when that happens, we can answer the halting problem saying, “No, the computation stopped because the machine crashed, not because it halted, so therefore it doesn’t count as halting on some accounts.” Or, you know, if you want to define that as halting, crashing as halting, then… But in any case, however it is that you set up your formalism, you’re going to be able to answer the question for the behavior of the machine when the head falls off.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:03)
So statistically, in the limit, you solve the halting problem.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:08:08)
Yes, exactly. Computably solve it.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:11)
What do we take from that? Because you didn’t solve the halting problem.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:08:15)
No, it’s impossible to fully solve…
Lex Fridman
(03:08:17)
Right
Joel David Hamkins
(03:08:17)
…the halting problem correctly in all cases.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:20)
That’s pretty cool. That’s kind of… I mean, I don’t know. This is…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:08:22)
It’s a probabilistic way… I mean, it’s probabilistic in the sense that we’re solving almost all instances… …Computably. There are versions of this that are maybe more interesting from the point of view of complexity theory and actually useful. I mean, there’s the whole P-NP problem and so on. And there’s this genre of NP-complete problems, which are problems that are infeasible. They would take exponential time to solve them in the ordinary way. And they’re not known to be polynomial time solvable, although in these cases it’s an open question whether there is a polynomial time algorithm, a feasible algorithm. And for most of the NP-complete problems, you can prove that there’s a polynomial time approximation that solves almost all instances…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:09:09)
…in a feasible amount of time. So like the knapsack problem, you know, packing problems, and so on, other kinds of problems, the satisfaction problem when… Depending on how you set up the formalism, you can prove, and I’ve proven many instances of this, but also I think it’s widespread for almost all the NP-complete problems, the difficult problems, and these are important problems for industrial application when these are problems… …That we actually want to solve. We can have feasible algorithms that solve almost every instance of them.

P vs NP

Lex Fridman
(03:09:42)
The amount of fields and topics you’ve worked on is truly incredible. I have to ask about P versus NP. This is one of the big open problems in complexity theory. So for people who don’t know, it’s about the relation between computation time and problem complexity. Do you think it will ever be solved? And is there any chance the weird counterintuitive thing might be true, that P equals NP?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:10:06)
Yeah, that’s an interesting question. Sometimes people ask about whether it could be independent, which I think is-
Joel David Hamkins
(03:10:11)
…an interesting question for logicians. And of course, well, one has to say if you’re entertaining the idea of independence, you know, over which theory? Because every statement is going to be independent over an extremely weak theory. So that’s, you know, it doesn’t make sense to say it’s independent all by itself. You’re only independent relative to a theory, right? So the way I think about P-NP is that… I mean, of course it’s a theoretical question about the asymptotic behavior of these problems. I mean, for a problem to be in P means that there is a computable decision procedure that runs in time bounded by some polynomial. But the coefficients on that polynomial could be enormous, and the degree could be incredibly high.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:10:59)
And so for small values of inputs, then it doesn’t make sense to talk about this polynomial time feasibility with respect to, say, the range of problem inputs that we will ever give it in our lifetime or in the span of human civilization or whatever. I mean, because it’s an asymptotic property, it’s really in the limit as the size of the inputs goes to infinity, that’s the only time that polynomial or NP becomes relevant. And so maybe it’s important to keep that in mind when… Sometimes you find kind of overblown remarks made about, you know, if P equals NP, then this will be incredibly important for human civilization because it means that we’ll have feasible algorithms for solving these incredibly important…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:11:45)
…problems in NP. You know, that it would cause immense wealth for human societies and so on because we would be able to solve these otherwise intractable problems, and that would be the basis of new technology and industry and so forth. I mean, people make these kinds of remarks, but…
Lex Fridman
(03:12:03)
Of course.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:12:04)
…you have to temper those remarks by the realization that P and P equal NP or P not equal NP are not about these practical things at all because of the asymptotic nature of the question itself. Okay, that’s on the one hand. But on the second hand, we already have the algorithm, so we could use it already, except it’s a terrible algorithm because it involves this incredible amount of coding and so on.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:30)
And on the third hand, like you said, we already have approximation algorithms that…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:12:34)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:34)
…that from a pragmatic perspective, solve all the actual real engineering problems of human civilization.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:12:42)
Like the SAT solvers work amazingly well, you know, in lots and lots of cases, even though we can prove we don’t expect… If P is not equal to NP, then there won’t be a polynomial time SAT solver. But actually, the SAT solver approximations are really quite amazing.

Greatest mathematicians in history

Lex Fridman
(03:12:59)
Sorry to ask the ridiculous question, but who is the greatest mathematician of all time? Who are the possible candidates? Euler, Gauss, Newton, Ramanujan, Hilbert. We mentioned Gödel, Turing, if you throw him into the bucket.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:13:14)
So this is, I think, an incredibly difficult question to answer. Personally, I don’t really think this way about ranking mathematicians by greatness. Um…
Lex Fridman
(03:13:28)
So you don’t have, like… You know, some people have a Taylor Swift poster in their dorm room. You don’t have it.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:13:33)
I mean, if you forced me to pick someone, it would probably be Archimedes because…
Lex Fridman
(03:13:37)
Archimedes
Joel David Hamkins
(03:13:37)
…he had such incredible achievements in such an early era, which totally transcended the work of the other people in his era. But I also have the view that I want to learn mathematics and gain mathematical insight from whoever can provide it and wherever I can find it. And this isn’t always just coming from the greats. Sometimes the greats are doing things that are just first and not… You know, somebody else could have easily been first. So there’s a kind of luck aspect to it when you go back and look at the achievements. And because of this progress issue in mathematics that we talked about earlier, namely we really do understand things much better now than they used to.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:14:22)
And when you look back at the achievements that had been made, then maybe you can imagine thinking, “Well, somebody else could’ve had that insight also.” And maybe they would have… It’s already a known phenomenon that disparate mathematicians end up proving essentially similar results at approximately the same time. But, okay, the person who did it first is getting the credit and so on.
Lex Fridman
(03:14:48)
What do you make of that? Because I see that sometimes when mathematicians… This also applies in physics and science, where completely separately, discoveries are made…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:14:58)
Right. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:14:58)
…maybe at a very similar time. What does that mean?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:15:01)
It’s relatively common. I mean, I think it’s like certain ideas are in the air and being thought about but not fully articulated, and so this is the nature of growth in knowledge.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:13)
Do you understand where ideas come from?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:15:16)
Not really.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:17)
I mean, what’s your own process when you’re thinking through a problem?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:15:22)
Yeah, that’s another difficult question. I suppose it has to do with… My mathematical style, my style as a mathematician, is that I don’t really like difficult mathematics. What I love is simple, clear, easy-to-understand arguments that prove a surprising result. That’s my favorite situation. And actually, the question of whether it’s a new result or not is somehow less important to me. And so that has to do with this question of the greats and so on, whoever does it first. Because I think, for example, if you prove a new result with a bad argument or a complicated argument, that’s great because you proved something new. But I still want to see the beautiful, simple, because that’s what I can understand.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:16:16)
Also, I’m kind of naturally skeptical about any complicated argument because it might be wrong. And… …If I can’t really understand it fully, like every single step all at once in my head, then I’m just worried maybe it’s wrong. And so these different styles, sometimes mathematicians get involved with these enormous research projects that involve huge numbers of working parts and… …Different technology coming together. I mean, mathematical technology, not physical technology.
Lex Fridman
(03:16:48)
And sometimes it actually involves now more and more something like the Lean programming language where some parts are automated, so you have this gigantic…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:16:54)
Yeah, yeah, I see. Well, that’s another issue because maybe those things are less subject to skepticism when it’s validated…
Lex Fridman
(03:17:02)
Sure
Joel David Hamkins
(03:17:02)
…by Lean. But I’m thinking about the case where the arguments are just extremely complicated, and so I sort of worry whether it’s right or not, whereas you know, I like the simple thing. So I tend to have often worked on things that are a little bit off the beaten path from what other people are working on from that point of view.
Lex Fridman
(03:17:23)
Your curiosity draws you towards simplicity.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:17:25)
Yeah. I want to work on the things that I can understand and that are simple. Luckily, I’ve found that I’ve been able to make contributions that other people seem to like, in this way, in this style. So I’ve been fortunate from that point of view. My process always, though, and I’ve recommended this always to my students, is just a kind of playful curiosity. So whenever I have…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:17:55)
Whenever there’s an idea or a topic then I just play around with it and change little things or understand a basic case and then make it more complicated or press things a little bit on this side or apply the idea to my favorite example that’s relevant, and see what happens, or you just play around with ideas, and this often leads to insights that then lead to more methods or more, then pretty soon you’re making progress on the problem. So this is basically my method, is I just fool around with the ideas until I can see a path through towards something interesting… …And then prove that, and that’s worked extremely well for me. So I’m pretty pleased with that method.
Lex Fridman
(03:18:47)
You do like thought experiments where you anthropomorphize like you mentioned?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:18:51)
Yeah, yeah. So this is a basic tool. I mean, I use this all the time. You imagine a set-theoretic model, a model of ZFC, as like a place where you’re living, and you might travel to distant lands by forcing. This is a kind of metaphor for what’s going on. Of course, the actual arguments aren’t anything like that because there’s not land and you’re not traveling and you’re not…
Lex Fridman
(03:19:13)
But you allow your mind to visualize that kind of thing-
Joel David Hamkins
(03:19:15)
Yeah
Lex Fridman
(03:19:15)
… in the natural real world.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:19:16)
And it helps you to understand. Particularly when there are parts of the argument that are in tension with one another, then you can imagine that people are fighting or something. And those kinds of metaphors, or you imagine it in terms of a game theoretic, you know, two players trying to win. So that’s kind of tension. And those kinds of metaphorical ways of understanding a mathematical problem often are extremely helpful in realizing, aha, the enemy is going to pick this thing to be like that because, you know, it makes it more continuous or whatever, and then we should do this other thing in order to… So it makes you realize mathematical strategies for finding the answer and proving the theorem that you want to prove because of the ideas that come out of that anthropomorphization.
Lex Fridman
(03:20:01)
What do you think of somebody like Andrew Wiles, who spent seven years grinding at one of the hardest problems in the history of mathematics? And maybe contrasting that a little bit with somebody who’s also brilliant, Terence Tao, who basically says if he hits a wall, he just switches to a different problem and he comes back and so on. So it’s less of a focused grind for many years without any guarantee that you’ll get there, which is what Andrew Wiles went through.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:20:30)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(03:20:30)
Maybe Grigori Perelman did the same.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:20:32)
I mean, Wiles proved an amazing theorem, Fermat’s Last Theorem result is incredible. This is a totally different style than my own practice, though, of working in isolation. For me, mathematics is often a kind of social activity. I have… I counted, I mean, it’s pushing towards a hundred collaborators, co-authors on various papers and so on. And, you know, if anybody has an idea they want to talk about with me, if I’m interested in it, then I’m going to want to collaborate with them and we might solve the problem and have a joint paper or whatever. You want to have a joint paper? Let me-
Lex Fridman
(03:21:06)
Yeah, exactly. Let’s go.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:21:08)
So my approach to making mathematical progress tends to involve working with other people quite a lot rather than just working on my…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:21:17)
…own, and I enjoy that aspect very much. So I, personally, I couldn’t ever do what Wiles did. Maybe I’m missing out. Maybe if I locked myself, you know, in the bedroom and just worked on whatever, then I would solve it. But I tend to think that no, actually, being on MathOverflow so much and I’ve gotten so many ideas, so many papers have grown out of the MathOverflow conversations and back and forth. Someone posts a question and I post an answer on part of it, and then someone else has an idea and it turns into a full solution, and then we have a three-way paper coming out of that. That’s happened many times. And so for me, I enjoy this kind of social aspect to it. And it’s not just the social part.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:22:01)
Rather, that’s the nature of mathematical investigation as I see it, is putting forth mathematical ideas to other people and they respond to it in a way that helps me learn, helps them learn, and I think that’s a very productive way of undertaking mathematics.
Lex Fridman
(03:22:20)
I think it’s when you work solo on mathematics, from my outsider perspective, it seems terrifyingly lonely. And because you’re, especially if you do stick to a single problem, especially if that problem has broken many brilliant mathematicians in the past, that you’re really putting all your chips in. And just the torment… …The rollercoaster of day to day. Because I imagine you have these moments of hopeful break, mini breakthroughs, and then you have to deal with the occasional realization that, no, it was not a breakthrough, and that disappointment.
Lex Fridman
(03:23:00)
And then you have to go, like, a weekly, maybe daily disappointment where you hit a wall, and you have no other person to brainstorm with. You have no other avenue to pursue. And it’s, I don’t know, the mental fortitude it takes to go through that. But everybody’s different. Some people are recluse and just really find solace in that lone grind. I have to ask about Grisha Grigori Perelman. What do you think of him famously declining the Fields Medal and the Millennial Prize? So he stated, “I’m not interested in money or fame. The prize is completely irrelevant to me. If the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed.” What do you think of him turning down the prize?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:23:52)
I guess what I think is that mathematics is full of a lot of different kinds of people. And my attitude is that, hey, it doesn’t matter. Maybe they have a good math idea, and so I want to talk to them and interact with them. And so I think the Perelman case is maybe an instance where, you know, he’s such a brilliant mind and he solved this extremely famous and difficult problem, and that is a huge achievement. But he also had these views about, you know, prizes and somehow, I don’t really fully understand why he would turn it down.
Lex Fridman
(03:24:33)
I do think I have a similar thing, just observing Olympic athletes that are, in many cases, don’t get paid very much, and they nevertheless dedicate their entire lives for the pursuit… … Of the gold medal. I think his case is a reminder that some of the greatest mathematicians, some of the greatest scientists and human beings do the thing they do, take on these problems for the love of it, not for the prizes or the money or any of that. Now, as you’re saying, if the money comes, you could use it for stuff. If the prizes come, and the fame, and so on, that might be useful. But the reason fundamentally the greats do it is because of the art itself.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:25:13)
Sure, I totally agree with that. I mean, I share the view. That’s, you know, that’s why I’m a mathematician is because I find the questions so compelling and I’ve spent my whole life thinking about these problems. But, you know, but like if I won an award…
Lex Fridman
(03:25:32)
Yeah, it’s great. It’s great. I mean, I’m pretty sure you don’t contribute to MathOverflow for the wealth and the power. That you gain. I mean, it’s, yeah, genuine curiosity.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:25:46)
Well, you asked who the greatest mathematician is, and of course if we want to be truly objective about it, we would need a kind of an objective criteria…
Lex Fridman
(03:25:55)
Criteria, yeah.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:25:55)
…about how to evaluate the relative, you know, strength and the reputation of various mathematicians. And so, of course, we should use MathOverflow score… …Because…
Lex Fridman
(03:26:06)
That you’re definitively… I mean, nobody’s objectively the greatest mathematician of all time.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:26:10)
Yes, that’s true. I’ve also argued that tenure and promotion decisions should be based…
Lex Fridman
(03:26:15)
Based on MathOverflow.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:26:16)
…Yeah. So my daughter introduced me to her boyfriend. …And told me that she had a boyfriend. And I, um…
Lex Fridman
(03:26:25)
Asked him what his MathOverflow…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:26:26)
I wanted to know, first of all, what is his chess rating, and secondly, what is his MathOverflow score?

Infinite chess

Lex Fridman
(03:26:34)
Oh, man. Well, that’s the only way to judge a person, I think. That’s, I think, objectively correct. Yeah. I mean, since you bring up chess, I’ve got to ask you about infinite chess. I can’t let you go. You’ve, I mean, you’ve worked on a million things, but infinite chess is one of them. Somebody asked on MathOverflow for the mathematical definition of chess.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:26:54)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(03:26:54)
So can we talk about the math of chess and the math of infinite chess? What is infinite chess?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:26:59)
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Infinite chess is fantastic. Chess ordinarily is played on this tiny, tiny board. It’s an eight by eight board, right? So when you play chess, normally it’s on the eight by eight board. But we want to play infinite chess, so on the integer board. It’s infinite in all four directions, you know, but it still has the chessboard pattern, and maybe there are pieces on this board, maybe infinitely many pieces we allow. But one difference from finite ordinary chess, in infinite chess, we don’t play from a standard starting position. Rather, you…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:27:36)
The interesting situation is that you present a position where there’s a lot of pieces already on the board in a complicated way, and you say, “What would it be like to start from this position or from that one?” You know, and we want to produce positions that have interesting features, meaning mathematically interesting features. And so I can tell you for example… probably a lot of people are familiar with, say, the mate in two genre of chess problem. You know, you have a chess problem and it’s white to mate in two, which means that white is going to make two moves, but the second move is going to be a checkmate.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:28:15)
Or maybe mate in three or mate in five or whatever. We can have mate in N positions for any N. In infinite chess, you can create a position which is not mate in N for any N, but white has a winning strategy that will win in infinitely many moves. In other words, Let me say it again. There are positions in infinite chess that white can definitely win. In infinitely many moves, white is going to make checkmate, but there’s no particular N for which white can guarantee to win in N moves.
Lex Fridman
(03:28:56)
There’s no N?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:28:57)
No N. So it’s not mate in N for any N, but it’s a white win, infinitely many. The way to think about it is white is going to win, but black controls how long it takes.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:09)
Ah, got it.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:29:10)
But it’s doomed. Black can say, “Well, I know you’re going to win, but this time it’s going to… you’re going to take a thousand moves at least.” And… Or maybe in a different way of playing, black can say, “Well, I know you’re going to win, but this time you’re going to have to take a million moves.” For any number, black can say that. So these are really interesting positions. There’s a position in my first infinite chess paper. So it’s black to play in this position, and if black doesn’t move that rook there, then white is going to checkmate pretty quickly.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:41)
By the way, can we describe the rules of infinite chess?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:29:44)
Right. So the rules of infinite chess are the… there’s just the ordinary pieces, and they move on this infinite board, which is just a chessboard, but extended in all directions.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:29:53)
Infinitely, with no edge. So there’s no boundary. But the pieces move just like you’d expect. So the knights move just the same and the rooks move, you know, on the ranks and files, and the bishops move on the same color diagonals and… just like you would expect, except they can move as far as they want, you know, if there’s no intervening piece in the way. The one thing is that… Okay, so the white pawns always move upwards and the black pawns always move downwards, but when they’re capturing, the pawns, you know, capture on the diagonal. So I think the piece movement is pretty clear. There are a couple of differences that you have to pay attention to from ordinary chess.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:30:32)
For example, there’s this threefold repetition rule in ordinary chess, but we just, we just get rid of this for infinite chess because, of course, threefold repetition is just a proxy for infinite play. The real rule is infinite play is a draw, not threefold repetition is a draw. That’s just a kind of convenient approximation to what I view as the actual rule, which is that infinite play is a draw. So the only way to win is to make checkmate on the board at a finite stage of play. And if you play infinitely, you haven’t done that, and so it’s a draw.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:05)
And the pawns can’t be converted into something else?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:31:06)
And there’s no promotion because there’s no edge. Right, exactly. And this position that we were just talking about is a position with game value omega, which means that because it has an ordinal value, white is going to win, but black can play as though counting down from omega. What is the nature of counting down from omega? If you’re black and you need to count down from omega, then you have to say a finite number.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:31:33)
… and then after that, it’s going to be at most that many numbers afterwards to count down, right? So the nature of counting down from omega is that you take this giant step on the first count, and then after that, you subtract one each time. You can’t subtract one from omega because that’s not an ordinal. So if you count down from omega, you have to go to some finite number, and then if you just subtract one each time, then that’s how many more moves you get. So that’s the sense in which black can make it take as long as he wants because he can pick his initial number to be whatever he wants.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:05)
By the way, I, I just noticed that you were citing a MathOverflow question, which is really cool.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:32:10)
That’s right, yeah. My interest in infinite chess was born on MathOverflow because someone asked this question.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:15)
Noam Elkies asked this question. That’s so cool to see a MathOverflow citation in a, in an arXiv paper. That’s cool. How do you construct the position-
Joel David Hamkins
(03:32:28)
Right
Lex Fridman
(03:32:28)
…that satisfies this? Is there an algorithm for construction?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:32:31)
No. This is an act of mathematical creativity, really, to come up with… I had a co-author, my co-author, Corey Evans. He’s a U.S. national master chess player. Very strong chess player. He’s also a philosophy professor of law.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:49)
Your collaborations are wonderful. That’s great.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:32:53)
So I met him because he was a grad student at CUNY, where I was at the time in New York. And also he was my son’s chess coach for when my son was… …Playing chess competitively in elementary school. Corey was the coach. And so we knew him that way. That was right around the time when I was getting interested in infinite chess, and I knew I needed a chess-knowledgeable partner. Corey was invaluable for the paper because the proofs in infinite chess are extremely finicky because you create these positions, but the details of the argument have to do with chess reasoning, you know? My chess reading wasn’t quite up to it because I would create the positions… Almost all the positions are ones that I made, but this is like after many generations…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:33:50)
…of being corrected by Corey because Corey would come and say, “Hey, you know, this pawn is hanging, and it breaks your argument, and…” “…or, or, you know, this bishop can leak out…” …of the cage,” or whatever. And so the process was I knew kind of in terms of these ordinals what we needed to create with…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:34:10)
…the position, and I would struggle to do it and create something that sort of had the features that I wanted, and then I would show it to Corey and he would say, “Look, it doesn’t work because of this and that,” and so on. This kind of back and forth was extremely helpful to me, and eventually we, you know, converged on arguments that were correct. So, yeah, it’s quite interesting. Also, maybe another thing to say is the follow-up paper to this one was a three-way paper with Corey, myself, and my PhD student, Norman Perlmutter, in which we improved the bound. So we were aiming to produce more and more chess positions with higher and higher ordinal values.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:34:52)
The initial position was value omega, and then we made omega-squared and omega-cubed in the first paper, and then in this three-way collaboration, we made omega to the fourth.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:03)
The title of the paper is “The Position in Infinite Chess with Game Value Omega to the 4th.”
Joel David Hamkins
(03:35:09)
Right. And so at the time, this was the best-known result, the state of the art, but since that time, it’s been improved now dramatically. And in fact, we know now that every countable ordinal arises as the game value of a position in infinite chess, so it’s a fantastic result.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:28)
Before I forget, let me ask about your views on AI and LLMs that are getting better and better at mathematics. We’ve spoken about collaborators, and you have so many collaborators. Do you see AI as a potential great collaborator to you as a mathematician, and what do you think the future role of those… …Kinds of AI systems is?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:35:52)
I guess I would draw a distinction between what we have currently and what might come in future years. I’ve played around with it and I’ve tried experimenting, but I haven’t found it helpful at all, basically zero. It’s not helpful to me. And, you know, I’ve used various systems and so on, the paid models and so on, and my typical experience interacting with AI on a mathematical question is that it gives me garbage answers that are not mathematically correct. And so I find that not helpful and also frustrating. If I was interacting with a person, the frustrating thing is when you have to argue about whether or not the argument they gave you is right, and you point out exactly the error—
Joel David Hamkins
(03:36:47)
…in the AI saying, “Oh, it’s totally fine.” If I were having such an experience with a person, I would simply refuse to talk to that person again. But okay, one has to overlook these kind of flaws. And so I tend to be a skeptic about the current value of the current AI systems as far as mathematical reasoning is concerned. It seems not reliable. But I know for a fact that there are several prominent mathematicians who I have enormous respect for who are saying that they are using it in a way— …that’s helpful, and I’m often very surprised to hear that based on my own experience, which is quite the opposite. Maybe my process isn’t any good, although I use it for other things like programming or image generation and so on. It’s amazingly powerful and helpful.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:37:50)
But for mathematical arguments, I haven’t found it helpful, and maybe I’m not interacting with it in the right way— …yet, or it could be. And so maybe I just need to improve my skill. But also maybe I wonder, like, these examples that are provided by other people maybe involve quite a huge amount of interaction, and so I wonder if maybe the mathematical ideas are really coming from the person, you know, these great mathematicians—
Joel David Hamkins
(03:38:21)
…who are doing it rather than the AI. And so I tend to be skeptical. But also, I’m skeptical for another reason, and that is because of the nature of the large language model approach to AI doing mathematics. I recognize that the AI is trying to give me an argument that sounds like a proof rather than an argument that is a proof. The motivation is misplaced. And so I worry that this is a very dangerous source of error because it often happens in mathematics that… I mean, if I think back to when I was an undergrad, here at Caltech, I was a math major eventually, and at that time, LaTeX was a pretty new thing and I was learning LaTeX, and so I was typing up my homeworks in LaTeX and they looked beautiful. Actually, they looked like garbage. From my current standards—
Joel David Hamkins
(03:39:28)
…I’m sure it was terrible. Except at the time, I didn’t know anything. I was an undergrad and LaTeX was sort of unheard of, and so I was producing these beautifully typeset, you know— …problem sets, solutions, and so on. And I would print it up and submit it and so on, and the grades would come back, terrible grades, and I realized what was happening— The copy was so beautiful, mathematically typeset in this way, it looked like the kind of mathematics you find in a book. Because basically, that’s the only time you saw that kind of mathematical typesetting was in a professional, published book. And that mathematics was almost always correct. …In a book, right? And so I had somehow lost my…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:40:20)
…because it was so beautiful, and I’m used to only seeing that kind of typesetting when an argument was totally right. I wasn’t critical enough and was making these bonehead mistakes in the proofs. So, okay, I corrected this, of course.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:36)
But this kind of effect is very much real with the modern LLM system.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:40:39)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:40)
That’s right.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:40:40)
And so I think that the chat programs and so on are producing these arguments that look really… That’s what they’re striving to do, that’s what they’re designed to do. They’re not designed to make a logically correct argument. They’re designed to make something that looks like a logically correct argument. And it’s easy to get fooled if you’re not skeptical. And so that’s why I worry a bit when people rely on AI for mathematical arguments. I mean, using… Tying them to Lean in the formal proof verification systems and so on, this is a totally different…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:41:17)
…way of operating. But for the ordinary person sitting down and using chat to come up with a mathematical argument, I think it’s a dangerous source of error if you’re not especially attuned to this very issue that the AI is going to produce something that’s not grounded in mathematical understanding, but rather something that is trying to look like something that is grounded…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:41:41)
…in mathematical understanding. And those are not the same thing at all. And furthermore, I really wonder if one can make a kind of system for producing genuine mathematical insight that isn’t based in what I would view as mathematical understanding as opposed to the text generation systems. The methods that are used, they don’t seem close enough grounded in understanding of the underlying mathematical concepts, but rather grounded in the way words appear on a page in arguments about those concepts, which are not the same.
Lex Fridman
(03:42:17)
So there’s a couple of things to say there. One, I think there is a real skill in providing the LLM system with enough information to be a good collaborator. Because you really are dealing with a different… It’s not a human being. You really have to load in everything you possibly can from your body of work, from the way you’re thinking, and that’s a real skill. And then the other thing is, for me, if it’s at all anything like programming, because I have a lot of colleagues and friends who are programmers who feel similarly to you. And for me, I’ve gotten better and better at giving as much information as possible to the systems in a really structured way, maybe because I just like natural language as a way to express my thinking.
Lex Fridman
(03:43:08)
And then the benefit comes from the inspiration that the system can provide by its ability to know a lot of things and make connections between disparate fields and between disparate concepts. And in that way, it provides not the answer but the inspiration, the handholding, the camaraderie that helps me get to the answer, because it does know a lot more than me, like knowledge. And if you give it a lot of information and ask the broader questions, it can make some really beautiful connections. But I do find that I have to be extremely patient, like you said. The amount of times I’ll do something dumb where I feel like, “You don’t get this at all, do you?” That’s a source of a lot of frustration for us humans. Like, “This…
Lex Fridman
(03:44:04)
…Wait, this thing doesn’t understand at all.” If you can have the patience to look past that, there might be some brilliant little insights that it can provide.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:44:16)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(03:44:16)
At least for me in the realm of programming. I should say programming, there’s just so much training data. There’s so much there. At least I see the light at the end of the tunnel of promising possibilities of it being a good collaborator, versus something that gives you really true genius-level insights.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:44:39)
Right. It’s probably true. I also find it likely that a lot of the, as far as mathematical training data is concerned, I just have to assume that MathOverflow answers are part of the training data.
Lex Fridman
(03:44:52)
Yes, of course.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:44:53)
It’s so…
Lex Fridman
(03:44:54)
And you’re…
Joel David Hamkins
(03:44:56)
So-
Lex Fridman
(03:44:56)
I mean, you’re talking to yourself, essentially.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:44:57)
Yeah, maybe.

Most beautiful idea in mathematics

Lex Fridman
(03:45:00)
Sorry for the ridiculously big question, but what idea in mathematics is most beautiful to you? We’ve talked about so many.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:45:10)
The most beautiful idea in mathematics is the transfinite ordinals. These were the number system invented by Georg Cantor about counting beyond infinity, just the idea of counting beyond infinity. I mean, you count through the ordinary numbers, the natural numbers, zero, one, two, three, and so on, and then you’re not done because after that comes omega and then omega plus one and omega plus two and so on. And you can always add one. And so of course after you count through all those numbers of the form omega plus N, then you get to omega plus omega, the first number after all those. And then comes omega plus omega plus one and so on. You can always add one. And so you can just keep counting through the ordinals. It never ends.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:45:59)
Eventually, you get to omega times three, omega times four, and so on, and then the limit of those numbers, the first number that comes after all those numbers will be omega squared. And this one is the first compound limit ordinal because it’s a… A limit ordinal is one of these numbers, an ordinal, that doesn’t have an immediate predecessor like omega and omega times two, omega times three. Those are all limit ordinals. But-… by omega squared is a limit ordinal, but it’s also a limit of limit ordinals because the omega times three, omega times four, and so on, those are all limit ordinals that limit up to omega squared. And then, of course, you form omega squared plus one, and then omega squared plus two, and so on, and it never stops.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:46:43)
And it’s just absolutely beautiful and amazing, and furthermore, forms the foundation for these transfinite recursive constructions that came later. I mean starting with the Cantor-Bendixson theorem that I mentioned. And continuing with the construction of the, of the V hierarchy and Godel’s constructible universe is built this way, and Zermelo’s proof of the well-order principle using the axiom of choice is a transfinite recursive construction. And, and so the idea of just counting past infinity is so simple and elegant, and has led to so much fascinating mathematics.
Lex Fridman
(03:47:27)
Yeah, the infinity’s not the end. And what about philosophy? What to you is the most beautiful idea in philosophy?
Joel David Hamkins
(03:47:35)
So I d- I have a foot in both fields, philosophy and mathematics, and in some contexts I seem to be required to choose whether I’m a mathematician or a philosopher. I mean, my training is in mathematics. My PhD, all my degrees are mathematics. But somehow I turned myself into a philosopher over the years because my mathematical work was engaging with these philosophical issues. And so when I went… In New York, I had appointments first in mathematics only, but then eventually I was also joining the philosophy faculty at the graduate center. And when I went to Oxford for the first time, my main appointment was in philosophy, and that’s also true now at Notre Dame although I’m also a concurrent professor in mathematics.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:48:20)
And I have math PhD students still and philosophy PhD students. And so I don’t really care to decide whether I’m a mathematician or a philosopher. And my work is engaging with mathematics and with philosophical issues in mathematics and with plain philosophy, and there’s this ample region between these re- between these two subjects. So it’s not necessary to choose. I remember when I first went to Oxford and I told my daughter that I was going to become professor of philosophy in Oxford and she looked at me plaintively and said, “Uh, but, but Papa, you’re not a philosopher.” Because in her mind, you know, her father was the mathematician and her mother was the philosopher ’cause my wife, Barbara, is a philosopher. Now also at Notre Dame. We’re together there.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:49:13)
And okay, but fortunately I don’t really have to choose be- between them. So you ask about the most beautiful idea in philosophy, and I would have to say that I think it’s the distinction between truth and proof, the one that we discussed already. It’s so profound and gets at the heart of so many philosophical issues. I mean, of course, this is a distinction that’s maybe born in mathematics or mathematical logic, but that’s already philosophical to a degree, and it’s fundamentally a philosophical distinction. The truth is about the nature of the world and the way things are. It’s about objective reality in a sense, whereas proof is about our understanding of the world and about how we come to know the things that we know about the world.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:50:18)
And so to focus on proof is to focus on the interaction that we have with the objective reality. And okay, I’m talking about the reality of mathematics, not the physical world, because as I said, I live in the platonic realm and I interact with mathematical reality, and so proof is about the interaction and how we come to know the facts that are true in this mathematical reality, whereas truth is about what’s really the case, sort of apart from our knowledge of it. And and this is I think a… such a core way that I have of understanding the world and and the nature of logic and reasonings.
Lex Fridman
(03:51:03)
And the gap between the two is full of fascinating mysteries, both in the platonic realm, but also in the physics realm, in I would even say in the, in the human psychology, sociology, politics, geopolitics, all of it, if you think about proof more generally, which is the process of discovery versus the truth itself. And that’s our journey whatever field we’re in. Well, I, for one, am grateful for… … For how marvelous of a philosopher, mathematician, and human being you are. It’s truly an honor to speak with you today.
Joel David Hamkins
(03:51:43)
Well, thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure to be here, and thank you for inviting me.
Lex Fridman
(03:51:47)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Joel David Hamkins. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. Thank you for listening. As always, happy New Year. I love you all.

Transcript for Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths | Lex Fridman Podcast #487

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #487 with Irving Finkel.
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:00:00)
The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, a scholar of ancient languages, curator at the British Museum for over 45 years, and a much-admired and respected world expert on cuneiform script. More generally, he’s an expert on ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian, as well as ancient board games and Mesopotamia magic, medicine, literature, and culture. I should also mention that both on and off the mic, Irving was a super kind and fun person to talk to, with an infectious enthusiasm for ancient history that, of course, I already love but fell in love with even more. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, or you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on.

Origins of human language

Lex Fridman
(00:00:53)
And now, dear friends, here’s Irving Finkel. Where and when did writing originate in human civilization? Let’s go back a few thousand years.
Irving Finkel
(00:01:05)
The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium, say around 3500 BC, something like that. There were people in the Middle East, individuals who lived between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, who had clay as their operating material for building and all sorts of other purposes, and eventually as a writing support. They somehow developed the idea of the basis of writing, which means that you can make a sign, which people agree on, on a surface that another person, when they see it, they know what sound it engenders. That is the essence of writing: that there’s an agreed system of symbols that A can use and B can then play back, either in their heads or literally with their voices, a bit like a gramophone record.
Irving Finkel
(00:01:54)
So when it really began is a terribly, terribly awkward question for us, because the truth of the matter is, we have no idea when anything began. And all we can say is that the oldest evidence we have is around 3500 BC, but whether that was anywhere near the time or the stage when this started off for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely. So, among these Mesopotamians around 3500, they started to do this. They made up signs which everybody understood and they could write simple pictographic messages. Foot is a foot, leg is a leg, and barley is barley.
Irving Finkel
(00:02:36)
And then very, very gradually, they had the idea of how you could represent numerals, and then they had the idea that the pictures could also represent signs. And once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, that’s the crucial thing, that a picture of a foot not only meant foot but it meant the sound of the word for foot. Once this happened, some probably very, very imaginative and clever persons had a kind of lightbulb moment when they realized that they could develop a whole panoply of signs which could convey sound. And once you had that, you’re liberated from pictographic writing into a position where you can record language. So, language, grammar, and all the rest of it, and before long, proverbs and literature and all the other things that got written down.
Irving Finkel
(00:03:29)
So it was a pretty gigantic step whenever it was taken, but we really have no idea when it was first taken. But the first evidence we have presents a sort of clear-ish picture. It was simple and it got more complicated, then it became magnificent, so that with all the signs a fluent, well-trained scribe could not only write down the Sumerian language, which was one of the native tongues of Iraq, or the Babylonian language, which was the other main language of Iraq, but also any other language he heard. So, if somebody came speaking French ahead of their time and spoke out loud, he could record with these signs the sound of French.
Irving Finkel
(00:04:10)
And we have examples of funny languages around the world in the Bronze Age, which were written in cuneiform purely by ear. And often, sometimes the scribes who recorded by dictation or by something, wrote stuff they couldn’t understand, but somebody else could read and understand it. So, what you have is long before the alphabet, when the alphabet was not even a dream, a complex, bewildering-looking, off-putting writing system, which was actually very beautiful, very flexible, and lasted for well over three millennia, probably closer to four millennia. And it took a long time for the alphabet, which anybody would say was much, much more useful and much more sensible, to displace it.
Irving Finkel
(00:04:52)
So it’s one of the major stages of man’s intellect, because quite soon after the writing first took off, the signs began to proliferate, and someone said, “Hey, we haven’t got a sign for this sound,” or, “We haven’t got a sign for this idea.” And so it began to swell out. And at some extremely remarkable stage, one, probably only one person, suddenly realized that if there was no control, they would grow exponentially and exponentially until it was all nonsense and everybody had their own writing. And the second thing is that no one could remember them unless they were written down in a retrievable way.
Irving Finkel
(00:05:34)
So they invented not only writing, they invented lexicography, which means that early in the third millennium, they put down all the things that were made of wood, and all the things that were made of reeds, and all the names of colors and of countries and all the gods and everything. They made a systematic attempt to make these signs to standardize them and to make them retrievable, and of course, to teach them. And having exercised that rigor from the outset, it meant that the thing became streamlined and stayed more or less as it was all the way through, for three millennia or more. Because the stamp put on it by those early visionaries, not only who came up with the system and how it would work, but to preserve it and to safeguard it, was fantastically effective.
Irving Finkel
(00:06:26)
So, it means that there were scholars in Babylon in the third century or the second century, when Alexander was there, for example. If somebody dug up a tablet in very early writing, they would have a pretty good idea what it meant. They would recognize the signs even though they were so ancient, and they’d see the relationships between them. So, you have a fantastically strong system where the spinal cord was structured in a lexicographic, regular system. So, lexicography and what the signs were was jealously safeguarded and protected, and it lasted fantastically.

Cuneiform

Lex Fridman
(00:07:04)
We should say that the name of that system that lasted for 3,000 years is cuneiform.
Irving Finkel
(00:07:10)
Yeah. So in the 19th century, about 1840, 1850, they started to find these things on excavations in Iraq, the big Assyrian cities and sometimes further south, the Babylonian cities. They found these clay tablets, which in the ground lasted unimaginable lengths of time. And they were all written in what we call cuneiform script. And the cuneiform part of it means wedge-shaped, because “cuneus” in Latin means wedge. And when they first saw these signs, they realized that a cluster of marks broke down into different arrangements of triangular shapes. And it’s most clear on the Assyrian reliefs where the writing is very big and you can easily tell that they were that shape. On a tablet, the wedge is not quite so predominant. So, that was it.
Irving Finkel
(00:08:02)
So, they first called them cuneatic or cuneiform, and the word stuck. And of course, growing up in the British Museum and reading these things for a living becomes a kind of lifetime’s work to make sure that everybody in the country knows what cuneiform means. Because once in a while you meet somebody who never heard of the word at all, and this is appalling. So, people do survive, however. But it’s an important mission because such an achievement by man and so much knowledge was encapsulated in these lumps of clay, because they used it for everyday things like letters and business documents and contracts. This is one thing. And then the kings wrote long, elaborate accounts of their campaigns and their military activities.
Irving Finkel
(00:08:46)
And then there was proper literature and magic and medicine and all other genres of literature that we would naturally list on a sheet of paper in alphabetic writing, what you would use writing for. They basically did. And it had the unexpected quality that most of these clay things lasted in the ground until now. So, however many hundreds of thousands of tablets are in the world’s museums and collections, there must be millions of them in the ground awaiting excavation. So in a way that’s a comforting thought, because they’re safe there and protected.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:26)
You said that the development of cuneiform, of these tablets, of written language is one of the greatest, probably the greatest invention in human history. How hard do you think it was to come up with this? And we should make clear that that very specific element of encoding sound on the tablet, that’s the genius invention. Drawing a picture makes sense. Okay, here’s, you know, barley. Here’s the sun. Here’s whatever, the actual object.
Irving Finkel
(00:10:00)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:00)
But to actually write down sound is a genius invention.
Irving Finkel
(00:10:05)
Well, I think it’s rather paradoxical, because the first generation or so of tablets that we have are written in these pictographic signs where each sign means what it looks like. So, this is a very limited method of recording messages, and it doesn’t lend itself to recording grammar. And then the secondary phase, as we understand it from archaeology, is the perception that you could take these signs, still meaning what they look like but also what the words sounded like. So, then you have all these wonderful ice cubes which express all the sounds of the language from which you can record words and grammar and everything else. Now, the thing is, the received law from Assyriology is it was that way around, that first we had pictures and secondly we had sound.
Irving Finkel
(00:10:55)
Well, I have to say, I find this very hard to believe, because if you had a group of people in an environment where it was compellingly necessary to make a system that you made marks on a surface which everybody could understand and use, why wouldn’t you start out with signs that made sounds? Because everybody speaks the same language, right? So, they didn’t have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but they could easily work out all the vowels and consonants without naming them as vowels and consonants, but they’re component parts. So, they could have had signs that started out… Because if you decided you had… We have 26, let’s say they had 50 signs that would create the sound, they could write anything without any further trouble.
Irving Finkel
(00:11:44)
So, I find it very bewildering that they started off with the least flexible and the least adaptable system of pictographs and then they moved on to the sound. I don’t know why they bothered with it. And my hunch is that the archaeological evidence that we have on this score is ultimately misleading, because I think this: that probably for a very, very long time before the Sumerians, people in the world, the world of what we call the Middle East, were in contact. They traded, they probably even had wars, and they had messages between them. And I think there was a long running system of communication between people who didn’t share a language for whom pictures would suffice. So, if merchants come and they have three sheep to sell, so they draw three little sheep.
Irving Finkel
(00:12:35)
You know how much it is and what they are and so forth. And so I think that what happened with the Sumerians, with their pictographic signs, is that those signs are right at the end of a very, very, very long period of time, when somebody thought, “What we can do is take these stupid inhibited no smoking signs and write language.” That is what I think happened. That’s what I think happened.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:04)
Is this a controversial statement?
Irving Finkel
(00:13:05)
Highly controversial. Many Assyriologists would leave the room.
Irving Finkel
(00:13:12)
But I’m not scared of controversy because it’s natural. I mean, if you think about it, it’s natural because you don’t have to have an alphabet to divide your word into sounds, see? For example, in Sumerian, you have a funny system, right? You have a root, like “du,” which means “to go.” And then you have prefixes, like E or Mu or Ba, and one’s a passive, one’s an active, and this and this. So when you have a sentence, you have one of the Mu, Ba, or E prefixes, then you have the root, and then you have things at the end. So it is called agglutinative by people who like to make things look more important than they are. So you have the central thing, you slap stuff on the beginning, slap stuff on the end, and each particle creates a bit of meaning.
Irving Finkel
(00:13:56)
So you have a long verb which tells you, “He would’ve done it if he could, but he couldn’t,” kind of thing, in the form of the verb. But the thing is, if you wanted to write it down, you and I decided to write it down, so the first thing we would do is have a sign Mu, and then we’d have Ba, and then we’d have E, because every five minutes people made those noises. You see what I mean?

Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe

Lex Fridman
(00:14:16)
Yeah, absolutely. Do you think it’s possible we might find much, much older…
Irving Finkel
(00:14:23)
I do
Lex Fridman
(00:14:24)
…cuneiform-type tablets?
Irving Finkel
(00:14:26)
Or pictographic-type tablets, before the cuneiform and its drawing type, and I’ll tell you why. Because there’s this marvelous site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:36)
Oh yeah?
Irving Finkel
(00:14:36)
Do you know about Gobekli Tepe?
Lex Fridman
(00:14:37)
Yes, of course.
Irving Finkel
(00:14:37)
Well, everybody knows about the buildings and the architecture. Everybody knows about it. If you go all the way through the photographs, which the archeologists unwisely put online, you will find in the middle of one color plate with lots of other things, a round green stone like a scarab from Egypt. That’s to say, it has an arched back and a flat bottom. And on the flat bottom, there are hieroglyphic signs carved in the stone. No one said anything about it at all, but it’s clear to me, A, that this was a stamp to ratify, where the carvings of the signs on clay or some other sealing material would leave an impression. It must be that. So this is about 9000 BC.
Irving Finkel
(00:15:26)
Now when I was a boy at university, my professor said to me that the reason writing evolved in Mesopotamia is because they had complex cities with ziggurats and big buildings and lots of people and they had to organize everything, and so they invented writing to cope with it. Well, if they had to cope with that in Sumer in 3000 BC, they sure as hell had to do it at Gobekli Tepe, because they’ve hardly even begun to finish excavating the sites of…
Irving Finkel
(00:15:54)
…Gobekli Tepe. They go on and on like Manchester and Newcastle United. And really, the old rule would be you could not have architecture like that, planned and built according to principle with all the different people. You couldn’t have that without writing in southern Iraq. So how come suddenly then 7,000 years earlier, they do it there? That, and that green stone shows that they had writing. That was an official who sealed this, got the stuff or whatever it was, or it was his dad’s name or whatever it is, got a wiggly snake and a wiggly this. That is pictographic writing. Maybe even as phonetic writing, I don’t know, but it was writing thousands of years before in the south. And that’s what I think it is.
Irving Finkel
(00:16:43)
You know, people came with metal or precious stones from Anatolia. They knew that in the south they had lots and lots of stuff, they wanted to trade, they had to communicate. And it’s basically like having a cigarette with an X through the middle. Everybody in the world knows what that means. They don’t know what the word for cigarette is in this language or cancer or filter or tobacco, it doesn’t matter. It’s pictographic writing. We still use it. And it’s above all kinds of mess. And I think that was the prevailing system because I honestly believe that the people at this time were not stupid. They weren’t gorillas. They weren’t less advanced than we are. They were probably indistinguishable from what we are.
Irving Finkel
(00:17:25)
So you have merchants and wanderers and people who say, “Let’s go down the river and see where we end up.” And people looking for money, looking for women, looking for everything. I mean, that’s surely how it was. But if you look at those Gobekli buildings with a skeptical eye, how it could be. I mean, the finish of it is astonishing, the structure of it, the vision of it. So the workforce and the tools and the organization, you know, what do they do it with? A megaphone? “Your breakfast!” And all that kind of stuff. No way. No way.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:57)
So that’s a really controversial statement that…
Irving Finkel
(00:17:59)
It is really controversial
Lex Fridman
(00:18:00)
…at the time of Gobekli Tepe, there may have already been a writing system.
Irving Finkel
(00:18:04)
There was, because the thing is about it, that it’s a seal to ratify. It’s not just a squiggle on a pot and you can say, “Oh, that’s just a piece of…” This is a finished thing with a flat surface. You press it down, so you have some contract, you have some building arrangement. That we’re paying for these bricks, whatever it was, and the official person had to squash it down and it leaves the impression. I mean, I am a great believer in Sherlock Holmes- …as a teaching system for intelligence and rationality and logic in thinking. I read those stories a million times when I was a kid, and one of the things which impresses me most of all was this point quoted by Holmes, not original to him, that it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:52)
That’s a powerful statement. Yeah.
Irving Finkel
(00:18:54)
It’s a powerful statement. Well, that seal from Gobekli Tepe is a raindrop from which I infer writing, and it’s perfectly possible they all wrote on flat leaves. After all, in many parts of the world, that’s what happened. So, for example, in the Indus Valley, people write the most abject nonsense about the Indus Valley writing system, but all we have is seals, basically. So they are also for ratification purposes, and they have the name of the owner in three or four or maybe five signs, and it’s probably me, son of my dad, or milkman or whatever it is. And it’s obvious, it’s obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can’t just have had inscribed stone seals, and many parts of India today write on palm leaf. Why should it be any different?
Irving Finkel
(00:19:45)
So people think, you know, “Oh, well, just because it’s now, it wouldn’t be then.” But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious, because the process of evolution is stymied left, right, and center by inertia. Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution, and this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:07)
First of all, your whole line of work, you’re making me realize, is a kind of Sherlock Holmes type of process. The deciphering of the language, archaeology, of taking those pieces of evidence and trying to reconstruct a vision of that world. And now you’re making me realize that even all the cuneiform tablets we have is just a raindrop compared to the waterfall of thousands of years of humans.
Irving Finkel
(00:20:39)
Yes, we have a lot, but it’s nothing in comparison with what existed. But not only that, you see, we don’t have to decipher anymore. We can read Akkadian or Babylonian, Sumerian pretty well fluently. That’s not a problem. So the information which you can get from these sources, especially three millennia of sources, is very, very substantial. Very substantial, but it means that Assyriologists have the inbuilt idea that what we have is something like all there ever was, which is absurd. For example, there’s a period called the Ur III Period, where people lived in city-states. They wrote very small account tablets by the thousand, and there were two or three major cities where this is the way they lived.
Irving Finkel
(00:21:25)
People had to bring tithes and offerings, and everything was recorded by what I always refer to, and people sympathize with, is the ancestors of the Inland Revenue, because everything had to be written down so that some schmuck could check it and fill out the ledger, and some other schmuck above him could okay it, so there’s no funny business or no mistakes. Now, the thing is, there are thousands of those tablets written in about 2100 to 2000 BC, thousands of them, about the size of a box of matches.
Irving Finkel
(00:21:55)
So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world, but they probably all came out of two rooms, because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room, and the archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these, and then all the locals came and they dug them up and they sold them all over the place, and they’ve gone all over the world. Thousands and thousands of them, out of probably two storage rooms, which is not a whole culture or a whole country, or their whole history, or their belief systems. So our view of it is skewed by the nature of the material, and sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always, and sometimes the people who work with skewed material don’t even realize how skewed it is.
Irving Finkel
(00:22:47)
I mean, you know, it’s quite remarkable.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:50)
So, in all your time of studying cuneiform tablets, do you sometimes late at night get a glimpse of the waterfall? Like, can you imagine?
Irving Finkel
(00:23:01)
Yes, I can imagine. I can imagine easily, because once in a while, a library is discovered. In the 1850s at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a fat king, king of the world, called Ashurbanipal, and he had a fantastic library, and he promoted it. He impounded tablets, he had them brought to Nineveh. He wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all knowledge from before under one roof. It was a kind of Alexandria thing. So he was a trained scholar, and this is what he did, and they found it in the 19th century. They dug it up, Layard and those people. So what did they find? They found the tablets higgledy-piggledy all over the floor of a huge room and in the corridors and everything.
Irving Finkel
(00:23:43)
And lots of them broken and lots of them burnt. So ever since then, until really quite recently, Assyriologists who spent all their… Well, people who work on these Nineveh tablets spent all their time joining the bits together, and you have the story about Gilgamesh and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden, and she wants to seduce him, and dot, dot, dot, you can’t find the bit… So you look for another bit and you look for another bit. And gradually, they piece together the literature, and the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again, you’ll have the whole library.
Irving Finkel
(00:24:14)
But it’s the absolute opposite. Because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion, they worked hand-in-glove with the Elamites from Iran. They had a pincer movement and they beat Assyria, they conquered Assyria. And they ran through the capital and they set fire to everything. Pinched all the women and took all the jewelry and all the gold. And people say that in a fit of pique, they destroyed the library. But they wouldn’t destroy the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire, and it had all the knowledge in the world. They destroyed that? They spoke the same language, they had the same writing system. They’d have taken them all safely home, cart after cart after cart.
Irving Finkel
(00:24:58)
And I think what’s left there is duplicates and broken things, the things that got dropped and everything, and that’s what everyone thinks it is. So this is also a controversial point.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:09)
You’re just nonstop…
Irving Finkel
(00:25:10)
But it’s common…
Lex Fridman
(00:25:10)
…starting trouble.
Irving Finkel
(00:25:11)
It’s common sense. It’s common…
Lex Fridman
(00:25:12)
You’re gonna get both of us canceled today.
Irving Finkel
(00:25:14)
But you see, the thing is, it’s predicated on the assumption that what we have is only what there was. And this is such a fallacy. It needs to be attacked left, right, and center.

How to write and speak Cuneiform

Lex Fridman
(00:25:29)
So, a lot of the cuneiform language is already deciphered. Can you speak to the deciphering process? How hard is it? Maybe take us to this place for you yourself first learning a language, figuring out the puzzle of it. How does it feel? What does it look like to a brain that doesn’t deeply understand it? And how do you then piece stuff together? Maybe you can go to the early days, sort of the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform.
Irving Finkel
(00:26:01)
That’s important. Well, the first thing is how the cuneiform writing system works, because the crucial point, and once you see it, it makes a lot of things clear, is that they wrote in syllables. So if you take the English alphabet, which of course they didn’t, you have the letter B, G, D, P, H, and so forth. They couldn’t write a consonant. They couldn’t do that. So what they did is they had a vowel before a consonant or one after. Say you have “Ab” and “Ba.” But as they had four vowels, you had to have Ab and Ba, Ib and Bi, Ub and Bu, Eb and Be.
Irving Finkel
(00:26:43)
So you had the range of things clustered around what we call a consonant. So they had all those for all the letters, which gave them a basic system. There was much more to it than that, and it was more complicated than that. We don’t have to really go into it, but basically if you are a Babylonian and you want to write the word “museum,” which of course is one of the most important words in the English language and other languages too. So what you would do is you would write the syllable mu-
Irving Finkel
(00:27:09)
And then the sign “Z” and then the sign “um.” So you split the word up into its component syllables. When you read it in your mind, you squash them together into “museum.” That’s the basic system. They had other signs which gave you a clue as to the meaning and the bits around the edge, but it’s basically syllabic writing. So when you go to university to study cuneiform, what you have to learn is all the signs and all their values, because unfortunately they didn’t just have one for each, they had multiple ones. And the reason is not that they were mad or they wanted to make life hell, but because the syllables derive from the writing of Sumerian words. So the Sumerian vocabulary had a lot of words that were probably differentiated by tone.
Irving Finkel
(00:28:07)
So you might have “Ba” and then a rising “A” and then a lowering… and these signs all retain the “Ba” value even though there were no tones. So it means if you look at a sign list, there’s a lot of signs. You have “Ba” number one, which is the common. Then there’s “Ba” number two, “Ba” number three, and you have to learn them all. And when you read, you have to learn how to do it. So in the modern world, if you go to university to do Assyriology, which I hope you and all of your disciples will do as soon as possible, you actually have to cope with two languages: the Sumerian and the Babylonian. Now, the first thing is this, that the Babylonian language is a Semitic tongue, which although it’s extinct, is connected to or related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriac.
Irving Finkel
(00:28:56)
All that family of Semitic languages which are still alive, it’s an early example of one of those. So that when the decipherment came along, it was the Semitic dictionary that they fell back on to identify words, nouns, and roots. The other language, which is Sumerian, the one when you stick bits in the beginning and stick bits at the end, is not only not Semitic, it’s not related to any other known language.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:25)
Oh, no.
Irving Finkel
(00:29:26)
Yeah, this is a bewitching thing. It’s a bewitching thing to me, and this is how to understand it. Because the languages that we study in the world today, linguists study, they more or less all fall into a language group. So you have Indo-European with Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hittite, and so forth, and that’s French, that’s one group. And you have Germanic and you have Slavonic. And most languages, even the far-flung ones, fall into what can be seen to be maybe big and airy groups, their family like that. There’s not one for Sumerian. So this means that the truth that languages do not exist in a vacuum but they’re part of a big family must always have been true. So that when writing arrives about 3000, say, 300 BC, to write properly.
Irving Finkel
(00:30:19)
It means that Sumerian was recorded just in time, but the big languages, maybe in China, in Russia, in somewhere else in Asia, that were related to Sumerian-
Lex Fridman
(00:30:33)
Are gone?
Irving Finkel
(00:30:34)
… are all gone. They’re gone forever and ever and ever, unless something amazing happens. So we’ve got the one representative of this bizarre family. Is that-

Primitive human language

Lex Fridman
(00:30:44)
Amazing.
Irving Finkel
(00:30:44)
It is. And it’s a very stimulating thing to imagine. I personally believe that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens for sure had language, for sure they talked to one another. It’s impossible that they didn’t. The point came when they did, they did. And the Neanderthals, 800,000 years of living in Europe. They had to deal with the Ice Age, they all lived together, they bring up their children. You think they couldn’t speak anything? They have the same apparatus. And if you have a human brain, then it responds to stimulus. And the more stimulus there is for communication, I mean, the idea that you and I are out hunting rhino…
Irving Finkel
(00:31:23)
…and you say, “Legs.” Well, shut up, I’m concentrating. “Legs, legs.” And then I suddenly think, “Oh, I get it. You are legs.” Right? You only have to do that once, then you know who I am. So I know that I’m me and that you are you. So people who say that they couldn’t distinguish ego and all that, it’s absolutely stupid. If you cut your hand with a knife, you sure as hell experience… You sure as hell do. It hurts. It hurts a lot. You might even bleed to death. But it’s not somebody else’s hand, and it’s your hand and it’s your existence and your life that’s threatened. You think people weren’t conscious that they were an entity? I don’t believe it.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:06)
And they probably had a way to express that with sounds.
Irving Finkel
(00:32:10)
Well, eventually, yes. Names. I mean…
Lex Fridman
(00:32:13)
Names
Irving Finkel
(00:32:13)
…names the things, and then you have the idea that a label fixes to something. Then the light bulb has gone on, and next minute you have rhino and you have skin and you have babies. Because I think you have an idea, and the idea then drives the brain, and the brain has another idea. It works like fertility.

Development of writing systems

Lex Fridman
(00:32:31)
So what do you think is the motivation, the primary driver of developing written language? Does it go hand-in-hand with civilization?
Irving Finkel
(00:32:40)
I think that the media in which it appears is when there’s a lot of people living in an urban environment. And with rival institutions or the king or the government or all those sorts of… …Things. And that’s why I think Gobekle Tepe must have been the same thing. I read somewhere that they’re all nomads and they only came to Gobekle Tepe three months a year. I mean, that cannot be true that they were nomads. Cannot be true. To get the stone and someone has to draw on the ground the plan of the building, they have to work out how thick it’s going to be, how high it’s going to be. I mean, you can’t just like that, like gorillas.

Decipherment of Cuneiform

Lex Fridman
(00:33:25)
All right. So deciphering, the process of deciphering.
Irving Finkel
(00:33:28)
So when I started, there were grammars and scientists and dictionaries. Everything was marvelous. It was all basically deciphered, all you had to do was get on with learning it. But at the beginning, when the first tablets and bricks in cuneiform and stone inscriptions came to light, no one could read them. But they knew they were writing, but they didn’t know how to read them. And what happened was, like you said before, with the Rosetta Stone, it was something directly comparable, because there was an inscription of one of the Persian kings halfway up a mountain in a place called Bisutun, where this King Darius had written an account of his successful career in Elamite and in Babylonian and in Old Persian, a trilingual version.
Irving Finkel
(00:34:18)
And Old Persian, although it isn’t obviously an archaic form of the language, Persian is still alive, it was still alive in the 19th century. So since the Old Persian was written in a very simple style of cuneiform, they deciphered it, they twigged it was Old Persian, they read it in Persian, and they read the names Darayawush in Old Persian. And then suddenly, somebody realized that the other two columns were about the same length.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:43)
Brilliant.
Irving Finkel
(00:34:44)
What do you know? And the thing is, it said, “I am Darius the great king, king of the world, king of the… son of… diddly, diddly, diddly, diddly… grandson of… diddly, diddly, diddly…” So there’s a whole paragraph with repeated things in the Persian which they could understand. So what do you know? They’re reiterated passages in the other two languages. So that was the key, that kind of… the chisel that opened up cuneiform writing proper. And the thing was, they soon twigged that the language of the Babylonian was a Semitic tongue. And this was so important. I think the first word they discovered was the word for river, which is Ɔaru in Akkadian and نحر in Arabic and Aramaic.
Irving Finkel
(00:35:27)
And when they realized that the word that corresponded to the Persian had this form, this was a gift, a gift of gold, because everybody immediately seized their Arabic and Hebrew dictionaries and started leafing through looking for words that would fit in the context. And they basically deciphered this inscription in that sort of way. And of course, all the other inscriptions came in order, and there were lots and lots of difficulties which had to be resolved, but that’s the basic thing. And without that trilingual, I don’t know what would have happened. I mean, I suppose it’s conceivable that in the very modern world, something might have happened. But as it was, it was done by sheer brainpower, by very, very clever persons just doing it. And they cracked it.
Irving Finkel
(00:36:14)
The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too. So it was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain, and Henry Rawlinson, who was an upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plain, thousands of feet up in the air, and brought those back, and they were used in the decipherment. So it’s very romantic.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:46)
Wait a minute. More controversial statement from today. Henry Rawlinson doesn’t deserve the credit for that?
Irving Finkel
(00:36:52)
No, I don’t think he does. He’s called the Father of Assyriology, but I think he’s the Stepfather of Assyriology because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about it, which was almost entirely wrong.
Irving Finkel
(00:37:05)
And there was a clergyman in Northern Ireland called Edward Hincks who lived in a place called Killyleagh and had five daughters and ran this church, who was possibly a card-carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly close. And what happened with him was this: there was an ongoing competition, well, an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing, which Champollion usually gets the credit for, and Hincks was very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic ahead of the French. And he ran into a sort of dead end at one stage, and he thought he’d have a look at cuneiform to see if it was helpful.
Irving Finkel
(00:37:46)
And at the same time, he cracked it. He worked out how it worked. He realized that one sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent, the signs. I tried to shelter you from the horrible news… …But it’s not a walk in the park. It takes about five years to… you’d probably do it in about four, probably.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:11)
That is a compliment. I think you just complimented me. Thank you. Thank you very much. So, you’re saying one sign that looks exactly the same might have different sounds given the context?
Irving Finkel
(00:38:24)
Yeah, and you have to choose the right sound, and also different meaning as well. Because, for example, if you have a sign for the word hot, right? You can’t really have a picture sign for hot. It doesn’t make sense, but what they did is they did a drawing of a kind of complex thing with a brazier inside another sign, which meant hot. So that sign existed, but it also meant other things as well, and you had to choose the right one for the context. It’s… all the context does matter. I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start cuneiform, because on top of everything else, they didn’t leave gaps between the words. And that’s really…
Lex Fridman
(00:39:04)
So they’re all connected?
Irving Finkel
(00:39:05)
That’s really mean. Yeah. So when you read, what you have to do is start with the first sign, and you think of the sign, this, and you go through the values in your mind, and there’s the next sign. And if one is ‘ba’ and the next one is ‘ab’ among other readings, ba-ab sounds like a syllable structure for a word, and you go on like that. So there are two things about it. One is that if you want to, you can master it. The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted. They controlled it so it wasn’t insane. So in other words, if you learn the corpus and you learn how the signs are composed and you learn their different values, then you’ve got it down. And off you go. And it’s very beautiful, I think. It’s marvelous.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:51)
Can you, in all seriousness, take me back to the time when you were learning it? What’s the process of learning it?
Irving Finkel
(00:39:57)
Well, I had a very abnormal upbringing because when I went to university, for about three years beforehand, I’d wanted to be an Egyptologist. So I read the grammar by Gardiner and was looking forward very much to studying ancient Egyptian. What happened was that I went up to the University of Birmingham, where I went to university, and there was a man called Rundle Clark, who was an Egyptologist. Rundle Clark came in on the Monday and gave us one lesson about Egyptian sculpture or something like that, and the next minute, next day, he died. Bang.
Irving Finkel
(00:40:38)
So the professor called me into his room and said, “Look, it’s going to take me a while to get an Egyptologist. They don’t grow on trees, but there’s another person in this department who teaches another ancient language called Lambert, and he teaches cuneiform. So what I suggest is you go and do a bit of cuneiform with Professor Lambert, and then when I get an Egyptologist, you can convert back.” So I went and knocked on the door. “Yes?” So I went in and said, “I want to learn cuneiform.” And Professor Lambert, who was rather a Sherlock Holmes kind of figure—aesthetic, bony, sarcastic… Cruel-
Lex Fridman
(00:41:20)
Cruel.
Irving Finkel
(00:41:20)
…cruel, absolutely terrifying. And I said I wanted to learn cuneiform, and he wasn’t at all pleased because this was a time in Britain when professors resented having students to teach because it cut into their research time. It was that sort of arrangement. Anyway, I started it, and after about, I don’t know, maybe one or two lessons, I knew this was going to be my life’s work. So that’s what happened to me. It was an amazing thing. So he gave me a list of basic signs to learn. I did, and in the next couple of days, then we came in and we started reading.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:02)
So given the complexity of the signs, why did cuneiform last 3,000 years? The most successful writing system ever.
Irving Finkel
(00:42:12)
Fair question. There are several factors. One is the famous factor of inertia- The second thing is that people who could read and write and were in charge of archives, and were the clerks in the temple, and the writers for the king and everything, commanded a very great deal of power because most of the public couldn’t. So they reserved to themselves knowledge, understanding, philosophical inquiry. I mean, no doubt it went on in pubs and things, but they were in charge. They had everything under lock and key. And I think the scribal schools were rather cliquey. They were certainly cliquey in the sense of Oxford and Cambridge being rivals, that sort of thing.
Irving Finkel
(00:43:02)
They had that sort of idea. And it was in no one’s interest whatsoever. Nobody would ever concede any interest in the idea of literacy for all. This would be—it would never be thought of, and it would be anathema. And so if you got on a soapbox on a Saturday afternoon and said, “Oh, enough of this, we have to teach the children,” they’d be taken away, I think.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:25)
So we’re getting, in these tablets, the output of the intellectual class, a very small fraction of-
Irving Finkel
(00:43:32)
We are
Lex Fridman
(00:43:32)
…humans.
Irving Finkel
(00:43:33)
We are.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:33)
So we’re getting just the Oxford and the Cambridge.
Irving Finkel
(00:43:35)
We are, except that when you went to scribal school, you had to learn Sumerian and Akkadian, the languages properly, and all the vocabulary and the grammar.
Irving Finkel
(00:43:45)
So some boys probably had a lot of trouble doing this. And, you know, they were okay, but then there ain’t gonna be no geniuses. And I think the situation in the school was that the teachers farmed out the kids who would actually rather have been outside playing football but could read and write, to earning their living doing low-level reading and writing. That’s to say writing contracts, letters, everyday things for people. Because no one could read and write, so you had to get a scribe if you’re gonna marry your daughter off, and you get all the witnesses about the presence and all this, all that thing had to be done for four days. So the writer would come and do… So your medium-level writers would serve that requirement.
Irving Finkel
(00:44:35)
And very talented or clever or intellectual students would be encouraged to go into one of the literary professions, which would be, so to speak, medicine, law, working for the king, working for the church, I mean, the priesthood. All those things which were dependent upon archives and writing, they would find their niveau. And also architecture, because if a big building had to be built, then somebody had to know about load-bearing things and brick measurements. And so some of them went into that kind of work. And also, probably some of them went into running the army. You had to move stores and animals and…
Irving Finkel
(00:45:17)
So they found their niveau, and some of them were intellectually very able indeed, and they went into the disciplines of, on the one hand astrology, but more seriously into astronomy and theoretical grammar. Because they had treatises about the relationship between the two languages and how they worked and different parts of speech, and they wrote learned commentaries as well, what words meant. So there was an intellectual high-level top, and then there were lots of professional scribes, and then the kids who left school as soon as possible and did all that, like today.

Limits of language

Lex Fridman
(00:45:57)
I apologize to be philosophical, but Wittgenstein, the philosopher, said, “The limits of our language is the limits of our world.” To what degree did the languages that were encoded in cuneiform define human civilization, would you say? What were the things that were complicated to express and therefore were not expressed often?
Irving Finkel
(00:46:21)
That’s a really an interesting question. So in terms of richness of vocabulary and richness of verbal subtlety, I think Babylonian rivals Arabic and of course English. You know, in other words, you can say whatever you want in English- …however subtle it might be, even if people understand the subtlety. You can, because the tools are fantastic. And Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices, and all the same. Same in Babylonian. It was a fully-fledged literary language. The question about whether the language put a stop to further things, which is basically what you’re asking…
Irving Finkel
(00:47:05)
…is immensely complicated. But the one thing that strikes me as relevant is that a very huge proportion of scholarly literature in Mesopotamia takes the form of omens, because they believed that events, accidental or deliberately stimulated, had implications for what was going to happen.
Irving Finkel
(00:47:29)
And they took omens from things in the sky and things in the street, every single thing. If you were a well-qualified diviner, it would have this significance, right? Now, there are thousands of lines of omens of all different kinds. And in Akkadian it says, for example, “If a lizard runs across the breakfast table, the queen will die.” So if you translate the Akkadian this way, the word “if,” verb and everything, “If that, then this.” So there are thousands upon thousands of lines translated into many books about omens where, “If this happens, that will happen.” So this is how it’s understood by my colleagues.
Irving Finkel
(00:48:15)
Well, this is absolutely impossible, because if you’re the chief diviner for the king, and you open up a sheep to take a liver out and examine it according to the… And if the queen’s gonna die and the king’s there, you’re not gonna say, “The queen’s gonna die.” I mean, you’re gonna look a fucking idiot if she doesn’t die.
Irving Finkel
(00:48:36)
And if she does die, you’re gonna be responsible. So all you can ever do and ever, ever have been able to do is to say, “There’s a sign here that says that the queen could die,” meaning “could die,” not “will die.” And therefore, the requisite ritual or magic must immediately swing into action to defer the danger. So the point is that A equals B is never true. It means that with A, B could be, might be, ought to be, should be, could be true, all those subtle things. So that the diviner who works for the king must have been a philosopher who looks at the king, and he knows what the king wants him to say. So he has to tell the king what he wants to hear. He has to tell the king if it’s bad news in such a way that he doesn’t mind it or he won’t worry.
Irving Finkel
(00:49:32)
It’s the most beautiful thing. It’s so subtle. It’s like a violin concerto. It can never have been A equals B for a minute. So the medical texts say, “If you do… If a man has this,” doo-dee-dee-doo, you know? “You do this, your drink’s…” He’ll get better, right? He says, “You’ll get better.” So have you ever met a doctor who will say, “You do this, you’ll get better”? No. They say, “All being well, you’ll be back on your feet.” Or, “I’ve seen this kind of condition many times, everything should go fine. You should get better, you should be better soon.” But never, “You will get better,” because what happens if you die? Where are you?
Lex Fridman
(00:50:10)
Th- the lawyers will show up.
Irving Finkel
(00:50:12)
Absolutely. So this means that not expressible in Akkadian grammar are these modal verbs… …Could, might, should, ought. They can’t be expressed grammatically, but it is impossible that it was such a magnificent literary language where they didn’t have these subtleties. It’s utterly impossible. And if you translate, “He will,” in a literary text, “He might,” then the whole text is different. The whole text is different.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:45)
Yeah, absolutely.
Irving Finkel
(00:50:46)
And, and they don’t… My colleagues translate… It says in the grammar books, ne-ne-ne-ne-ne, like that, automatically. There’s no self-appraisal of the folly of it.

Art of translation

Lex Fridman
(00:50:57)
You have said the translation is part archeology, part detective work, part poetry. Can we just speak about translation and the art of it a bit more?
Irving Finkel
(00:51:05)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:06)
I mean, it’s such a, such an incredible discipline. Just like you said, hinted at, just a subtle variation in a single word can change everything.
Irving Finkel
(00:51:16)
Well, you know, the truth about translation is that you never really have a word in one language which precisely equates another. You never do. They’re always a kind… The best you can do. And sometimes it makes no difference, and sometimes it’s really quite misleading. And so what people do when they learn Akkadian, is they learn the Akkadian word and they learn the English translation, right? You have, “To divide.” So whenever you have the verb, it’s some form of divide or division. But actually, it’s not, because divide is like the primary root, but there’s maybe 10 nuances of what that can mean in English, where the one at the bottom and the one at the top, you’d hardly know they were connected.
Irving Finkel
(00:52:02)
And the Chicago Dictionary, which is such a magnificent thing, when you come to the museum and see me- …I’ll show you this. It’s the most salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history, is the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which is this long. There’s only one rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course. But the two of them, I think, are your countrymen’s greatest achievement.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:29)
It’s the pride of our nation-
Irving Finkel
(00:52:31)
I think so
Lex Fridman
(00:52:31)
… those two things.
Irving Finkel
(00:52:32)
The very thing.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:33)
Chicago Dictionary… Can you… I’m sorry to take the attention. What is the Chicago Dictionary?
Irving Finkel
(00:52:37)
It started in the ’20s, and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:42)
Ah.
Irving Finkel
(00:52:42)
A, A to Z, so to speak. And it’s as long as this table. It’s magnificent thing, and this big. And the people who worked on it were real translators, so they knew that it wasn’t lexically A means B, but they had… So if you have something in a proverb, the meaning is going to be a little bit different from in their letter. And, you know, so people really, really understand Akkadian, they really do. But this thing about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum to me, because there’s no way it’s reflected in the writing. So I can only assume that there was some kind of drawing out of the vowel in a verb, meaning could… Now, like you were saying, it might do it, you know, something like that. Anyway, so nowadays we… It’s not the decipherment that’s the job, it’s just reading.
Irving Finkel
(00:53:31)
And if you have lots of tablets to work on, like on a dig, it’s very exciting if they come out of the ground and no one’s looked for them before you, you know, it’s your job. And if you’re a competent assyriologist, you should be able to sight-read more or less. Except most… Say, a letter or something like that, but most documents have some damage, so you have to learn how to interpret stuff. And also, some literature is very difficult because of technical vocabulary, and then they had technical vocabulary and unusual words.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:03)
So you can do all of that. You can kind of figure out the technical complexities.
Irving Finkel
(00:54:09)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:09)
You can figure out the noise, meaning missing pieces.
Irving Finkel
(00:54:14)
Yeah. Sometimes you can calculate what it ought to be, make a reasonable suggestion. And this dictionary, which I was talking to you about, is such a fantastic tool because a lot of people worked on it. It was the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it was for decades and decades of work. And most of the world’s best Assyriologists collaborated on it, so the quality of translation and understanding is really extraordinary.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:41)
What are some things you’ve read from that time? Are there some jokes? Are there some love letters?
Irving Finkel
(00:54:48)
There are one or two letters about that from a chap to a woman about, you know, “You are very beautiful and your lips are like radishes and your ears are like walruses,” and things. But I mean, there are some things like that. And then there’s a kind of street drama in Babylon, in 4th century BC, something like that, when there must have been actors who did this in the street. And it’s Marduk and Sarpanitum, his wife, and another woman. Marduk’s having an affair with this other…
Lex Fridman
(00:55:21)
Oh, no
Irving Finkel
(00:55:21)
…goddess. And Sarpanitum is jealous, and these women fight in the street and hurl insults at one another, and, you know, “slop bucket” and all this kind of stuff. It’s hilarious, and it must have been a bit like a sort of Verdi opera without the music, I suppose. I don’t know. But anyway, it starts off when Sarpanitum is in the room and Marduk’s in bed with this other goddess on the roof, and she can hear. You could say it was an eternal human issue.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:50)
Yeah, love, heartbreak, jealousy, all of that.
Irving Finkel
(00:55:53)
And between deities also. Because deities are only modeled on human beings, after all, so…
Lex Fridman
(00:55:58)
Yeah, deities are a grandiose way of expressing human affairs, human behaviors, human ways, yeah.
Irving Finkel
(00:56:05)
Indeed.

Gods

Lex Fridman
(00:56:06)
In the writing, what was their relationship to the divine?
Irving Finkel
(00:56:10)
Relationship with the divine, well, the first thing to say is that they had a large pantheon of gods. So there were three gods at the top, sometimes called Anu, Enlil, and Ea. There were three gods at the top and hundreds of other gods and goddesses. And you have the situation that I think lots of small villages and towns had their old, ancient gods, and eventually they were all worked into a kind of theological system like a phone book. And the lesser, minor gods were amalgamated and then they were given jobs in the households of the big gods. So there was a sort of structure. So you have this in the background, a big, sweeping theology, like you have in the world today in some parts of the world, and this was the main system.
Irving Finkel
(00:56:59)
And the main gods were concerned with the ruler and the fate of the country. Another god was concerned with illness and the dead, and what happens to the dead, and they had other specialties, and they all had their own temples. And when a baby came into the world, probably this was universally true, the baby was put under the tutelage of one or other of the gods. Sometimes, you know, the royal family, they were the big shots, but sometimes not, or the ones that were in the family or something like that. So people had, grew up with the idea that among all of them, there were special ones for the family and they had a special one who was supposed to look after them. That’s the sort of basic idea.
Irving Finkel
(00:57:46)
But the trouble is, since gods are, as you say, human beings on a larger scale, they can be forgetful or uninterested or on holiday, and there are lots of ways that you have to prompt them. Make little sacrifices and little bribes so they do their job and keep an eye on you. So they had that kind of slightly practical view of gods, that they were a bit unpredictable, “great when they were there but not always there” sort of idea. And I also believe this, that a lot of people in the world today who did not have the disadvantage of growing up in a stifling religion, but are just normal people, get a lot more interested when they’re really ill or when they have a big disaster.
Irving Finkel
(00:58:36)
All of a sudden, God or gods seem a lot more important than they do normally. So few people walk about in a state of religious awe, and a good proportion of clergymen I’ve ever met don’t do that either. It’s a kind of conception that’s not actually based on reality, that the individual’s response to religious stimuli fluctuates and is varied and is often a response to need. It doesn’t come from nothing. I mean, people don’t suddenly feel, “I got to thank the Lord for the rainbow,” or something like that. I think it’s probably true today, I mean, when you read the investigations they make of religion today, Christianity in this country is on the decline because people who are supposed to be Christian say they aren’t anymore, they’re atheists.
Irving Finkel
(00:59:27)
And people who say, “I go to church and I believe in everything,” it is a relatively small number of people saying now this is the situation, which is quite remarkable if you think about it. Lord knows what the consequence will be for the human race, whether religion will balance out, whether it will die off. Who knows?
Lex Fridman
(00:59:45)
I think it’s an ancient technology that has proven across millennia to give a set of tools to humans to contend, as you said, with suffering. That’s a part of life. So when those rare moments come when you have to deal with deep pain, loss, suffering, heartbreak, all those things… …Looking up to the sky and asking questions and trying to figure out the answers in your conversation with the divine.
Irving Finkel
(01:00:15)
I think that’s true, but I think in Mesopotamia it was different in terms of its potency and immediacy because there are no skyscrapers in Iraq. You know, if you live in Southern Iraq and you sleep on the roof, there are no lights at night. You know, you’re under the stars, you can see everything because of no smog and everything like that. And the idea that the gods are there watching, it’s not like a big artifice like it is here. It just doesn’t ring true here. You can’t come to it and really believe in it, whereas these people didn’t have to really believe in it because it was it.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:53)
It’s the obvious practical part of life. They’re right there.
Irving Finkel
(01:00:57)
Yeah. But they didn’t believe in ghosts, they took them for granted. And they didn’t believe in the gods, they took them for granted. This is a different mechanism, because nobody here in the world today takes those things for granted, just the opposite. But I think that’s how it worked. So you didn’t have people wrestling with the idea of whether the gods really exist or whether they really care about me. They gave them a nudge when it was necessary, and they might offer this, they might offer that, but it was the system, it was the prevailing system. And I think it’s an important difference.

Ghosts

Irving Finkel
(01:01:32)
And also that thing about ghosts is that it’s clear from the inscriptions, all of them that I managed to find, that nobody ever asked themselves, “Do these things exist or not?” Or, “Did I really see them or not?” They didn’t. They just took it all for granted.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:50)
What are ghosts? Is it usually ancestors?
Irving Finkel
(01:01:54)
Well, everybody, everybody who died in bed naturally or peacefully, what we call their ghost, went down to the netherworld, and there they were. So they buried people jolly quick for obvious reasons, and like they do in Islam and Judaism today, it’s the same kind of idea. And the spirit of the person went down through the gates of the netherworld and stayed there. So that’s the basic situation. And people in their houses had actual burials under the courtyard, and they had a thing where you pour stuff down a hole, fluid and food, kind of symbolic offerings to them.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:39)
So isn’t that a way to lessen the impact of mortality?
Irving Finkel
(01:02:44)
I don’t know, because you know that everyone’s going to die. I think the real tragedy would be, is if we’re not supposed to. That would be the tragedy. But every single person is going to die. So all relationships have this finite clause in them. So if you’re very fond of somebody or you love somebody and they die, it’s kind of infantile to whine about it ever after. Because what did you think was gonna happen? Either you or them. You know, I always see it like that. I don’t feel grief when people die.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:24)
It is infantile, but I gotta tell you something about human beings. We’re all kind of infantile all the way through from, you know, we don’t stop being infantile after we’re infants. It’s one thing to know it, you know, theoretically, and it’s another thing to know it know it. Like this thing ends, this ride ends.
Irving Finkel
(01:03:45)
But that’s the pain, it’s the fact that the- the whole thing ends. And when people fall off the edge, they fall off the edge.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:54)
So yeah, the knowledge that it ends is the painful thing, not the actual moment of the ending. Yeah. Many times what makes moments really precious is that they’re going to be gone. I think that’s not a trivial thing for us humans to really contend with. I think religion, religious thought, the divine, I think help with that.
Irving Finkel
(01:04:12)
I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions, because they brought evil into the world. Because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, that means I’m right and you’re wrong if you don’t. So it’s already on that footing.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:31)
It’s very dogmatic. Yeah.
Irving Finkel
(01:04:32)
Dogmatic, and it’s led to everything, there’s inquisitions and this, you know, all this kind of stuff. It’s all a result of it, that one religion is superior and the others should be stamped out and all that. And in my opinion, monotheistic religion has generated the most fantastic amount of non-religious feeling. Whereas when you have all the different gods and they have different specialties, and the ones you like and the ones that everybody likes, and they have their temples and their offerings. It was very interesting to me to go into a temple in Kolkata when I went there with my wife, Joanna, we went into the temples and saw how they were, and I think they must be very much like the ones in Mesopotamia.
Irving Finkel
(01:05:13)
So there was never anything about them which affronted people’s individuality, or I mean, there’s no religious prejudice or even racial prejudice in antiquity. All these things are modern disadvantageous matters. If you think what’s done in the name of religion, it is absolutely staggering.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:33)
So let’s talk… go to literature, ’cause we didn’t really mention literature much, except you did briefly mention Epic of Gilgamesh. So that was written in cuneiform. It’s one of the earliest works of literature.
Irving Finkel
(01:05:45)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:45)
Can you tell me about this work?
Irving Finkel
(01:05:47)
Yeah. Well, we know it best from this Assyrian library set of tablets. There are 12 of them, it’s a 12-tablet work, so it’s quite long. And Gilgamesh is the hero of it. But the literature, we know it from earlier texts, and we know that Gilgamesh lived. He was a real person, he was a king in Uruk, and he was one of those people who lived after their death in the world, like Alexander, for example. So there were stories about Gilgamesh when he was alive, there were stories about him afterwards. And firstly, they were oral literature, not written down at all, and then around the 1800s, people started to write them down in Sumerian or Babylonian. So there was a corpus, and eventually they were woven into this long 12 Homeric-type thing about the adventures of Gilgamesh.
Irving Finkel
(01:06:38)
So it is certainly literature, and it’s to do with humanity and immortality and man in the hands of the gods, and incorporates lots of interesting and exciting stories. It’s very Hollywoody kind of thing. And you can see within it, even in the sophisticated Nineveh version, its roots are in oral literature. Because when somebody speaks, it says, “Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and addressed his friend Enkidu,” and then there’s a speech. “And then Enkidu opened his mouth and addressed his friend Gilgamesh.” Well, when you’re reading a story, you don’t need that, and that must be because of when there was an enacting of an oral thing, a narrator would say and it suddenly got frozen into the text.
Irving Finkel
(01:07:28)
So it’s a very strange thing, because if you’re reading it, it’s obvious that one person speaks and the other person speaks, and they always have this complicated thing stuck in the text. So it must be an echo of presumably you have your protagonists enacting their timeless matter with a and the person who’s writing it down says, “And then Gilgamesh said…” you know, like in a script.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:55)
I mean, what can you say about the telling of stories in written form during that time? Do you think that, too, stretched back in time?
Irving Finkel
(01:08:06)
I do. I think the fireside narrative matters. You know, when we were kids it would be twerps with a guitar sitting around a fire on holiday. But that mechanism, when people gather after dark when there is a fire and talk, is the sort of environment where narrative accounts flourish naturally among human beings.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:30)
Stories, telling of stories. It doesn’t have to be pragmatic, it could be… …Literary in a way.
Irving Finkel
(01:08:35)
Yeah. Either a human person like Gilgamesh or stories about the gods, and someone sees the Milky Way and they think, “There’s a god riding a chariot up it,” and then they have a story about… you know, and all those sorts of things. Or whatever it would be. But I think probably you have to allow for a strong creative principle surfacing in Homo sapiens at a quite early age, because of the paintings on cave walls…
Irving Finkel
(01:09:04)
You try drawing a running antelope in color on a wall. I mean, the quality of the workmanship, of the artistic ability, is unsurpassable. It’s not just good. So how is that an explicable thing at this very early date? It means that among all the population, you have imbeciles and Einsteins, and somewhere along the line you have Rembrandts. And I imagine that half the cave paintings in Europe were done by one person. I mean, you get the impression every family had a genius painter. It’s impossible. Probably there was a person who went from place to place doing these paintings because they could draw straight away accurately like that. But they are a distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill.
Irving Finkel
(01:09:57)
So this, this is right at a pretty early stage, is it not, the cave painting material? So if you consider the human stock which encapsulates such ideas ever after, then you have to reckon with that. You have to reckon with that. Very creative, very creative people. So the function of stories to tell the young and about what happened and about famous battles or when the flood came, or how people learned to make fire, or how we invented the wheel. All those sorts of things everybody puts down, but that’s presumably what absolutely happened. And you have the capacity for people to adore and to respect among their own kind people of astounding ability.
Irving Finkel
(01:10:47)
There must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and, you know, wrestle with polar bears and all that kind of… And all this stuff would be grist to the narrator’s thing. And as things got more complicated and more sophisticated, so lessons might be incorporated or lessons might come out of them unintentionally. Because if you tell a story without a moral, there is usually a moral if you think about it.

Ancient flood stories

Lex Fridman
(01:11:13)
And many of those stories are sadly lost to time or not yet found. You mentioned floods, and speaking of stories that have been lost and found, you’re well-known for a lot of things. One of them is decoding the so-called Ark Tablet.
Irving Finkel
(01:11:29)
Yeah. That was a challenge, because it’s really hard to read.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:32)
You gotta tell me the story. This ancient Babylonian clay tablet dating 1700 BC which contains a flood narrative that predates the biblical story of Noah by a thousand years.
Irving Finkel
(01:11:45)
At least.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:46)
At least. Okay. Well, you gotta tell me the full story.
Irving Finkel
(01:11:50)
So the full story is like this. Visitors used to come to the museum to ask questions of the experts who worked there, and one would be on duty periodically, and sometimes people would bring objects, sometimes they’d ask questions. And somebody once came in with a whole load of objects, including this tablet, which, to cut a long story short, I identified pretty much straight away as being part of the flood story. It was a tablet about eight inches by three. Not the whole flood story, which is a complex narrative which ended up in the Gilgamesh narrative much, much later, but this one was an early narrative in which the point was taken up where the gods in heaven had decided that the population of Mesopotamia needed to be wiped out because they were so noisy.
Irving Finkel
(01:12:40)
This was the expression. And the gods couldn’t sleep after lunch, sort of thing. So they decided they would wipe them out and create something quieter that worked harder. So this was the basic mechanism, and they had different ways of doing it. And the most effective one was they were going to send a flood to wipe them all out. And one of the gods, the number three in the triumvirate, thought this was a deplorable idea. So he took it upon himself to warn this person called Atra-Hasis, who lived in Mesopotamia, to build a boat to rescue life when the waters came. And in it, he told him the shape of it and the materials he would need and how much he would need of the materials so he could do it safely. And in the 60 lines of the tablet, all this stuff was there.
Irving Finkel
(01:13:29)
It was like a blueprint to build this boat. And it was just extraordinary because the boat was round. And everybody who knew their Bible, the ark’s a coffin-shape kind of affair. And nobody thought of it being a round boat. And the fact is that round boats were used in Mesopotamia on the rivers, coracles that’s to say, because for transporting things, and they would never sink. They were very appropriate. And so in this story, it was decided it was going to be a giant coracle, a really, really big one that would never sink, and the male and female animals could go in and Atra-Hasis’ wife and his three sons and so forth, could go in and everything would be there and it would float on the water.
Irving Finkel
(01:14:23)
And when it came down, they said, “We’ll start all over again.” So it’s got very many points in common with the description of the flood in Genesis. And of course, so did the one in Gilgamesh. So in 1872, there was a Assyriologist in the British Museum called George Smith, and he was a very, very talented reader. And in 1872, he discovered that one of the tablets from the Nineveh library we were talking about before had on it a passage which ran in parallel with Gilgamesh about the waters coming and the boat and everybody floating.
Irving Finkel
(01:15:02)
And even to the point that when the rain stopped and the ark came to rest on a mountain, the hero of this thing in Gilgamesh, who was called Utnapishtim, released a bird three times to see whether the trees had come up, and the first one came back and the second one and the third one didn’t. So he knew that… So this was not only in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it was also in the Book of Genesis. So what it meant was that it wasn’t… You couldn’t have two stories… It wasn’t two stories about the same thing. It was literary dependence.
Irving Finkel
(01:15:40)
It was literary dependence. The one was locked into the other. The text of the Hebrew Bible, from whenever it was written down, of course, nobody knows quite when, but whenever it was, it was about the same time as the one from Nineveh, about the 7th century, 6th century, something like that. The time interval between the Gilgamesh version from Nineveh and the Hebrew Bible is not like a big expanse of time. So there was an argument that one goes this way and one goes that way. But then when this tablet came in, a thousand years older, nobody believes the Bible was written in 1700 BC. So the primacy of the Mesopotamian matter was established. And it’s important because you never get floods in Jerusalem. You just don’t. But in Mesopotamia, they had floods.
Irving Finkel
(01:16:31)
The rivers, sometimes there wasn’t enough water, sometimes there was too much, sometimes there was far too much water. So the mechanism that the waters could be used as a destructive force by the powers that be is a plausible Mesopotamian mechanism and is based, in a sort of sense, in my opinion, in reality. I think there must have been some tsunami once, most people were drowned, and those who survived were in boats, obviously. And then afterward, nobody ever forgot it. It went on and on and on.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:01)
So you mean there actually could have been a catastrophic event of a large scale?
Irving Finkel
(01:17:04)
Yeah, not the whole world, ’cause people were…
Lex Fridman
(01:17:07)
But just enough to imagine.
Irving Finkel
(01:17:08)
Yeah, sweeping down to the Persian Gulf, and, you know, the flat plains, everything would be destroyed, all the houses would be destroyed, animals would be drowned, and…
Lex Fridman
(01:17:16)
This is an incredible discovery. Do you think it’s possible that this is the original? There are flood myths in many cultures.
Irving Finkel
(01:17:24)
I believe this. The Mesopotamians had a deep-seated horror of dependency on water when they couldn’t control it. They were fearful of it. And they had a rainbow in Babylonia, like in the Bible, as a proof that the disastrous flood would never happen again. But I think there must have been one episode of this kind, maybe 5,000 years before the tablet, 10,000, it doesn’t matter. Because with the passage of time, nothing happens in that part of the world. So something will be alive, grandfather to grandson, before you go to sleep, “And remember, my boy, you know, you only have to be careful because otherwise…” and all that stuff. For sure, bogeyman stuff. It never quite died out in their conscious minds.
Irving Finkel
(01:18:12)
So I think that when the Judeans from Jerusalem, after the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians and the rout of the priesthood and everything, the king and the others went overland to Babylon as refugees, and they had to live there for three generations of time under Nebuchadnezzar’s reign. So I believe that the text of the Bible was written then, because if you read the Bible attentively, which I can’t say I do on a regular basis, but if you do read it dispassionately, you have the mechanism that the only books in the Bible explain to the reader how it is that these people are in such a mess, because they’re supposed to be the chosen people doing all that.
Irving Finkel
(01:18:58)
And, and look, they haven’t got a temple, they haven’t got a country, they’re washed up and everything like that. So I think that what happened was it’s a complex thing, but the Judeans from Jerusalem, they spoke Hebrew, but they also spoke Aramaic, right? The two languages, they’re sister languages. And the Babylonians spoke Babylonian, and they also spoke Aramaic. And they all wore the same kind of clothes, and they all had brown skin. And when all these refugees from Jerusalem were milling around in Babylonia, they would have intermarried and disappeared within no time at all.
Irving Finkel
(01:19:36)
And the authorities who were there prevented this by drawing up a kind of charter of their history, explaining things from the beginning of time up until now, how it happened and what happened, and it was all intentional. So that is, in my opinion, the driving force behind the Hebrew text. And the thing about it is that they didn’t have in Jewish philosophical tradition stuff about creation and the beginning of the world. And they took Babylonian ideas, which they learned when they were there, and they recycled them. So whereas the Babylonians decided that the gods were going to wipe out the noisy persons, when the Jewish philosophers got this narrative to recycle about the vengeful Almighty who was in the Old Testament a very unpleasant and vengeful person, it was because of sin.
Irving Finkel
(01:20:34)
It wasn’t because of racket and playing the radio, it was sin. So they took one narrative and they recycled it for their own purposes.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:43)
The flood is a useful tool to, to punish people for whatever X is?
Irving Finkel
(01:20:49)
That’s exactly right. And something else is this, right? You have five days to build the ark or whatever it is, or two weeks to build the ark, so the clock goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And about a third of the films that come out of Hollywood are the world’s going to be demolished by aliens and you’ve got 24 hours to think of a cure, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. So it’s that narrative is irresistible, that one man can save the world, if he’s lucky, in time from disaster. So it starts off with Utnapishtim, and then it goes on to Noah, and then it goes on to Hollywood.

Noah’s Ark

Lex Fridman
(01:21:27)
Do you think this ark in the tablet actually was ever built? You did build a replica one third the size. And you, people should check out, you tell the story of that wonderfully. What did you learn from building this replica? And do you think the actual ark existed?
Irving Finkel
(01:21:46)
No, I don’t think so. I think it’s a literary construction out of the reality that people who did survive were on boats. I mean, they had boats for sure, and you might wake up in the Persian Gulf and never know what happened, but, you know, it’s a literary moral principle teaching narrative. And look, missionaries take it all around the world. That’s the other thing. See, this is the mystery of it, that you have flood stories everywhere, and some of them are from meddlesome missionaries who have all these innocent little kids sitting on benches, and, “I’m going to tell you a story,” like that. So it moves into this consciousness, then it gets recycled, and it gets recycled. So this is one thing.
Irving Finkel
(01:22:29)
And then also, there probably are spontaneous ideas, because it’s not so complicated or so amazing that independently people would have such a narrative. After all, you know, like the great river in China floods and everybody gets… so that’s not at all surprising. But what was so shocking for George Smith, who was such a clever person, is to read for the first time on this tablet from Nineveh, long before the one that I discovered came to light, about the three birds being released one after the other. And that was the clincher that the two stories were locked together. And lots of clergymen got very miserable about it and didn’t know what to make of it.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:10)
So that’s, that’s a definitive proof that those are literary-
Irving Finkel
(01:23:13)
A literary, I think literary link. I think so.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:18)
And I mean, these puzzles are then connected, but the ark you discovered is 1,000 years older. So that means that story of the flood has been told many, many times across that span to, you know… … “Do your homework or the flood is gonna come.”
Irving Finkel
(01:23:40)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:40)
Do all that, can… oh.
Irving Finkel
(01:23:42)
That’s right. And every time somebody built a coracle and they didn’t do the waterproofing right—
Irving Finkel
(01:23:49)
…you know what will happen? You’ll be out on the river, and that will be your lot, you know? I, I think so. I think it was a… I, I… there, there’s a certain amount of evidence that in Mesopotamian society, people talk about the time before the flood and after the flood. And it’s like when I was a boy, people used to talk about, “Before the war, we used to…” And now, we, we do this. It’s, it’s a kind of cataclysmic cut across history, which provides a, a, a ruler, so things are either before it or after it. Because there’s a king list, for example, where they wrote down the names of all the kings, all the way back to the beginning, including kings before the flood. They knew about that… they have their names and their great regnal years, or thousands of years. Fascinating.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:42)
So there’s a guy named Graham Hancock who talks about the Younger Dryas hypothesis, 10,000 BC, that there was an asteroid that hit Earth and melted the ice sheets, and that created a flood in North America. So that means an actual cataclysmic global event, that then as all the different civilizations sprung up, they all carried that knowledge, that memory. That’s his idea. What probability would you assign to that?
Irving Finkel
(01:25:13)
I would say negligible, because I regard it as a literary matter— …which is not predicated on the existence of flood in people’s minds. But I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia owes its inception to a disastrous flood, but nothing global. Nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham. So I, I, I don’t have any sympathy with that. But people have made drilled cores and then they, and then they… I do that all the… I’m not interested in all that stuff. It’s, to my mind—
Lex Fridman
(01:25:42)
It’s a literary device.
Irving Finkel
(01:25:43)
…it’s a literary top-off of great potency, of irresistible potency, because everybody identifies with the idea of being in bed and someone knocks on the door, says, “Get up, you’ve got to build a boat and this is what you’re going to need, and you’ve got to get on with it, sunshine, or we’re all sunk.” I mean, what are you going to do? The most interesting thing is this Atrahasis in the 1700 text, he wasn’t a king and he wasn’t a sailor or a boat builder. So how comes this clever god who wants to find someone to build… wouldn’t you go for a look in the Yellow Pages for a, a boat building company, say, “Listen, fellow, I’ve got a deal…” No.
Irving Finkel
(01:26:22)
He had to tell him, “This is the blueprint, this is the shape, you need all this, you need all that, you’ve got to measure it and all that.” It’s a very interesting thing.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:30)
I mean, yeah, that’s a great story. You don’t go to the great boat builder, you go—
Irving Finkel
(01:26:35)
Taxi driver or something like that.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:36)
…to the taxi, and then that’s that—that hero’s journey. That’s the stuff of great myths, yeah.
Irving Finkel
(01:26:43)
It is, it is a great myth.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:45)
A little detail would be really cool about the replica, like, uh—
Irving Finkel
(01:26:49)
Of the boat?
Lex Fridman
(01:26:49)
What did you… Of the boat, yeah. One-third replica, of course.
Irving Finkel
(01:26:51)
That was something else. There were three blokes who did it. And they were specialists in reconstructing medieval Arab boats. Because quite often, they’re found in the mud or bits, or they have information and they reconstruct them, so they were at home in it. And we built it on a small lagoon in Kerala. It was just the most unbelievably wonderful thing, because they used the instructions as a blueprint. They made it about a third of the size of the original, a pretty huge thing. But they made it because it had wooden ribs, you see?
Irving Finkel
(01:27:28)
They could get wood ribs. They worked out by computer the maximum size they could do it when it would work. Beyond it, it would be impossible, because once they built the curved ribs, and then they stuffed woven all around it, it had to be covered in bitumen, which is also very heavy, to make it waterproof. So they calculated the size and it worked. So they built this thing on rollers and it was pushed out into the… It was just the most unbelievable… I went out there with my dear wife for the last few days and was on the maiden voyage. And they had trouble with the bitumen because Indian bitumen is really not up to scratch, and they couldn’t get Iraqi bitumen because its cultural property is carcinogenic.
Irving Finkel
(01:28:10)
They wouldn’t export a tanker load of Iraqi, so we had to use the Indian stuff. But the thing is this, the bitumen which they coated it with was okay but it wasn’t perfect, so when it went out into the waters, there was a bit of a leak, water had to be bailed out. So, they said, “Ah,” you see, and I said, I said, “Okay, listen, sunshine,” I said to this producer, “Have you ever been in a rowing boat without water in the bottom? Excuse me?”
Lex Fridman
(01:28:35)
Oh, you’re saying that’s- that’s a feature, not a bug.
Irving Finkel
(01:28:37)
That’s the feature of the thing, yeah. That’s the feature. That thing could have gone to ports.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:41)
So it’s authentic.
Irving Finkel
(01:28:43)
Absolutely right. We had such an adventure with that thing. They made a documentary film. In various languages. And you know what they did? You know, I was in it a bit, and they had people saying, “Oh, I don’t think it was this, I don’t think it was that,” you know. And they didn’t let me go back and say, “What the hell are you talking about? I did it. I know what… I can read, you know, funkan you.” They didn’t have, they didn’t do it. I couldn’t get my own back. I was really annoyed. Really furious.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:10)
So you’re- you’re saying that there’s some inaccurate things to it.
Irving Finkel
(01:29:13)
I am saying there’s some inaccurate things. Yeah, somebody in Iraq said, “Oh, it couldn’t have been that. They probably had lots of little coracles all tied together.” Did they f-? I mean, I, you know, he couldn’t read the stuff. I mean, it’s really, really, really annoying. I mean, you should have a chance, shouldn’t you? You know, if you’re gonna have a fencing match, you both have to have a rapier, wouldn’t you say?
Lex Fridman
(01:29:32)
Yeah, and you’re the OG. You’re the person that decoded it.
Irving Finkel
(01:29:37)
Well, I can read. Yeah. But the thing is this, the proportions of the material were accurate. This is the crucial thing, that, um- …what had happened was, they took the information about how you make a real coracle, which is usually enough, two people… …And a few sheep and goats…
Lex Fridman
(01:29:56)
Got it.
Irving Finkel
(01:29:56)
…and they bumped them up… …So that it worked. And I know why that is, because it goes back to your question about oral literature, because there must’ve been times when people went to villages and told them about the flood, and when they got to the question of the boat, they’d say something like this, “And Enki said, ‘You got to build the biggest coracle you’ve ever seen.'” Like that, right? Well, I mean, if you do this in a cinema in Guildford, people will say, “Well, that’s fine,” but if you do it to a whole load of river people who use coracles and make them, they’re not going to take that, they’re not… “So how big was it then? Come on, how big was it?” So what do they do? They go to a coracle place and they work out…
Irving Finkel
(01:30:45)
…the proportions of material and then they bump it up so that the actor who reads this, for the first few times, he has in his pocket how much it is. But after a while, he knows it by heart so that none of these people get angry. “You can’t expect us, big enough for all this.” So then he’d have all the stuff and he’d do it this way, “And you need all this and, and you need all this,” and they’d all be hypnotized by it. That, I think, is, it’s actually, regarding your question, it’s on the cusp of purely oral literature to purely literary literature. It’s actually there because you can see that it was molded in the environment when people were still talking.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:26)
Yeah, you’ve got to make it authentic to really connect with people.
Irving Finkel
(01:31:29)
Well, you couldn’t pull it over their eyes. I mean, you know?
Lex Fridman
(01:31:32)
Yeah, well, I wish many of the films in Hollywood today would have the same level of rigor.
Irving Finkel
(01:31:37)
Rigor is one of the things lacking in the world.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:40)
By the way, I forgot to ask, why was the flood myth focused on noisy people?
Irving Finkel
(01:31:45)
Well, it can’t really be noisy. I’ll tell you what the explanation is; it’s something quite different. Before the flood, the gods had not created death. So I think the noise was a reflex of the fact there were just too many animals, too many people, and they had to do something about it. So it’s a sort of euphemism, so to speak, because after the flood, at the end of the tablet… not my tablet, but the other ones, where it’s still broken. It says, there’s a tantalizing thing where they create barren women who can’t have children and men who can’t have children and princesses who don’t have children, and they institute in society some figures who will not reproduce the species. So it’s actually a rather sophisticated Malthusian kind of philosophical position.
Irving Finkel
(01:32:41)
It’s remarkable. So that the noise means there are so many of them, not that they’re actually so noisy that we can’t hear ourselves think.

The Royal Game of Ur

Lex Fridman
(01:32:50)
You have to tell me about the world of ancient games. Maybe we can start with the ancient Royal Game of Ur. What is it and how were you somehow able to crack the rules of it?
Irving Finkel
(01:33:05)
Well, the Royal Game of Ur is a board of 20 squares in a rather idiosyncratic form. And it was pretty much unknown until the 1920s when Sir Leonard Woolley was digging at the site of Ur, and in the graves of the royal family, Sumerian rulers, they found four or five boards of this pattern, together with dice and pieces, which showed that it was popular among them at this time, and also that wherever they were going in the world to come, they would want to be playing it. And so that was one thing, and we had the number of pieces and some dice. So lots of people had ideas about how it might have been played, and that went on like that for a very long time. And thereafter, boards for this game turned up in most of the countries of the Middle East, sometimes quite a lot of them.
Irving Finkel
(01:34:07)
And the one from Ur dates to about 2600 BC, and from then down to the end of the first millennium, there are examples of boards from Mesopotamia itself and from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Crete, all over the place. And when you put all the boards together, you realize that you’re dealing with a board game which was extremely widespread and extremely popular.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:44)
Across space and time.
Irving Finkel
(01:34:46)
across space and time. So, it lasted for nearly 3,000 years and it was played all over the place. So, it’s one of those games that’s like chess or backgammon, which you can say are world conquerors. Because the way I see the issue is that human beings for a very long time have been, shall we say, hungry for things to do. Because all through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, there was no television, you know? There was nothing, and kids played with pull-along things and adults had board games, and they’re kind of embedded in culture from a very early time.
Irving Finkel
(01:35:38)
And this game was so widespread, you know, Tutankhamun, for example, in his tomb, there were two or three boards for it with the pieces. So it arrived in the middle of the second millennium in Egypt and even the Pharaoh played it. So you have a game, which the interesting point about it is that it spread across the known world without written rules and without people necessarily knowing the same language. So a merchant would go, end up in a bar, you know, come from India or, I don’t know, where, start seeing these guys playing, have a go himself, and it looks rather interesting. You go home and try and remember what it looked like and try and work out how to, you know, be transported this way and the other.
Irving Finkel
(01:36:29)
And so you can see that the board has 20 squares, so you have a block of four by three and then a bridge of two and then a second three by two thing at the end. So it’s difficult to describe the actual shape. But what happened was after about 2000 BC, the squares at the far end, which were two on one flank and two on the other, were all put at the end of the central avenue. So you end up with 12 squares down the middle. All the boards after the period of Ur have 12 squares down the middle, and then four on each side at one end. So it meant then that when you play the game, you have dice to move the pieces, you have pieces all the same, and you obviously put them on your first corner, and you turn the corner and you go up the middle and off the end.
Irving Finkel
(01:37:22)
And it was a race game of the kind that everybody knows from their own childhood. Some squares, which had rosettes on, were either safe squares or you had another throw, and you could maybe put two on one square, we don’t know. You could try and block people. But anyway, the crucial thing is that the widespread distribution of this idiosyncratic shape, and it’s a lasting thing, shows it must have been a very good game if people more or less played the same thing on it everywhere. I mean, it may be that they were completely different games, but probably not. So this is the thing, it makes you wonder what would be about it that would fit so well with a wide appetite from different persons, different types of person.
Irving Finkel
(01:38:08)
And the thing is that although it’s a race game where you’re at the mercy of dice and lucky squares and unlucky squares, the process of getting your pieces on and off the board as a winner is primarily fortuitous. But it has built within it, is the way I understand the game plays, a measurable quota of strategy. It’s a mix of probability and strategy. So most games are either just probability like Snakes and Ladders, like Chutes and Ladders is just a thing like that. Or you have a game like chess, which is pure strategy. It’s a mix, and the grown-up game in the modern world where fortuity or chance and strategy have a good balance is backgammon, which is a sort of grown-up version of this sort of game.
Irving Finkel
(01:39:03)
where, nevertheless, if you play according to the most rational interpretation, its strategy is a major factor. So what happened was that many people had ideas how it was played, and the route followed, and I did too. And then I discovered this tablet in the British Museum, which was written at a very late period in the second century BC, so 2,300 years after this object existed, and it had on it the names of the pieces and what the pieces were like and various things about the throws. And it was obvious that it was, the rules were to do with a game which was derived from this simple early game. And that working backwards from it, you could reconstruct the game in accordance with its later incarnation that might be workable.
Irving Finkel
(01:39:54)
And it jolly well turned out to be workable ’cause people play this all over the world now. And they even play in Iraq in cafes. “Wait, now?” They do. “Oh, wow.” Because after it’s come back to life, it’s on the internet, people play, there are different rules. “That’s amazing.” The ones I invented are pretty much regular. So if you have a good balance between chance and strategy, and it’s a fair game, and doesn’t take four days to play like modern board games. So you could have a go and if you’re lucky, you win fast and then you have another go, maybe best of three or something like that. It works out rather well.
Irving Finkel
(01:40:32)
And once I was in California, at the Getty, and I had to give a talk about this with all the information, because there’s lots of things to say about it. And the lady who ran the Friends of the Getty had a brilliant idea. So what she brought in 20 or so commercial copies of this game, and they had small tables with chairs. And after the lecture, I was supposed to say to everybody, “Okay, this is what you have to do, this is how you play.” Because you can get the rules down in like three minutes. So I said, “Okay, first you have to do this, first you have to do that, so off you go.” So there was silence, and then after a while, someone said, “I hate you!
Irving Finkel
(01:41:13)
I’m never playing this game with you again.” When they’d never played it before, when somebody had escaped at the last minute, cleaned up just when they thought they were going to get it. And it provokes that salutary, benevolent fury and rage in the players, which all good board games do. And they were happily married couples who were, at the end of the afternoon, phoning their respective lawyers to discuss the future, that kind of thing. Beautiful. Do you think games, our desire to play games, a mix of chance, a mix of strategy, is a part of human nature? Do you think that’s always been there? I do. I do, yes. I think…
Irving Finkel
(01:41:59)
I mean, you can say that in communities you have rivalry, hostility, and who’s the best, who’s the fastest, who’s the strongest and things. And if you play a board game like that, all the reality of it is sublimated into a safe terrain, yes, the safety of it, where you can nevertheless get angry, but it’s not like that. That’s one thing. But more significantly, I believe is the question of what in India people call “time pass.” Which is not quite the same as “past time.” Time pass is the question of what you do when it’s too hot to do anything, which is true a good part of the day and a good part of the year. And grandmothers sit under trees with their grandchildren and they tell stories and they do this and they do that.
Irving Finkel
(01:42:47)
And “time pass” is a very useful catch-all phrase for the existence of board games. And in India, there are many board games. Chess, of course, is the famous one, but there are quite a lot of three-in-a-row type games or fox-against-geese games, and wolves against sheep and all those sorts of things which come out of the landscape in miniature and were played for pleasure. And also in a kind of way, it doesn’t really matter who wins, because you might play and it goes round and round and round, eventually somebody wins and then they have another game. So it’s a sort of that kind of rather graceful, valid function for not wasting time, doing something which is stimulating and beneficial without it being overpowering in either way. So I think it is a human matter.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:42)
Of course, we humans also sometimes mix in gambling into the whole thing, to add some money on top of it, which I’m sure sometimes was- … involved here.
Irving Finkel
(01:43:52)
I think so, but probably only late on, because money as such… … Of course that doesn’t appear until quite late. But there are… We know in Mesopotamia, it’s a rather interesting thing, there’s a school tablet with three or four lines quoted from one literary thing and three or four from another literary thing. And one of them, it has this, “Oh my astragal, oh my astragal, woe is me, woe is me.” And that’s all we have. And I think this is an example of a genre of literature called “the gambler’s lament.” Because they used knucklebones or astragals as dice. And I’m sure there were people who bet a sack of this or a roomful of that on the throw of the knucklebones.
Irving Finkel
(01:44:48)
And this extract in the school text is probably from a literary tablet in which somebody lost everything, even though there weren’t coins, because I think you’re right that it’s a natural thing for it to accrue. And also maybe men and women played differently, because there are some games which were played in harems among girls, you know, woman on a hot afternoon where nobody was going to win anything. But the rules tablet, which gives this kind of backhanded information about it, is couched in such a way that it talks about people in a bar. Because the movement of the pieces is calculated in terms of food and drink and women, what you win. So the landscape in which the rules are couched for credibility are for just exactly that setup.

British Museum

Lex Fridman
(01:45:49)
As you mentioned, you are the curator at the, possibly the greatest place on Earth, the British Museum.
Irving Finkel
(01:45:57)
Oh, yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:58)
Can you tell me what are some of the incredible, magical aspects of the British Museum?
Irving Finkel
(01:46:04)
Well, the British Museum is a magical place and it’s a special case because there’s a lot of flurry and dispute now about what museums are and what they’re for and why they exist and whether they should ever have existed, and all these sorts of issues which people go on about. But the British Museum is unlike almost all museums in the world because it’s to do with the achievements of mankind from the beginning onwards. So it’s a kind of celebration of art and more, but it’s not an art museum. It’s to do with the struggle of the human race against all the things that beset it and how it has triumphed, and how marvelous it is and the things that have happened.
Irving Finkel
(01:46:50)
And not turning a blind eye to all the contrasting horrible things that have happened, but it’s the narrative of the human race, as I see it, as discernible in objects. So it means that we serve two very important horizons. One is that we represent, as far as we can, the whole world with no injudicious attention paid to any one or other culture, that they’re all to us one. So there’s no favoring any religious group, any country group, anything of the kind. It’s the human species. We try to tell the narrative of, in its own right, and how it overlaps with its neighbors and what it’s learned from what came before. All those features together is really what the concern of the museum is. And of course, to collect everything we…
Irving Finkel
(01:47:53)
Or has been, to collect everything we can to tell those narratives, and also to look after them according to scientific principle. So, all those things at once are the task for the British Museum. And the second horizon it serves is the unborn. So babies yet to be born, and their children, and their children, and their children. And it seems to me that the task of the museum is of such cultural significance and such, so to speak, sacred validity, that it shouldn’t have to put up with people carping about this or that or saying, “Museums are sinful and wicked and should be demolished,” because the people who say these things don’t really have any idea of actually what it really does stand for.
Irving Finkel
(01:48:44)
And it’s a kind of lighthouse in a universe where we are surrounded by darkness, ignorance, stupidity, uninterest, disinterest, skepticism, ignorance, and so forth about the very issues that we’re interested in. And it’s one of the places in the world where you can talk about truth and beauty and elegance and intelligence without it being an affront to people who have none of those qualities, and without it being the kind of speech that people shudder or they think you’re being naive about it, because those are the crucial things. And also about religion, that we don’t favor a religion and we don’t sponsor a religion. We try to look at them for what they are and to assess their relationships and what they offer.
Irving Finkel
(01:49:40)
Perhaps less, with a less acerbity and less criticism than I would if I was the director. I would try to put them down the wrong end of a microscope and look at them for what they are and what they have done and what’s been done in the name of religion. You probably would never get away with that, but maybe one day that will be an important part because it’s a major contributive factor to what’s happened to the human race, which has never really articulated sharply about what religion has done to us and where we might have been without it. Because not having religion does not mean not having law or morality or sensitivity or consideration or love or any of those things. None of those things depends on religion, and those are the things which are important.
Irving Finkel
(01:50:28)
So I think it’s people say, “Oh, you say this ’cause you work there and you, you know, you’re a curator, you wouldn’t say that the British Museum is a special place.” It’s nothing to do with that. It is actually a special place because you cannot point to another museum in the world with the same task. For example, the Louvre is basically a museum of art, basically a museum of art, not a museum of ideas. And the Met is definitely a museum of art. It’s called the Museum of Art and that’s their priority. Design and color and shape, to my mind, it’s the British Museum. This is one factor among many others. And we’re not an art museum and we’re not a local museum, we’re not a museum of the history of the bicycle, we’re not a celebration of evil.
Irving Finkel
(01:51:16)
We are, as it were, doing, as I see it, the best we could do if, for example, a whole load of Martians arrived in the Great Court and burst through the front door and said to us, “Tell us all about this place. Tell us about the world. Can you do it fast ’cause we got to leave?” And if you took them around and said, “Look at this, look at this, look at this, look at this,” they’d get some picture which wasn’t insane. The only thing they wouldn’t get is a recording of “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, but apparently one’s been put into space. Yeah. I’ve heard about it. So this is a very comforting thing.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:58)
But that’s kind of what… The task of the British Museum is to do that, but for the entirety of human history.
Irving Finkel
(01:52:02)
Yeah. It can be done.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:03)
It would be a store of artifacts…
Irving Finkel
(01:52:05)
Yes
Lex Fridman
(01:52:06)
…that are the raindrops from which you can reconstruct the waterfall.
Irving Finkel
(01:52:09)
Precisely so. And it’s not a valid criticism to say to us that most of the stuff is not on exhibition, which is what everybody says. “It should go here, it should go there ’cause it’s not on exhibition.” But we’re not doing it for any other reason than stockpiling for future examination. See, this is the important perspective that nobody considers. Because the thing is, when you have something which is contemporary, if you’re a clever journalist or a clever thinker, you can write essays about it, you can talk about it and you can see it, but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate. And with the passage of time, the significance of objects, what they stand for, what they meant, and what they can still mean shifts.
Irving Finkel
(01:52:57)
And the further back you go, the sharper you can understand things, especially in terms of their own precedent and their own contemporary parallels. So the benefit of distance, storage, and contemplation is inestimable.

Evolution of human civilization

Lex Fridman
(01:53:13)
There are so many questions I want to ask you. What wisdom do you think the people from whom these artifacts came had that we, the modern-day humans, may have lost or lost in part or in whole? It’s often, as you’ve spoken about, we see the ancient peoples as lesser, dumber, more primitive. And you’ve spoken about how they are basically the same.
Irving Finkel
(01:53:46)
I think if you put them on a bus all wearing the same clothes, you wouldn’t know. That’s my feeling.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:51)
But there is some… I’m sure there’s some greater wisdom they had about certain things, as we have greater wisdom about others. Thanks to Einstein, we’ve figured out the curvature of space-time.
Irving Finkel
(01:54:05)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:05)
Which they didn’t know about. But…
Irving Finkel
(01:54:07)
They knew quite a lot about astronomy, though. Quite a lot about astronomy.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:11)
They stared at the stars.
Irving Finkel
(01:54:12)
Yeah, and they measured them and they made calculations. And when the Greeks went to Babylon, they thought, “Hey man, this is really cool.” And they wrote it all down and went home. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, I think it’s a hard question to answer. But one of the things is that they were spared things which have cluttered up the essence of humanity. Because I think that the modern adherence to the electronic universe is disastrous for humans, and because it reduces the vitality of the human component. I think it’s restrictive in a way that people don’t realize until it’s too late. Like drugs, if you take drugs now and again, you think, “Oh, it’s fine, it’s fine.” Then suddenly you realize you’re addicted to heroin. It’s a bit like that.
Irving Finkel
(01:55:06)
People use the electronic world like an addictive drug and they can’t get through without it. And I think this is a very recent thing, but I suppose I’m not a Luddite and say we shouldn’t have railway engines and we shouldn’t have kettles. But I think one of the things about the ancient world was that people never went anywhere unless they were merchants or soldiers. They never went anywhere. Probably people born and died in a village and then their children born and died in the village, and they never knew anything about the outside world. Maybe a very little. Sometimes there’d be a message, but in principle, they had no idea about other countries, other languages, or how big they were or any…
Irving Finkel
(01:55:50)
So I don’t think they had wisdom in a way that you could type out following precepts will make life better. Because they told lies and they esteemed the truth, and they fell in love and they committed adultery and they did murder, and they did all the things. I think in a way, the ancient world allowed human beings to behave more naturally than the world in which we live now. I mean, if you live in a rustic environment or by the sea, or you’re a fisherman, or you… I mean all those normal, real kind of things, then it’s probably all right. But most people who live crammed in the cities live a very, very artificial life where the principles which they regard as ineluctably crucial are not ineluctably crucial. They’re not in…
Irving Finkel
(01:56:43)
You know, one example is this ghastly thing on mobiles where you get a short clip from a real program.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:50)
Yeah, yeah.
Irving Finkel
(01:56:50)
I think it’s utterly, utterly wicked. So you have children all over the world who cannot articulate, spell, or make meaning clear using the best, most literary, and most beneficial language that’s ever been created, which is English. They have to save their lives, and they use a word… I’ll give you an example.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:13)
Yeah.
Irving Finkel
(01:57:14)
Right? Like I went.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:16)
Like I went.
Irving Finkel
(01:57:17)
Like I went.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:18)
Yeah.
Irving Finkel
(01:57:18)
So difficult to define that grammatically. Difficult. Like, I should have gone. Where “I went” or “I should have gone” means “to speak.” Now, how would it be if when we see the verb “to go” in Sumerian it actually meant “to speak”? Where would we be? Where would we be?
Lex Fridman
(01:57:39)
I mean, we should probably say that even in that time there was probably slang, right? It just wouldn’t end up written.
Irving Finkel
(01:57:45)
Yes, there were dialects. There were words that sailors used. For sure, all those things.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:50)
But they wouldn’t end up in writing.
Irving Finkel
(01:57:52)
Sometimes they do.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:53)
We have to remember that Cambridge and Oxford speak in a certain way that’s proper and formal and very smart, but most of the people in bars, sailors, have a different way of speaking.
Irving Finkel
(01:58:06)
They do.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:06)
So they would probably say “like I went” and have emojis and…
Irving Finkel
(01:58:13)
But the thing is, you have to moderate your vocabulary. If you talk to people of a certain age, because they don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about if you use language. And the thing that was just so exquisite about English is like with a barrister, you can make a case which is absolutely wonderful because it says exactly what it means and there’s no wiggle room. The conversation should be like that, with no wiggle room. It’s not just a matter of spelling, but the basic vocabulary. You know something very interesting, people say they know English or they speak English. Have you ever in your life opened a full-size volume of the Oxford English Dictionary? It’s about that thick, this fat. I have a whole set. I love them. So this is it.
Irving Finkel
(01:58:58)
You take a volume off the shelf and you open the book, and you run your forefinger down the various columns of writing. You might have to turn several pages before you find a single word you’ve ever heard before, because English is unimaginably rich. I grew up in a house where everybody read literature all the time, and I had three sisters and then a brother, and we all read literature. Went to the library every week, read lots and lots and lots of books, so we all had really good vocabulary, and that’s how you get vocabulary. Otherwise, you don’t, because in conversation, “Do you want more tea?” All this sort of stuff, you don’t learn new vocabulary, you have to get it from reading and listening to proper stuff.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:46)
Which is a very important aspect of vocabulary, why it’s important to know a lot of words and to speak clearly, because those words also define the quality of your thoughts.
Irving Finkel
(01:59:56)
Sure
Lex Fridman
(01:59:56)
… at the end of the day.
Irving Finkel
(01:59:57)
That’s exactly right. I must say, I think it is a pity if having produced such wonderful languages in the world that their use is so inhibited.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:08)
I think the right way to think about it is the way the British Museum thinks about it. So you’re commenting on the ephemeral, on the thing that is in the moment right now is happening. The reality is only a few select things will last a hundred, 200 years from now about this moment in time. And so we have to sort of think with the big picture perspective and the slowness of time. Yes, in the moment there are these catastrophes, there are changing ways of speaking, the technology tearing apart the fabric of society, but when you zoom out…You will think about the grand ideas of Einstein, the battle of ideologies with communism and Nazism of the 20th centuries. The bad, the triumphant, the rockets. Humans started launching rockets, going to the moon, maybe to Mars.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:05)
Those things. And we won’t be thinking about emojis and any of that. And in some sense, that’s the stuff you’re looking at with cuneiforms, is the things that stand the test of time, that are there.
Irving Finkel
(02:01:23)
That’s true. But I think that language, properly used, is a crucial human tool for communication.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:32)
Absolutely, yes. Speaking of which, I have to ask some more about the cuneiform tablets at the British Museum, when you’re surrounded by so many… And by the way, how many cuneiforms?
Irving Finkel
(02:01:45)
About 130,000.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:47)
That is so cool.
Irving Finkel
(02:01:48)
It is. It’s pretty cool.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:49)
What are some of the most beautiful cuneiforms to you? Maybe ones we don’t know about, that make you smile?
Irving Finkel
(02:01:59)
Well, there are not many jokes. You asked about jokes.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:01)
Yeah, they lost their sense of humor in cuneiform.
Irving Finkel
(02:02:04)
Yeah, I think there are. There’s one that I can remember. A fly or a mosquito lands on the back of an elephant and says, “Am I too heavy for you?” Or something like that. That’s sort of a Babylonian joke. You wouldn’t use it in the pub or anything like that.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:21)
Yeah, yeah. You had to be there.
Irving Finkel
(02:02:24)
But then also, do you like Tom Lehrer?
Lex Fridman
(02:02:26)
Of course.
Irving Finkel
(02:02:27)
Okay, that’s good. That’s good. I once went to America on a lecture tour and I ended up in the town where Dr. Wernher von Braun ended up running the American rocket… … Industry.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:48)
It doesn’t matter?
Irving Finkel
(02:02:49)
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
Lex Fridman
(02:02:51)
Where they come down, yeah.
Irving Finkel
(02:02:52)
“That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:55)
That guy, I mean, I could tell where your wit comes from, the fact that you know Tom Lehrer.
Irving Finkel
(02:03:00)
But he’s such a… The way he plays the piano is fantastic. I think my dad recorded them off the radio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I learned them all by heart because they were so fantastic. But I knew a Harvard professor who I stayed with once who was a Sumerologist. And his wife said that she knew Tom Lehrer when he was in the math department… …And they used to have parties and he always played the piano in the corner of the room. He’s just amazing, that man.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:25)
Yeah, I mean, he had a real… You have that. You know, I’ve watched a lot of your stuff. Your whole way of being, the wit. There’s something about that biting wit. It’s a bit of humor, bit of sadness in it. It just kind of feels like it really quickly gets to the complexity of what it means to be human.
Irving Finkel
(02:03:49)
I think so. But the paradoxical thing about Tom Lehrer is that when he’s talking about the bomb and all that, and devices, and international trouble, it’s so unchanged. And same with Dr. Strangelove. It’s just, it’s very remarkable. Anyway, next time you’re here or when you’re here, you should come and see me in the museum.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:16)
I will
Irving Finkel
(02:04:16)
And I’ll show you…
Lex Fridman
(02:04:16)
I will
Irving Finkel
(02:04:16)
…some of these confounded things for yourself, and show you the Chicago Dictionary and give you a grammar book to learn.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:26)
Irving, you’re a remarkable human being. It’s-
Irving Finkel
(02:04:28)
Well, I’m very glad we met.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:29)
It’s truly an honor to meet you, to talk to you.
Irving Finkel
(02:04:31)
Me- me too. It’s been very interesting.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:33)
Irving, thank you so much for talking to me.
Irving Finkel
(02:04:34)
It’s been a big pleasure for me, Lex. Be well.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:38)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Irving Finkel. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #486

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #486 with Michael Levin.
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:00:00)
The following is a conversation with Michael Levin, his second time on the podcast. He is one of the most fascinating and brilliant biologists and scientists I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with. He and his labs at Tufts University study and build biological systems that help us understand the nature of intelligence, agency, memory, consciousness, and life in all of its forms here on Earth and beyond. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here’s Michael Levin.

Biological intelligence

Lex Fridman
(00:00:45)
You write that the central question at the heart of your work, from biological systems to computational ones, is how do embodied minds arise in the physical world, and what determines the capabilities and properties of those minds? Can you unpack that question for us and maybe begin to answer it?
Michael Levin
(00:01:04)
Well, the fundamental tension is in both the first-person, the second-person, and third-person descriptions of mind. So in third-person, we want to understand how do we recognize them, and how do we know looking out into the world what degree of agency there is, and how best to relate to the different systems that we find. And are our intuitions any good when we look at something and it looks really stupid and mechanical, versus it really looks like there’s something cognitive going on there? How do we get good at recognizing them? Then there’s the second-person, which is the control, and that’s both for engineering but also for regenerative medicine, when you want to tell the system to do something. What kind of tools are you going to use?
Michael Levin
(00:01:45)
And this is a major part of my framework, is that all of these kinds of things are operational claims. Are you going to use the tools of hardware rewiring, of control theory and cybernetics, of behavior science, of psychoanalysis and love and friendship? Like, what are the interaction protocols that you bring? And then in first-person, it’s this notion of having an inner perspective and being a system that has valence and cares about the outcome of things. Makes decisions and has memories and tells a story about itself and the outside world. And how can all of that exist and still be consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry and various other things that we see around us?
Michael Levin
(00:02:20)
So that I find to be maybe the most interesting and the most important mystery for all of us, both on the science and also on the personal level. So that’s what I’m interested in.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:30)
So your work is focused on starting at the physics, going all the way to friendship and love and psychoanalysis.
Michael Levin
(00:02:37)
Yeah, although actually I would turn that upside down. I think that pyramid is backwards, and I think it’s behavior science at the bottom. I think it’s behavior science all the way. I think in certain ways, even math is the behavior of a certain kind of being that lives in a latent space, and physics is what we call systems that at least look to be amenable to a very simple, low-agency kind of model, and so on. But that’s what I’m interested in, is understanding that and developing applications.
Michael Levin
(00:03:05)
Because it’s very important to me that what we do is transition deep ideas and philosophy into actual practical applications that not only make it clear whether we’re making any progress or not, but also allow us to relieve suffering and make life better for all sentient beings, and enable us and others to reach their full potential. So these are very practical things, I think.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:28)
Behavioral science, I suppose, is more subjective, and mathematics and physics is more objective? Would that be the clear difference?
Michael Levin
(00:03:35)
The idea basically is that where something is on that spectrum, and I’ve called it the spectrum of persuadability. You could call it the spectrum of intelligence or agency or something like that. I like the notion of the spectrum of persuadability, because it’s an engineering approach. It means that these are not things you can decide or have feelings about from a philosophical armchair. You have to make a hypothesis about which tools, which interaction protocols you’re going to bring to a given system, and then we all get to find out how that worked out for you, right? So you could be wrong in many ways, in both directions. You can guess too high or too low, or wrong in various ways, and then we can all find out how that’s working out.
Michael Levin
(00:04:14)
And so I do think that the behavior of certain objects is well-described by specific formal rules, and we call those things the subject of mathematics. And then there are some other things whose behavior really requires the kinds of tools that we use in behavioral cognitive neuroscience, and those are other kinds of minds that we think we study in biology or in psychology or other sciences.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:39)
Why are you using the term persuadability? Who are you persuading, and of what?
Michael Levin
(00:04:43)
Well-
Lex Fridman
(00:04:44)
In this context.
Michael Levin
(00:04:45)
Yeah, the beginning of my work is very much in regenerative medicine, in bioengineering, things like that. So for those kinds of systems, the question is always, how do you get the system to do what you want it to do? So there are cells, there are molecular networks, there are materials, there are organs and tissues and synthetic beings and biobots and whatever. And so the idea is, if I want your cells to regrow a limb, for example, if you’re injured and I want your cells to regrow a limb, I have many options. Some of those options are, I’m going to micromanage all of the molecular events that have to happen, right? And there’s an incredible number of those. Or maybe I just have to micromanage the cells and the stem cell kinds of signaling factors.
Michael Levin
(00:05:28)
Or maybe actually I can give the cells a very high-level prompt that says, “You really should build a limb,” and convince them to do it, right? And so which of those is possible? I mean, clearly people have a lot of intuitions about that. If you ask standard people in regenerative medicine and molecular biology, they’re going to say, “Well, that convincing thing is crazy. What we really should be doing is talking to the cells, or better yet, the molecular networks.” And in fact, all the excitement of the biological sciences today are at single molecule approaches and big data and genomics and all of that.
Michael Levin
(00:06:00)
The assumption is that going down is where the action’s going to be, going down in scale. And I think that’s wrong. But the thing that we can say for sure is that you can’t guess that. You have to do experiments and you have to see, because you don’t know where any given system is on that spectrum of persuadability. And it turns out that every time we look and we take tools from behavioral science, so learning different kinds of training, different kinds of models that are used in active inference and surprise minimization and perceptual multi-stability and visual illusions and all these kinds of interesting things, you know, stress perception and active memory reconstruction, all these interesting things.
Michael Levin
(00:06:41)
When we apply them outside the brain to other kinds of living systems, we find novel discoveries and novel capabilities, actually being able to get the material to do new things that nobody had ever found before. And precisely because I think that people didn’t look at it from those perspectives, they assumed that it was a low-level kind of thing. So when I say persuadability, I mean different types of approaches, right? And we all know if you want to persuade your wind-up clock to do something, you’re not going to argue with it or make it feel guilty or anything. You’re going to have to get in there with a wrench and you’re going to have to, you know, tune it up and do whatever.
Michael Levin
(00:07:15)
If you want to do that same thing to a cell or a thermostat or an animal or a human, you’re going to be using other sets of tools that we’ve given other names to. And so that’s… Now, of course, that spectrum, the important thing is that as you get to the right of that spectrum, whereas the agency of the system goes up, it is no longer just about persuading it to do things. It’s a bidirectional relationship, what Richard Watson would call a mutual vulnerable knowing. So the idea is that on the right side of that spectrum, when systems reach the higher levels of agency, the idea is that you are willing to let that system persuade you of things as well. You know, in molecular biology, you do things, hopefully the system does what you want it to do, but you haven’t changed.
Michael Levin
(00:07:53)
You’re still exactly the way you came in. But on the right side of that spectrum, if you’re having interactions with even cells, but certainly, you know, dogs, other animals, maybe other creatures soon, you’re not the same at the end of that interaction as you were going in. It’s a mutual bidirectional relationship. So it’s not just you persuading something else, it’s not you pushing things. It’s a mutual bidirectional set of persuasions, whether those are purely intellectual or of other kinds.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:20)
So in order to be effective at persuading an intelligent being, you yourself have to be persuadable. So the closer in intelligence you are to the thing you’re trying to persuade, the more persuadable you have to become, hence the mutual vulnerable knowing. What a term.
Michael Levin
(00:08:37)
Yeah. Richard, you should talk to Richard as well. He’s an amazing guy and he’s got some very interesting ideas about the intersection of cognition and evolution. But I think what you bring up is very important because there has to be a kind of impedance match between what you’re looking for and the tools that you’re using. I think the reason physics always sees mechanism and not minds is that physics uses low-agency tools. You’ve got voltmeters and rulers and things like this. And if you use those tools as your interface, all you’re ever going to see is mechanisms and those kinds of things. If you want to see minds, you have to use a mind, right? You have to have, there has to be some degree of resonance between your interface and the thing you’re hoping to find.

Living vs non-living organisms

Lex Fridman
(00:09:18)
You said this about physics before. Can you just linger on that and expand on it, what you mean, why physics is not enough to understand life, to understand mind, to understand intelligence? You make a lot of controversial statements with your work. That’s one of them because there’s a lot of physicists that believe they can understand life, the emergence of life, the origin of life, the origin of intelligence using the tools of physics.
Michael Levin
(00:09:41)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:41)
In fact, all the other tools are a distraction to those folks. If you want to understand fundamentally anything, you have to start at physics to them. And you’re saying, “No, physics is not enough.”
Michael Levin
(00:09:52)
Here’s the issue. Everything here hangs on what it means to understand. For me, understand doesn’t just mean have some sort of pleasing model that seems to capture some important aspect of what’s going on. It also means that you have to be generative and creative in terms of capabilities. And so for me, that means if I tell you this is what I think about cognition in cells and tissues, it means, for example, that I think we’re going to be able to take those ideas and use them to produce new regenerative medicine that actually helps people in various ways, right? It’s just an example.
Michael Levin
(00:10:26)
So if you think as a physicist you’re going to have a complete understanding of what’s going on from that perspective of fields and particles and, you know, who knows what else is at the bottom there. Does that mean then that when somebody is missing a finger or has a psychological problem or has these other high-level issues, that you have something for them, that you’re going to be able to do something? Because my claim is that you’re not going to, and even if you have some theory of physics that is completely compatible with everything that’s going on, that is… it’s not enough. That’s not specific enough to enable you to solve the problems you need to solve.
Michael Levin
(00:11:04)
In the end, when you need to solve those problems, the person you’re going to go to is not a physicist. It’s going to be either a biologist or a psychiatrist, or who knows, but it’s not going to be a physicist. And the simple example is this: let’s say someone comes in here and tells you a beautiful mathematical proof, okay? It’s just really, you know, deep and beautiful. And there’s a physicist nearby, and he says, “Well, I know exactly what happened. There were some air particles that moved from that guy’s mouth to your ear. I see what goes on.
Michael Levin
(00:11:32)
It moved the cilia in your ear and the electrical signals went up to your brain.” I mean, we have a complete accounting of what happened, done and done. But if you want to understand what’s the more important aspect of that interaction, it’s not going to be found in the physics department. It’s going to be found in the math department. So that’s my only claim is that physics is an amazing lens with which to view the world, but you’re capturing certain things, and if you want to stretch to sort of encompass these other things, we just don’t call that physics anymore, right? We call that something else.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:03)
Okay. But you’re kind of speaking about super complex organisms. Can we go to the simplest possible thing where you first take a step over the line, the Cartesian cut as you’ve called it, from the non-mind to mind, from the non-living to living? The simplest possible thing, isn’t that in the realm of physics to understand? How do we understand that first step where you’re like, that thing is no mind, probably non-living, and here’s a living thing that has a mind. That line. I think that’s a really interesting line. Maybe you can speak to the line as well, and can physics help us understand it?
Michael Levin
(00:12:43)
Yeah, let’s talk about it. Well, first of all, of course it can. I mean, it can help, meaning that I’m not saying physics is not helpful. Of course it’s helpful. It’s a very important lens on one slice of what’s going on in any of these systems. But I think the most important thing I can say about that question is I don’t believe in any such line. I don’t believe any of that exists. I think there is a continuum. I think we as humans like to demarcate areas on that continuum and give them names because it makes life easier, and then we have a lot of battles over, you know, so-called category errors when people transgress those categories.
Michael Levin
(00:13:18)
I think most of those categories at this point, they may have done some good service at the beginning of when the scientific method was getting started and so on. I think at this point they mostly hold back science. Many, many categories that we can talk about are at this point very harmful to progress, because what those categories do is they prevent you from hoarding tools. If you think that living things are fundamentally different from non-living things, or if you think that cognitive things are these like advanced brainy things that are very different from other kinds of systems, what you’re not going to do is take the tools that are appropriate to these kind of cognitive systems, right?
Michael Levin
(00:13:55)
So the tools that have been developed in behavioral science and so on, you’re never going to try them in other contexts because you’ve already decided that there’s a categorical difference, that it would be a categorical error to apply them. And people say this to me all the time, that you’re making a category error, as if these categories were given to us, you know, from on high, and we have to obey them forevermore. The categories should change with the science. So yeah, I don’t believe in any such line, and I think a physics story is very often a useful part of the story, but for most interesting things, it’s not the entire story.

Origin of life

Lex Fridman
(00:14:30)
Okay. So if there’s no line, is it still useful to talk about things like the origin of life? That’s one of the big open mysteries before us as a human civilization, as scientifically minded curious homo sapiens. How did this whole thing start? Are you saying there is no start? Is there a point where you could say that invention right there was the start of it all on Earth?
Michael Levin
(00:15:01)
My suggestion is that it’s much better than trying to define any kind of a line, okay? Because inevitably I’ve never found, and people try to… You know, we play this game all the time when I make my continuum claim. Then people try to come up, “Okay, well, what about this, you know, what about this?” And I haven’t found one yet that really shoots that down, that you can’t zoom in and say, “Yeah, okay, but right before then this happened, and if we really look close, like here’s a bunch of steps in between,” right? Pretty much everything ends up being a continuum, but here’s what I think is much more interesting than trying to make that line.
Michael Levin
(00:15:34)
I think what’s really more useful is trying to understand the transformation process. What is it that happened to scale up? And I’ll give you a really dumb example. And we always get into this because people often really don’t like this continuum view: the word adult, right?
Michael Levin
(00:15:51)
Everybody is going to say, “Look, I know what a baby is. I know what an adult is. You’re crazy to say that there’s no difference.” I’m not saying there’s no difference. What I’m saying is the word adult is really helpful in court because you just need to move things along, and so we’ve decided that if you’re 18, you’re an adult. However, what it hides is… what it completely conceals is the fact that first of all nothing happens on your 18th birthday, right? That’s special. Second, if you actually look at the data, the car rental companies actually have a much better estimate because they actually look at the accident statistics and they’ll say it’s about 25 is really what you’re looking for, right?
Michael Levin
(00:16:27)
So theirs is a little better. It’s less arbitrary. But in either case what it’s hiding is the fact that we do not have a good story of what happened from the time that you were an egg to the time that you’re the supposed adult and what is the scaling of personal responsibility, decision-making, judgment. These are deep fundamental questions. Nobody wants to get into that every time somebody, you know, has a traffic ticket. So we’ve just decided that there’s this adult idea. And of course it does come up in court because then somebody has a brain tumor or somebody’s eaten too many Twinkies or something has happened. You say, “Look, that wasn’t me.
Michael Levin
(00:17:01)
Whoever did that, I was on drugs.” “Well, why’d you take the drugs?” “Well, that was, you know, that was yesterday. Me today, this is I’m…” Right? So we get into these very deep questions that are completely glossed over by this idea of an adult. So I think once you start scratching the surface, most of these categories are like that. They’re convenient and they’re good. You know, I get into this with neurons all the time. I’ll ask people, “What’s a neuron? Like, what’s really a neuron?” And yes, if you’re in neurobiology 101, of course you just say like, “These are what neurons look like.
Michael Levin
(00:17:30)
Let’s just study the neuroanatomy and we’re done.” But if you really want to understand what’s going on, well, neurons develop from other types of cells and that was a slow and gradual process, and most of the cells in your body do the things that neurons do. So what really is a neuron, right? So once you start scratching this, this happens, and I have some things that I think are coming out of our lab and others that are I think very interesting about the origin of life. But I don’t think it’s about finding that one boon, like this is. Yeah, there will be innovations, right? There are innovations that allow you to scale in an amazing way, for sure. And there are lots of people that study those, right?
Michael Levin
(00:18:06)
So things like thermodynamic, kind of metabolic things and all kinds of architectures and so on. But I don’t think it’s about finding a line. I think it’s about finding a scaling process.

The search for alien life (on Earth)

Lex Fridman
(00:18:16)
the scaling process, but then there is more rapid scaling and there are slower scaling. So innovation, invention, I think is useful to understand so you can predict how likely it is on other planets, for example. Or to be able to describe the likelihood of these kinds of phenomena happening in certain kinds of environments. Again, specifically in answering how many alien civilizations there are.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:44)
It’s useful. But it is also useful on a scientific level to have categories, not just ’cause it makes us feel good and fuzzy inside, but because it makes conversation possible and productive, I think. If everything is a spectrum, it becomes difficult to make concrete statements, I think. Like, we even use the terms of biology and physics. Those are categories. Technically, it’s all the same thing, really. Fundamentally, it’s all the same. There’s no difference between biology and physics. But it’s a useful category. If you go to the physics department and the biology department, those people are different in some categorical way. So somehow, I don’t know what the chicken or the egg is, but the categories…
Lex Fridman
(00:19:28)
Maybe the categories create themselves because of the way we think about them and use them in language, but it does seem useful.
Michael Levin
(00:19:35)
Let me make the opposite argument. They’re absolutely useful. They’re useful specifically when you want to gloss over certain things. The categories are exactly useful when there’s a whole bunch of stuff. And this is what’s important about science, is like the art of being able to say something without first having to say everything, right?
Michael Levin
(00:19:50)
which would make it impossible. So, categories are great when you want to say, “Look, I know there’s a bunch of stuff hidden here. I’m going to ignore all that, and we’re just going to, like, let’s get on with this particular thing.” And all of that is great as long as you don’t lose track of the stuff that you glossed over. And that was what I’m afraid is happening in a lot of different ways. And in terms of, look, I’m very interested in life beyond Earth and all of these kinds of things so that we should also talk about what I call SUTI, S-U-T-I, the search for unconventional terrestrial intelligences. I think we got much bigger issues than actually recognizing aliens off Earth, but I’ll make this claim.
Michael Levin
(00:20:27)
I think the categorical stuff is actually hurting that search. Because if we try to define categories with the kinds of criteria that we’ve gotten used to, we are going to be very poorly set up to recognize life in novel embodiments. I think we have a kind of mind blindness. I think this is really key. To me, the cognitive spectrum is much more interesting than the spectrum of life. I think really what we’re talking about is the spectrum of cognition. And it is… Well, I know it’s weird as a biologist to say, I don’t think life is all that interesting a category. I think the categories of different types of minds, I think, is extremely interesting.
Michael Levin
(00:21:06)
And to the extent that we think our categories are complete and are cutting nature at its joints, we are going to be very poorly placed to recognize novel systems. So for example, a lot of people will say, “Well, this is intelligent and this isn’t,” right? And there’s a binary thing, and that’s useful occasionally for some things. I would like to say, instead of that, let’s admit that we have a spectrum, but instead of just saying, “Oh, look, everything’s intelligent,” right? Because if you do that, you’re right, you can’t do anything after that. What I’d like to say instead is, no, no, you have to be very specific as to what kind and how much. In other words, what problem spaces they’re operating in?
Michael Levin
(00:21:43)
What kind of mind does it have? What kind of cognitive capacities does it have? You have to actually be much more specific. And we can even name, right? That’s fine. We can name different types of… I mean, this is doing predictive processing. This can’t do that, but it can form memories. What kind? Well, habituation and sensitization, but not associative conditioning. It’s fine to have categories for specific capabilities, but it actually makes for much more rigorous discussions because it makes you say, what is it that you are claiming this thing does? And it works in both directions. So, some people will say, “Well, that’s a cell. That can’t be intelligent.” And I’ll say, “Well, let’s be very specific.
Michael Levin
(00:22:19)
Here are some claims about… here’s some problem solving that it’s doing. Tell me why that doesn’t… you know, why doesn’t that match? Or in the opposite direction, somebody comes to me and says, “You’re right, you’re right. You know, the whole, the whole solar system, man. It’s just like this amazing…” I’m like, “Whoa, okay. Well, what is it doing?” Like, “Tell me what tools of cognitive and behavioral science are you using to reach that conclusion,” right? And so I think it’s actually much more productive to take this operational stance and say, “Tell me what protocols you think you can deploy with this thing that would lead you to use these terms.”
Lex Fridman
(00:22:49)
To have a bit of a meta conversation about the conversation, I should say that part of the persuadability argument that we two intelligent creatures are doing is me playing devil’s advocate every once in a while. And you did the same, which is kind of interesting, taking the opposite view and see what comes out. Because you don’t know the result of the argument until you have the argument, and it seems productive to just take the other side of the argument.
Michael Levin
(00:23:14)
For sure. It’s a very important thinking aid to, first of all, you know, what they call steel manning, right? To try to make the strongest possible case for the other side and to ask yourself, “Okay, what are all the places that I am sort of glossing over because I don’t know exactly what to say? And where are all the holes in the argument, and what would a, you know, a really good critique really look like?” Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:38)
Sorry to go back there just to linger on the term, because it’s so interesting, persuadability. Did I understand correctly that you mean that it’s kind of synonymous with intelligence? So it’s an engineering-centric view of an intelligence system. Because if it’s persuadable, you’re more focused on, how can I steer the goals of the system, the behaviors of the system? Meaning an intelligence system maybe is a goal-oriented, goal-driven system with agency. And when you call it persuadable, you’re thinking more like, “Okay, here’s an intelligence system that I’m interacting with that I would like to get to accomplish certain things.” But fundamentally, are they synonymous or correlated, persuadability and intelligence?
Michael Levin
(00:24:28)
They’re definitely correlated. So let me… I want to preface this with one thing. When I say it’s an engineering perspective, I don’t mean that the standard tools that we use in engineering and this idea of enforced control and steering is how we should view all of the world. I’m not saying that at all, and I want to be very clear on that because people do email me and say, “Bah, this engineering thing. You’re going to drain the, you know, the life and the majesty out of these high-end, like, human conversation.” My whole point is not that at all. It’s that of course, at the right side of the spectrum, it doesn’t look like engineering anymore, right?
Michael Levin
(00:25:04)
It looks like, it looks like friendship and love and psychoanalysis and all these other tools that we have. But here’s what I want to do. I want to be very specific to my colleagues in regenerative medicine and everything. Just imagine if I, you know, if I went to a bioengineering department or a genetics department and I started talking about high-level, you know, cognition and psychoanalysis, right? They don’t want to hear that. So I focus on the engineering approach…
Michael Levin
(00:25:28)
…because I want to say, look, this is not a philosophical problem. This is not a linguistics problem. We are not trying to define terms in different ways to make anybody feel fuzzy. What I’m telling you is, if you want to reach certain capabilities, if you want to reprogram cancer, if you want to regrow new organs, you want to defeat aging, you want to do these specific things, you are leaving too much on the table by making an unwarranted assumption that the low-level tools that we have, so these are the rules of chemistry and the kind of remolecular rewiring, that those are going to be sufficient to get to where you want to go.
Michael Levin
(00:25:59)
It’s an assumption only, and it’s an unwarranted assumption. And actually, we’ve done experiments now, so not philosophy, but real experiments, that if you take these other tools, you can in fact persuade the system in ways that has never been done before. And we can unpack all that. But it is absolutely correlated with intelligence, so let me flesh that out a little bit. What I think is scaling in all of these things, right, because I keep talking about the scaling. So what is it that’s scaling? What I think is scaling is something I call the cognitive light cone, and the cognitive light cone is the size of the biggest goal state that you can pursue. This doesn’t mean how far do your senses reach.
Michael Levin
(00:26:39)
This doesn’t mean how far can you affect it. So the James Webb Telescope has enormous sensory reach, but that doesn’t mean that’s the size of its cognitive light cone. The size of the cognitive light cone is the scale of the biggest goal you can actively pursue, but I do think it’s a useful concept to enable us to think about very different types of agents of different composition, different provenance, you know, engineered, evolved, hybrid, whatever, all in the same framework. And by the way, the reason I use light cone is that it has this idea from physics that you’re putting space and time kind of in the same diagram, which I like here.
Michael Levin
(00:27:11)
So if you tell me that all your goals revolve around maximizing the amount of sugar in this, in this, you know, 10, 20 micron radius of space-time, and that you have, you know, 20 minutes memory going back and maybe five minutes predictive capacity going forward, that tiny little cognitive light cone, I’m going to say, probably a bacterium. And if you say to me that, “Well, I’m able to care about several hundred yards sort of scale, I could never care about what happens three weeks from now, two towns over, just impossible,” I would say you might be a dog. And if you say to me, “Okay, I care about really what happens, you know, the financial markets on Earth, you know, long after I’m dead, and this and that,” I’d say you’re probably a human.
Michael Levin
(00:27:56)
And if you say to me, “I care in the linear range, I actively, I’m not just saying it, I can actively care in the linear range about all the living beings on this planet,” I’m going to say, “Well, you’re not a standard human. You must be something else,” because humans, I don’t know, standard humans today, I don’t think can do that. You must be some kind of a bodhisattva or some other thing that has these massive cognitive light cones. So I think what’s scaling from zero, and I do think it goes all the way down. I think we can talk about even particles doing something like this. I think what scales is the size of the cognitive light cone. And so now this is an interesting… here, I’ll try for a definition of life or whatever, for whatever it’s worth.
Michael Levin
(00:28:33)
I spent no time trying to make that stick, but if we wanted to… I think we call things alive to the extent that the cognitive light cone of that thing is bigger than that of its parts. So in other words, rocks aren’t very exciting because the things it knows how to do are the things that its parts already know how to do, which is follow gradients and things like that. But living things are amazing at aligning their competent parts so that the collective has a larger cognitive light cone than the parts. I’ll give you a very simple example that comes up in biology and that comes up in our cancer program all the time. Individual cells have little tiny cognitive light cones. What are their goals?
Michael Levin
(00:29:15)
Well, they’re trying to manage pH, metabolic state, some other things. There are some goals in transcriptional space, some goals in metabolic space, some goals in physiological state space, but they’re generally very tiny goals. One thing evolution did was to provide a kind of cognitive glue, which we can also talk about, that ties them together into a multicellular system, and those systems have grandiose goals. They’re making limbs, and if you’re a salamander limb and you chop it off, they will regrow that limb with the right number of fingers. Then they’ll stop when it’s done; the goal has been achieved. No individual cell knows what a finger is or how many fingers you’re supposed to have, but the collective absolutely does.
Michael Levin
(00:29:54)
And that process of growing that cognitive light cone from a single cell to something much bigger, and of course the failure mode of that process, so cancer, right? When cells disconnect, they physiologically disconnect from the other cells. Their cognitive light cone shrinks. The boundary between self and world, which is what the cognitive light cone defines, shrinks. Now they’re back to an amoeba. As far as they’re concerned, the rest of the body is just external environment, and they do what amoebas do. They go where life is good. They reproduce as much as they can, right? So that cognitive light cone, that is the thing that I’m talking about that scales. And so when we are looking for life, I don’t think we’re looking for specific materials.
Michael Levin
(00:30:30)
I don’t think we’re looking for specific metabolic states. I think we’re looking for scales of cognitive light cone. We’re looking for alignment of parts towards bigger goals in spaces that the parts could not comprehend.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:42)
And so cognitive light cone, just to make clear, is about goals that you can actively pursue now. You said linear, like we’re within reach immediately.
Michael Levin
(00:30:54)
No, I didn’t… sorry, I didn’t mean that. First of all, the goal necessarily is often removed in time. So, in other words, when you’re pursuing a goal, it means that you have a separation between current state and target state, at minimum. Your thermostat, right? Let’s just think about that. There’s a separation in time because the thing you’re trying to make happen, so that the temperature goes to a certain level, is not true right now. And all your actions are going to be around reducing that error, right? That basic homeostatic loop is all about closing that gap. When I said linear range, this is what I meant.
Michael Levin
(00:31:24)
If I say to you, “This terrible thing happened to, you know, 10 people,” and, you know, you have some degree of activation about it. And then I say, “No, no, no, actually it was 100, you know, 10,000 people.” You’re not a thousand times more activated about it. You’re somewhat more activated, but it’s not a thousand. And if I say, “Oh my God, it was actually 10 million people,” you’re not a million times more activated. You don’t have that capacity in the linear range. You sort of, you sort of, right? If you think about that curve, we sort of reach a saturation point.
Michael Levin
(00:31:54)
I have some amazing colleagues in the Buddhist community with whom we’ve written some papers about this. The radius of compassion is like, can you grow your cognitive system to the point that, yeah, it really isn’t just your family group, it really isn’t just the hundred people you know in your, in your, you know, circle? Can you grow your cognitive light cone to the point where, no, no, we care about the whole, whether it’s all of humanity or the whole ecosystem, or the whole, whatever? Can you actually care about that the exact same way that we now care about a much smaller set of people? That’s what I mean by linear range.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:25)
But this is separated by time like a thermostat, but a bacteria… I mean, if you zoom out far enough, a bacteria could be formulated to have a goal state of creating human civilization, because if you look at the, you know, bacteria… …Has a role to play in the whole history of Earth. So, you know, if you anthropomorphize the goals of a bacteria enough, I mean, it has a concrete role to play in the history of the evolution… …Of human civilization. So, you do need to… when you define a cognitive light cone, you’re looking at directly short-term behavior.
Michael Levin
(00:33:08)
Well, no. How do you know what the cognitive light cone of something is? Because as you’ve said, it could be almost anything. The key is you have to do experiments. And the way you do experiments is you put barriers… You have to do interventional experiments. You have to put barriers between it and its goal, and you have to ask what happens. And intelligence is the degree of ingenuity that it has in overcoming barriers between it and its goal. Now, if it were to be that… Now, this is, I think, a totally doable, but impractical and very expensive experiment. But you could imagine setting up a scenario where the bacteria were blocked from becoming more complex. And you can ask if they would try to find ways around it, or whether their goals are actually metabolic.
Michael Levin
(00:33:51)
And as long as those goals are met, they’re not going to actually get around your barrier. This business of putting barriers between things and their goals is actually extremely powerful because we’ve deployed it in all kinds of… And I’m sure we’ll get to this later, but we’ve deployed it in all kinds of weird systems that you wouldn’t think are goal-driven systems. And what it allows us to do is to get beyond just what you called anthropomorphizing claims of, say, you know, saying, “Oh, yeah, I think this thing is trying to do this or that.” The question is, well, let’s do the experiment. And one other thing I want to say about anthropomorphizing is people say this to me all the time.
Michael Levin
(00:34:27)
I don’t think that exists. I think that’s kind of like, you know… And I’ll tell you why. I think it’s like heresy or like other terms that aren’t really a thing. Because if you unpack it, here’s what anthropomorphism means: Humans have a certain magic, and you’re making a category error by attributing that magic somewhere else. My point is we have the same magic that everything has. We have a couple of interesting things besides, the cognitive light cone and some other stuff. And it isn’t that you have to keep the humans separate because there’s some bright line. It’s just… It’s that same old… All I’m arguing for is the scientific method, really. That’s really all this is.
Michael Levin
(00:35:11)
All I’m saying is you can’t just make pronouncements such as, “Humans are this,” and let’s not sort of push that. You have to do experiments. After you’ve done your experiments, you can say either, “I’ve done it, and I’ve found… Look at that. That thing actually can predict the future for the next, you know, 12 minutes. Amazing.” Or you say, “You know what? I’ve tried all the things in the behaviorist handbook, they just don’t help me with this. It’s a very low level of…” Like, that’s it. It’s a very low level of intelligence. Fine, right? Done. So that’s really all I’m arguing for, is an empirical approach. And then things like anthropomorphism go away. It’s just a matter of, have you done the experiment, and what did you find?
Lex Fridman
(00:35:45)
And that’s actually one of the things you’re saying, that if you remove the categorization of things, you can use the tools… …Of one discipline on everything.
Michael Levin
(00:35:56)
You could try.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:57)
To try and then see. That’s the underpinnings of the criticism of anthropomorphization, because what is that? That’s like psychoanalysis of another human could technically be applied to robots, to AI systems, to more primitive biological systems, and so on. Try.
Michael Levin
(00:36:18)
Yeah. We’ve used everything from basic habituation conditioning all the way through anxiolytics, hallucinogens, all kinds of cognitive modification on a range of things that you wouldn’t believe. And by the way, I’m not the first person to come up with this. So there was a guy named Bose well over 100 years ago who was studying how anesthesia affected animals and animal cells, and drawing specific curves around electrical excitability. And he then went and did it with plants and saw some very similar phenomena. And being the genius that he was, he then said, “Well, how do I…” I don’t know when to stop, but there’s no, there’s no… You know, everybody thinks we should have stopped long before plants because people made fun of him for that.
Michael Levin
(00:36:59)
And he’s like, “Yeah, but the science doesn’t tell us where to stop. The tool is working, let’s keep going.” And he showed interesting phenomena on materials, metals, and other kinds of materials, right? And so… …The interesting thing is that there is no generic rule that tells you when you need to stop. We make those up. Those are completely made up. You have to just do the science and find out.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:23)
Yeah, we’ll probably get to it. You’ve been doing recent work on looking at computational systems, even trivial ones like algorithms— … sorting algorithms- …and analyzing them in a behavioral kind of way, to see if there are minds inside those sorting algorithms. And, of course, let me make a pothead statement question here, that you could start to do things like trying to do psychedelics with a sorting algorithm. And what does that even look like? It looks like a ridiculous question that’ll get you fired from most academic departments, but it may be, if you take it seriously, you could try— …and see if it applies.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:00)
If a thing could be shown to have some kind of cognitive complexity, some kind of mind, why not apply to it the same kind of analysis and the same kind of tools, like psychedelics, that you would to a human mind that’s a complex human mind? It at least might be a productive question to ask. You’ve seen spiders on psychedelics, more primitive biological organisms on psychedelics. Why not try to see what an algorithm does on psychedelics? Anyway.
Michael Levin
(00:38:33)
Well, yeah, because, you see, the thing to remember is we don’t have a magic sense or really good intuition for what the mapping is between the embodiment of something and the degree of intelligence it has. We think we do because we have an N of one example on Earth and we kind of know what to expect from cells, snakes to, you know, primates, but we really don’t. We don’t have, and this is, we’ll get into more of the stuff on the Platonic space, but our intuitions around that stuff are so bad that to really think that we know enough not to try things at this point is, I think, really short-sighted.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:09)
Before we talk about the platonic space, let’s let’s lay out some foundations. I think one useful one comes from the paper, Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere. An experimentally grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds. Could you tell me about this framework, and maybe can you tell me about figure one from this paper that has a few components? One is the tiers of biological cognition that goes from group to whole organism to whole tissue organ, down to neural network, down to cytoskeleton, down to genetic network, and then there’s layers of biological systems from ecosystem, down to swarm, down to organism, tissue, and then finally cell. So can you explain this figure and can you explain the TAME, so-called, framework?
Michael Levin
(00:40:02)
So this is the version 1.0, and there’s a kind of update, a 2.0, that I’m writing at the moment, trying to formalize in a careful way all the things that we’ve been talking about here, and in particular, this notion of having to do experiments to figure out where any given system is on a continuum, and we can… let’s just start with figure two maybe for a second, and then we’ll come back to figure one. And first, just to unpack the acronym, I like the idea that it spells out TAME, because the central focus of this is interactions and how do you interact with a system to have a productive interaction with it, and the idea is that cognitive claims are really protocol claims.
Michael Levin
(00:40:42)
When you tell me that something has some degree of intelligence, what you’re really saying is, “This is the set of tools I’m going to deploy, and we can all find out how that worked out for you.” And so technological, because I wanted to be clear with my colleagues that this was not a project in just philosophy. This had very specific, empirical implications that are going to play out in engineering and regenerative medicine and so on. Technological approach to mind everywhere, this idea that we don’t know yet where different kinds of minds are to be found and we have to empirically figure that out.
Michael Levin
(00:41:15)
And so what you see here in figure two is basically this idea that there is a spectrum, and I’m just showing four waypoints along that spectrum, and as you move to the right of that spectrum, a couple things happen: persuadability goes up, meaning that the systems become more reprogrammable, more plastic, more able to do different things than whatever they’re standardly doing, so you have more ability to get them to do new and interesting things. The effort needed to exert influence goes down; that is, autonomy goes up. And to the extent that you are good at convincing or motivating the system to do things, you don’t have to sweat the details as much, right? And this also has to do with what I call engineering agential materials.
Michael Levin
(00:41:51)
So when you engineer wood, metal, plastic, things like that, you are responsible for absolutely everything because the material is not going to do anything other than hopefully hold its shape. If you’re engineering active matter, or you’re engineering computational materials, or better yet, agential materials like living matter, you can do some very high-level prompting and let the system then do very complicated things that you don’t need to micromanage, and we all know that that increases when you’re starting to work with intelligent systems like animals and humans and so on. And the other thing that goes down as you get to the right is the amount of mechanism, or physics, that you need to exert the influence goes down.
Michael Levin
(00:42:31)
So if you know how your thermostat is to be set as far as its set point, you really don’t need to know much of anything else, right? You, you just need to know that it is a homeostatic system and that this is how I change the set point. You don’t need to know how the cooling and heating plant works in order to get it to do complex things.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:46)
By the way, a quick pause just for people who are listening, let me describe what’s in the figure. So there’s four different systems going up the scale of persuadability. So the first system is a mechanical clock, then it’s a thermostat, then it’s a dog that gets rewards and punishments, Pavlov’s dog, and then finally a bunch of very smart-looking humans communicating with each other and arguing, persuading each other using reasons. And then there’s arrows below that showing persuadability going up as you go up these systems from the mechanical clock to a bunch of Greeks arguing, and then going down as the effort needed to exert influence, and once again, going down as mechanism knowledge needed to exert that influence.
Michael Levin
(00:43:30)
Yeah. I’ll give you an example about that, panel C here with the dog. Isn’t it amazing that humans have been training dogs and horses for thousands of years knowing zero neuroscience? Also amazing is that when I’m talking to you right now, I don’t need to worry about manipulating all of the synaptic proteins in your brain to make you understand what I’m saying and hopefully remember it. You’re going to do that all on your own. I’m giving you very thin, in terms of information content, very thin prompts, and I’m counting on you as a multi-scale agential material to take care of the chemistry underneath, all right?
Lex Fridman
(00:44:03)
So you don’t need a wrench to convince me?
Michael Levin
(00:44:05)
Correct. I don’t need, and I don’t need physics to convince you, and I don’t need to know how you work. I don’t need to understand all of the steps. What I do need to have is trust that you are a multi-scale cognitive system that already does that for yourself, and you do. This is an amazing thing. I know people don’t think about this enough, I think. When you wake up in the morning and you have social goals, research goals, financial goals, whatever it is that you have, in order for you to act on those goals, sodium and calcium and other ions have to cross your muscle membranes. Those incredibly abstract goal states ultimately have to make the chemistry dance in a very particular way, right? You—
Michael Levin
(00:44:42)
Our entire body is a transducer of very abstract things. And, by the way, not just our brains, but our organs have anatomical goals and other things that we can talk about, because all of this plays out in regeneration and development and so on. But the scaling, right, of all of these things, the way that… the way you regulate yourself is not by, “Oh my God,” you don’t have to sit there and think, “Wow, I really have to push some sodiums across this membrane.” All of that happens automatically, and that’s the incredible benefit of these multi-scale materials. So what I was trying to do in this paper is a couple of things.
Michael Levin
(00:45:18)
All of these were, by the way, drawn by Jeremy Gay, who’s this amazing graphic artist that works with me. First of all, in panel A, which is the spiral I was trying to point out, is that at every level of biological organization, like we all know we’re sort of nested dolls of organs and tissues and cells and molecules and whatever, but what I was trying to point out is that this is not just structural. Every one of those layers is competent and is doing problem-solving in different spaces, and spaces that are very hard for us to imagine. We humans are, because of our own evolutionary history, so obsessed with movement in three-dimensional space that even in AI you see this all the time.
Michael Levin
(00:45:53)
They say, “Well, this thing doesn’t have a robotic body, it’s not embodied.” Yeah, it’s not embodied by moving around in 3D space, but biology has embodiments in all kinds of spaces that are hard for us to imagine, right? So your cells and tissues are moving in high-dimensional physiological state spaces, in gene expression state spaces, in anatomical state spaces. They’re doing that perception, decision-making, action loop that we do in 3D space when we think about robots wandering around your kitchen. They’re doing those loops in these other spaces. And so the first thing I was trying to point out is that every layer of your body has its own ability to solve problems in those spaces.
Michael Levin
(00:46:31)
And then on the right, what I was saying is that this distinction between, you know, people say, “Well, there are living beings and then there are engineered machines,” and then they often follow up with all the things machines are never going to be able to do and whatever. And so what I was trying to point out here is that it is very difficult to maintain those kinds of distinctions, because life is incredibly interoperable. Life doesn’t really care if the thing it’s working with was evolved through random trial and error or was engineered with a higher degree of agency, because at every level within the cell, within the tissue, within the organism, within the collective, you can replace and substitute engineered systems with naturally-evolved systems.
Michael Levin
(00:47:12)
And that question of, “Is it real, you know, is it biology or is it technology?” I don’t think is a useful question anymore. So I was trying to warm people up with this idea that what we’re going to do now is talk about minds in general, regardless of their history or their composition. It doesn’t matter what you’re made of. It doesn’t matter how you got here. Let’s talk about what you’re able to do and what your inner world looks like. That was the goal of that.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:34)
Is it useful to, as a thought experiment, as an experiment of radical empathy, to try to put ourselves in the space of the different minds at each stage of the spiral? Like, what state space is human civilization as a collective embodied? Like, what does it operate in? So humans, individual organisms, operate in 3D space. That’s what we understand. But when there’s a bunch of us together… …What are we doing together?
Michael Levin
(00:48:07)
It’s really hard, and you have to do experiments, which at larger scales are really difficult.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:12)
But there is such a thing?
Michael Levin
(00:48:14)
There may well be. We have to do experiments. I don’t know. Here’s an example. Somebody will say to me, “Well, you know, with your kind of panpsychist view, you probably think the weather is agential too.” It’s like, “Well, I can’t say that, but we don’t know, but have you ever tried to see if a hurricane has habituation or sensitization?” Maybe. We haven’t done the experiment. It’s hard, but you could, right? And maybe weather systems can have certain kinds of memories. I have no idea. We have to do experiments.
Michael Levin
(00:48:41)
So I don’t know what the entire human society is doing, but I’ll just give you a simple example of the kinds of tools, and we’re actively trying to build tools now to enable radically different agents to communicate. So we are doing this using AI and other tools to try and get this kind of communication going across very different spaces. I’ll just give you a very dumb example of how that might be. Imagine that you’re playing tic-tac-toe against an alien. So you’re in a room. You don’t see him. You draw the tic-tac-toe thing on the board, on the floor, and you know what you’re doing.
Michael Levin
(00:49:17)
You’re trying to make straight lines with Xs and Os, and you’re having a nice game. It’s obvious that he understands the process. Like, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It’s obvious. In that one little segment of activity, you guys are sharing a world. What’s happening in the other room next door? Well, let’s say the alien doesn’t know anything about geometry. He doesn’t understand straight lines. What he’s doing is he’s got a box, and it’s full of basically billiard balls, each one of which has a number on it. And all he’s doing is he’s looking through the box to find billiard balls whose numbers add up to 15. He doesn’t understand geometry at all. All he understands is arithmetic.
Michael Levin
(00:49:55)
You don’t think about arithmetic, you think geometry. The reason you guys are playing the same game is that there’s this magic square, right? That somebody constructed that basically is a three-by-three square, where if you pick the numbers right, they add up to 15. He has no idea that there’s a geometric interpretation to this. He is solving the problem that he sees, which is totally algebraic. You don’t know anything about that. But if there is an appropriate interface like this magic square, you guys can share that experience. You can have an experience. It doesn’t mean you start to think like him. It means that you guys are able to interact in a particular way.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:27)
Okay, so there’s a mapping between the two different ways of seeing the world that allows you to communicate with each other.
Michael Levin
(00:50:34)
Of seeing a thin slice of the world.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:36)
Thin slice of the world. How do you find that mapping? So you’re saying we’re trying to figure out ways of finding that mapping… …For different kinds of systems. What’s the process for doing that?
Michael Levin
(00:50:48)
So the process is twofold. One is to get a better understanding of what space the system is navigating, what goals it has, what level of ingenuity it has to reach those goals. For example, xenobots, right? We make xenobots or anthropods. These are biological systems that have never existed on Earth before. We have no idea what their cognitive properties are. We’re learning. We found some things. But you can’t predict that from first principles because they’re not at all what their past history would inform you of.

Creating life in the lab

Lex Fridman
(00:51:19)
Can you actually explain briefly what a xenobot is and what an anthropod is?
Michael Levin
(00:51:24)
So one of the things that we’ve been doing is trying to create novel beings that have never been here before. The reason is that typically when you have a biological system, an animal or a plant, and you say, “Hey, why does it have certain forms of behavior, certain forms of anatomy, certain forms of physiology? Why does it have those?” The answer is always the same. Well, there’s a history of evolutionary selection, and there’s a long, long history going back of adaptation, and there are certain environments, and this is what survived, and so that’s why it has. So what I wanted to do was break out of that mold, and to basically force us as a community to dig deeper into where these things come from.
Michael Levin
(00:52:07)
And that means taking away the crutch where you just say, “Well, it’s evolutionary selection that’s why it looks like that.” So in order to do that, we have to make artificial synthetic beings now. To be clear, we are starting with living cells, so it’s not that they had no evolutionary history. The cells do. They had evolutionary history in frogs or humans or whatever. But the creatures they make and the capabilities that these creatures have were never directly selected for. And in fact, they never existed. So you can’t tell the same kind of story. And what I mean is, we can take epithelial cells off of an early frog embryo, and you don’t change the DNA. No synthetic biology circuits, no material scaffolds, no nanomaterials, no weird drugs, none of that.
Michael Levin
(00:52:46)
What we’re mostly doing is liberating them from the instructive influences of the rest of the cells that they were in in their bodies. And so when you do that, normally these cells are bullied by their neighboring cells into having a very boring life. They become a two-dimensional outer covering for the embryo, and they keep out the bacteria, and that’s that. So you might ask, “Well, what are these cells capable of when you take them away from that influence?” So when you do that, they form another little life form we call a xenobot. And it’s this self-motile little thing that has cilia covering its surface. The cilia are coordinated so they row against the water, and then the thing starts to move, and has all kinds of amazing properties.
Michael Levin
(00:53:25)
It has different gene expression, so it has its own novel transcriptome. It’s able to do things like kinematic self-replication, meaning make copies of itself from loose cells that you put in its environment. It has the ability to respond to sound, which normal embryos don’t do. It has these novel capacities. And we did that, and we said, “Look, here are some amazing features of this novel system. Let’s try to understand where they came from.” And some people said, “Well, maybe it’s a frog-specific thing,” you know? Maybe this is just something unique to frog cells. And so we said, “Okay, what’s the furthest you can get from frog embryonic cells?”
Michael Levin
(00:54:00)
How about human adult cells?” And so we took cells from adult human patients who were donating tracheal epithelia for biopsies and things like that, and those cells, again, no genetic change, nothing like that. They self-organized into something we call anthropods. Again, a self-motile little creature. 9,000 different gene expressions. So about half the genome is now different. And they have interesting abilities. For example, they can heal human neural wounds. So in vitro, if you plate some neurons and you put a big scratch through it so you damage them, anthropods can sit down, and they will try… They will spontaneously, without us having to teach them to do it, they will spontaneously try to knit the neurons across.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:42)
What is this video that we’re looking at here?
Michael Levin
(00:54:44)
So this is an anthropod. So often when I give talks about this, I show people this video, and I say, “What do you think this is?” And people will say, “Well, it looks like some primitive organism you got from the bottom of a pond somewhere.” And I’ll say, “Well, what do you think the genome would look like?” And they say, “Well, the genome would look like some primitive creature.” Right? If you sequence that thing, you’ll get 100% Homo sapiens. And that doesn’t look like any stage of normal human development. It doesn’t act like any stage of human development. It has the ability to move around. It has, as I said, over 9,000 differential gene expressions. Also interestingly, it is younger than the cells that it comes from.
Michael Levin
(00:55:20)
So it actually has the ability to roll back its age, and we could talk about that and what the implications of that are. But to go back to your original question, what we’re doing with these kind of systems…
Lex Fridman
(00:55:30)
Trying to talk to it.
Michael Levin
(00:55:31)
We’re trying to talk to it. That’s exactly right. And not just to this. We’re trying to talk to molecular networks. So we found a couple years ago that gene regulatory networks, never mind the cells, but the molecular pathways inside of cells can have several different kinds of learning, including Pavlovian conditioning. And what we’re doing now is trying to talk to it. The biomedical applications are obvious. Instead of, “Hey, Siri,” you want, “Hey, liver, why do I feel like crap today?” And you want an answer.
Michael Levin
(00:55:54)
“Well, you know, your potassium levels are this and that, and I don’t feel good for these reasons.” And you should be able to talk to these things, and there should be an interface that allows us to communicate, right? And I think AI is going to be a huge component of that interface, of allowing us to talk to these systems. It’s a tool to combat our mind-blindness, to help us see diverse, very unconventional minds that are all around us.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:19)
Can you generalize that? So let’s say we meet an alien or an unconventional mind here on Earth. Think of it as a black box. You show up. What’s the procedure for trying to get some hooks into a communication protocol with the thing?
Michael Levin
(00:56:43)
Yeah. That is exactly the mission of my lab. It is to enable us to develop tools to recognize these things, to learn to communicate with them, to ethically relate to them. And in general, to expand our ability to do this in the world around us. I specifically chose these kinds of things because they’re not as alien as proper aliens would be. So we have some hope. I mean, we’re made of them. We have many things in common. There’s some hope of understanding them.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:11)
You’re talking about xenobots and anthropods?
Michael Levin
(00:57:12)
Xenobots, anthropods, cells, and everything else. But they’re alien in a couple of important ways. One is the space they live in is very hard for us to imagine. What space do they live in? Well, your body, your body’s cells, long before we had a brain that was good for navigating three-dimensional space, was navigating the space of anatomical possibilities. It was going from, you start as an egg, and you have to become, you know, a snake or a giraffe or a human, whatever we’re going to be.
Michael Levin
(00:57:42)
And I specifically am telling you that this general idea, when people model that with cellular automata type of ideas, this open-loop kind of thing where everything just follows local rules and eventually, there’s complexity, and here you go. Now, you’ve got a giraffe or a human. I’m specifically telling you that that model is totally insufficient to grasp what’s actually going on. What’s actually going on, and there have been many, many experiments on this, is that the system is navigating a space. It is navigating a space of anatomical possibilities. If you try to block where it’s going, it will try to get around you.
Michael Levin
(00:58:17)
If you try to challenge it with things it’s never seen before, it will try to come up with a solution. If you really defeat its ability to do that, which you can, you know, they’re not infinitely intelligent, so you can defeat them. You will either get birth defects, or you will get creative problem-solving such as what you’re seeing here with xenobots and anthropods. If you can’t be a human, you’ll find another way to be. You can be an anthropod, for example, or you’ll be something else.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:42)
Just to clarify, what’s the difference between cellular automata type of action where you’re just responding to your local environment and creating some kind of complex behavior, and operating in the space of anatomical possibilities?
Michael Levin
(00:58:56)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:56)
So there’s a kind of goal, I guess, you’re articulating.
Michael Levin
(00:58:59)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:59)
There is some kind…
Michael Levin
(00:59:01)
Yes
Lex Fridman
(00:59:01)
…of thing. There’s a will to X something.
Michael Levin
(00:59:06)
The will thing, let’s put that aside.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:08)
Okay, sorry.
Michael Levin
(00:59:08)
Because that’s a… Well, it’s fine too.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:10)
There I go, anthropomorphizing. I just always love to quote Nietzsche, so there we go.
Michael Levin
(00:59:13)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I’m not saying I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m just saying I don’t have data for that one, but I’ll tell you the stuff that I’m quite certain of. There are a couple of different formalisms that we have in control theory. One of those formalisms is open-loop complexity. In other words, I’ve got a bunch of subunits, like a cellular automaton. They follow certain rules, and you turn the crank, time goes forward, whatever happens, happens. Now, clearly you can get complexity from this. Clearly you can get some very interesting-looking things, right? So the game of life, all those kinds of cool things, right? You can get complexity. No, no, no problem.
Michael Levin
(00:59:47)
But the idea that that model is going to be sufficient to explain and control things like morphogenesis is a hypothesis. It’s okay to make that hypothesis, but we know, we know it’s false despite the fact that that is what we learned, you know, in basic cell biology and developmental biology classes. When the first time you see something like this, inevitably, especially if you’re an engineer in those classes, you go, “Hey, how does it know to do that? How does it know, you know, four fingers instead of seven?” What they tell you is, “It doesn’t know anything.” Make sure. That’s very clear. They all insist, like, when we learn these things, they insist nothing here knows anything.
Michael Levin
(01:00:27)
There are rules of chemistry, they roll forward, and this is what happens. Okay. Now, that model is testable. We can ask, “Does that model explain what happens?” Here’s where that model falls down. If you have that model and situations change, either there’s damage or something in the environment that’s happened, those kinds of open-loop models do not adjust to give you the same goal by different means. This is William James’ definition of intelligence: the same goal by different means. And in particular, working them backward, let’s say you are in regenerative medicine, and you say, “Okay, but this is the situation now. I want it to be different.” What should the rules be? It’s not reversible.
Michael Levin
(01:01:09)
So the thing with those kinds of open-loop models is they’re not reversible. You don’t know what to do to make the outcome that you want. All you know how to do is roll them forward, right? Now, in biology, we see the following. If you have a developmental system and you put barriers between… So I’m going to give you two pieces of evidence that suggest that there is a goal. One piece of evidence is that if you try to block these things from the outcome that they normally have, they will do some amazing things. Sometimes very clever things, sometimes not at all the way that they normally do it, right? So this is William James’ definition.
Michael Levin
(01:01:45)
By different means, by following different trajectories, they will go around various local maxima and minima to get to where they need to go. It is navigation of a space. It is not blind, turn the crank, and wherever we end up is where we end up. That is not what we see experimentally. And more importantly, I think, what we’ve shown, and this is something that I’m particularly happy with in our lab, over the last 20 years, we’ve shown the following. We can actually rewrite the goal states because we found them. We have shown through our work on bioelectric imaging and bioelectric reprogramming, we have actually shown how those goal memories are encoded, at least in some cases.
Michael Levin
(01:02:21)
We certainly haven’t got them all, but we have some. If you can find where the goal state is encoded, read it out, and reset it, and the system will now implement a new goal based on what you just reset, that is the ultimate evidence that your goal-directed model is working. Because if there was no goal, that shouldn’t be possible. Right? Once you can find it, read it, interpret it, and rewrite it, it means that by any engineering standard, it means that you’re dealing with a homeostatic mechanism.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:53)
How do you find where the goal’s encoded?
Michael Levin
(01:02:55)
So, through lots and lots of hard work.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:58)
The barrier thing is part of that? Creating barriers and observing?
Michael Levin
(01:03:01)
The barrier thing tells you that you should be looking for a goal.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:04)
So step one, when you approach an agentic system, is create a barrier of different kinds until you see how persistent it is at pursuing the thing it seemed to have been pursuing originally.
Michael Levin
(01:03:14)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:14)
And then you know, okay, cool, this is a… This thing has agency, first of all. And then second of all, like, you start to build the intuition about exactly which goal it’s pursuing.
Michael Levin
(01:03:24)
Yes. The first couple of steps are all imagination. You have to ask yourself, “What space is this thing even working in?” And you really have to stretch your mind, because we can’t imagine all the spaces that systems work in, right? So step one is, what space is it? Step two, what do I think the goal is? And let’s not mistake step two, you’re not done. Just because you have made a hypothesis, that doesn’t mean you can say, “Well, I see it doing this, therefore that’s the goal.” You don’t know that. You have to actually do experiments. Now, once you’ve made those hypotheses, now you do the experiments.
Michael Levin
(01:03:50)
You say, “Okay, if I want to block it from reaching its goal, how do I do that?” And this, by the way, is exactly the approach we took with the sorting algorithms and with everything else. You hypothesize the goal, you put a barrier in, and then you get to find out what level of ingenuity it has. Maybe what you see is, “Well, that derailed everything, so probably this thing isn’t very smart.” Or you say, “Oh, wow, it can go around and do these things.” Or you might say, “Wow, it’s taking a completely different approach using its affordances in novel ways, like that’s a high level of intelligence.” You will find out what the answer is.

Memories and ideas are living organisms

Lex Fridman
(01:04:21)
Another pothead question. Is it possible to look at, speaking of unconventional organisms and going to Richard Dawkins for example with memes, is it possible to think of things like ideas? Like how weird can we get? Can we look at ideas as organisms then creating barriers for those ideas, and seeing are the ideas themselves… If you take the actual individual ideas and trying to empathize and visualize what kind of space they might be operating in, can they be seen as organisms that have a mind?
Michael Levin
(01:04:58)
Yeah. Okay, if you want to get really weird, we can get really weird here. Think about the caterpillar-butterfly transition, okay? So, you’ve got a caterpillar, soft-bodied kind of creature, has a particular controller that’s suitable for running a soft body, you know, kind of robot. It has a brain for that task, and then it has to become this butterfly, hard-bodied creature, flies around. Okay. During the process of metamorphosis, its brain is basically ripped up and rebuilt from scratch, right? Now, what’s been found is that if you train the caterpillar, so you give it a new memory, meaning that if the caterpillar sees this color disc, then it crawls over and eats some leaves. Turns out, the butterfly retains that memory.
Michael Levin
(01:05:39)
Now, the obvious question is, how the hell do you retain memories when the medium is being refactored like that? Let’s put that aside. That’s something that I’m going to get somewhere even weirder than that. There’s something else that’s even more interesting than that. It’s not just that you have to retain the memory. You have to remap that memory onto a completely new context, because guess what? The butterfly doesn’t move the way the caterpillar moves, and it doesn’t care about leaves. It wants nectar from flowers. And so if that memory is going to survive, it can’t just persist. It has to…
Lex Fridman
(01:06:10)
Be remapped
Michael Levin
(01:06:11)
…be remapped into a novel context. Now, here’s where things get weird. We can take a couple of different perspectives here. We can take the perspective of the caterpillar facing some sort of crazy singularity and say, “My God, I’m going to cease to exist, but, you know, I’ll sort of be reborn in this new higher-dimensional world where I’ll fly.” Okay, so that’s one thing. We can take the perspective of the butterfly and say that, “Well, here I am, but, you know, I seem to be saddled with some tendencies and some memories, and I don’t know where the hell they came from, and I don’t remember exactly how I got them, and they seem to be a core part of my psychological makeup, and, you know, they’re…
Michael Levin
(01:06:49)
If they come from somewhere. I don’t know where they come from.” Right? So you can take that perspective. But there’s a third perspective that I think is really interesting and useful. The third perspective is that of the memory itself. If you take a perspective of the memory, so what is a memory? It is a pattern. It is an informational pattern that was continuously reinforced within one cognitive system, and now here I am on this memory. What do I need to do to persist into the future? Well, now I’m facing the paradox of change. If I try to remain the same, I’m gone. There’s no way the butterfly is going to retain me in the original form that I’m in now. What I need to do is change, adapt, and morph. Now, you might say, “Well, that’s kind of crazy.
Michael Levin
(01:07:31)
Well, how are you taking the perspective of a pattern within an excitable medium?” Right? Agents are physical things. You’re talking about information, right? So let me tell you another quick science fiction story. Imagine that some creatures come out from the center of the earth. They live down in the core. They’re super dense, okay? They’re incredibly dense because they live down in the core. They have gamma ray vision, you know, for… And so on. So they come out to the surface. What do they see? Well, all of this stuff that we’re seeing here, this is like a thin plasma to them. They are so dense. None of this is solid to them.
Michael Levin
(01:08:06)
They don’t see any of this stuff. So they’re walking around, you know, because the planet is sort of, you know, covered in this like thin gas, you know. And one of them is a scientist and he’s taking measurements of the gas, and he says to the others, “You know, I’ve been watching this gas, and there are like little whirlpools in this gas, and they almost look like agents. They almost look like they’re doing things. They’re moving around, they kind of hold themselves together for a little bit, and they’re trying to make stuff happen.” And the others say, “Well, that’s crazy. Patterns in a gas can’t be agents. We’re agents. We’re solid. This is just patterns in an excitable medium.”
Michael Levin
(01:08:38)
And by the way, how long do they hold together? He says, “Well, about 100 years.” “Well, that’s crazy. Nothing… You know, no real agent can exist to dissipate that fast.” Okay. We are all metabolic patterns, among other things, right? And so one of the things that… And so you see what I’m warming up to here. So one of the things that we’ve been trying to dissolve, and this is some work that I’ve done with Chris Fields and others, is this distinction between thoughts and thinkers. So all agents are patterns within some excitable medium, we could talk about what that is, and they can spawn off others. And now you can have a really interesting spectrum. Here’s the spectrum.
Michael Levin
(01:09:15)
You can have fleeting thoughts, which are like waves in the ocean when you throw a rock in. You know, they sort of go through the excitable medium and then they’re gone. They pass through and they’re gone, right? So those are kind of fleeting thoughts. Then you can have patterns that have a degree of persistence, so they might be hurricanes or solitons or persistent thoughts or earworms or depressive thoughts. Those are harder to get rid of. They stick around for a little while. They often do a little bit of niche construction, so they change the actual brain to make it easier to have more of those thoughts, right? Like, that’s a thing. And so they stay around longer. Now what’s further than that?
Michael Levin
(01:10:00)
Well, fragments, personality fragments of a dissociative personality disorder, they’re more stable, and they’re not just on autopilot. They have goals and they can do things, and then past that is a full-blown human personality. And who the hell knows what’s past that? Maybe some sort of trans-human, you know, trans-personal, like, I don’t know, right? But this idea, again, I’m back to this notion of a spectrum. It’s there is not a sharp distinction between, you know, we are real agents and then we have these thoughts. Yeah, patterns can be agents too, but again, you don’t know until you do the experiment. So if you want to know whether a soliton or a hurricane or a thought within a cognitive system is its own agent, do the experiment. See what it can do.
Michael Levin
(01:10:43)
Does it, can it learn from experience? Does it have memories? Does it have goal states? What can it do, right? Does it have language? So coming back to your original question, yeah, we can definitely apply this methodology to ideas and concepts and social whatevers, but you’ve got to do the experiment.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:04)
That’s such a challenging thought experiment of thinking about memories, from the caterpillar to the butterfly as an organism. I think at the very basic level, intuitively, we think of organisms as hardware… …And software as not possibly being able to be organisms, but…
Lex Fridman
(01:11:26)
…what you’re saying is that it’s all just patterns in an excitable medium, and it doesn’t really matter what the pattern is. We need to… and what the excitable medium is. We need to do the testing of how persistent is it? How goal-oriented is it? And there are certain kinds of tests to do that, and you can apply that to memories. You can apply that to ideas. You can apply that to anything, really. I mean, you could probably think about consciousness. You could… There’s really no boundary to what you can imagine. Probably really, really wild things could be minds.
Michael Levin
(01:12:08)
Yeah. Stay tuned. I mean, this is exactly what we’re doing. We’re getting progressively more and more unconventional. I mean, so this whole distinction between software and hardware, I think it’s a super important concept to think about. And yet, the way we’ve mapped it onto the world, I would like to blow that up in the following way. And again, I want to point out what the practical consequences are, because this is not just, you know, fun stories that we tell each other. These have really important research implications. Think about a Turing machine. So one thing you can say is the machine’s the agent.
Michael Levin
(01:12:47)
It has passive data, and it operates on the data, and that’s it. The story of agency is the story of whatever that machine can and can’t do. The data is passive, and it moves it around. You can tell the opposite story. You can say, “Look, the patterns on the data are the agent. The machine is a stigmergic scratch pad in the world of the data doing what data does.” The machine is just the consequences, the scratch pad of it working itself out. And both of those stories make sense depending on what you’re trying to do. Here’s the biomedical side of things. So our program in bioelectrics and aging, okay?
Michael Levin
(01:13:19)
One model you could have is the physical organism is the agent and the cellular collective has pattern memories, specifically what I was saying before, goals, anatomical goals. If you want to persist for 100 plus years, your cells better remember what your correct shape is and where the new cells go, right? So there are these pattern memories. They exist during embryogenesis, during regeneration, during resistance to aging. We can see them. We can visualize them. One thing you can imagine is, fine, the physical body, the cells, are the agent. The electrical pattern memories are just data, and what might happen during aging is that the data might get degraded. They might get fuzzy.
Michael Levin
(01:14:01)
And so what we need to do is reinforce the memories, reinforce the pattern memories. That’s one specific research program, and we’re doing that. But that’s not the only research program, because the other thing you might imagine is that, what if the patterns are the agent in exactly the same sense as we think in our brains? It’s the patterns of electrophysiological computations, whatever else, that is the agent, right?
Michael Levin
(01:14:30)
And that what they’re doing in the brain are the side effects of the patterns working themselves out. And those side effects might be to fire off some muscles and some glands and some other things. From that perspective… maybe what’s actually happening is, maybe the agent’s finding it harder and harder to be embodied in the physical world. Why? Because the cells might get less responsive. In other words, the cells are sluggish. The patterns are fine. They’re having a harder time making the cells do what they need to do, and that maybe what you need to do is not reinforce the memories, maybe what you need to do is make the cells more responsive to them, and that is a different research agenda. So which we are also doing.
Michael Levin
(01:15:07)
We have evidence for that as well, actually now, and we published it recently. And so my point here is, when we tell these crazy sci-fi stories, the only worth to them and the only reason I’m talking about them now, and I hadn’t been… you know, a year ago I wasn’t talking about this stuff, is because these are now actionable in terms of specific experimental research agendas that are heading to the clinic, I hope, in some of these biomedical approaches. And so now here we can go beyond this and we can say, okay, so up until now we’ve considered… What are disease states? Well, we know there’s organic disease, something that’s physically broken. We can see the tissues breaking down.
Michael Levin
(01:15:40)
There’s damage in the joint, you know, where the liver is doing what, you know, we can see these things. But what about disease states that are not physical states, they’re physiological states or informational states or cognitive problems? So in other words, in all of these other spaces, you can start to ask, what’s a barrier in gene expression space? What’s a local minimum that traps you in physiological state space, and what is a stress pattern that keeps itself together, moves around the body, causes damage, tries to keep itself going, right? What level of agency does it have?
Michael Levin
(01:16:15)
This suggests an entirely different set of approaches to biomedicine, and, you know, anybody who’s, let’s say, in the alternative medicine community, is probably yelling at the screen right now saying, “We’ve been saying this for hundreds of years,” and yeah, but. And I’m well aware these ideas are not new. What’s new is being able to now take this and make them actionable and say, “Yeah, but we can image this now. I can now actually see the bioelectric patterns and why they go here and not there,” and we have the tools that now hopefully will get us to therapeutics. So this is very actionable stuff, and it all leans on not assuming we know minds when we see them, because we don’t, and we have to do experiments.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:57)
To return back to the software-hardware distinction, you’re saying that we can see the software is the organism and the hardware is just the scratchpad, or you could see the hardware as the organism and the software is the thing that the hardware generates, and in so doing, we can decrease the amount of importance we assign to something like the human brain, or it could be the activations, it could be the electrical signals that are the organisms, and then the brain is the scratchpad.
Michael Levin
(01:17:30)
And by saying scratchpad, I don’t mean it’s not important. When we get to talking about the Platonic space, we have to talk about how important the interface actually is. It’s… The scratchpad isn’t unimportant, the scratchpad is critical. It’s just that my only point is that when we have these formalisms of software, of hardware, of other things, the way we map those formalisms onto the world is not obvious. It’s not given to us. We get used to certain things, right? But, but who’s the hardware, who’s the software, who’s the agent and who’s the excitable medium is to be determined.

Reality is an illusion: The brain is an interface to a hidden reality

Lex Fridman
(01:18:02)
So this is a good place to talk about the increasingly radical weird ideas that you’ve been writing about. You’ve mentioned it a few times, the Platonic space. So there’s this “Ingressing Minds” paper where you described the Platonic space. You mentioned there’s an asynchronous conference… … Happening, which is a fascinating concept because it’s asynchronous. People are just contributing asynchronously.
Michael Levin
(01:18:30)
So what happened was this crazy notion, which I’ll describe momentarily, I have given a couple talks on it. I then found a couple papers in the machine learning community called the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, and I said, “That’s pretty cool. These guys are climbing up to the same point where I’m getting at it from biology and philosophy and whatever. They’re getting there from computer science and machine learning.” We’ll take a couple hours, I’ll give a talk, they’ll give a talk, we’ll talk about it. I thought there were going to be three talks at this thing.
Michael Levin
(01:18:57)
Once I started reaching out to people for this, everybody sort of said, “You know, I know somebody who’s really into this stuff, but they never talk about it because there’s no audience for this,” so I reached out to them. And then they said, “Yeah. Oh, yeah, I know this mathematician,” or, “I know this, you know, economist, whatever, who has these ideas and there’s nowhere we can have her talk about them.” So I got this whole list and it became completely obvious that we can’t do this in a normal… You know, we are now booked up through December, so every week in our center, somebody gives a talk. We kind of discuss it. It all goes on this thing.
Michael Levin
(01:19:29)
I’ll give you a link to it, and then there’s a huge running discussion after that, and then in the end, we’re all going to get together for an actual real-time discussion section and talk about it. But there’s going to be probably 15 or so talks about this from all kinds of disciplines. It’s blown up in a way that I didn’t realize how much undercurrent of these ideas had already existed that were ready, like now, now is the time, and I think… This is… Like I’ve been thinking about these things for, I don’t know, 30-plus years. I never talked about them before because they weren’t actionable before. There wasn’t a way to actually make empirical progress with this now.
Michael Levin
(01:20:07)
You know, this is something that Pythagoras and Plato and probably many people before them talked about, but now we’re to the point where we can actually do experiments and they’re making a difference in our research program.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:19)
You can just look it up, “Platonic Space Conference.” There’s a bunch of different fascinating talks. Yours first on the patterns of forms and behavior, beyond emergence, then radical Platonism and radical empiricism from Joel Dietz, and Patterns And Explanatory Gaps In Psychotherapy, Does God Play Dice? from Alexey Tolchinsky and so on. So, let’s talk about it. What is it? And it’s fascinating that the origins of some of these ideas are connected to ML people thinking about representation space.
Michael Levin
(01:20:58)
Yeah. The first thing I want to say is that while I’m currently calling it the Platonic space, I am in no way trying to stick close to the things that Plato actually thought about. In fact, to whatever extent we even know what that is, I think I depart from that in quite… in some ways, and I’m going to have to change the name at some point. The reason I’m using the name now is because I wanted to be clear about a particular connection to mathematics, which a lot of mathematicians would call themselves Platonists because what they think they’re doing is discovering… not inventing as a human construction, but discovering a structured, ordered space of truths. Let’s put it this way.
Michael Levin
(01:21:38)
In biology, as in physics, there’s something very curious that happens that if you keep asking why, then something interesting goes on. Let’s… Well, I’ll give you two examples. First of all, imagine cicadas. So the cicadas come out at 13 years and 17 years, okay? And so if you’re a biologist and you say, “So why is that?” And then you get this explanation for, well, it’s because they’re trying to be off-cycle from their predators. Because if it was 12 years, then every two years, every three years, every four years, every six years, a predator would eat you when you come out, right? So, and you say, “Okay, okay, cool. That makes sense. What’s special about 13 and 17?” Oh, they’re prime. Uh-huh. And why are they prime?
Michael Levin
(01:22:18)
Well, now you’re in the math department. You’re no longer in the biology department. You’re no longer in the physics department. You’re now… you’re now in the math department to understand why the distribution of primes is what it is. Another example, and I’m not a physicist, but what I see is every time you talk to a physicist and you say, “Hey, why do the, you know, leptons do this or that, or the fermions are doing whatever?” Eventually, the answer is, oh, because there’s this mathematical, you know, this SU(8) group or whatever the heck it is, and it has certain symmetries in these certain structures. Yeah, great. Once again, you’re in the math department. So something interesting happens is that there are facts that you come across, many of them are very surprising.
Michael Levin
(01:22:55)
You don’t get to design them. You get more out than you put in, in a certain way, because you make very minimal assumptions. And then certain facts are thrust upon you. For example, the value of Feigenbaum’s constant, the value of natural logarithm E. These things you sort of discover, right? And the salient fact is this, if those facts were different, then biology and physics would be different, right? So they matter, they impact instructively, functionally, they impact the physical world. If the distribution of primes was something else, well then the cicadas would have been coming out at different times. But the reverse isn’t true. What I mean is, there is nothing you can do in the physical world to change E, as far as I know, to change E or to change Feigenbaum’s constant.
Michael Levin
(01:23:40)
You could have swapped out all the constants at the Big Bang, right? You can change all the different things, you are not going to change those things. So this, I think Plato and Pythagoras understood very clearly, that there is a set of truths which impact the physical world, but they themselves are not defined by and determined by what happens in the physical world. You can’t change them by things you do in the physical world, right? And so I’ll make a couple claims about that. One claim is, I think we call physics those things that are constrained by those patterns. When you say, “Hey, why is this the way it is?” Ah, it’s because this is how symmetries or topology or whatever. Biology are the things that are enabled by those. They’re free lunches. They’re…
Michael Levin
(01:24:24)
Biology exploits these kinds of truths, and it really enables biology and evolution to do amazing things without having to pay for it. I think there’s a lot of free lunches going on here. And so I show you a xenobot or an anthropod, and I say, “Hey, look, here are some amazing things they’re doing,” that tissue has never done before in their history. You say, first of all, where did that come from? And when did we pay the computational cost for it? Because we know when we pay the computational cost to design a frog or a human, it was for the eons that the genome was bashing against the environment getting selected, right? So you pay the computational cost of that. There’s never been any anthropods. There’s never been any xenobots.
Michael Levin
(01:25:02)
When do we pay the computational cost for designing kinematic self-replication and, you know, all these things that they’re able to do? So there’s two things people say. One is, “Well, it’s sort of… you got it at the same time that they were being selected to be good humans and good frogs.” Now, the problem with that is it kind of undermines the point of evolution. The point of evolutionary theory was to have a very tight specificity between how you are now and the history of selection that got you here, right? The history of environments that got you to this point. If you say, “Yeah, okay, so this is what your environmental history was. And by the way, you got something completely different.”
Michael Levin
(01:25:37)
You got these other skills that you didn’t know about, that’s really strange, right? And so then what people say is, “Well, it’s emergent.” And I say, “What’s that? What does that mean?” And they say… besides the fact that you got surprised, right? Emergence often just means I didn’t see it coming. You know, there was something happened. I didn’t know that was going to happen. So what does it mean that it’s emergent? And people say, “Well,” and there are many emergent things like this. For example, the fact that gene regulatory networks can do associative learning. Like, that’s amazing, and you don’t need evolution for that. Even random genetic regulatory networks can do associative learning.
Michael Levin
(01:26:07)
I say, “Why does that happen?” And they say, “Well, it’s just a fact that holds in the world. Just a fact that holds.” So now you have an option, and you can go one of two ways. You can either say, “Okay, look, I like my sparse ontology. I don’t want to think about weird platonic spaces. I’m a physicalist. I want the physical world, nothing more.” So what we’re going to do is when we come across these crazy things that are very specific, like, you know, anthropods have four specific behaviors that they switch around. Why four? Why not 12? Why not 100? Like four, why four?
Michael Levin
(01:26:36)
When we come across these things, just like when we come across the value of E or Feigenbaum’s number or whatever, what we’re going to do is we’re going to write it down in our big book of emergence. And that’s it. We’re just going to have to live with it. This is what happens. We’re just… You know, there’s some cool surprises. You know, when we come across them, we’re going to write them down. Great. It’s a random grab bag of stuff. And when we come across them, we’ll write them down. That’s one… the upside is you get to be a physicalist, and you get to keep your sparse ontology.
Michael Levin
(01:27:02)
The downside is I find it incredibly pessimistic and mysterian because you’re basically then just willing to make a catalog of these amazing patterns. Why not, instead, and this is why I started with this Platonic terminology, why not do what the mathematicians already do? A huge number of them say, “We are going to make the same optimistic assumption that science makes, that there’s an underlying structure to that latent space.” It’s not, like, a random grab bag of stuff. There’s a space to it where these patterns come from, and by studying them systematically, we can get from one to another. We can map out the space. We can find out the relationships between them.
Michael Levin
(01:27:43)
We can get an idea of what’s in that space, and we’re not going to assume that it’s just random. We’re going to assume there’s some kind of structure to it. And you’ll see all kinds of people, I mean, you know, well-known mathematicians that talk about this stuff. You know, Penrose and lots of other people who will say that, “Yeah, there’s another space physically, and it has spatial structure. It has components to it and so on. We can traverse that space in various ways.” And then there’s the physical space. So I find that much more appealing because it suggests a research program, which we are now undergoing in our lab.
Michael Levin
(01:28:14)
The research program is everything that we make, cells, embryos, robots, biobots, language models, simple machines, all of it, they are interfaces. All physical things are interfaces to these patterns. You build an interface, some of those patterns are going to come through that interface. Depending on what you build, some patterns versus others are going to come through. The research program is mapping out that relationship between the physical pointers that we make, and the patterns that come through it, right? Understanding what is the structure of that space, what exists in that space, and what do I need to make physically to make certain patterns come through?
Michael Levin
(01:28:50)
Now, when I say patterns, we have to ask, “What kinds of things live in that space?” Well, the mathematicians will tell you, “We already know. We have a whole list of objects. You know, the amplituhedrons and all this crazy stuff that lives in that space.” Yeah, I think that’s one layer of stuff that lives in that space, but I think those patterns are the lower agency kinds of things that are basically studied by mathematicians. What also lives in that space are much more active, more complex, higher agency patterns that we recognize as kinds of minds, that behavioral scientists would look at that pattern and say, “Well, I know what that is. That’s the competency for delayed gratification or problem-solving of certain kinds,” or whatever.
Michael Levin
(01:29:29)
And so, what I end up with right now is a model in which that latent space contains things that come through physical objects, so simple, simple patterns, right? So facts about triangles and Fibonacci patterns and fractals and things like that. But also, if you make more complex interfaces such as biologicals, and importantly, not just biologicals, but let’s say cells and embryos and tissues, what you will then pull down is much more complex patterns that we say, “Ah, that’s a mind. That’s a human mind,” or, “That’s a snake mind,” or whatever.
Michael Levin
(01:30:02)
So I think the mind-brain relationship is exactly the kind of thing that the math-physics relationship is, that in some very interesting way, there are truths of mathematics that become embodied, and they kind of haunt physical objects, right, in a very specific functional way. And in the exact same way, there are other patterns that are much more complex, higher agency patterns that basically inform living things that we see as obvious embodied minds.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:35)
Okay, given how weird and complicated what you’re describing is, we’ll talk about it more, but you gotta ELI5 the basics to a person who’s never seen this. So again, you mentioned things like pointers. So the physical object themselves or the brain is a pointer to that platonic space. What is in that platonic space? What is the platonic space? What is the embodiment? What is the pointer?
Michael Levin
(01:31:05)
Yeah, okay. Let’s try it this way. There are certain facts of mathematics. So the distribution of prime numbers, right, that if you map them out, they make these nice spirals. And there’s an image that I often show, which is a very particular kind of fractal.
Michael Levin
(01:31:22)
And that fractal is the Hally map, which is, it’s pretty awesome that it actually looks very organic. It looks very biological. So if you look at that thing, that image, which has very specific complex structure, it’s a map of a very compact mathematical object. That formula is like, you know, Z cubed plus seven. It’s something like that. That’s it. So now you look at that structure and you say, “Where does that actually come from?” It’s definitely not packed into the Z cubed plus seven. It’s not, there’s not enough bits in that to give you all of that. There’s no fact of physics that determines this. There’s no evolutionary history. It’s not like we selected this based on some, you know, from a larger set over time. Where does this come from?
Michael Levin
(01:32:01)
Or the fact that… Think about the way that biology exploits these things. Imagine a world in which the highest fitness belonged to a certain kind of triangle, right? So evolution cranks a bunch of generations and it gets the first angle right, then cranks a bunch more generations, gets a second angle right. Now there’s something amazing that happens. It doesn’t need to look for the third angle because you already know. If you know two, you get this magical free gift from geometry that says, “Well, I already know what the third one should be.” You don’t have to go look for it.
Michael Levin
(01:32:29)
Or as evolution, if you invent a voltage-gated ion channel, which is basically a transistor, right, and you can make a logic gate, then all the truth tables and the fact that NAND is special and all these other things, you don’t have to evolve those things. You get those for free. You inherit those. Where do all those things live? These mathematical truths that you come across that you don’t have any choice about. You know, once you’ve committed to certain axioms, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that is now just what it is. And so what I’m saying is, and this is what Pythagoras was saying, I think, that there is a whole space of these kinds of truths.
Michael Levin
(01:33:04)
Now, he was focused on mathematical ones, but he was embodying them in music and in geometry and in things like that. There are the space of patterns and they make a difference in the physical world, to machines, to sound, to things like that. I’m extending it, and what I’m saying is, yeah, and so far we’ve only been looking at the low agency inhabitants of that world. There are other patterns that we would recognize as kinds of minds, and that you don’t see them in this space until there’s an interface, until there’s a way for them to come through the physical world. That interface, the same way that you have to make a triangular object before you can actually see the rule of what you’re going to gain, right?
Michael Levin
(01:33:45)
Out of the rules of geometry and whatever. Or you have to actually do the computation on the fractal before you actually see that pattern. If you want to see some of those minds, you have to build an interface, right? At least if you’re going to interact with them in the physical world, the way we normally do science. As Darwin said, “Mathematicians have their own new sense, like a different sense than the rest of us.” And so that’s right. You know, mathematicians can perhaps interact with these patterns directly in that space. But for the rest of us, we have to make interfaces.
Michael Levin
(01:34:13)
And when we make interfaces, which might be cells or robots, you know, embryos or whatever, what we are pulling down are minds that are fundamentally not produced by physics. So I don’t believe that—I don’t know if we’re going to get into the whole consciousness thing—but I don’t believe that we create consciousness, whether we make babies or whether we make robots. Nobody’s creating consciousness. What you create is an interface, a physical interface through which specific patterns, which we call kinds of minds, are going to ingress, right? And consciousness is what it looks like from that direction looking out into the world. It’s what we call the view from the perspective of the platonic patterns.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:53)
Just to clarify, what you’re saying is a pretty radical idea here. So if there’s a mapping from mathematics to physics, okay, that’s understandable, intuitive as you’ve described. But what you’re suggesting is there’s a mapping from some kind of abstract mind object to an embodied brain that we think of as a mind— —as fellow humans. What is that? What exactly… ‘Cause you said interface. You’ve also said pointer. So the brain, and I think you said somewhere, a thin interface.
Michael Levin
(01:35:37)
A thin client. Yeah. The brain— The brain, a brain is a thin client. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:40)
Thin client. Okay. So you’re… A brain is a thin client to this other world. Can you just lay out very clearly how radical the idea is? Because you’re kind of dancing around. I think you could also point to Donald Hoffman and who speaks of an interface to a world. So we only interact with the, quote unquote, real world through an interface. What is the connection here?
Michael Levin
(01:36:11)
Okay, a couple of things. First of all, when you said it makes sense for physics, I want to show that it’s not as simple as it sounds. Because what it means is that even in Newton’s boring, sort of classical universe, long before quantum anything, Newton’s world, physicalism was already dead in Newton’s world. I mean, think about what that means. This is, this is nuts. Because already he knew perfectly well… I mean, Pythagoras and Plato knew that even in a totally classical, deterministic world, already you have the ingression of information that determines what happens and what’s possible and what’s not possible in that world from a space that is itself not physical. In other words, it’s something like the natural logarithm E, right?
Michael Levin
(01:36:57)
Nothing in Newton’s world is set to the value of E. There is nothing you could do to set the value of E in that world. And yet, the fact that it was that and not something else governed all sorts of properties of things that happened. That classical world was already haunted by patterns from outside that world. This should be like… This is wild. This is not saying that, “Okay, everything was cool. Physicalism was great up until, you know, maybe we got quantum interfaces or we got consciousness or whatever. But originally it was fine.” No, this is saying that that worldview was already impossible really, since… So from a very long time ago, we already knew that there are non-physical properties that matter in the physical world.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:42)
This is the chicken or, or the egg question. You’re saying Newton’s laws are creating the physical world?
Michael Levin
(01:37:51)
That is a very deep follow-on question that we will come back to in a minute. All I was saying about Newton is that you don’t need quantum anything. You don’t need to think about consciousness. You already, long before you get to any of that, as Pythagoras, I think, knew, already we have the idea that this physical world is being strongly impacted by truths that do not live in the physical world. And when I say…
Lex Fridman
(01:38:18)
Wait. Which truths are we referring to? Are we talking about Newton’s laws, like mathematical equations, or…
Michael Levin
(01:38:23)
No, no. Mathematical facts. So, for example, the actual value of E or…
Lex Fridman
(01:38:27)
Oh, like very primitive mathematical facts.
Michael Levin
(01:38:29)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, some of them are… I mean, if you ask Don Hoffman, there’s this amplituhedron thing that is a set of mathematical objects that determines all the scattering amplitudes of the particles and whatever. They don’t have to be simple. I mean, the old ones were simple. Now they’re like crazy. I can’t imagine this amplituhedron thing, but maybe they can. But all of these are mathematical structures that explain and determine facts about the physical world, right? If you ask physicists, “Hey, why this many of this type of particle?” “Ah, because this mathematical thing has these symmetries.” That’s why.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:00)
So Newton is discovering these things. They’re not… He’s not inventing.
Michael Levin
(01:39:04)
This is very controversial, right? And there are, of course, physicists and mathematicians who disagree with what I’m saying, for sure. But what I’m leaning on is simply this: I don’t know of anything you can do in the physical world. You’re around at the Big Bang, you get to set all the constants. Set physics however you want. Can you change E? Can you change Feigenbaum’s constant? I don’t think you can.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:28)
Is that an obvious statement? I don’t even know what it means to change the parameters at the start of the Big Bang.
Michael Levin
(01:39:34)
So physicists do this. They’ll say, “Okay, you know, if we made the ratio between gravitation and the electromagnetic force different, would we have matter? How many dimensions would we have? Would there be inflation? Would there be this or that?” Right? You can imagine playing with it. There are however many unitless constants of physics. These are the kind of knobs on the universe that could, in theory, be different, and then you’d have different physics, you’d have different physical properties.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:05)
You’re saying that’s not gonna change the axiomatic systems that mathematics has?
Michael Levin
(01:40:10)
What I’m not saying is that every alien everywhere is going to have the exact same math that we have. That’s not what I’m claiming, although, maybe. But that’s not what I’m claiming. What I’m saying is, you get more out than you put in. Once you’ve made a choice… And maybe some alien somewhere made a different choice of how they’re going to do their math. But once you’ve made your choice, then you get saddled with a whole bunch of new truths that you discover that you can’t do anything about. They are given to you from somewhere. And you can say they’re random, or you can say, “No, there’s this space of these facts that they’re pulled from. There’s a latent space of options that they come from.”
Michael Levin
(01:40:41)
So when your E is exactly 2.718 and so on, there is nothing you can do in physics to change it.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:46)
And you’re saying that space is immutable? It’s-
Michael Levin
(01:40:50)
I’m not saying it’s immutable. So I think Plato may or may not have thought that these forms are eternal and unchanging. That’s one place we differ. I actually think that space has some action to it, maybe even some computation to it.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:01)
But we’re, we’re just pointers. Can this-
Michael Levin
(01:41:05)
Well, so I’ll circle back around to that whole thing. So the only thing I was trying to do is blow up the idea that we’re cool with how it works in physics. No problem there. I think that’s a much bigger deal than people normally think it is. I think already there, you have this weird haunting of the physical world by patterns that are not coming from the physical world.
Michael Levin
(01:41:28)
The reason I emphasize this is because now what I’m going to… when I amplify this into biology, I don’t think it sort of jumps as a new thing. I think it’s just a much more… I think what we call biology are systems that exploit the hell out of it. I think physics is so constrained by it, but we call biology those things that make use of those kinds of things and run with it. And so, again, I just think it’s a scaling. I don’t think it’s a brand new thing that happens. I think it’s a scaling, right? So what I’m saying is we already know from physics that there are non-physical patterns, and these are generally patterns of form, which is why I call them low agency, because they’re like fractals that stand still, and they’re like prime number distributions.
Michael Levin
(01:42:10)
Although there’s a mathematician that’s talking in our symposium that’s telling me that actually I’m too chauvinistic even there. That actually, even those things have more oomph than even I gave them credit for, which I love. So what I’m saying is those kinds of static patterns are things that we typically see in physics, but they’re not the full extent of what lives in that space. That space is also home to some patterns that are very high agency. And if we give them a body, if we build a body that they can inhabit, then we get to see different behavioral competencies that the behavior scientists say, “Oh, I know what that looks like.” That’s this kind of behavioral, you know, this kind of mind or that kind of mind.
Michael Levin
(01:42:49)
In a certain sense, I mean, yes, what I’m saying is extremely radical, but it is a very old idea. It’s an old idea of a dualistic worldview, right? Where the mind was not in the physical body, and that it in some way interacted with the physical brain. So, I just want to be clear. I’m not claiming that this is fundamentally a new idea. This has been around forever. However, it’s mostly been discredited, and it’s a very unpopular view nowadays. There are very few people in the, for example, cognitive science community or anywhere else in science that like this kind of view. Primarily, and already Descartes was getting crap for this when he first tried it out as this interaction problem, right?
Michael Levin
(01:43:30)
So the idea was, okay, well, if you have this non-physical mind and then you have this brain that presumably obeys conservation of mass energy and things like that, how are you supposed to interact with it? And there are many other problems there. So what I’m trying to point out is that first of all, physics already had this problem. You didn’t have to wait till you had biology and cognitive science to ask about it. And what I think is happening and the way we need to think about this is coming back to my point that I think the mind-brain relationship is basically of the same kind as the math-physics relationship.
Michael Levin
(01:44:06)
The same way that non-physical facts of physics haunt physical objects is basically how I think different kinds of patterns that we call kinds of minds are manifesting through our… through interfaces like brains.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:19)
How do we prove or disprove the existence of that world? ‘Cause it’s a pretty radical one. ‘Cause this physical world, we can poke. It’s there. It feels like all the incredible things like consciousness and cognition and all the goal-oriented behavior in agency all seems to come from this 3D entity.
Michael Levin
(01:44:43)
Yeah, I mean-
Lex Fridman
(01:44:44)
And so, we can test it. We can poke it. We can hit it with a stick.
Michael Levin
(01:44:48)
Yeah, sort of.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:48)
Makes noises.
Michael Levin
(01:44:50)
Sort of. I mean, Descartes got some stuff wrong, I think. But one thing that he did get right, the fact that you actually don’t know what you can poke and what you can’t poke. The only thing you actually know are the contents of your mind, and everything else might be… And, in fact, what we know from Anil Seth and Don Hoffman and various other people, it’s definitely a construct. You might be on drugs, and you might wake up tomorrow and say, “My God, I had the craziest dream of being Lex Fridman.” Amazing.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:16)
It’s a nightmare.
Michael Levin
(01:45:17)
Yeah, well… Yeah, that, that… Who knows? But-
Lex Fridman
(01:45:19)
It’s a ride.
Michael Levin
(01:45:20)
Right? But you see, it’s not clear at all that the physical poking is your primary reality. That’s not clear to me at all.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:30)
I don’t know. That’s an obvious thing that a lot of people can show… is true to take a step to the Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” That’s the only thing you know for sure, and everything else could be an illusion or a dream. That’s already a leap. I think from a basic caveman science perspective, the repeatable experiment… …Is the one that most of intelligence comes from here. The reality is exactly as it is. To take a step towards the Donald Hoffman worldview takes a lot of guts and imagination, and stripping away of the ego and all these kinds of processes.
Michael Levin
(01:46:11)
I think you can get there more easily by synthetic bioengineering in the following sense. Do you feel a lack of X-ray perception? Do you feel blind in the X-ray spectrum or in the ultraviolet? I mean, you don’t. You have absolutely no clue that stuff is there, and all of your reality as you see it is shaped by your evolutionary history. It’s shaped by the cognitive structure that you have, right? There are tons of stuff going on around us right now that we are completely oblivious. There’s equally all kinds of other stuff which we construct, and this is just modern cognitive science that says that a lot of what we think is going on is a total fabrication constructed by us.
Michael Levin
(01:46:54)
So I think this is not a… I don’t think this is a philos-… I mean, Descartes got there from a philosophical point. That’s not what I’m, that’s not the leap I’m asking us to make. I’m saying that depending on your embodiment, depending on your interface, and this is increasingly going to be more relevant as we make first augmented humans that have sensory substitution. You’re going to be walking around. Your friend’s going to be like, “Oh, man. I have this primary perception of the solar weather and the stock market because I got those implants.” “And what do you see?” “Well, I see the, you know, the traffic or the internet through the Trans-Pacific Channel.” We’re all going to be living in somewhat different worlds. That’s the first thing.
Michael Levin
(01:47:29)
The second thing is we’re going to become better attuned to other beings, whether they be cells, tissues. You know, what’s it like to be a cell living in a 20,000-dimensional transcriptional space? To novel beings that have never been here before, that have all kinds of crazy spaces that they live in, and that might be AIs, it might be cyborgs, it might be hybrids, it might be all sorts of things. So this idea that we have a consensus reality here that’s independent of some very specifically chosen aspects of our brain and our interaction, we’re going to have to give that up no matter what to relate to these other beings.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:07)
I think the tension is, and absolutely, and this idea that you’re talking about, almost… I think you’ve termed it cognitive prosthetics… …Which is different ways of perceiving and interacting with the world. But I guess the question is, is our human experience, the direct human experience, is that just a slice of the real world, or is it a pointer to a different world? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Figure out, because the claim you’re making is a really fascinating one, a compelling one. There’s a pretty strong one, which is there’s another world into which our brain is an interface, which means you could theoretically map that world systematically.
Michael Levin
(01:48:52)
Yeah, which is exactly what we’re trying to do. I mean, we’re…
Lex Fridman
(01:48:54)
Right, right, but it’s not clear that that world exists.
Michael Levin
(01:48:59)
Yeah, yeah, okay. So, that’s the beautiful part about this, and this is why I’m talking about this now, whereas I wasn’t, you know, about a year ago. Up until a year ago, I was never talking about this because I think this is now actionable. So there’s this diagram that’s called the Map of Mathematics, and they basically try to show how all the different pieces of math link together, and there’s a bunch of different versions of it. So there are two features to this. One is that, what is it a map of? Well, it’s a map of various truths. It’s a map of facts that are thrust on you. You don’t have a choice. Once you’ve picked some axioms, you just, you know, hear some surprising facts that are just going to be given to you.
Michael Levin
(01:49:38)
But the other key thing about this is that it has a metric. It’s not just a random heap of facts. They’re all connected to each other in a particular way. They literally make a space, and so when I say it’s a space of patterns, what I mean is it is not just a random bag of patterns such that when you have one pattern, you are no closer to finding any other pattern. I’m saying that there’s some kind of a metric to it so that when you find one, others are closer to it, and then you can get there. So that’s the claim. And obviously, this is… Now, not everybody buys this, and so on. This is one idea. Now, how do we know that this exists? Well, I’ll say a couple of things. If that didn’t exist, what is that a map of?
Michael Levin
(01:50:18)
If there is no space, if you don’t want to call it a space, that’s okay, but you can’t get away from the fact that as a matter of research, there are patterns that relate to each other in a particular way. What’s, you know, well, the final step of calling it a space is minimal. The bigger issue is what the hell is it a map of then if it’s not a space? So that’s the first thing. Now, that’s how it plays out, I think, in math and physics. Now, in biology, here’s how we’re going to know if this makes any sense. What we are doing now is trying to map out that space by saying, “Look, we took…
Michael Levin
(01:50:53)
We know that the frog genome maps to one thing, and that’s a frog. It turns out that exact same genome, if you just take the slightest step with the exact same genome but you just take some cells out of their environment, they can also make xenobots with very specific different transcriptomes, very specific behaviors, very specific shapes. It’s not just, “Oh, well, you know, they do whatever,” and that they have very specific behaviors, just like the frog had very specific properties. We can start to map out what all those are, right, and make that…
Michael Levin
(01:51:25)
And basically try to draw the latent space from which those things are pulled, and one of two things is going to happen in the future. So this is, you know, come back in 20 years, and we’ll see how this worked out. One thing that could happen is that we’re going to see, “Oh, yeah, just like the map of mathematics, we made a map of the space.” And we know now that if I want a system that acts like this and this, here’s the kind of body I need to make for it, because those are the patterns that exist. The Anthrobots have four different behaviors, not seven and not one. And so, that’s what I can pull from. These are the options I have.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:59)
Is it possible that there are varying degrees of grandeur to the space that you’re thinking about mapping? Meaning, it could strictly be just the space of biology, or is this a space of, like, minds, which feels like it could encompass a lot more than just biology?
Michael Levin
(01:52:25)
Yeah, except that… and I don’t see how it would be separate because I’m not just talking about an anatomical shape and transcriptional profile. I’m also talking about behavioral competencies. So when we make something and we find out that, okay, it does habituation, sensitization. It does not do Pavlovian conditioning, and it does do delayed gratification, and it doesn’t have language, that is a very specific cognitive profile. That’s a region of that space, and there’s another region that looks different, because I don’t make a sharp distinction between biology and cognition. If you want to explain behaviors, they are drawn from some distribution as well. So I think in 20 years, or however long it’s going to take, one of two things will happen.
Michael Levin
(01:53:08)
Either we and other people who are working on this are going to actually produce a map of that space and say, “Here’s why you’ve gotten systems that work like this and like this and like this, but you’ve never seen any that work like that,” right? Or, we’re going to find out that I’m wrong, and that basically it’s not worth calling it a space because it is so random and so jumbled up that there is, we’ve been able to make zero progress in linking the embodiments that we make to the patterns that come through.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:40)
Just to be clear, I mean, from your blog post on this, from the paper, we’re talking about a space that includes a lot of stuff.
Michael Levin
(01:53:48)
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:48)
It includes human, what is it, meditating? Steve. “Hello, my name is Steve.” AI systems, so all those basic computational systems, objects, biological systems, concepts. It includes everything.
Michael Levin
(01:54:04)
Well, it includes specific patterns that we have given names to.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:08)
Right.
Michael Levin
(01:54:08)
Some of those patterns we’ve named mathematical objects. Some of those patterns we’ve named anatomical outcomes. Some of those patterns we’ve named psychological types.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:17)
So every entry in an encyclopedia, old-school Britannica, is a pointer to this space.
Michael Levin
(01:54:27)
There is a set of things that I feel very strongly about because the research is telling us that’s what’s going on, and then there’s a bunch of other stuff that I see as hypotheses for next steps that guide experiment.
Michael Levin
(01:54:40)
So what I’m about to tell you, I don’t, you know, these are things I don’t actually know. These are just guesses that, you know, you need to make some guesses to make progress. I don’t think that there are specific, or I don’t know, but it doesn’t mean that there are going to be specific Platonic patterns for, “This is the Titanic, and this is the sister of the Titanic, and this is some other kind of boat.” This is not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, in some way that we absolutely need to work out, when we make minimal interfaces, we get more than we put in. We get behaviors. We get shapes. We get mathematical truths, and we get all kinds of patterns that we did not have to create. We didn’t micromanage them. We didn’t know they were coming.
Michael Levin
(01:55:22)
We didn’t have to put any effort into making them. They come from some distribution that seems to exist that we don’t have to create. And exactly whether that space is sparse or dense, I don’t know. So, for example, if there is, you know, some kind of a Platonic form for the movie, The Godfather, if it’s surrounded by a bunch of crappy versions and then crappier versions still, I have no idea, right? I don’t know if the space is sparse or not. I, you know, I don’t know if it’s finite or infinite. These are all things I don’t know. What I do know is that it seems like physics, and for sure biology and cognition, are the benefits of ingressions that are free lunches in some sense. We did not make them.
Michael Levin
(01:56:04)
Calling them emergent does nothing for a research program, okay? That just means you got surprised. I think, I think it’s much better if you make the optimistic assumption that they come from a structured space, that we have a prayer in hell of actually exploring. And in some decades, if I’m wrong, and it says, “You know what? We tried. It looks like it really is random. Too bad.” Fine.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:24)
Is there a difference? Like, can we one day prove the existence of this world? And is there a difference between it being a really effective model for connecting things, explaining things, versus an actual place where the information about these distributions that we’re sampling actually exists, that we can hit with a stick?
Michael Levin
(01:56:52)
Yeah, you can try to make that distinction.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:55)
Yeah.
Michael Levin
(01:56:56)
But I think modern cognitive neuroscience will tell you that whatever you think this is, at most, it is a very effective model for predicting the future experiences you’re going to have.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:09)
So all of this that we think about as physical reality is just a convenient model.
Michael Levin
(01:57:13)
I mean, that’s not me. That’s predictive processing and active inference—that’s modern neuroscience telling you this. This isn’t anything that I’m particularly coming up with. All I’m saying is the distinction you’re trying to make, which is an old-school, realist kind of view, that is it metaphorical or is it real? All we have in science are metaphors, I think, and the only question is how good are your metaphors. And I think as agents living in a world, all we have are models of what we are and what the outside world is. That’s it. And the question is, how good is it a model?
Michael Levin
(01:57:49)
And my claim about this is in some small number of decades, this will either give rise to a very enabling mapping of the space for AI, for bioengineering, for, you know, biology, whatever. Or we are going to find out that it really sucks, because it really is a random grab bag of stuff, and we tried the optimistic research program, it failed, and we’re just going to have to live with surprise. I mean, I doubt that’s going to happen, but it’s a possible outcome.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:16)
But do you think there is some place where the information is stored about these distributions that are being sampled through the thin interfaces? Like an actual place?
Michael Levin
(01:58:28)
Place is weird because it isn’t the same as our physical space-time, okay? I don’t think it’s that. So calling it a place is a little weird.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:35)
No, but like physics, general relativity describes a space-time.
Michael Levin
(01:58:40)
Okay.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:40)
Could other physics theories be able to describe this other space where information is stored that we can apply, maybe different, but in the same spirit, laws about—
Michael Levin
(01:58:52)
Yes
Lex Fridman
(01:58:52)
information?
Michael Levin
(01:58:53)
I definitely think there are going to be systematic laws. I don’t think they’re going to look anything like physics. You can call it physics if you want, but I think it’s going to be so different that that probably just, you know, cracks the word. And whether information is going to survive that, I’m not sure. But I definitely think that there are going to be laws. But I think they’re going to look a lot more like aspects of psychology and cognitive science than they’re going to look like physics. That’s my guess.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:23)
So what does it look like to prove that world exists?
Michael Levin
(01:59:26)
What it looks like is a successful research program that explains how you pull particular patterns when you need them, and why some patterns come and others don’t, and show that they come from an ordered space.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:40)
Across a large number of organisms?
Michael Levin
(01:59:43)
Well, it’s not just organisms. I mean, I think it’s going to end up, and I mean, you can talk to the machine learning people about how they got to this point. Again, because this is not just me. There are a bunch of different disciplines that are converging on this now simultaneously. You’re going to find again, just like in mathematics, where from different directions everybody sort of is looking at different things. Say, “Oh my God, this is one underlying structure that seems to inform all of this.” So in physics, in mathematics, in computer science, machine learning, possibly in economics, certainly in biology, possibly in cognitive science, we’re going to find these structures.
Michael Levin
(02:00:20)
It was already obvious in Pythagoras’ time that there are these patterns. The only remaining question is, are they part of an ordered, structured space, and are we up to the task of mapping out the relationship between what we build and the patterns that come through it?
Lex Fridman
(02:00:39)
So from the machine learning perspective, is it then the case that even something as simple as LLMs are sneaking up onto this world, that the representations that they form are sneaking up to it?
Michael Levin
(02:00:54)
When… I’ve given this talk to some audiences, especially in the organicist community. People like the first part where it’s like, okay, now there’s an idea for what the magic, quote unquote, is that’s special about living things and so on. Now, if we could just stop there, we would have dumb machines that just do what the algorithm says, and we have these magical living interfaces that can be the recipient for these ingressions. Cool, right? We can cut up the world in this way. Unfortunately or fortunately, I think, that’s not the case. And I think that even simple minimal computational models are to some extent beneficiaries of these free lunches.
Michael Levin
(02:01:41)
I think that the theories we have, and this goes back to the thin client interface kind of idea. The theories we have of both physics and computation, so theory of algorithms, you know, Turing machines, all that good stuff. Those are all good theories of the front-end interface, and they’re not complete theories of the whole thing. They capture the front end which is why they get surprised, which is why these things are surprising when they happen. I think that when we see embryos of different species, we are pulling from well-trodden familiar regions of that space, and we know what to expect: frog, you know, snake, whatever.
Michael Levin
(02:02:21)
When we make cyborgs and hybrids and biobots, we are pulling from new regions of that space that look a little weird and they’re unexpected, but you know, we can still kind of get our mind around them. When we start making AIs, proper AIs, we are now fishing in a region of that space that may never have had bodies before. It may have never been embodied before. And what we get from that is going to be extremely surprising. And the final thing just to mention on that is that because of this, because of the inputs from this Platonic space, some of the really interesting things that artificial constructs can do are not because of the algorithm; they’re in spite of the algorithm. They are filling up the spaces in between.
Michael Levin
(02:03:09)
There’s what the algorithm is forcing you to do, and then there’s the other cool stuff it’s doing which is nowhere in the algorithm. And if that’s true, and we think it’s true even of very minimal systems, then this whole business of language models and AIs in general, watching the language part may be a total red herring because the language is what we force them to do. The question is, what else are they doing that we are not good at noticing? And this is, you know, this is something that we are, I think, as an existential step for humanity, to become better at this because we are not good at recognizing these things now.

Unexpected intelligence of sorting algorithms

Lex Fridman
(02:03:49)
You’ve got to tell me more about this behavior that is observable, that is unrelated to the explicitly stated goal of a particular algorithm. So you looked at a simple algorithm of sorting. Can you explain what was done?
Michael Levin
(02:04:04)
Sure. First, just the goal of this study: there are two things that people generally assume. One is that we have a pretty good intuition about what kind of systems are going to have competencies. So from observing biologicals, we’re not terribly surprised when biology does interesting things. Everybody always says, “Well, it’s biology, you know, of course it does all this cool stuff.” And yeah, but do we have these machines? And the whole point of having machines and algorithms and so on is they do exactly what you tell them to do, right? And people feel pretty strongly that that’s a binary distinction, and that’s what we can carve up the world in that way. So I wanted to do two things.
Michael Levin
(02:04:42)
I wanted to first of all explore that and hopefully break the assumption that we’re good at seeing this, because I think we’re not. And I think it’s extremely important that we understand very soon that we need to get much better at knowing when to expect these things. And the other thing I wanted to do was to find out, you know, mostly people assume that you need a lot of complexity for this. So when somebody says, “Well, the capabilities of my mind are not properly encompassed by the rules of biochemistry,” everybody’s like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” Where, you know, you’re very complex and okay, your mind does things that you couldn’t…
Michael Levin
(02:05:22)
You didn’t see that coming from the rules of biochemistry, right? Like, we know that. So mostly people think that has to do with complexity, and what I would like to find out as part of understanding what kind of interfaces give rise to what kind of ingressions, is it really about complexity? How much complexity do you actually need? Is there some threshold after which this happens? Is it really specific materials? Is it biologicals? Is it something about evolution? Like, what is it about these kinds of things that allows this surprise, right? Allows this idea that we are more than the sum of our parts. And I had a strong intuition that none of those things are actually required, that this is…
Michael Levin
(02:05:58)
This kind of magic, so to speak, seeps into pretty much everything. And so to look at that, I wanted also to have an example that had significant shock value. Because the thing with biology is there’s always more mechanism to be discovered, right? Like, there’s infinite depth of what the materials are doing. You know, somebody will always say, “Well, there’s a mechanism for that, you just haven’t found it yet.” So I wanted an example that was simple, transparent, so you could see all the stuff. There was nowhere to hide. I wanted it to be deterministic, because I don’t want it to be something around unpredictability or stochasticity, and I want it to be something familiar to people, minimal.
Michael Levin
(02:06:35)
And I wanted to use it as a model system for honing our abilities to take a new system and looking at it with fresh eyes, and that’s because these sorting algorithms have been studied for over 60 years. We all think we know what they do and what their properties are. The algorithm itself is just a few lines of code, you know? You can see exactly what’s there, it’s deterministic. So that’s why. That’s why, right? I wanted the most shock value out of a system like that, if we were to find anything, and to use it as an example of taking something minimal and seeing what can be gotten out of it.
Michael Levin
(02:07:08)
So I’ll describe two interesting things about it, and then we have lots of other work coming in the next year about even simpler systems. I mean, it’s actually crazy. So the very first thing is this: the standard sorting… so let’s say bubble sort, right? And all these sorting algorithms, you know, what you’re starting out with is an array of jumbled up digits, okay, so integers. It’s an array of mixed up integers, and what the algorithm is designed to do is to eventually arrange them all into order, and what it does, generally, is compare some pieces of that array and based on which one is larger than which, it swaps them around.
Michael Levin
(02:07:46)
And you can imagine that if you just keep doing that and you just keep comparing and swapping, then eventually you can get all the digits in the same order. So, the first thing I decided to do, and this is the work of my student Kaining Zhang and then Adam Goldstein on this paper, this goes back to our original discussion about putting a barrier between it and its goals. And the first thing I said, “Okay, how do we put a barrier in?” Well, how about this? The traditional algorithm assumes that the hardware is working correctly. So if you have a seven and then a five, and you tell them to swap, the lines that swap the five and the seven, and then you go on, you never check. Did it swap?
Michael Levin
(02:08:24)
Because you assume that it’s reliable hardware, okay? So what we decided to do was to break one of the digits so that it doesn’t move. When you tell it to move, it doesn’t move. We don’t change the algorithm. That’s really key. We do not put anything new in the algorithm that says, “What do you do if the damn thing didn’t move?” Okay? Just run it exactly the same way. What happens? Turns out, something very interesting happens. It still works, so it still sorts it, but it eventually sorts it by moving all the stuff around the broken number, okay? And that makes sense, but here’s something interesting. Suppose we, suppose we plot, at any given moment, we plot the degree of sortedness of the string as a function of time.
Michael Levin
(02:09:09)
If you run the normal algorithm, it’s running and it’s guaranteed to get where it’s going. That’s the, you know, it’s got to sort, and it will always reach the end. But when it encounters one of the broken digits, what happens is, the actual sortedness goes down. In order to then recoup and get better order later. What it’s able to do is to go against the thing that it’s trying to do.
Michael Levin
(02:09:34)
To go around in order to meet its goal later on. Now, if I showed this to a behavior scientist and I didn’t tell him what system was doing, they would say, “Well, we know what this is. This is delayed gratification.” This is the ability of a system to go against its gradient and get what it needs to do. Now, imagine two magnets. Imagine you take two magnets and you put a piece of wood between them, and they’re like this. What the magnet is not going to do is to go around the barrier and get to its goal. The two… they’re not smart enough to go against their gradient. They’re just going to keep doing this. Some animals are smart enough, right? They’ll go around, and the sorting algorithm is smart enough to do that.
Michael Levin
(02:10:13)
But the trick is there are no steps in the algorithm for doing that. You could stare at the algorithm all day long. You would not see that this thing can do delayed gratification. It isn’t there. Now, there are two ways to look at this. On the one hand, you could say, or the reductionist physics approach, you could say, “Did it follow all the steps in the algorithm?” You say, “Yeah, it did.” Well then, there’s nothing to see here. There’s no magic. This is, you know, it does what it does. It didn’t disobey the algorithm, right? I’m not claiming that this is a miracle. I’m not saying it disobeys the algorithm. I’m saying it’s not failing to sort. I’m saying it’s not doing some sort of, you know, crazy quantum thing.
Michael Levin
(02:10:49)
Not saying any of that. What I’m saying is other people might call it emergent. What it has are properties that are not complexity, not unpredictability, not perverse instantiation as sometimes in ALife. What it has are unexpected competencies recognizable by behavioral scientists, meaning different types of cognition. Primitive. Well, we wanted primitive, so there you go, it’s simple that you didn’t have to code into the algorithm. That’s very important. You get more than you start with, than you put in. You didn’t have to do that. You get these surprising behavioral competencies, not just complexity. That’s the first thing. The second thing, which is also crazy, but it requires a little bit of explanation.
Michael Levin
(02:11:32)
The second thing that we said is, “Okay, what if instead of in the typical sorting algorithm, you have a single controller top down?” I’m sort of godlike looking down at the numbers and I’m swapping them according to the algorithm. What if… and this goes back to, actually the title of the paper talks about agential data, self-sorting algorithms. This is back to like, who’s the pattern and who’s the agent, right?
Michael Levin
(02:11:52)
You say, “What if we give the numbers a little bit of agency?” Here’s what we’re going to do: we’re not going to have any kind of top-down sort. Every single number knows the algorithm, and it’s just going to do whatever the algorithm says. So if I’m a five, I’m just going to execute the algorithm, and the algorithm will try to make sure that to my right is the six and to my left is a four. That’s it. So every digit is… it’s like a distributed… you know, it’s like an ant colony. There is no central planner. Everybody just does their own algorithm, okay? We’re just going to do that.
Michael Levin
(02:12:20)
Once you’ve done that, and by the way, one of the values of doing that is that you can simulate biological processes because in biology, you know, if I have like a frog face and I scramble it with all the different organs, every tissue is going to rearrange itself so that ultimately you have, you know, nose, eyes, head. You’re going to have an order, right? So you can do that. But okay, fine, but you can do something else cool. Once you’ve done that, you can do something cool that you can’t do with a standard algorithm. You can make a chimeric algorithm. What I mean is not all the cells have to follow the same algorithm. Some of them might follow bubble sort, some of them might follow selection sort.
Michael Levin
(02:12:52)
It’s like in biology what we do when we make chimeras, we make frogolottles. So frogolottles have some frog cells, they have some axolotl cells. What is that going to look like? Does anybody know what a frogolottle is going to look like? It’s actually really interesting that despite all the genetics and the developmental biology, you have the genomes, you have the frog genome, you have the axolotl genome, nobody can tell you what a frogolottle is going to look like, even though you have, yeah. This is, this is back to your question about physics and chemistry. Like, yeah, you can know everything there is to know about how, you know, how the physics and the genetics work, but the decision-making, right? Is like baby axolotls have legs.
Michael Levin
(02:13:27)
Tadpoles don’t have legs. Is a frogolottle going to have legs, right? Can you predict that from understanding the physics of transcription and all of that? Anyway, so, so we made some… So, so you, you see this as like an intersection of biology, physics- …cognition. So we made chimeric algorithms, and we said, “Okay, half the digits randomly.” We assigned them randomly. So half the digits are randomly doing bubble sort, half the digits are randomly doing, I don’t know, selection sort or something.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:51)
But once you choose bubble sort, that digit is sticking with bubble sort.
Michael Levin
(02:13:55)
It’s sticking. We haven’t done the thing where they can swap between… no. But they’re sticking to it, right? You label them and they’re sticking to it. The first thing we learned is that… Well, the first thing we learned is that distributed sorting still works. It’s amazing. You don’t need a central planner when every number is doing its own thing, it still gets sorted. That’s cool. The second thing we found is that when you make a chimeric algorithm where actually the algorithms are not even matching, that works too. The thing still gets sorted. That’s cool. But the most amazing thing is when we looked at something that had nothing to do with sorting, and that is we asked the following question. We defined…
Michael Levin
(02:14:30)
Adam Goldstein actually named this property, and I think it’s well-named. We define the algotype of a single cell. It’s not the genotype, it’s not the phenotype, it’s the algotype. The algotype is simply this: What algorithm are you following? Which one are you? Are you a selection sort or a bubble sort, right? That’s it. There are two algotypes. And we simply ask the following question, “During that process of sorting, what are the odds that whatever algotype you are, the guys next to you are your same type?” It’s not the same as asking how the numbers are sorted because it’s got nothing to do with the numbers. It’s actually just whatever type you are.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:03)
It’s more about clustering than sorting.
Michael Levin
(02:15:05)
Clustering. Well, that’s exactly what we call it. We call it clustering. And at first… So now think of what happens, and that’s… and you can see this on that graph, it’s the red. You start off, the clustering is at 50% because as I told you, we assign the algotypes randomly. So the odds that the guy next to you is the same as you is half, 50%, right? Because there are only two algotypes. In the end, it is also 50% because the thing that dominates is actually the sorting algorithm, and the sorting algorithm doesn’t care what type you are. You’ve got to get the numbers in order. So by the time you’re done, you’re back to random algotypes because you have to get the numbers sorted.
Michael Levin
(02:15:39)
But in between, in between you get some amount of increased… very significant, because look at the control, it’s in the middle, the pink is in the middle. In between you get significant amounts of clustering, meaning that certain algotypes like to hang out with their buddies for as long as they can. Now, now, now here’s one more thing and then I’ll kind of give the philosophical significance of this. And so we saw this and I said, “That’s nuts because the algorithm doesn’t have any provisions for asking what algotype am I, what algotype is my neighbor? If we’re not the same, I’m going to move to be next to…” Like if you wanted to implement this, you would have to write a whole bunch of extra steps.
Michael Levin
(02:16:17)
There would have to be a whole bunch of observations that you would have to take of your neighbor to see how he’s acting. Then you would infer what algotype he is. Then you would go stand next to the one that seems to have the same algotype as you. You would have to take a bunch of measurements to say, “Wait, is that guy doing bubble sort or is he doing selection sort,” right? Like if you wanted to implement this, it’s a whole bunch of algorithmic steps. None of that exists in our algorithm. You don’t have any way of knowing what algotype you are or what anybody else is. Okay. We didn’t have to pay for that at all. So notice a couple of interesting things. The first interesting thing is that this was not at all obvious from the algorithm itself.
Michael Levin
(02:16:50)
The algorithm doesn’t say anything about algotypes. Second thing is we paid computationally for all the steps needed to have the numbers sorted, right? Because we know, you pay for a certain computation cost. The clustering was free. We didn’t pay for that at all. There were no extra steps. So this gets back to your other question of how do we know there’s a platonic space, and this is kind of like one of the craziest things that we’re doing. I actually suspect we can get free compute out of it. I suspect that one of the things that we can do here is use these aggressions in a useful way that don’t require you to pay costs to pay physical costs, right? Because we know every bit has an energy cost that you have to get. The clustering was free. Nothing extra was done.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:31)
Yeah, just this plot for people who are just listening, on the X-axis is the percentage of completion of the sorting process and the Y-axis is the sortedness of the listed numbers, and then also in the red line is basically the degree to which they’re clustered. And you’re saying that there’s this unexpected competence of clustering. And I should comment that I’m sure there’s a theoretical computer scientist listening to this saying, “I can model exactly what is happening here and prove that the clustering increases and decreases.” So taking the specific instantiation of the thing you’ve experimented with and prove certain properties of this.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:19)
But the point is that there’s a more general pattern here of probably other unexpected competencies that you haven’t discovered that emerge from this, that you could get free computation out of this thing.
Michael Levin
(02:18:32)
So this goes back to the very first thing you said about physicists thinking that physics is enough. You’re 100% correct that somebody could look at this and say, “Well, I see exactly why this is happening. We can track through the algorithm.” Yeah, you can. There’s no miracle going on here, right? I mean, the hardware isn’t doing some crazy thing that it wasn’t supposed to do. The point is that despite following the algorithm to do one thing, it is also at the same time doing other things that are neither prescribed nor forbidden by the algorithm. It’s the space between chance and necessity, which is how a lot of people, you know, see these things.
Michael Levin
(02:19:07)
It’s that free space, we don’t really have a good vocabulary for it, where the interesting things happen. And to whatever extent it’s doing other things that are useful, that stuff is computationally without extra cost. Now, there’s one other cool thing about this. And this is the beginning of a lot of thinking that I’ve done about this—this relates to AI and stuff like that: intrinsic motivations.
Michael Levin
(02:19:29)
The sorting of the digits is what we forced it to do. The clustering is an intrinsic motivation. We didn’t ask for it. We didn’t expect it to happen. We didn’t explicitly forbid it, but we didn’t, you know, we didn’t know. This is a great definition of the intrinsic motivation of a system. So when people say, “Oh, that’s a machine, it only does what you programmed it to do.” I, you know, I as a human have intrinsic motivation, you know I’m creative and I have intrinsic motivation. Machines don’t do that. Even this minimal thing has a minimal kind of intrinsic motivation, which is something that is not forbidden by the algorithm, but isn’t prescribed by the algorithm either.
Michael Levin
(02:20:08)
And I think that’s an important, you know, third thing besides chance and necessity. Something else that’s fun about this is when you think about intrinsic motivations, think about a child. If you make him sit in math class all day, you’re never going to know what the other intrinsic motivations are that he might be doing, right? Like who knows what else he might be interested in. So I wanted to ask this question. I want to say, if we let off the pressure on the sorting, what would happen? Now, that’s hard because if you mess with the algorithm, now it’s no longer the same algorithm, so you don’t want to do that. So we did something that I think was kind of clever. We allowed repeat digits.
Michael Levin
(02:20:48)
So if you allow repeat digits in your array, you can still have all the fives, can still be after all the fours and after all the sixes, but you can keep them as clustered as you want. So this thing at the end where they have to get de-clustered in order for the sorting to happen, we thought maybe we could let off the pressure a little bit. If you do that, all you do is allow some extra repeat digits, the clustering gets bigger. It will cluster as much as you let it. The clustering is what it wants to do. The sorting is what we’re forcing it to do. And my only point is if the bubble sort, which has been gone over and gone over, how many times has these kinds of things that we didn’t see coming, what about the AIs, the language model, everything else?
Michael Levin
(02:21:29)
Not because they talk, not because they say that they’re, you know, have an inner perspective or any of that, but just from the fact that this thing is even the most minimal system surprises with what happens. And frankly, when I see this, tell me if this doesn’t sound like all of our existential story. For the brief time that we’re here, the universe is going to grind us into dust eventually, but until then, we get to do some cool stuff that is intrinsically motivating to us, that is neither forbidden by the laws of physics nor determined by the laws of physics, but eventually, it kind of comes to an end. So I think that aspect of it, right, that there are spaces…
Michael Levin
(02:22:13)
Even in algorithms, there are spaces in which you can do other new things, not just random stuff, not just complex stuff, but things that are easily recognizable to a behavior scientist. You see, that’s the point here. And I think that kind of intrinsic motivation is what’s telling us that this idea that we can carve up the world, we can say, “Okay, look, biology is complex. Cognition, who knows what’s responsible for that, but at least we can take a chunk of the world aside and we can cut it off and we can say, these are the dumb machines.” These are just these algorithms…
Michael Levin
(02:22:46)
Whereas we know the rules of biochemistry don’t explain everything we want to know about how psychology is going to go, but at least the rules of algorithms tell us exactly what the machines are going to do, right? We have some hope that we’ve carved off a little part of the world and everything is nice and simple, and it is exactly what we said it was going to be. I think that failed. I think it was a good try. I think we have good theories of interfaces, but even the simplest algorithms have these kinds of things going on. And so that’s why I think something like this is significant.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:17)
Do you think that there is going to be in all kinds of systems of varying complexity things that the system wants to do and things that it’s forced to do? So, are there these unexpected competencies to be discovered in basically all algorithms and all systems?
Michael Levin
(02:23:38)
That’s my suspicion, and I think that it is extremely important for us as humans to have a research program to learn to recognize and predict. We make things… Never mind something as simple as this. We make, you know, social structures, financial structures, Internet of Things robotics, AI, so we make all this stuff, and we think that the thing we make it do is the main show. And I think it is very important for us to learn to recognize the kind of stuff that sneaks into the spaces.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:06)
What if, what… It’s a very counterintuitive notion. By the way, I like the word emergent. I hear your criticism and it’s a really strong one, that emergent is like you toss your hands up, but I don’t know the process, but it’s just a beautiful word, because it is… I guess it’s a synonym for surprising. And I mean, this is very surprising, but just because it’s surprising doesn’t mean there’s not a mechanism that explains it.
Michael Levin
(02:24:34)
Mechanism and explanation are both not all they’re cracked up to be in the sense that, you know, anything you and I do, we could come up with the most beautiful theory. We paint a painting, anything we do. Somebody could say, “Well, I was watching the biochemistry and the Schrodinger equation playing out, and it totally described everything that was happening. You didn’t break even a single law of biochemistry. Nothing to see here, nothing to see, right?” Like, okay, you know, consistent with the low-level rules, you can do the same thing here. You can look at the machine code and say, “Yeah, this thing is just executing machine code.” You can go further and say, “Oh, it’s quantum foam.” It’s just doing the thing that quantum foam does.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:17)
That, that you’re saying that’s what physicists miss.
Michael Levin
(02:25:20)
Well, and I’m not saying they’re unaware of that. I mean, they’re generally a pretty sophisticated bunch. I just think they’ve picked a level and they’re going to discover what is to be seen at that level, which is a lot. And my point is, the stuff that the behavior scientists are interested in shows up at a much lower level than you think.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:39)
How often do you think there’s a misalignment of this kind between the thing that a system is forced to do and what it wants to do? And it’s particularly… I’m thinking about various levels of complexity of AI systems.
Michael Levin
(02:25:53)
So right now, we’ve looked at, like, five other systems. That’s a small N, okay? But just looking at that, I would find it very surprising if bubble sort was able to do this, and then there was some sort of valley of death where nothing showed up, and then living things. Like, I can’t imagine that. I’m going to say that if something… And we actually have a system that’s even simpler than this, which is 1D cellular automata that’s doing some weird stuff. If these things are to be found in this kind of simple system, I mean, they just have to be showing up in these other more complex AIs and things like that. The only thing we don’t know, but we’re going to find out, is to what extent there is interaction between these.
Michael Levin
(02:26:37)
So I call these things side quests, you know. It’s like they’re like in a game, you know, with the main thing you’re supposed to do. And as long as… As long as you still do it, the thing about this is you have to sort. You have to sort. There’s no miracle. You’re going to sort. But as long as you can do other stuff while you’re sorting, it’s not forbidden. And what we don’t know is, to what extent are the two things linked? So if you do have a system that’s very good at language, are the side quests that it’s capable of, do they have anything to do with language whatsoever? We don’t know the answer to that.
Michael Levin
(02:27:08)
The answer might be no, in which case all of the stuff that we’ve been saying about language models because of what they’re saying, all of that could be a total red herring and not really important, and the really exciting stuff is what we never looked for. Or in complex systems, maybe those things become linked. In biology, they’re linked. In biology, evolution makes sure that the things you’re capable of have a lot to do with what you’ve actually been selected for. In these things, I don’t know, and so we might find out that they actually do give the language some sort of leg up, or we might find that the language is just… You know, that’s not the interesting part.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:43)
Also, it is an interesting question of this intrinsic motivation of clustering. Is this a property of the particular sorting algorithms? Is this a property of all sorting algorithms? Is this a property of all algorithms operating on lists, on numbers? How big is this? So, for example, with LLMs, is it a property of any algorithm that’s trying to model language, or is it very specific to transformers and that’s all to be discovered?
Michael Levin
(02:28:14)
We’re doing all that. We’re testing this stuff in other algorithms. We’re looking for… We’re developing suites of code to look for other properties. We… You know, to some extent, it’s very hard because we don’t know what to look for, but we do have a behaviorist handbook which tells you all kinds of things to look for. The delayed gratification, the problem-solving, like, we have all that. I’ll tell you an N of one of an interesting biological intrinsic motivation, because people… So, in the alignment community and stuff, there’s a lot of discussion about what the intrinsic motivations are going to be of AIs? What are their goals going to be, right?
Michael Levin
(02:28:48)
What are they going to want to do? Just as an N of one observation, anthrobots, the very first thing we checked for… So this is not experiment number 972 out of a thousand things. This is the very first thing we checked for. We put them on a plate of neurons with a big wound through them, a big scratch. First thing they did was heal the wound, okay? So it’s an N of one, but I like the fact that the first intrinsic motivation that we noticed out of that system was benevolent and healing. Like, I thought that was pretty cool. And we don’t know. Maybe the, you know, maybe the next 20 things we find are going to be some sort of, you know, damaging effects. I can’t tell you that. But the first thing that we saw was kind of a positive one. And, I don’t know, that makes me feel better.

Can aging be reversed?

Lex Fridman
(02:29:27)
What was the thing you mentioned with the anthrobots that they can reverse aging?
Michael Levin
(02:29:31)
There’s a procedure called an epigenetic clock where what you can do is look at particular epigenetic states of cells and compare to a curve that was built from humans of known age. You can guess what the age is, okay? So we can take now… And this is Steve Horvath’s work, and many other people, that when you take a set of cells you can guess what their biological age is, okay? So we make the anthrobots from cells that we get from human tracheal epithelium. We collaborated with Steve’s group, the Clock Foundation. We sent them a bunch of cells and we saw that if you check the anthrobots themselves, they are roughly 20% younger than the cells they come from.
Michael Levin
(02:30:17)
And so that’s amazing, and I can give you a theory of why that happens, although we’re still investigating. And then I could tell you the implications for longevity and things like that. My theory for why it happens I call this age evidencing. And I think that what’s happening here, like with a lot of biology, is that cells have to update their priors based on experience. And so I think that they come from an old body. They have a lot of priors about how many years they’ve been around and all that, but their new environment screams, “I’m an embryo,” basically. There are no other cells around. You’re being bent into a pretzel. They actually express some embryonic genes.
Michael Levin
(02:30:58)
They say, “You’re an embryo.” And I think it’s not enough new evidence to roll them all the way back, but it’s enough to update them to about 28% back.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:08)
Yeah, so it’s similar to, like, when an older adult gives birth to a child. So you’re saying you could just fake it till you make it with age? Like, the environment convinces the cell that it’s young?
Michael Levin
(02:31:27)
Well, first of all, yeah, yes. And that’s my hypothesis.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:32)
That’s nice
Michael Levin
(02:31:32)
And we have a whole bunch of research being done on this. There was a study where they went into an old age home and they redid the decor, like ’60s style, when all these folks were really young. And they found all kinds of improvements in blood chemistry and stuff like that, because they say it was sort of mentally taking them back to when… you know, when they were the way they were at that time. I think this is a basal version of that, that basically if you’re finding yourself in an embryonic environment, what’s more plausible, that you’re young or what? What, you know, like, I think this is the basic feature of biology, is to update priors based on experience.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:10)
Do you think that’s actually actionable for longevity? Like, you can convince cells that they’re younger and thereby extend their lifespan?
Michael Levin
(02:32:21)
This is what we’re trying to do, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:23)
Could it be as simple as that?
Michael Levin
(02:32:25)
Well, I’m not claiming it’s simple. That is in no way simple. But because again, you have to… All of this, all of the regenerative medicine stuff that we do balances on one key thing, which is learning to communicate to the system. We have to… If you’re going to convince that system, you know, so when we make gut tissue into an eye, you have to convince those cells that their priors about, “We are gut precursors,” those priors are wrong and you should adopt this new worldview that you’re going to be an eye.
Michael Levin
(02:32:53)
So being convincing and figuring out what kind of messages are convincing to cells, and how to speak the language, and how to make them take on new beliefs, literally, is at the root of all of these future advances in birth defects and regenerative medicine and cancer. That’s what’s going on here. So I’m not saying it’s simple, but I can see the path.

Mind uploading

Lex Fridman
(02:33:17)
Going back to the Platonic space, I have to ask if our brains are indeed thin client interfaces to that space, what does that mean for our mind? Can we upload the mind? Can we copy it? Can we ship it over to other planets? What does that mean for exactly where the mind is stored?
Michael Levin
(02:33:49)
Yeah. Couple of things. So we are now beyond anything that I can say with any certainty. This is total conjecture, okay? Because we don’t know yet. The whole point of this is we actually don’t really understand very well the relationship between the interface and the thing.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:02)
And the thing you’re currently working on is to map-
Michael Levin
(02:34:06)
Correct.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:06)
… this space?
Michael Levin
(02:34:07)
Correct. And we are beginning to map it, but, you know, this is a massive effort. So I’ll give a couple of conjectures here. One is that I strongly suspect that the majority of what we think of as the mind is the pattern in that space, okay? And one of the interesting predictions from that model, which is not a prediction of modern neuroscience, is that there should be cases where there is very minimal brain, and yet normal IQ function. This has been seen clinically. Corina Kofman and I reviewed this in a paper recently, a bunch of cases of humans where there’s very little brain tissue, and they have normal or sometimes above normal intelligence.
Michael Levin
(02:34:54)
Now, things are not simple because that obviously doesn’t happen all the time, right? Most of the time it doesn’t happen. So what’s going on? We don’t understand. But it is a very curious thing that is not a prediction of… I’m not saying it can’t… You know, you can take modern neuroscience and sort of bend it into a pretzel to accommodate it. You can say, “Well, there are these, you know, kind of redundancies and things like this,” right? So you can accommodate it, but it doesn’t predict this. So there are these incredibly curious cases. Now, do I think you can copy it? No, I don’t think you can, because what you’re going to be copying is the interface, the front end, the brain or, you know, whatever.
Michael Levin
(02:35:35)
The action is actually the pattern in the Platonic space. Are you going to be able to copy that? I doubt it. But what you could do is produce another interface through which that particular pattern is going to come through. I think that’s probably possible. I can’t say anything at this point about what that would take, but my guess is that that’s possible.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:55)
Is your guess, your gut is that that process, if possible, is different than copying? Like, it looks more like creating a new thing versus copying.
Michael Levin
(02:36:08)
For the interface. So if you could… So here’s my prediction for a Star Trek transporter: For whatever reason, right now, your brain and body are very attuned and attractive to a particular pattern, which is your set of psychological propensities. If we could rebuild that exact same thing somewhere else, I don’t see any reason why that same pattern wouldn’t come through it the same way it comes through this one. That would be a guess, you know? So I think what you will be copying is the physical interface, and hoping to maintain whatever it is about that interface that was appropriate for that pattern. We don’t really know what that is at this point.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:48)
So when we’ve been talking about mind, in this particular case, it’s the most important to me because I’m a human. Does self come along with that? Does the feeling, like, this mind belongs to me? Does that come along with all minds? The subjective… Not the subjective experience. The subjective experience is important too, consciousness, but like the ownership.
Michael Levin
(02:37:19)
I suspect so, and I think so because of the way we come into being. So one of the things that I should be working on is this paper called “Booting Up the Agent,” and it talks about the very earliest steps of becoming a being in this world. Kind of like you can do this for a computer, right? Before you switch the power on, it belongs to the domain of physics, right? It obeys the laws of physics. You switch the power on, some number of nanoseconds, microseconds, I don’t know, later, you have a thing that, oh look, it’s taking instructions off the stack and doing them, right? So now it’s executing an algorithm.
Michael Levin
(02:37:56)
How did you get from physics to executing an algorithm? Like, what was happening during the boot-up exactly before it starts to run code or whatever, right? And so we can ask that same question in biology. What are the earliest steps of becoming a being?
Lex Fridman
(02:38:12)
Yeah, that’s a fascinating question. Through embryogenesis, at which point are you booting on? Do you have a hope of an answer to that?
Michael Levin
(02:38:21)
Well, I think so. I think so in two ways. The first thing is just physically what happens. So I think that your first task as a being, and again, I don’t think this is a binary thing. I think this is a positive feedback loop that sort of cranks up and up. Your first task as a being coming into this world is to tell a very compelling story to your parts. As a biological being, you are made of agential parts.
Michael Levin
(02:38:52)
Those parts need to be aligned, literally, into a goal they have no comprehension of. If you’re going to move through anatomical space by means of a bunch of cells which only know physiological and metabolic spaces and things like that, you are going to have to develop a model and bend their action space. You’re going to have to deform their option space with signals, with behavior-shaping cues, with rewards and punishments, whatever you got. Your job as an agent is ownership of your parts, is alignment of your parts. I think that fundamentally is going to give rise to this ability. Now, that also means having a boundary saying, “Okay, this is the stuff I control. This is me.”
Michael Levin
(02:39:35)
This other stuff over here is outside world. I have to figure out… You don’t know where that is, by the way. You have to figure it out. And in embryogenesis, it’s really cool. As a grad student, I used to do this experiment with duck embryos, which are a flat blastodisc. You can take a needle and put some scratches into it, and every island you make for a while until they heal up, thinks it’s the only embryo. There’s nothing else around, so it becomes an embryo. And eventually you get twins and triplets and quadruplets and things like that. But each one of them at the border, you know, they’re joined. Well, where do I end and where does he begin? You have to know where your borders are.
Michael Levin
(02:40:10)
So that action of aligning your parts and coming to be this, this emergence. I mean, I’m even going to say it. This emergence. We just don’t have a good vocabulary for it. This emergence of a model that aligns all the parts is really critical to keep that thing going. There’s something else that’s really interesting, and I was thinking about this in the context of this question of these beautiful ideas. There’s this amazing thing that we found, and this is largely the work of Federico Pagosi in my group. So a couple of years ago, we saw that networks of chemicals can learn. They have five or six different kinds of learning that they can do.
Michael Levin
(02:40:51)
And so what I asked them to do was to calculate the causal emergence of those networks while they’re learning. And what I mean by that is this: If you’re a rat, and you learn to press a lever and get a reward, there’s no individual cell that had both experiences, right? The cells at your paw had touched the lever. The cells in your gut got the delicious reward. No individual cell has both experiences. Who owns that associative memory? Well, the rat. So that means you have to be integrated, right? If you’re going to learn associative memories from different parts, you have to be an integrated agent that can do that. And so we can measure that now with metrics of causal emergence like fi and things like that.
Michael Levin
(02:41:33)
So we know that in order to learn, you have to have significant fi. But I wanted to ask the opposite question: What does learning do for your fi level? Does it do anything for your degree of being an agent that is more than the sum of its parts? So we trained the networks, and sure enough, some of them, not all of them, but some of them, as you train them, their fi goes up, okay? And so basically what we were able to find is that there is this positive feedback loop between every time you learn something… …You become more of an integrated agent. And every time you do that, it becomes easier to learn. And so, it’s this…
Lex Fridman
(02:42:13)
It’s a virtuous cycle.
Michael Levin
(02:42:14)
It’s a virtuous cycle. It’s an asymmetry that points upwards for agency and intelligence. And now back to our platonic space stuff, where does that come from? It doesn’t come from evolution. You don’t need to have any evolution for this. Evolution will optimize the crap out of it, for sure. But you don’t need evolution to have this. It doesn’t come from physics. It comes from the rules of information, the causal information theory, and the behavior of networks. They’re mathematical objects. This is not anything that was given to you by physics or by a history of selection. It’s a free gift from math.
Michael Levin
(02:42:47)
And those two free gifts from math lock together into a spiral that I think causes simultaneously a rise in intelligence and a rise in collective agency. And I think that’s just amazing to think about.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:04)
Well, that free gift from math, I think, is extremely useful in biology. When you have small entities forming networks, hierarchy that builds more and more complex organisms. That’s obvious. I mean, this speaks to embryogenesis, which I think is one of the coolest things in the universe. In fact, you acknowledge its coolness in the “Ingressing Mind” paper, writing, quote, “Most of the big questions of philosophy are raised by the process of embryogenesis. Right in front of our eyes, a single cell multiplies and self-assembles into a complex organism, with order on every scale of organization and adaptive behavior. Each of us takes the same journey across the Cartesian cut, starting off as a quiescent human oocyte, a little blob thought to be well-described by chemistry and physics.”
Lex Fridman
(02:44:00)
Gradually, it undergoes metamorphosis and eventually becomes a mature human with hopes, dreams, and a self-reflective metacognition that can enable it to describe itself as not a machine, that’s more than its brain, body, and underlying molecular mechanisms,” and so on. What, in all of our discussion, can we say as the clear intuition of how it’s possible to take a leap from a single cell to a fully functioning organism full of dreams and hopes and friends and love and all that kind of stuff? In everything we’ve been talking about which has been a little bit technical, how do we understand? ‘Cause that’s one of the most magical things the universe is able to create, perhaps the most magical. From simple physics and chemistry, create this, us two talking about ourselves.
Michael Levin
(02:45:03)
I think we have to keep in mind that physics and chemistry are not real things. They are lenses that we put on the world; they are perspectives where we say, “We are, for the time being, for the duration of this chemistry class or career or whatever, we are going to put aside all the other levels, and we’re going to focus on this one level.” And what is fundamentally going on during that process is an amazing positive feedback loop of collective intelligence for the interface. It’s the physical interface scaling its cognitive light cone that it can support, so it’s going from a molecular network… The molecular network can already do things like Pavlovian conditioning. You don’t start with zero.
Michael Levin
(02:45:47)
When you have a simple molecular network, you are already hosting some patterns from the platonic space that look like Pavlovian conditioning. You’ve already got that starting out. That’s just the molecular network. Then you become a cell, and then you’re many cells. And now you’re navigating anatomical amorphous space, and you’re hosting all kinds of other patterns. And eventually you… And I think again, I think there’s then this is like what all this stuff that we’re trying to work out now.
Michael Levin
(02:46:14)
There’s a consistent feedback between the ingressions you get and the ability to have new ones, which again I think is this positive feedback cycle, where the more of these free gifts you pull down, they allow you physically to develop to ways where, “Oh, look, now we’re suitable for more and higher ones.” And this continuously goes and goes and goes until you’re able to pull down a full human set of behavioral capacities.
Lex Fridman
(02:46:39)
What is the mechanism of such radical scaling of the cognitive cone? Is it just this kind of… The same thing that you were talking about with the network of chemicals being able to learn?
Michael Levin
(02:46:49)
I’ll give you two mechanisms that we found. But again, just to be clear, these are mechanisms of the physical interface. What we haven’t gotten is a mature theory of how they map onto the space; that’s just beginning. But I will tell you what the physical side of things look like. The first one has to do with stress propagation. So imagine that you’ve got a bunch of cells, and there’s a cell down here that needs to be up there. Okay. All of these cells are exactly where they need to go, so they’re happy, their stress is low. This cell… Now, let’s imagine stress is basically a physical implementation of the error function.
Michael Levin
(02:47:32)
It’s basically the amount of stress, it’s basically the delta between where you are now and where you need to be. Not necessarily in physical position, this could be in anatomical space, and physiological space, and in transcriptional space, whatever, right? It’s just the delta from your set point. So, you’re stressed out, but these guys are happy, they’re not moving. You can’t get past them. Now imagine if what you could do, is you could leak your stress, whatever your stress molecule is, and the cool thing is that evolution has actually conserved these highly, so these are all… And we’re studying all of these things, they’re actually highly conserved.
Michael Levin
(02:48:01)
If you start leaking your stress molecules, then all of this stuff around here is starting to get stressed out. When things get stressed, starting to get stressed out, their temperature, in the… not physical temperature, but in the sense of, like, simulated annealing or something, right, their ability to… their plasticity goes up. Because they’re feeling stress, they need to relieve that stress, and because all the stress molecules are the same, they don’t know it’s not their stress. They are equally irritated by them as if it was their own stress, so they become a little more plastic, they become ready to kind of, you know, adopt different fates. You get up to where you’re going, and then everybody’s stress can drop.
Michael Levin
(02:48:35)
So notice what can happen by a very simple mechanism: just be leaky for your own stress. My problems become your problems, not because you’re altruistic, not because you actually care about my problems. There’s no mechanism for you to actually care about my problems, but just that simple mechanism means that faraway regions are now responsive to the needs of other regions, such that complex rearrangements and things like that can happen. It’s an alignment of everybody to the same goal through this very dumb, simple stress-sharing thing.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:04)
Via leaky stress.
Michael Levin
(02:49:05)
Leaky stress, right? So there’s another one, there’s another one… …Which I call memory anonymization. So imagine here are two cells, and imagine something happens to this cell, and it sends a signal over to this cell. Traditionally, you send a signal over, this cell receives it. It’s very clear that it came from outside, so this cell can do many things. It could ignore it, it could take on the information, it could just ignore it, it could reinterpret it, it could do whatever, but it’s very clear that it came from outside. Now imagine the kind of thing that we study, which is called gap junctions. These are electrical synapses that could directly link the internal milieus of two cells. If something happens to this cell, it gets…
Michael Levin
(02:49:45)
Let’s say it gets poked, and there’s a calcium spike or something that propagates through the gap junction here. This cell now has the same information, but this cell has no idea, “Wait a minute, was that… Is that my memory or is that his memory?” Because it’s the same, right? It’s the same components, and so what you’re able to do now is to have a mind meld. You can have a mind meld between the two cells where nobody’s quite sure whose memory it is, and when you share memories like this, it’s harder to say that I’m separate from you. If we share the same memories, we are kind of a…
Michael Levin
(02:50:16)
And I don’t mean every single memory, right? So they still have some identity, but to a large extent, they have a little bit of a mind meld, and there are many complexities you can lean on top of it. But what it means is that if you have a large group of cells, they now have joint memories of what happened to us, as opposed to, you know, what happened to you and I know what happened to me. And that enables a higher cognitive light cone, because you have greater computational capacity, you have a greater area of concern, of things you want to manage. I don’t just want to manage my tiny, little memory states because I’m getting your memories. Now I know I’ve got to manage this whole thing.
Michael Levin
(02:50:50)
So both of these things end up scaling the size of things you care about, and that is a major ladder for cognition. It is scale the degree of, you know, the size of concern that you have.
Lex Fridman
(02:51:02)
It’d be fascinating to be able to engineer that scaling. Probably applicable to AI systems, how do you rapidly scale the cognitive cone?
Michael Levin
(02:51:12)
Yeah, yeah. We have some collaborators…
Lex Fridman
(02:51:14)
Light cone
Michael Levin
(02:51:14)
…in a company called Softmax that we’re working with to do some of that stuff. In biology, that’s our cancer therapeutic, which is that what you see in cancer literally is cells electrically disconnect from their neighbors when they were part of a giant memory that was working on making a nice organ. Well, now they can’t remember any of that, now they’re just amoebas, and the rest of the body is just external environment. And what we found is if you then physically reconnect them to the network, you don’t have to fix the DNA, you don’t have to kill the cells with chemo, you can just reconnect them and they go back to… Because they’re now part of this larger collective, they go back to what they were working on. And so, yeah, I think we can intervene at that scale.

Alien intelligence

Lex Fridman
(02:51:57)
Let me ask you more explicitly on the SETI, the Search for Unconventional Terrestrial Intelligence, what do you hope to do there? How do you actually try to find unconventional intelligence all around us? First of all, do you think on Earth there is all kinds of incredible intelligence we haven’t yet discovered?
Michael Levin
(02:52:21)
I mean, guaranteed we’ve already seen in our own bodies, and I don’t just mean that we are host to a bunch of microbiomes or any of that. I mean your cells, and we have all kinds of footwork on this, every day they traverse these alien spaces, 20,000-dimensional spaces and other spaces. They solve problems. I think they suffer when they fail to meet their goals, they have stress reduction when they meet their goals. These things are inside of us, they are all around us. I think that we have an incredible degree of mind blindness to all of the very alien kinds of minds around us, and I think that, you know, looking for aliens off the Earth is awesome and whatever.
Michael Levin
(02:53:02)
But if we can’t recognize the ones that are inside our own bodies, what chance do we have to really recognize the ones that are out there?
Lex Fridman
(02:53:12)
Do you think there could be a measure like IQ for mind? What would it be? Not mindedness, but intelligence that’s broadly applicable to the unconventional minds, that’s generalizable to unconventional minds, where we could even quantify like, “Holy shit, this discovery is incredible because it has this IQ”?
Michael Levin
(02:53:41)
Yeah, yes and no. The yes part is that as we have shown, you can take existing IQ metrics… I mean, literally existing kinds of ways that people use to measure intelligence of animals and humans and whatever, and you can apply them to very weird things. If you have the imagination to make the interface, you can do it. And we’ve done it, and we’ve shown creative-
Michael Levin
(02:54:03)
…problem-solving and all this kind of stuff. So, yes. However, we have to be humble about these things and recognize that all of those IQ metrics that we’ve come up with so far were derived from an N of one example of the evolutionary lineage here on Earth, and so we are probably missing a lot of them. So I would say we have plenty to start with. We have so much to start with. We could keep tens of thousands of people busy just testing things now, but we have to be aware that we’re probably missing a lot of important ones.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:32)
What do you think has more interesting intelligent unconventional minds inside our body, the human body, or like we were talking off-mic, the Amazon jungle, like nature, natural systems outside of the sophisticated biological systems we’re aware of?
Michael Levin
(02:54:55)
Yeah. We don’t know because it’s really hard to do experiments on larger systems. It’s a lot easier to go down than it is to go up. But my suspicion is, you know, like the Buddhists say, innumerable sentient beings. I think by the time you get to that degree of infinity, it kind of doesn’t matter to compare. I suspect there are just massive numbers of them.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:16)
Yeah, I think it really matters which kind of systems are amenable to our current methods of scientific inquiry. I mean, I’ve, I spent quite a lot of hours just staring at ants- When I was in the Amazon, and it’s such a mysterious, wonderful collective intelligence. I don’t know how amenable it is to research. I’ve seen some folks try. You can simulate, you can… But I feel like we’re missing a lot.
Michael Levin
(02:55:41)
I’m sure we are. But one of my favorite things about that kind of work: have you seen there’s at least three or four papers showing that ant colonies fall for the same visual illusions that we fall for?
Lex Fridman
(02:55:51)
Okay.
Michael Levin
(02:55:51)
Not the ants, the colonies. So if you-
Lex Fridman
(02:55:53)
The colony together. Yeah.
Michael Levin
(02:55:54)
The colonies. So if you- Lay out food in particular patterns, they’ll do things like complete lines that aren’t there and- And all the same stuff that we fall for, they fall for. So I don’t think it’s hopeless, but I do think that we need a lot of work to develop tools.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:08)
Do you think all the tooling that we develop and the mapping that we’ve been discussing will help us do the study part, finding aliens out there?
Michael Levin
(02:56:17)
I think it’s essential. I think it’s essential. We are so parochial in what we expect to find in terms of life that we are going to be just completely missing a lot of stuff. If we can’t even agree on, never mind, definitions of life, but what’s actually important… I, I read a paper recently where I asked whatever, 65 or so modern working scientists for a definition of life. And we had so many different definitions across so many different dimensions. We had to use AI to make amorphous space out of it. And there was zero consensus about what actually is important, you know? And if we’re not good at recognizing it here, I just don’t see how we’re going to be good at recognizing it somewhere else.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:08)
So given how miraculous life is here on Earth, it’s clear to me that we have so much more work to do. That said, would that be exciting to you if we find life on other planets in the solar system? Like, what would you do with that information, or is that just another life form that we don’t understand?
Michael Levin
(02:57:32)
I would be very excited about it because it would give us some more unconventional embodiments to think about- Right? A data point that’s pretty far away from our existing data points, at least in this solar system. So that would be cool. I’d be very excited about it. But I must admit that my level of, my set point for surprise has been pushed so high at this point that it would have to… you know, it would have to be something really weird to make me shocked. I mean, the things that we see every day is just, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:04)
I think you’ve mentioned in a few places that like you wrote that the “Ingressing Minds” paper is not the weirdest thing you plan to write. How weird are you going to get? Maybe a better question is, in which direction of weirdness do you think you will go in your life? In which direction of the weird Overton window are you going to expand?
Michael Levin
(02:58:34)
Yeah, well, the background to this is simply that I’ve had a lot of weird ideas for many, many decades, and my general policy is not to talk about stuff until it becomes actionable. And the amazing thing, I mean, I’m really just kind of shocked, is that in my lifetime, the empirical work, I really didn’t think we would get this far. And the knob, I have this mental knob of what percentage of the weird things I think do I actually say in public, right?
Michael Levin
(02:59:08)
And every few years when the empirical work moves forward, I sort of turn that knob a little, right, as we keep going. So I have no idea if we’ll continue to be that fortunate or how long I can keep doing this or whatever. But just to give you a direction for it, it’s going to be in the direction of what kinds of things do we need to take seriously as other beings with which to relate to. So I’ve already pushed it, you know, so like, we knew brainy things, and then we said, “Well, it’s not just brains.” And then we said, “Well, it’s not just…” So, you know, it’s not just in physical space, and it’s not just biologicals, and it’s not just complexity.
Michael Levin
(02:59:52)
There are a couple of other steps to take that I’m pretty sure are there, but we’re going to have to do the actual work to make it actionable before, you know, before we really talk about it. So that direction.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:07)
I think it’s fair to say you’re one of the more unconventional humans, scientists out there. So the interesting question is, what’s your process of idea generation? What’s your process of discovery? You’ve done a lot of really incredibly interesting, like you said, actionable, but interesting, out-there ideas that you’ve actually engineered with Xenobots and Anthrobots, these kinds of things. When you go home tonight, go to the lab, what’s the process? Empty sheet of paper, when you’re thinking through it?
Michael Levin
(03:00:50)
Well, the mental part is, a lot of it, funny enough, much like making Xenobots. You know, we make Xenobots by releasing constraints, right? We don’t do anything to them. We just release them from the constraints they already have, and then we see-
Michael Levin
(03:01:05)
So a lot of it is releasing the constraints that mentally have been placed on us. And part of it is my education has been a little weird because I was a computer scientist first, and only later biology. And so by the time I heard all the biology things that we typically just take on board, I was already a little skeptical and thinking a little differently, but a lot of it comes from releasing constraints. And I very specifically think about, okay, this is what we know. What would things look like if we were wrong? Or what would it look like if I was wrong? What are we missing? What is our worldview specifically not able to see, right? Whatever model I have.
Michael Levin
(03:01:41)
Or another way I often think is I’ll take two things that are considered to be very different things, and I’ll say, “Let’s just imagine those as two points on a continuum.” What does that look like? What does the middle of that continuum look like? What’s the symmetry there? What’s the parameter that I can turn to get from here to there? So those kinds of… I look for symmetries a lot. I’m like, okay, this thing is like that way, in what way? What’s the fewest number of things I would have to move to make this map onto that? Right? So those are, you know, those are kind of mental tools.
Michael Levin
(03:02:12)
The physical process for me is basically, I mean, obviously, I’m fortunate to have a lot of discussions with very smart people. So in my group there are some, you know, I’ve hired some amazing people, so we of course have a lot of discussions and some stuff comes out of that. My process is I do pretty much every morning, I’m outside for sunrise, and I walk around in nature. There’s just not really anything better as inspiration than nature. I do photography, and I find that it’s a good meditative tool because it keeps your hands and brain just busy enough.
Michael Levin
(03:02:50)
You don’t have to think too much, but, you know, you’re sort of twiddling and looking and doing some stuff, and it keeps your brain off of the linear, logical, careful train of thought enough to release it so that you can ideate a little more while your hands are busy.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:04)
So it’s not even the thing you’re photographing, it’s the mechanical process of doing the photography?
Michael Levin
(03:03:09)
And mentally, right? Because I’m not walking around thinking, “Okay, let’s see, so for this experiment we’ve got to, you know, I’ve got to get this piece of equipment and this…” Like, that goes away, and it’s like, okay, what’s the lighting and what am I looking at? And during that time when you’re not thinking about that other stuff, then I say, “Well, yeah, I’ve got to get a notebook,” and I’m like, “Look, this is what we need to do.” So that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:30)
And the actual idea of writing down stuff, is it a notebook? Is it a computer? Are you super organized in your thinking, or is it just like random words here and there with drawings, and… What is the space of thoughts you have in your head? Is this sort of amorphous, things that aren’t very clear? Are you visualizing stuff? Is there something you can articulate there?
Michael Levin
(03:04:01)
I tend to leave myself a lot of voicemails. Because as I’m walking around, I’m like, “Oh man, this idea,” so I’ll just call my office and leave myself a voicemail for later to transcribe.
Michael Levin
(03:04:12)
I don’t have a good enough memory to remember any of these things, so what I keep is a mind map. So I have an enormous mind map. One piece of it hangs in my lab so that people can see, like, these are the ideas, this is how they link together. Here’s everybody’s project. I’m working on this. How the hell does this attach to everybody else’s so they can track it? The thing that hangs in the lab is about nine feet wide. It’s a silk sheet, and it’s out of date within a couple of weeks of my printing it, because new stuff keeps moving around. And then there’s more that isn’t, you know, isn’t for anybody else’s view. But yeah, I try to be very organized because otherwise I forget.
Michael Levin
(03:04:49)
So, so everything is in the mind map, things are in manuscripts. I have something like, h- right now, probably 163, 62 open manuscripts that are in process of being written at various stages. And, and when things come up I stick ’em in the right manuscript, in the right place, so that when I’m finally ready to finalize, then, then I’ll put words around it and whatever. But there’s like outlines of everything. So I try…
Lex Fridman
(03:05:13)
So there’s a wide front of manuscripts of work that’s being done, and it’s continuously pushing towards completion, but you’re not clear what’s going to be finished when and how.
Michael Levin
(03:05:27)
That’s…
Lex Fridman
(03:05:27)
When is the actual…
Michael Levin
(03:05:27)
That’s… I mean, that’s… Yes, but that’s just the theoretical, philosophical stuff. The empirical work that we’re doing in the lab, I mean, those are… We know exactly, you know…
Lex Fridman
(03:05:36)
It’s more focused. There’s a specific set of questions.
Michael Levin
(03:05:37)
Like, we know this is, this is, you know, anthrobot aging. This is limb regeneration. This is the new cancer paper. This is whatever. Yeah, those things are very linear.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:45)
Where do you think ideas come from when you’re taking a walk that eventually materialize in a voicemail? Where’s that? What … Is that from you? Is that … You know, a lot of really … Some of the most interesting people feel like they’re channeling from somewhere else.
Michael Levin
(03:06:02)
I mean, I hate to bring up the Platonic space again, but I mean, if you talk to any creative, that’s basically what they’ll tell you, right? And certainly that’s been my experience, so I feel like it’s a collaboration. So collaboration is I need to bust my ass and be prepped in one, A, to work hard, to be able to recognize the idea when it comes, and B, to actually have an outlet for it so that when it does come, we have a lab and we have people who can help me do it, and then we can actually get it out, right? So that’s my part, is, you know, be up at 4:30 AM doing your thing and be ready for it.
Michael Levin
(03:06:40)
But the other side of the collaboration is that, yeah, when you do that, amazing ideas come, and, you know, to say that it’s me, I don’t think would be right. I, you know, I think it’s definitely coming from other places.

Advice for young people

Lex Fridman
(03:06:53)
What advice would you give to scientists, PhD students, grad students, young scientists that are trying to explore the space of ideas given the very unconventional, non-standard, unique set of ideas you’ve explored in your life and career?
Michael Levin
(03:07:09)
Let’s see. Well, the first and most important thing I’ve learned is not to take too much advice, and so I don’t like to give too much advice. But I do have one technique that I’ve found very useful, and this isn’t for everybody, but there’s a specific demographic. There’s a lot of unconventional people reach out to me, and I try to respond and help them and so on. This is a technique that I think is useful for some people. How do I describe it? You need to… It’s the act of bifurcating your mind, and you need to have two different regions. One region is the practical region of impact. In other words, how do I get my idea out into the world so that other people recognize it? What should I say?
Michael Levin
(03:07:57)
What are people hearing? What are they able to hear? How do I pivot it? What parts do I not talk about? Which journal am I going to publish this in? Is it time now? Do I wait two years for this? Like, all the practical stuff that is all about how it looks from the outside, right? All the stuff that I can’t say this, or I should say this differently, or this is going to freak people out, or this is odd. You know, this community wants to hear this so I can pivot it this way. Like, all that practical stuff. It’s got to be there; otherwise, you’re not going to be in a position to follow up any of your ideas. You’re not going to have a career. You’re not going to have resources to do anything. But it’s very important that that can’t be the only thing.
Michael Levin
(03:08:30)
You need another part of your mind that ignores all that shit completely, because this other part of your mind has to be pure. It has to be I don’t care what anybody else thinks about this. I don’t care whether this is publishable, describable. I don’t care if anybody gets it. I don’t care if anybody thinks it’s stupid. This is, this is what I, what I think, and why, and, and give it space to, to sort of grow, right? And if you keep the … If you try to mush them … If you try to mush them together, I, I found that impossible because, because the practical stuff poisons the other stuff.
Michael Levin
(03:08:58)
If you’re, if you’re too much … If you’re too much on the creative end, you can be an amazing thinker, it’s just nothing ever materializes. But if you’re very practical, it tends to poison the other stuff because the more you think about how to present things so that other people get it, it, it constrains and it- and it bends how you start to think. And, you know what I tell my students and others is there’s two kinds of advice. There’s very practical, specific things, like somebody says, “Well, you forgot this control,” or, “This isn’t the right method,” or, “You shouldn’t be …” That stuff is gold, and you should take that very seriously, and you should use it to par- to improve your craft, right? And that’s, like, super important.
Michael Levin
(03:09:37)
But then there’s the meta advice where people are like, “That’s not a good way to think about it. Don’t work on this. This isn’t …” That, that stuff is, is, is garbage. And, and even very successful people often give very constraining, terrible advice. Like, one of my, one of my reviewers in the paper years ago said … I, I love this. The Freudian slip. He, he said he was gonna give me constrictive criticism, right? And that’s exactly what he gave me.
Lex Fridman
(03:09:59)
That’s funny.
Michael Levin
(03:09:59)
was constrictive criticism. I was like, “That’s awesome.” Uh, that’s a great typo.
Lex Fridman
(03:10:03)
Well, it’s very true. I mean, that second, the bifurcation of the mind is beautifully put. I do think some of the most interesting people I’ve met are… sometimes fall short on the normie side, on the practical, “How do I… having the emotional intelligence of how do I communicate this with people that have a very different worldview, that are more conservative and more conventional and more kind of fit into the norm.” You have to be able to have the skill to fit in. And then you have to, again, beautifully put, be able to shut that off when you go on your own and think. And having two skills is very important.
Lex Fridman
(03:10:46)
I think a lot of radical thinkers think that they’re sacrificing something by learning the skill of fitting in, but I think if you want to have impact, if you want ideas to resonate and actually lead to, um … First of all, be able to build great teams- … that help bring your ideas to life. And second of all, for your ideas to have impact, and to scale, and to resonate with a large number of people, you have to have that skill. And those are, those are very different. Those are very different. Let me ask a ridiculous question. You already spoke about it, but what to you is one of the most beautiful ideas that you’ve encountered in your various explorations? Maybe not just beautiful, but one that makes you happy to be a scientist, to be able to be a… …Curious human exploring ideas.
Michael Levin
(03:11:39)
I mean, I must say that, you know, I sometimes think about these ingressions from this space as a kind of steganography, you know? So steganography is when you hide data and messages within the bits of another pattern that don’t matter, right?
Michael Levin
(03:11:56)
And the rule of steganography is you can’t mess up the main thing, you know? So if it’s a picture of a cat or whatever, you’ve got to keep the cat. But if there are bits that don’t matter, you can kind of stick stuff. So I feel like all these ingressions are a kind of universal steganography, that there’s this, like, these patterns seep into everything, everywhere they can. And they’re kind of shy, meaning that they’re very subtle, not invisible. If you work hard, you can catch them. They’re not invisible, but they’re hard to see. And the fact that, I think they also affect “machines,” as much as they certainly affect living organisms, I think is incredibly, incredibly beautiful.
Michael Levin
(03:12:35)
And I personally am happy to be part of that same spectrum, and the fact that that magic is sort of applicable to everything. A lot of people find that extremely disturbing, and that’s some of the hate mail I get is like, “Yeah, we were with you, you know, on the majesty of life thing, until you got to the fact that machines get it too.” And now, like, terrible, right? You’re, you know, kind of devaluing the majesty of life. And I don’t know. The idea that we’re now catching these patterns and we’re able to do meaningful research on the interfaces and all that is just, to me, absolutely beautiful. And that it’s all one spectrum, I think to me is amazing. I’m enriched by it.

Questions for AGI

Lex Fridman
(03:13:16)
I agree with you. I think it’s incredibly beautiful. I lied, there’s an even more ridiculous question. So it seems like we are progressing towards possibly creating a superintelligent system, an AGI, an ASI. If I had one, gave it to you, put you in the room, what would be the first question you ask it? Maybe the first set of questions? There are so many topics that you’ve worked on and are interested in. What is there like a first question that you really just, if you can get a solid answer, what would it be?
Michael Levin
(03:13:53)
I mean, the first thing I would ask is how much should I even be talking to you? For sure. Because it’s not clear to me at all that getting somebody to tell you an answer in the long run is optimal. It’s the difference between when you’re a kid learning math and having an older sibling that’ll just—
Lex Fridman
(03:14:14)
Oh, yeah
Michael Levin
(03:14:14)
—tell you the answers, right? Like, sometimes it’s just like, “Come on, just give me the answer. Let’s move on with this, you know, cancer protocol and whatever.” Like, great. But in the long run, the process of discovering it yourself, how much of that are we willing to give up? And by getting a final answer, how much have we missed of stuff we might have found along the way? Now, I don’t know what the… The thing is, I don’t think it’s correct to say, “Don’t do that at all. You know, take the time in all the blind alleys,” and like… That may not be optimal either, but we don’t know what the optimal is. We don’t know how much we should be stumbling around versus having somebody tell us the answer.
Lex Fridman
(03:14:52)
That’s actually a brilliant question to ask AGI then.
Michael Levin
(03:14:55)
It, I mean— …if it’s really—
Lex Fridman
(03:14:56)
That’s a really—
Michael Levin
(03:14:56)
If it’s really an AGI—
Lex Fridman
(03:14:58)
I mean, that’s a good first question.
Michael Levin
(03:14:58)
Yeah, if it’s really an AGI, I’m like, “Tell me what the balance is. Like, how much should I be talking to you versus stumbling around in the lab and making all my, you know, all my own mistakes?” And was it 70/30? You know, 10/90? I don’t know. So that would be, that would be the first—
Lex Fridman
(03:15:09)
And then the AGI will say, “You shouldn’t be talking to me.”
Michael Levin
(03:15:12)
It may well be. It may say, “What the hell did you make me for in the first place? You guys are screwed.” Like, that’s possible. Um— You know, the second question I would ask is what’s the question I should be asking you that I probably am not smart enough to ask you? That’s the other thing I would say.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:30)
This is really complicated. It’s a really, really strong question. But again, there the answer might be… You wouldn’t understand the question it proposes most likely. So I think for… Me, I would probably, assuming you can get a lot of questions, I would probably go for questions where I would understand the answer. Like, it would uncover some small mystery that I’m super curious about. Because if you ask big questions like you did, which are really strong questions, I just feel like I wouldn’t understand the answer. If you ask it, “What question should I be asking you?” It would probably say something like, “What is the shape of the universe?” And you’re like, “What? Why is that important?” Right? You would be very confused by the question it proposes.
Lex Fridman
(03:16:20)
I would probably want… It would just be nice for me to know, straight up, first question, how many living intelligent alien civilizations are in the observable universe? Yeah, that would just be nice. To know if it’s zero or is it a lot? I just want to know that. And then… Unfortunately, it might answer. It might be a Michael Levin answer.
Michael Levin
(03:16:45)
That’s what… that’s what I was about to say, is that my guess is it’s going to be exactly the problem you said, which is, it’s going to say, “Oh my God. I mean, right in this room you got…” You know, and like, “Oh, man.”
Lex Fridman
(03:16:56)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything you need to know about alien civilizations is right here in this room. In fact, it’s inside your own body.
Michael Levin
(03:17:06)
Just for…
Lex Fridman
(03:17:06)
Thank you-
Michael Levin
(03:17:07)
… for starters
Lex Fridman
(03:17:07)
AGI. Thank you. All right. Michael, one of my favorite scientists, one of my favorite humans. Thank you for everything you do in this world.
Michael Levin
(03:17:16)
Thank you so much.
Lex Fridman
(03:17:17)
Truly, truly fascinating work, and keep going for all of us.
Michael Levin
(03:17:20)
Thank you…
Lex Fridman
(03:17:21)
You’re an inspiration
Michael Levin
(03:17:21)
So much. Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s great to see you. Always a good discussion. Thank you so much, I appreciate it.
Lex Fridman
(03:17:27)
Thank you for this.
Michael Levin
(03:17:27)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(03:17:28)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Levin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Transcript for David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy | Lex Fridman Podcast #485

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #485 with David Kirtley.
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Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:00:00)
The following is a conversation with David Kirtley, a nuclear engineer, expert on nuclear fusion, and the CEO of Helion Energy, a company working on building nuclear fusion reactors and have made incredible progress in a short period of time that make it seem possible, like we could actually get there as a civilization. This is exciting because nuclear fusion, if achieved commercially, will solve most of our energy needs in a clean, safe way, providing virtually unlimited clean electricity. The problem is that fusion is incredibly difficult to achieve. You need to heat hydrogen to over 100 million degrees Celsius and contain it long enough for atoms to fuse. That’s why the joke in the past has been that fusion is 30 years away, and always will be.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:51)
Just in case you’re not familiar, let me clarify the difference between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission. By the way, I believe according to the excellent Sample Size subreddit post by pmgoodbeer on this, the preferred pronunciation of the latter in the U.S. is nuclear fission, like vision. And in the U.K. and other countries is nuclear fission, like mission. I prefer the nuclear fission pronunciation because America. So today’s nuclear power plants use nuclear fission. They split apart heavy uranium atoms to release energy. Fusion does the opposite. It combines light hydrogen atoms together, the same reaction that powers the sun and the stars. The result is that it’s clean fuel from water, no long-lived radioactive waste, and inherently safe because a fusion reactor can’t melt down.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:50)
If something goes wrong, the reactor simply stops. And there are no carbon emissions. On a more technical side, Helion uses a different approach to fusion than has traditionally been done. Most fusion efforts have used tokamaks, which are these giant donut-shaped magnetic containment chambers. Helion uses pulsed magnetoinertial fusion. David gets into the super technical physics and engineering details in this episode, which was fun and fascinating. I think it’s important to remember that for all of human history, we’ve been limited by energy scarcity. And every major leap in civilization—agriculture, industrialization, information age—came in part from unlocking new energy sources.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:38)
If someone is able to solve commercial fusion, we would enter a new era of energy abundance that fundamentally changes what’s possible for us humans. I’m excited for the future, and I’m excited for super technical physics podcast episodes. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here’s David Kirtley.

Nuclear fission vs fusion

Lex Fridman
(00:03:14)
Let’s start with the big picture. What is nuclear fusion, and maybe what is nuclear fission? Let’s lay out the basics.
David Kirtley
(00:03:22)
So fusion is what powers the universe. Fusion is what happens in stars, and it’s where the vast amount of energy that we even use today here on Earth comes from the process of fusion. It also is what powers plants. And those plants become oil, and those become fossil fuels that then power the rest of human civilization for the last 100 years. So fusion really underpins a lot of what has enabled us as humans to go forward. However, ironically, we don’t do it actively here on Earth to make electricity yet. And so fundamentally, what fusion is, is taking the most common elements in the universe, hydrogen, and lightweight isotopes of hydrogen and helium, and fusing those together to make heavier elements.
David Kirtley
(00:04:14)
In that process, as you combine atomic nuclei and form heavier nuclei, those nuclei are slightly lighter than the sum of the parts. And that comes from a lot of the details of quantum mechanics and how those fundamental particles combine and interact. We also talk about the strong nuclear force that holds the atomic nuclei together as one of the fundamental forces involved in fusion. But that mass defect, E=mc², we know from Einstein, is also energy. And so in that process, a tremendous amount of energy is released. And the actual reactions, I think, are a lot more interesting than simply it’s a little bit lighter, and therefore, energy is released.
David Kirtley
(00:04:55)
But that’s the fundamental process in fusion as you’re bringing those lightweight atomic nuclei, those isotopes, together. Fission is the exact opposite, where you’re taking the heaviest elements in the universe, uranium, plutonium, things that are so heavy and have so many internal protons and neutrons and electrons, that they’re barely held together at all. They’re fundamentally unstable or radioactive, and those elements are very close to falling apart. And as they do that, if you take a Uranium-235 or a Plutonium-239 nucleus, and you add something new, usually it’s a neutron, a subatomic particle that’s uncharged, that unstable, that very large nuclei will then break into pieces. Many pieces, a whole spectrum of pieces.
David Kirtley
(00:05:40)
But if you add up all of those pieces, they also have slightly less mass than the initial one did, the initial uranium or plutonium. And in that process, again, E=mc², a tremendous amount of energy is released. There’s a very famous curve in atomic physics, fusion or fission, looking at the periodic table. Going from the lightest elements, hydrogen, to the heaviest elements, those uranium, plutonium, and others. And fusion happens up to iron. Iron is the magical point in between where lighter elements than iron fuse together, and heavier elements fission or are fissile and break apart and release energy. I think about and I look at that process in stars, in that our star is fundamentally an early stage star that’s burning just hydrogens.
David Kirtley
(00:06:30)
But when it burns and does fusion, those hydrogens combine into heliums, and later stage stars can then burn those heliums and they can fuse those together to form even heavier elements and carbons. And those carbons can fuse together and form heavier elements. And that whole stellar process is something that inspires us at Helion to think about what are fusion fuels, not just the simplest ones, but more advanced fusion fuels that we see in stars throughout the universe.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:59)
Okay, so there’s a million things I want to say. So first, maybe zooming out to the biggest possible picture, if you look across hundreds of millions, billions of years, and all the, in my opinion, alien civilizations that are out there, they’re going to be powered likely by fusion. So our advanced intelligent civilization is powered by fusion in that the sun is our power plant. Then the other thing is the physics. Again, very basic, but you said E=mc² a couple times. Can you explain this equation?
David Kirtley
(00:07:30)
E=mc² is a fundamental relationship that a patent clerk, Einstein, discovered and unlocked an entire new realm of physics and engineering and has shown us atomic physics, what happens inside the nucleus, and unlocked our understanding of the universe and paved the way for many of the physics advancements that came after, that we think about mass as these particles. But in reality also, at the same time, they’re energy, and there’s a direct quantitative relationship between how much energy is in all of that mass. And in fact, all of the energy that is released, even by atomic physics, certainly in atomic reactions, is E=mc². And I think most people have heard of and are used to that.
David Kirtley
(00:08:19)
But also in chemistry and in chemical bonds, in those chemical bonds, there is a change in mass. When you take a hydrogen and an oxygen and you burn them and you combine them into water, there’s a change in mass. Now, that change per atom and per molecule is actually so small that it’s extremely hard to measure, but it’s still there, and that’s the energy that is released, and you can quantify that. We use units of electron volts as a unit of what is the energy in atomic processes or chemical processes.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:53)
Can you also just speak to the different fuels that you mentioned, both on the fusion and the- …fission side? So uranium, plutonium for the fission, and then hydrogen isotopes for the fusion?
David Kirtley
(00:08:58)
So for fission, uranium and plutonium, we don’t make those nuclei. Those, for humanity, have been made in the primordial universe through supernovae and the Big Bang and the initial formation of the universe where matter was created. And so we dig those up. We dig up uranium and plutonium out of the ground. And in fact, most plutonium we make from uranium, and we can talk about how to enrich uranium if we want to go down that road. But that’s how we get those molecules and nuclei. For fusion materials, hydrogenic species or hydrogens are primordial in the universe. Also, only the most common things that are in the universe. Suns and stars are made up of hydrogens and heliums. And so the vast majority of atoms in the universe still are hydrogen.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:58)
So the basic fuel for fission is already in the ground, and then the basic fuel for fusion is everywhere?
David Kirtley
(00:08:58)
Is everywhere, and we particularly use a type of hydrogen called deuterium, which is a heavier isotope of hydrogen. Hydrogen is typically one proton and one electron, atomic mass of one. Deuterium has an atomic mass of two, which is a proton, which is a charged particle, and it has a neutron in its nucleus, which is an uncharged particle. And so that’s deuterium as the fuel. Now, deuterium is also found in all water on Earth, in the water I’m drinking right now. It’s in my body. It’s in Coca-Cola.
David Kirtley
(00:08:58)
It’s everywhere. And safe and clean and one of those fundamental particles that was born in the cosmos, and we estimate that in seawater here on Earth, we have, if we powered all of humanity on fusion at our current use of electricity, somewhere between 100 million years and a billion years of fuel in hydrogen and deuterium here on Earth.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:58)
And how is that stored mostly?
David Kirtley
(00:08:58)
And mostly that’s just in water. Mostly that it’s a mix of what we call heavy water, where you have normal water that you’re used to and you learn in school is H₂O, where there are two hydrogens and an oxygen in a molecule. And deuterium, or heavy water, is D₂O, two deuteriums and an oxygen. In reality, it’s actually an interesting mix where you have some HDO, so a mix of hydrogen and deuterium. You also have other hydrogen.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:58)
that I think most people have heard of and are used to. But also in chemistry and in chemical bonds, there is a change in mass. When you take a hydrogen and an oxygen and you burn them and combine them into water, there’s a change in mass. Now, that change per atom and per molecule is so small that it’s extremely hard to measure, but it’s still there. That’s the energy that is released, and you can quantify that. We use units of electron volts as a unit of energy in atomic processes or chemical processes. Can you also just speak to the different fuels that you mentioned, both on the fusion and the- fission side? So uranium, plutonium for the fission, and then hydrogen isotopes for the fusion?
David Kirtley
(00:09:04)
So for fission, uranium and plutonium: we don’t make those nuclei. For humanity, those were made in the primordial universe through supernovae, the Big Bang, and the initial formation of the universe where matter was created. And so we dig those up. We dig up uranium, plutonium out of the ground. In fact, most plutonium we make from uranium, and we can talk about how to enrich uranium if we want to go down that road. But that’s how we get those molecules and nuclei. For fusion materials, hydrogenic species, or hydrogens, are primordial in the universe and the most common things in the universe. Suns and stars are made up of hydrogens and heliums, so the vast majority of atoms in the universe are still hydrogen.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:57)
So the basic fuel for fission is already in the ground, and the basic fuel for fusion is everywhere.
David Kirtley
(00:10:02)
Is everywhere, and we particularly use a type of hydrogen called deuterium, which is a heavier isotope of hydrogen. Hydrogen is typically one proton and one electron, with an atomic mass of one. Deuterium has an atomic mass of two, which is a proton, a charged particle, and it has a neutron in its nucleus, which is an uncharged particle. So that’s deuterium. As a fuel, deuterium is also found in all water on Earth, in the water I’m drinking right now. It’s in my body. It’s in Coca-Cola.
David Kirtley
(00:10:32)
It’s everywhere. And it’s safe and clean, one of those fundamental particles that was born in the cosmos. We estimate that in seawater here on Earth, if we powered all of humanity on fusion at our current use of electricity, we would have somewhere between 100 million years and a billion years of fuel in hydrogen and deuterium here on Earth.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:00)
And how is that stored mostly?
David Kirtley
(00:11:02)
And mostly, that’s just in water. Mostly, it’s a mix of what we call heavy water. Normal water, which you’re used to and learn about in school, is H2O, where there are two hydrogens and an oxygen in a molecule. Deuterium, or heavy water, is D2O, two deuteriums and an oxygen. In reality, it’s an interesting mix where you have some HDO, so a mix of hydrogen and deuterium. You also have other hydrogen
Lex Fridman
(00:11:32)
that I think most people have heard of and are used to. But also in chemistry and in chemical bonds, there is a change in mass. When you take a hydrogen and an oxygen and you burn them and combine them into water, there’s a change in mass. Now, that change per atom and per molecule is so small that it’s extremely hard to measure, but it’s still there. That’s the energy that is released, and you can quantify that. We use units of electron volts as a unit of energy in atomic processes or chemical processes. Can you also just speak to the different fuels that you mentioned, both on the fusion and the- fission side? So uranium, plutonium for the fission, and then hydrogen isotopes for the fusion? Is that correct to say in terms of fuel?
David Kirtley
(00:12:19)
That’s correct to say at today’s power level. I think what’s interesting is the idea that as we deploy the same power source that powers the universe here on Earth as humans, can we do more? Can we have access to much more electricity, and much more energy and do really interesting things with that? And still, there are large amounts—millions and millions of years of power—even at much higher output power levels for humanity.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:45)
Yeah, so the moment we start running out of hydrogen and helium, that means we’re doing some pretty incredible things with our technology. And then that technology is probably going to allow us to propagate out into the universe and then discover other sources, because you can also get it on other planets. Whatever planets have water, it looks more and more likely like a lot of them do. What an incredible future, just out into the cosmos, nuclear power plants everywhere. Okay, so to linger on some of the technical stuff, you said strong nuclear force. So how exactly is the energy created? How does the E=MC²—the M—go to the E in fusion?

Physics of E=mc^2

David Kirtley
(00:13:31)
So in fusion, you take these lightweight isotopes like hydrogen and deuterium, and as you combine them and get these molecules closer and closer together, some really interesting fundamental physics happens. First, these atomic nuclei are charged. They have an electric charge, and like charges repel. I think everybody is familiar with that, where you take two positive charges and you try to push them together, and the electromagnetic force between them repels them. So you have a force that’s actually pushing against them. In fusion, you work to get your fuel very hot, very, very high temperatures—100 million degree temperatures. And temperature really is kinetic energy; it’s motion, it’s velocity.
David Kirtley
(00:14:14)
So these particles are moving so fast that even though they’re coming together and there’s this repulsive electromagnetic force, they can still come close enough that another force comes into play, which is the strong force. Once you get within a very close distance, on the order of the scale of those nuclei themselves—of those atomic nuclei, the tiniest thing you could imagine, and probably way smaller than that—these particles then are attracted to each other, and they combine and fuse together. At that point, you create heavier atomic nuclei that have a slightly less mass, slightly less total mass in the system, and that mass equals MC² as energy.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:55)
So extremely high temperature, extremely high speed. Maybe that’s one of the other differences also with fusion and fission, is just the amount of temperature required for the reactions. Is that accurate to say?
David Kirtley
(00:15:07)
Yeah, and I think fundamentally, in a lot of ways, fusion is hard and fission is easy. Nuclear fission happens at room temperature. This uranium and plutonium is so likely to break apart already that simply the adding of one of these neutrons, one extra particle, will then break it apart and release energy. If you have a lot of them together, it will create a chain reaction. Fusion, that doesn’t happen at all. Fusion is actually really hard to do. You have to overcome those electromagnetic forces to have a single fusion reaction happen. So it takes things like, in our sun, we have what is called gravitational confinement, where the gravity, literally the mass of the fuel itself, is pulling to the center of the sun and it’s pulling.
David Kirtley
(00:15:55)
There’s a large force that’s pulling all that fuel together and holding it and confining it together such that it gets close enough and hot enough for long enough that fusion happens.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:07)
And then we have to figure out, if we’re building fusion generators, how to do that confinement without the huge size gravity of the sun.
David Kirtley
(00:16:18)
That’s right. Obviously, the sun is vastly larger than Earth, so we can’t do that same process here on Earth.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:25)
Yet. No, I’m just kidding. All right.
David Kirtley
(00:16:27)
But we have other forces we get to use. We can use the electromagnetic force, which the sun doesn’t get to do, to apply those forces. I actually want to take a pause right there and point out a word. Historically, we’ve used the word reactor around fusion, but I don’t think that’s right. For me, we’re really careful about this terminology.
David Kirtley
(00:16:47)
When we look to how that word is defined, and we can look to how the experts define it, it doesn’t really apply to fusion. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC, defines reactor as—I have it right here—”A nuclear reactor is an apparatus, other than an atomic weapon, designed or used to sustain nuclear fission in a self-supporting chain reaction.” There are two big parts to that: one, fission reaction. Obviously, fusion is not that, and we’ve talked about why, but also the self-sustaining part. A reactor is self-sustaining; you take your hands off it, and it keeps going. In fusion, that doesn’t happen, and we know because we have to do it every day, and it’s really hard to do.
David Kirtley
(00:17:33)
So we actually use the word generator because we don’t talk about, for instance, a natural gas reactor. If you stop putting in fuel, it turns off. The same thing happens in fusion. We’re pretty careful about making sure we talk about that as a generator where you’re putting in fuel, you’re getting electricity out. When you stop putting in fuel, it just shuts off. You can go even one step further and say, “What am I going to do with this fusion that powers the universe? And what does humanity want out of this?” What we want is electricity. We don’t simply want a set of reactions or even heat and energy. That’s great, but what I really want is electricity.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:12)
And yeah, we’ll talk about the technical details of one of the big benefits of the linear design of the approach that you do, is you get electricity directly as quickly as possible. Some of the other alternatives have an intermediate step, and those, again, are technical details, but let me still linger on the difference between… …Fusion and fission. What are some advantages at a high level of nuclear fusion as a source of energy?

Is nuclear fusion safe?

David Kirtley
(00:18:38)
…fundamentally as a source of energy. In fusion, you’re taking these lightweight isotopes, you’re bringing them together, you’re releasing energy, and that energy is in the form of charged particles. It’s already in the form of electricity. Fusion itself has electricity built into it without a lot of the steam or thermal system requirements. That’s a really nice fundamental benefit of fusion itself. Also, this reaction that’s really hard to do turns itself off, so you end up with fusion being fundamentally safe, and that’s really a key requirement of any industrial system, is that it turns itself off and is safe. You turn the key off on your car, you know it’s going to turn off.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:20)
I guess the flip side of that, just stating the obvious, but it’s nice to lay it out. For nuclear fission, it’s a chain reaction, so it’s hard to shut off, and it works by boiling water into steam, which spins turbines and produces electricity. Can you talk through this process in a nuclear fission reactor?
David Kirtley
(00:19:43)
In a nuclear fission reactor, you put enough of this fissile material, uranium or plutonium, together such that as these unstable molecules, these unstable atoms, crack open and break apart, they release heat. The component parts of those are actually quite hot. So not only are the component parts that the uranium breaks into—and it’s a whole spectrum of different atoms and atomic nuclei—hot, but it also releases neutrons. It also releases more of these uncharged particles. If you do it right, this fissile material will be next to other fissile material, and so that neutron will then go and bombard another uranium nucleus, again opening that up and releasing more heat and more of these neutrons.
David Kirtley
(00:20:31)
That’s how you have those reactions of a self-supporting chain reaction, and that chain reaction then continues. People design fission reactors such that you have just the right balance of enough neutrons are made such that the reaction is continuing, but not so many neutrons are made that it speeds up… …Because you don’t want it to speed up.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:50)
And there are some kind of cooling mechanisms also? That’s part of the art and the engineering of it?
David Kirtley
(00:20:56)
The key is at the same time, you want to make sure that the whole thing is in water, which is typically the cooling fluid. There are some more advanced fission reactors that have different cooling fluids, but water typically, then absorbs both the heat and those extra neutrons. So you use the water and the fluid to then run a steam turbine to do traditional electricity generation and output electricity through your steam turbine. You end up with complicated systems of flowing liquids and flowing water, balancing the heat.
David Kirtley
(00:21:28)
A lot of fission reactor design comes from that thermal balance of keeping this reaction going, making sure it doesn’t speed up, because that’s an uncontrolled chain reaction, which you would not want, and balancing the cooling and the output of getting the water out of it.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:48)
So we should say that for reasons you already laid out—maybe you can speak to it a bit more—nuclear fusion is much safer. There’s no chain reaction going on; you can just shut it off. But it should also be said that, as far as I understand, the current fission nuclear reactors are also very safe. I think there’s a perception that nuclear fission reactors are unsafe, they’re dangerous, and if you just look empirically at the statistics, that fear is not justified by the actual safety data. Can you just speak to that a little bit?
David Kirtley
(00:22:22)
Yeah, we’ve been talking about the reaction processes themselves, but I think fundamentally, let’s take a step back and look a little broader and say, let’s look at what we care about, which is the power plant, making electricity. I look at this from a nuclear engineer’s point of view. I spent a lot of years studying these systems. Modern fission reactors, I believe, are engineered to be safe. They’re engineered in ways where as those reactions maybe speed up and those systems get hotter, they actually are built to expand and cool down passively and natively. There are protection systems in place that modern systems are quite safe from an engineering perspective.
David Kirtley
(00:23:03)
So I believe that we have figured out how to build nuclear fission reactors in a way where the engineering of the power plant is safe. I would say that I look back at the history of what we’ve built over time, and the challenge hasn’t come to the engineering, actually. I believe the engineers have solved these problems. The problem comes from humans, and the problem comes from other things around nuclear power. You have to enrich that uranium to put it in a plant, and the plant’s safe, but you had to enrich that uranium, and that is some of the problem. Or a plant is designed to run for a certain number of decades safely, but do we run it longer than that?
David Kirtley
(00:23:42)
And so those are where I think the real challenges happen, is more with the humans around these systems than the engineering of the power plants themselves.

Chernobyl

Lex Fridman
(00:23:50)
Well, I have to ask then, what do you think happened in Chernobyl? What lessons do we learn from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and maybe also Three Mile Island and Fukushima accidents? I think you’re suggesting that it has to do with the humans a bit.
David Kirtley
(00:24:02)
So with Chernobyl and Fukushima, I actually put Three Mile Island in a different category. In fact, some of the recent news in the last year is that we’re going to be restarting Three Mile Island, because there’s such a need for clean base load power. So that’s actually a very interesting other topic we should talk about is, is why and how we’re doing that. But more than that, going back to the accidents that did happen in both of those systems, you can point to the human failure rather than the engineering failures of those systems. That in Fukushima specifically, there were multiple nuclear fission reactors on the same site that successfully kept running through the tsunami, totally successfully, and were only later shut down for more political reasons.
David Kirtley
(00:24:48)
But the old one, the oldest of them that had been on site for long periods, and maybe too long, I think some experts have looked at this in the past was where some of the problems actually happened. And so, I look to that less as a failure of the engineering of the power plants, and more of the humans around those systems. That we should be operating these plants as designed, and then I believe they’re safe. And that gets to some of the atomic weapons questions that I think are the other part around nuclear reactors and fission reactors that are concerning for me.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:30)
Can you speak to those? So, maybe this is a good place to also lay out the difference between nuclear fission power plants and nuclear fission weapons, and maybe also nuclear fusion power plants and nuclear fusion weapons. What are the differences here?
David Kirtley
(00:25:53)
Fusion power plants can’t be used to make nuclear weapons. Fundamentally, the processes in fusion aren’t the same processes that happen in nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons. And so it’s actually one reason I started in fusion, and most of our team thinks about the mission of fusion, of delivering clean, safe electricity, is it also can’t be used to make weapons. And I think that’s a little bit of a distinction from traditional nuclear fission reactors, is that while I totally believe as a nuclear engineer we can build power plants now that are safe, that aren’t going to have reactions. They use a fuel, uranium and plutonium, that can be used to make nuclear weapons.
David Kirtley
(00:26:40)
We know that if you take enough fissile material together, enough uranium and plutonium, put it in a small volume, that it will not just create a reaction, but it will create a supercritical reaction that will then continue and grow and release a tremendous amount of energy all at once. And that is a bomb. That is a bad situation, and that is what we want to avoid. A lot of the key is recognizing that even though there are things called fusion bombs, the H-bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the hydrogen bomb has uranium in it. It’s still a fission bomb. And so how this fundamentally works is that you have a fission reaction, a primary, and that creates radiation that induces a fusion reaction with a small amount of fusion fuel that then boosts that uranium reaction again.
David Kirtley
(00:27:29)
And so most of the energy, in fact 90% of the energy in an H-bomb, is all still from the uranium reactions themselves.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:37)
Yeah, I think people call it sort of the nuclear fusion bomb, hydrogen bomb, but really it’s still a nuclear fission bomb. It’s just that fusion is a part of the process to make it more powerful, but you still need, like you said, the uranium fuel. So it’s not accurate to sort of think of it as a fusion bomb really.
David Kirtley
(00:27:53)
And if you take away that fissile material, that nuclear fission reaction, the fusion reaction doesn’t happen at all. In fact, there have been researchers that have over the decades tried to make an all-fusion bomb and been very unsuccessful at it. The physics and the engineering don’t support it can ever happen with our understanding today. The topic we’re talking about is more broadly called proliferation, and this is the creation of nuclear weapons in the world and the distribution of those weapons. And something we know as physicists and engineers is that fusion can’t be used to make nuclear weapons. We know that. But that is not widely known.
David Kirtley
(00:28:38)
And part of what we went out to do is work with the proliferation experts in the world, the people who work to prevent nuclear weapons from being made, being created, being shared throughout the world, because we know the challenges, the geopolitical challenges that happen. And we went to those proliferation experts, and we were worried they would have sort of the same historical question of, like, “Well, the word nuclear is in fusion, so therefore it must be related.” And in fact, the total opposite happened. What they told us is, “Please, please go develop fusion power plants absolutely as fast as possible.
David Kirtley
(00:29:15)
The world needs this.” And the proliferation experts were telling us that otherwise people would start enriching uranium throughout the world, and we’d be building enriched uranium power plants because we need the electricity that’s clean and base load. But in those processes, they’ll be making fuel that could be one day used for atomic weapons, for nuclear weapons, and they were worried that the growth of this enriched uranium, think about the centrifuges, that having a lot more centrifuges happening all over the world would lead to more weapons, at least the possibility of it. And so they are pushing us as fast as possible, go build fusion generators and get them deployed everywhere.
David Kirtley
(00:29:55)
Not that’s just in the United States, but all over the world so that we’re building fusion power and that’s meeting humanity’s needs, not this other thing. And so I was really pleasantly surprised. We’ve written a number of papers and worked with those communities on this of what does it mean, how is fusion power safe and can’t be used for nuclear weapons.

Geopolitics

Lex Fridman
(00:30:18)
So, this might be interesting to ask on the geopolitics side of things. I have the chance to interview a few world leaders coming up. By way of advice, what questions should I ask world leaders to figure out the geopolitics of nuclear proliferation? nuclear weapons, nuclear fission power plants, and nuclear fusion power plants? What’s the interesting intricate complexity there that you could maybe speak to?
David Kirtley
(00:30:47)
The question I would want to ask is, “What would you do?” If we could deliver for you low-cost, clean, industrial scale, tens or hundreds of megawatts of fusion power that’s low-cost, clean, base load and doesn’t have the geopolitical consequences of uranium and plutonium, of fissile material, what would you do there? How would that change your view of the next 30 years?
Lex Fridman
(00:31:17)
But also, there’s a lot of geopolitics connected to oil, natural gas… …And other sources of energy which I think are important in Saudi Arabia, in the Middle East, in Russia, I mean, all across the world. And that’s interesting too. So do you think actually if everybody has nuclear fusion power plants, that alleviates some of the geopolitical tension that have to do with energy, other energy sources?
David Kirtley
(00:31:42)
I certainly do, that the fuel is in seawater all over Earth. Everybody has deuterium, and everybody has it. And so you can’t have a monopoly on the fuel. And no one can control the fuel and no one can turn off the fuel, no one can cut a pipeline. That just cannot happen with fusion. And so if we can deploy those plants and we can deploy them quickly, then it decouples the ability of any one or any few countries to control energy.

Extreme scenarios

Lex Fridman
(00:32:12)
Okay, so let’s return to the basic question. We already mentioned it a little bit, but is nuclear fusion safe? So, are the fusion power plants we’re talking about safe?
David Kirtley
(00:32:26)
Yes, fusion power is fundamentally safe. The physics and the reactions of the fusion system itself mean you don’t have runaways. We’ve talked about some of the human factors around power plants, power systems, and industrial scale systems, and that’s something that we build into the design of these from today. We look at how these systems might fail. In fact, some of the analysis we do, we did this analysis for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the last few years, looking at how to regulate fusion power. As we’re building the first fusion power plant, we need to make sure we’re regulated safely. So we spent a lot of time doing the technical and political case in the United States of how to regulate fusion.
David Kirtley
(00:33:18)
The analysis we did assumes you have a fusion power plant that’s operating and then, at any one time, a meteor strikes it. The whole thing is vaporized. What is the impact of that? This is worse than you could ever imagine an actual physical scenario, but let’s start there. The answer is, you don’t need to evacuate the populace nearby the fusion power plant. One of the keys, I think, that I come to when I think about this is the fuel. In a fusion generator, you are continuously feeding in this hydrogen, these deuterium fuels. At any one time, in a Helion fusion system and most fusion systems, you have one second of fuel in that system. So what that means is if you stop turning on…
David Kirtley
(00:34:08)
If you stop putting fuel into that system, fusion just stops. But what it also means is that if something really catastrophic happened and for whatever reason you have all that fuel that’s not in the system, and fusion is so hard to make happen, you hit it with a meteor, you do anything of that nature, and fusion doesn’t happen. That hydrogen, that heavy water, that deuterium, just goes back into the environment safely and cleanly without issue. That’s the fundamental safety mechanism of fusion. You can compare that with other types of power plants like an oil or a coal power plant. You might have a large pile of coal that then catches fire and burns.
David Kirtley
(00:34:47)
It’s not catastrophic, but you have a large coal fire for a long time releasing toxic fumes that you may have to deal with. In nuclear power, in a fission power plant, you may have several years of fuel sitting in the core. In that case, if something bad happened, you have all that potential energy for things to happen. But in fusion, you have literally one second of fuel at any time in the system. Having a tank of deuterium, which we have around all the time, can’t do fusion by itself. It needs that complex system.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:17)
I love that there’s like a PowerPoint going on in a secret meeting about what happens if a meteor hits a fusion power plant. Okay, so that’s really interesting. What about the waste? What kind of waste is there for fusion power plants?
David Kirtley
(00:35:31)
The fusion reaction itself is still fundamentally an atomic reaction. So during this reaction, you do create ionizing radiation. You create X-rays, you create neutrons, and you create all these charged particles. The charged particles themselves for a fusion reaction are all contained in the fusion system. The X-rays, similar to a dentist office, although a lot more than that, but that same type of X-ray and X-ray energy is absorbed by the fusion system. But the thing we do care about is those neutrons. So we do have, in a fusion system, activation. During its operation, neutrons are made and leave, so we have to shield these fusion systems during their operation.
David Kirtley
(00:36:13)
This is very similar, in fact, this is a lot of the work we did with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the last number of years. There was a landmark agreement that happened for the NRC that was then codified into law last year called the ADVANCE Act, which is really powerful because it says, for the very first time—how the U.S. government, leading the way on this, which I’m really proud of, will regulate fusion. This gets into a little bit of the details, but the way the Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulates nuclear things in the United States is in these different sets of statutes. Nuclear reactors are regulated under something called Part 50.
David Kirtley
(00:36:54)
And there’s a lot of variety in the regulatory language around that, but most of it is to handle special nuclear materials, uranium and plutonium. But fusion is not. Fusion is regulated under something called Part 30. Part 30 is how hospitals are regulated, particle accelerators, other types of irradiators where, as they’re operating, you have very high energy particles, ionizing radiation, and you have to protect operators from it. You have to shield them, so we build concrete shields. If you came and visited Helion, you would see plastic, borated polyethylene, and concrete shielding to protect operators and equipment from the fusion reactions while they’re happening. But again, you turn them off, and those fusion reactions stop. And that’s really the key.
David Kirtley
(00:37:38)
There’s a funny story related to that. We’ve been building fusion systems that do fusion for a long time, and at some level, they got powerful enough, doing enough fusion, we started building these shields and shielding them like a particle accelerator. I went to the regulatory bodies that regulate Part 30. This is in Washington state, it’s the Department of Health. So I went to the Department of Health and said, “Here’s an application for a fusion generator shielding permit as a particle accelerator.” The very first question I got asked was, “Great, where do the patients go?” Because the standard form had a patient as a hospital, the patient dose for the particle accelerator, and then the shielding.
David Kirtley
(00:38:26)
We talked all about the shielding and the operators, which is very similar for a Helion system. We said, “No, no patients at all. No one’s inside this thing. Our goal is to generate electricity one day.” This was a lot of years ago. We were able to go through and work with the state agencies to license these fusion particle accelerators. We were, as far as we know, the first licensed fusion system ever as a particle accelerator for those first systems. The first license we had was in 2020. We then have gone on and now licensed several of our fusion systems that we’ve built that do fusion, both the shielding as well as some of the fuel processes.

How nuclear fusion works

Lex Fridman
(00:39:08)
So high level, what are the different ways to build a nuclear fusion power plant? Can you explain what a tokamak is, what a stellarator is, and what’s the linear approach that Helion is using?
David Kirtley
(00:39:25)
There are a number of ways to do fusion. Fundamentally, in all fusion approaches, you’re trying to do the same physical process, which is take these lightweight isotopes, heat them up so that they can move at high velocity—over 100 million degrees—bring enough of them together. We call it density. Enough of them together in a certain volume so that you have reactions happening at a higher rate, and keep them together long enough that they are able to collide into each other and do fusion and release energy. That’s the fundamental core. Now, how you do that, how you bring those particles together, how you hold them together long enough, there’s a wide range of technologies that, as humans, we’ve been exploring since the 1950s.
David Kirtley
(00:40:12)
And I think about several main categories. If you look at the fusion funding out there, government funding in the world, private funding actually has quite a different profile, which is an interesting thing to talk about. But in public funding, in federal funding in the United States, there are two mainline programs called inertial fusion and magnetic fusion. In inertial fusion, what you’re trying to do is bring together and push together by a variety of physical means, those particles. You push them together. The most common is called laser inertial fusion. Our colleagues at the National Ignition Facility did this really well and made world records in the last few years for being able to demonstrate you can do this and do it at scale.
David Kirtley
(00:40:58)
Where you take very high power lasers and pulse them together to combine them to do fusion for a pulse, for a very short period of time: nanoseconds, billionths of a second. The other extreme, and you mentioned tokamaks and stellarators. Stellarators are actually my favorite, so we’ll talk about those. As a graduate student in fusion, the stellarator is the first thing you learn about. Because there’s a mathematical solution for a stellarator that solves perfectly. And you can write it out and you can solve it, and analytically, it’s very simple. Building one is very hard. It’s taken humanity a number of decades to be able to build stellarators, and we can do it now with the Wendelstein 7-X that came online in the last few years, being the premier stellarator in the world.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:49)
I should say, all the different ways to do fusion all just look so badass in terms of engineering. Creating this containment, extremely high temperature, high density. Everything’s moving super fast. Everything is happening super fast. It’s just fascinating that humans are able to do it. Like, there are certain things, accelerators are that a little bit, but this is even cooler because you’re generating energy that can power humanity with this machine. Anyway, can you just speak a little bit more to the inertial and the magnetic fusion systems?
David Kirtley
(00:42:23)
In a magnetic system, your goal is not to push together those particles as fast as possible. Your goal is to hold onto them for as long as possible. To do that, we use magnetic fields. So let’s take a step back. What is a magnetic field? In an electromagnet, there are a variety of ways to make a magnetic field. One of the most famous, I think everyone is familiar with, is Earth itself. Earth has what we call the magnetosphere, which is the magnetic protection that’s generated by the core of the Earth. We have a magnetic field around the Earth, and that magnetic field protects us from particles coming from the galaxy, galactic cosmic rays, and solar particles that would come to Earth.
David Kirtley
(00:43:11)
That magnetic field, when you run a compass, you see the magnetic field from the Earth. So we know it’s happening. It’s all over. But how we generate it with electric currents is a little bit different. What we do is that we have a loop of wire, and the simplest way to think about it is literally a round loop. In that loop, you have electrons; you have electrical current that’s running. And when electrical current, this is some of Maxwell’s equations that we discovered in the 1800s, when you have an electrical current in a wire, it generates a magnetic field inside that wire. And so when you look at fusion systems, you always have these big magnetic coils with large amounts of current. We don’t run a little bit of current.
David Kirtley
(00:43:52)
In our systems, we have hundreds of mega amps of current. If you think about your house, you have your breaker box with 200 amps or maybe a 400-amp breaker box, and we run 100 million amps of electrical current. So massive amounts of electrical current to be able to do this. That magnetic field that’s generated inside that magnetic coil has some really special properties, and we take advantage of those properties to do fusion. Some of those properties are not intuitive. So here’s one of my favorites: when you have an electromagnetic field, you have this coil with electricity going around it and you have a magnetic field inside of it, and then you have a test particle, a charged particle, an electron or an ion.
David Kirtley
(00:44:39)
If you imagine to generate this, I have a coil with electrons moving around it. But if I put one in the middle of it, in this magnetic field, some really interesting things happen. That electron or that ion, that charged particle, is what’s called magnetized. And what magnetized means is that it’s trapped on that field line. In fact, even more interesting is that it oscillates around that field line. So the way I think about this is if you think about the Earth’s magnetosphere again, and you think about the charged particles, the aurora, the Northern Lights, is a charged particle trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field going around the Earth’s magnetic field.
David Kirtley
(00:45:18)
In the same way, in fusion, we do the same thing here on Earth, but in a smaller direction where we trap these particles on magnetic fields, and they can go around and stay trapped to that magnetic field line.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:29)
How much of the physics at this scale is understood here? Like, how these systems behave when you attract a magnetic field in this way. Is this fundamentally now an engineering problem, or is there new physics to be discovered about how the system is behaving?
David Kirtley
(00:45:48)
In fusion, the physics we’re using is actually quite old. The fundamental electromagnetic physics is 1800s physics. The fundamental atomic physics is early 1900s. So the fundamental physics of how these work is very well understood. Putting them all together into a power plant, that’s hard. So you can do the math, every introductory grad student does the math on a stellarator and says, “This is all I need to do. I just need to make a magnetic coil in this very complicated shape, and then fusion will happen.” However, doing that in practice is actually quite challenging.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:27)
So maybe you could speak a little bit more. So the stellarator and the tokamak, what’s the difference between those two? They’re both magnetic fusion systems. And then what does Helion do?
David Kirtley
(00:46:38)
The tokamak and the stellarator are both magnetic systems. Their goal is to generate this magnetic field and hold onto the fusion fuel long enough. Like I mentioned, these charged particles are trapped on the magnetic field. In fact, they’re oscillating. We call that a gyro orbit; it’s the radius that they oscillate around this magnetic field. We’ve been talking about atomic physics, where everything is at this nanoscale. But gyro orbits are not. Gyro orbits for these fusion particles are measured in inches. So they’re on a scale that we can see and measure and understand really intuitively.
David Kirtley
(00:47:16)
In a magnetic system, your goal is to simply trap as many of these particles as you can for long enough and heat them so they’re hot enough so that they bang into each other. They collide enough that you’re doing fusion, and you’re doing enough fusion to overcome as fast as you’re losing those particles. And so that’s what happens when you put particles in a magnetic field and you try to hold onto it. The challenge is that’s really hard to hold onto them long enough. These particles are moving around. They’re moving at very high velocity, millions of miles per hour. They’re colliding with each other, and they’re getting knocked off and getting knocked away.
David Kirtley
(00:47:51)
So we’ve talked about inertial fusion, where you try to confine a fusion plasma by crushing it as fast as possible. And magnetic fusion, where you just simply have a magnetic field and your goal is to hold onto it for as long as possible. But there’s another way to do fusion, and in some ways, it’s one of the earliest approaches for fusion that was successful. As scientists and engineers, maybe we’re not too creative with the terminology. We call the technique that Helion uses magneto-inertial fusion because it does a little bit of both.
David Kirtley
(00:48:25)
To understand that, we can actually go back in history a little bit and think about the evolution of some of these approaches to fusion. From our perspective, we look at the technology that we use as built on physics experiments that were very successful in the 1950s. In those systems, the earliest pioneers of fusion said, “I know, we understand the physics. We have to take these gases, heat them to 100 million degrees, and then confine them, push them together so that fusion happens.” So, what is the best way to do that? Some of the earliest programs, we call them theta pinch. And what those programs were, were a linear topology, because we knew how to build these magnets.
David Kirtley
(00:49:08)
It’s called a solenoid, where you take a series of electric coils, you run electrical current through them, that generates a magnetic field. Great, so you have a magnetic field. Now you add your fusion particles. Okay? So you’ve added fusion particles to this solenoid. Here’s the challenge. Those particles, as they’re sitting in that magnetic field in this nice magnet, escape. They leave out the ends because there’s nothing holding them in. Great. So that makes sense. And so that doesn’t work, okay? So then the next approach is to say, well, one branch of fusion said, “Okay, well, to solve that, why don’t we take the solenoid and bend it around? Let’s just make it a big donut. So as they’re escaping, they go around and around in a circle.” Great. That’s a great approach.
David Kirtley
(00:49:49)
One branch of fusion went down that direction, and that became, that evolved into the stellarator and the tokamak. Different ways of taking those solenoids and wrapping them around so that the plasmas go around and around in that magnetic field, and those charged particles are held long enough that fusion happens. But there’s a different way to do it. And so the theta pinch was what was born in the 1950s of, “Take this magnetic field, and oh, they’re trying to escape. Great. Let’s not let them escape. Let’s close the bottle, let’s close the ends.” And so we make the magnetic field much stronger at the ends. This one was called the mirror. And so the idea was that the particles would bounce in between.
David Kirtley
(00:50:30)
And that worked, and they got hotter and hotter and hotter. But guess what? As you would imagine, as this mirror topology, this linear topology, the pressure increased inside, the particle pressure, the particles tried to push back on the magnetic field. They were trying to escape now. They’re getting hotter and hotter. And just as you imagine, hot gas in a balloon tries to get out the ends, you could not hold it tight enough at the ends to keep those particles in. In fact, the problem is the hottest ones were the ones that would escape. So you do a good job of heating it, and they’d all leave out the ends. So then the next iteration said, “Okay, well, why don’t we just not try to hold on to it very long?”
David Kirtley
(00:51:07)
Why don’t we squeeze it?” So rather than just holding it constantly, let’s now crush it. So we built this solenoid, we pinched the ends, and then we crushed it. And what I mean by crushing it is not actually crushing any magnets or changing the topology or moving any parts, but just rapidly increasing the magnetic field. So going from a magnetic field that’s just holding it to now taking all those particles, if you imagine they were streaming around together, and then rapidly increasing the magnetic field so that those particles get closer and closer and closer together. So you increase the density. And now fusion starts to really happen. But they ended up hitting a technological limit.
David Kirtley
(00:51:53)
So this is the part that I look back and I look at the pioneers. In 1958, there was some pioneering work done. And this was in California, what later became Livermore Labs. There was also some work done at other national labs too. These were all federally funded programs to explore this theta pinch topology. Can you just squeeze the plasma down fast enough, hard enough? This was 1958. The transistor was sitting in the laboratory, and they were turning on millions of amps of electrical current. And they were doing it, we haven’t talked about the time scales, but they were doing it in millionths of a second. Microseconds, megahertz speeds. And this was in 1958.
David Kirtley
(00:52:39)
No transistor, no CPUs, and no electrical switches, none of the things that I take for granted every day. And so they were able to show at that time the highest performing fusion systems. They got to temperatures… They didn’t get to 100 million degrees, not quite then, but they got to 50 million degrees. They were outperforming everything else in fusion, but they reached the technical limit where they just could not build it anymore. And so those pioneers went in a different direction, and they started down the laser inertial path, saying, “Okay, well, we can’t do these electromagnetic pinches, but we now have this new thing invented: the laser,” which turns on in nanoseconds. It’s fast. It’s interesting. Let’s go down that path.
David Kirtley
(00:53:25)
And it’s not… You have to fast-forward a couple of decades to researchers who found that with some of these theta pinches when they’re operated in a very specific way, something else happened, something new happened, and that these plasmas, where before they squeezed them very hard, and just like squeezing a tube of toothpaste, they squirted out the ends. Now it didn’t squirt out the ends. It actually pushed back. It stayed confined. It stayed trapped inside that linear topology. Even though the ends were open, the plasma didn’t leave. And so there was a large amount of programs asking, “What is happening here?” This is an accidental discovery in plasma physics that something new is happening. And what we discovered is what we now call the field-reversed configuration.
David Kirtley
(00:54:09)
There are numerous FRC (field-reversed configuration) programs, both at national labs. There are actually a number of private companies now building field-reversed configurations. And they have some really unique properties, but fundamentally, talking about the main difference, I describe the solenoid with magnetic fields throughout the center of that volume, and plasma trapped, going back and forth. But some other things can happen, which is really interesting.
David Kirtley
(00:54:37)
And what they discovered early is if they have field going in one direction, so the plasma, the electrical current is going around the loop and the plasma is going back and forth along this magnetic field line inside that solenoid, inside that theta pinch, but then they change the direction of the magnetic field. And this is what we call field reversal, and this is really the key: that you start with the plasma going in one direction, and then very rapidly, you change the direction. You change the direction and reverse the direction of that field. And something really interesting happens, which is the plasma, this fusion fuel, these charged particles which are trapped on the magnetic field lines that are moving back and forth, you change the direction.
David Kirtley
(00:55:20)
What that means is that you’re trying to take that electrical current and that magnetic field and reverse its direction, flip it, but it can’t flip fast enough. The plasma is sitting there and you can’t move the particles. So what’s really interesting is what happens is that because the particles can’t move, but you’ve now flipped the direction of the magnetic field, you’ve inverted it, something really, really unique happens, which is that the plasma itself reconnects internally. So now what you’re left with is an outside magnetic field, an electrical coil, and inside, the plasma, where before it was moving along, it’s now moving internally.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:06)
Rapidly reversing the magnetic field, plasma self-organizes into a closed field. What? So how…
David Kirtley
(00:56:16)
It sounds wild.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:17)
It’s… Yeah. So first of all, there are a million questions I have. So one of them, what’s “rapidly”? What time scale are we talking about here?
David Kirtley
(00:56:28)
You have to reverse the electrical current faster than a millionth of a degree, which is a very hot gas particle, can move.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:37)
Okay.
David Kirtley
(00:56:37)
And so that means we have to do it on the order of a millionth of a second.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:40)
Wow.
David Kirtley
(00:56:41)
We have to do it in a millionth of a second.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:42)
Wow.
David Kirtley
(00:56:43)
And in practice, this is hard. And we can only do it now because of semiconductor switching. Because we can move things, we can switch things. Like the transistor in every CPU in a computer switches at a gigahertz; that means in a nanosecond, it’s switching in a billionth of a second. And so now, which we didn’t in the 1950s when these theta pinches were invented, but now we have the semiconductors to be able to do that.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:10)
The self-organizing plasma. Can you just speak to that? What the heck is it doing? How do we discover? How do we understand the self-organizing mechanism, the dynamics of the plasma that’s able to contain itself?
David Kirtley
(00:57:23)
So what I like to do is use an analogy here. Once you’ve made it, it’s actually somewhat straightforward to understand. Getting to it is tricky, and how they discovered it the first time is absolutely amazing. But once you’ve made it, it’s a lot more straightforward to understand. So in a magnetic coil, when you have a round electrical coil, you have electrical current flowing in that coil. And if you have a conductor, if you have another metal inside that coil—and this is called Lenz’s Law in one of the Maxwell equations—is that as you have electrons and you have current flowing in that coil, an equal and opposite electrical current is induced in a piece of metal nearby.
David Kirtley
(00:58:11)
This is the same thing that happens in a transformer where you have a primary on a transformer and you have electricity flowing in it, and you have a secondary where electricity flows exactly the opposite direction. We use this every day in our lives. And so in this condition, you have a conductor, an electrical conductor where current can flow, and you have an electrical current flowing on the outside, electrical current flows on the inside. And in that case, now you… I’ve described two pieces of metal. Now let’s go one step further, and that inner conductor is not a piece of metal anymore. It’s one of these high-temperature gases, this plasma, these charged particles. So now you have current, electrical current flowing in the plasma.
David Kirtley
(00:58:54)
This is really, really interesting. We talked about these charges moving back and forth. Well, moving electrical charges is current. So in every plasma condition we’ve talked about—the tokamak, the theta pinch, the stellarator—there’s electrical current flowing in the plasma. But in the field-reversed configuration, you have a lot of electrical current flowing in the plasma, massive amounts of it. And that’s the key. So you have the center core where electrical current is flowing in this transformer, if you want to think about it, primary and secondary. And here’s the craziest part of it: this electrical current… Well, how did I describe a magnet? An electromagnet is a loop that has electrical current flowing in it that generates a magnetic field.
David Kirtley
(00:59:37)
And for a theta pinch, and for a mirror, and for a tokamak, in that magnetic field, the plasma gets trapped. But in an FRC, this electrical current is the plasma. And that plasma then generates its own magnetic field, and it’s then trapped in its own magnetic field.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:59)
That’s fascinating.
David Kirtley
(01:00:00)
And that’s the key. And so in your tokamak, in your donut, in your funky donut, your stellarator— you make the magnets and you trap your plasma in it. In an FRC, you make the plasma which makes the magnets, and it traps itself. And the craziest part of this, in my mind, is that we actually see this in nature all the time. If you look at the sun, we see solar flares. And in a solar flare, we’ve all seen the pictures of the photosphere of the sun and this large arc of plasma coming out. That plasma has electrical current flowing in it, and then we see this solar flare rip off of the sun.
David Kirtley
(01:00:41)
And that solar flare then can flow throughout and continue into the solar system, and for a little while anyway, it makes something called a plasmoid. That plasmoid is, in fact, electrical current flowing in the plasma, generating a magnetic field and holding it for longer than it would otherwise. And so we’ve observed these for 100 years, and we’ve known about these plasmoids for a long time, and there are researchers that have tried intentionally to make them. But fundamentally, that’s what we do every day: we make one of these self-organized closed-field plasmas.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:15)
In a more controlled way at this rapid rate of one-millionth of a second, and being able to make sure it’s reliable, stable, and all that kind of stuff. So, by the way, how do you keep the thing stable?
David Kirtley
(01:01:26)
And there’s the hard part, because I just described a solar flare. But, yes, we’ve seen the pictures of them, but we’ve also watched them, and they appear. They fly away from the sun and then they go away, and that’s not what we want in fusion, right? We want to be able to control this. And so that’s the hard part of the job. And so that’s what we’ve spent the last number of years learning how to do, ourselves and others, on these pulsed, closed-field FRC systems.
David Kirtley
(01:01:53)
Let’s first talk about how to make them, and then we’ll talk about how to make them stable, because they’re two different things and we spend a lot of time on both. So, we talked about timescales. You have to reverse the field. You have to change the electrical current in a millionth of a second. And so how do you do that? So I’ve described this system as you have a series of magnets. You have a magnetic field on the outside, and then on the inside of this, you have this donut, this FRC that has its own electrical current. And we didn’t talk about this yet, but it’s generated a magnetic field and that magnetic field has pressure, and this is the other thing that’s really interesting. So we talked about how this theta pinch compresses a magnetic field.
David Kirtley
(01:02:34)
It applies a pressure on the outside. But the plasma itself has a pressure on the inside, and it has both a particle pressure, literally the particles bouncing. Think about hot gas in a balloon, the particles expanding, the ideal gas law expanding and contracting inside a balloon. But they also have a magnetic pressure. They have the electromagnetism pushing back, and so I like to think about this as the motor in a Tesla. In your electric car, you have an electric motor, and what that motor has is a series of windings. Those windings, you flow electrical current, in this case, from a battery. Hit the gas, electricity flows from the battery into the motor, into those windings, and it generates an electromagnetic force, a Lorentz force is what it’s technically called.
David Kirtley
(01:03:20)
This electromagnetic force induces an electrical current on the armature, on the shaft. And this is getting into the details, but in the armature of an electrical motor, that actually is what spins. And so the outside of a motor doesn’t spin. You flow electrical current through it, and the inside does spin. That electromagnetic force is what is spinning that armature. In our case, we’re inducing an electrical force in that electromagnet, and that’s putting an electrical current, just like in the armature, into that plasma. And we can use that force to do interesting things. So that electromagnetic force can compress the fusion plasma. It can expand the fusion plasma. But here’s the problem: it’s unstable.
David Kirtley
(01:04:02)
And so this is something you learn very early in your graduate work as a student in fusion, is you learn about plasmas that are called high beta plasmas.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:13)
So I keep seeing this plasma beta thing everywhere. What is this ratio of plasma field energy to confining magnetic field energy? Please explain.
David Kirtley
(01:04:23)
Plasma beta is the ratio of the magnetic pressure to the particle pressure. And so what that fundamentally means is I talked about how you have a magnetic field, and in that magnetic field, plasma is trapped in, on that magnetic field. But it’s not very well trapped. It can escape. It can leave either down the ends, it can freely travel, or it can also travel across the magnetic field. And so we have a term called plasma beta which gives us an understanding of how well trapped that plasma is. So, as you apply a magnetic pressure, a magnetic field to this plasma, it pushes back, and does it push back a little or does it push back a lot? And for a field-reversed configuration in one of our plasmas, beta is very close to one.
David Kirtley
(01:05:09)
In fact, usually by definition, one at any point in the system, which means that every time I apply a magnetic force on this donut to compress it, the plasma particles on the inside push back.
David Kirtley
(01:05:23)
And what’s really interesting is you have an equation for magnetic pressure, which is B squared over two mu naught. The magnetic field squared is the external magnetic pressure. Any magnetic field anywhere generates this pressure. But the plasma particles themselves also have a pressure. This is the ideal gas law, and we use the definition NKT, density, Boltzmann constant, and temperature for pressure. And in high beta, they’re the same. B squared over two mu naught is NKT. So for a known magnetic field, I know what the density and the temperature of the plasma is. And just to circle back to it, when we talked about fusion, we talked about it had to be hot enough and it had to be dense enough. And that’s N and that’s T.
David Kirtley
(01:06:09)
And so now I have a very clear equation between magnetic field and density and temperature of the fusion fuel, and that’s really critical. All plasmas have some… All fusion plasmas have some beta, some number. The FRC has one of the highest betas, beta equal one. However, what you also learn in school when you learn about beta the first time, is you learn that high beta plasmas are typically unstable. And so the good way to think about this is a tokamak is a accelerator are stable, because those plasmas that are going around in the donut, there’s a force on that donut. But that plasma donut is very well held by all those magnetic fields, by all those magnetic coils. If it tried to move, it would be confined by that magnetic coil. But in an FRC, it’s unconfined.
David Kirtley
(01:06:59)
So the plasma is confined, but the whole topology can do something what is called tilt, is that this whole plasma donut, because it’s under pressure, can just turn over. The way I think about this is think about the a motor’s a good example. An armature in the center of your motor, you have a spinning armature. You have this spinning magnet on the inside, and it is held by the main axis of the magnet. It can’t go anywhere. We don’t have that axis. We don’t have any mechanical things inside these fusion systems. They’re 100 million degrees. You can’t put any mechanical things inside them, and so we have nothing to hold onto it, and so it’s unstable.
David Kirtley
(01:07:41)
So when you learn about the FRC, that’s the first thing you learn, and it took us a number of years to learn about a parameter of how to make them stable. And that’s pretty fundamental, but most people who’ve heard of an FRC haven’t understood this really key fact. And so we have a parameter we call S star over E. And we’re getting really into the physics weeds here, but…
Lex Fridman
(01:08:04)
Let’s go.
David Kirtley
(01:08:05)
But it’s really important, and the good analogy here is a top. Literally a top, a spinning top, and so you have a top spinning on your desk. You know that it’ll spin for a little while and then it will fall over. It is unstable. However, if you spin it fast enough, if you take a top and you spin it fast enough, put enough angular momentum, enough angular inertia into that system, it’ll stay upright even though it wants to just fall over, even though it’s unstable. And we do the same thing in an FRC, is if you can drive it fast enough, if you can add enough kinetic energy and inertia to the particles, it will stay stable. However, you can do another really key thing. We are not limited now to having a very skinny top.
David Kirtley
(01:08:51)
We can actually make it much bigger, so the good analogy here is if you have a coin and you know you’re spinning that coin, if you spin it faster and faster, it’ll stay spinning longer. However, eventually it’ll slow down and fall over, but if you had a roll of duct tape, if you had something thicker and heavier and longer, and it’s spinning around that same axis, it’ll stay spinning even longer both because of the inertia and because of the geometry. And so we have this parameter called S star over E. S star is the hybrid kinetic parameter which tells you how stable it is from that top point of view, and the E, which is the elongation of how long it is.
David Kirtley
(01:09:31)
And so, maybe fortuitously, thank you nature gave us a win here, which is that how we make these in these long solenoids is naturally very, very long. And so we can build these with very long lengths, and if we can drive them fast enough and hard enough and drive the ions to move at very high velocities, we can stabilize against those instabilities and hold them stable. And so we now know we can design with a given S star over E parameter, we can design these for very long lives. The theory of the systems we make say that they should last for a few microseconds at most. Us and others in the field have been able to make them last for thousands of microseconds, thousands of times what the basic criteria would tell you.
David Kirtley
(01:10:21)
And so we know now how to do this, and we just design them with this built into them.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:26)
Can you explain a little bit more of the S star over E? Are you given that, or is that an emergent thing? So like at which stage… Is that the result or the- the requirement?
David Kirtley
(01:10:39)
It’s a great question. So it is a requirement of the system, is that you must design it with this parameter in mind.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:47)
Got it.
David Kirtley
(01:10:48)
The hard part is you have to design it with S star over E being satisfied the whole time.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:54)
Right.
David Kirtley
(01:10:54)
And here’s the extra trick here. S star over E is also a measure of temperature.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:02)
Oh boy.
David Kirtley
(01:11:02)
And, and, yup, this, it all comes back to temperature. The hotter you make them is the same thing, temperature as kinetic energy, is the faster you’re spinning. So if you take your top and you spin it faster, it’s more stable. But you’ve got to make it hot. And so here’s the trick: How do you make something hot that’s starting cold? And it has to be hot by definition. And so that’s part of the challenge of what we do day-to-day, is getting to these hot plasmas. And where other people have tried to make FRCs and not been very successful is because they couldn’t get it hot enough fast enough. It fell over, it tilted, before it got hot. And so we spend a lot of our electrical engineering…
David Kirtley
(01:11:45)
In some ways, Helion is more of an electrical engineering company than a fusion company some days, focusing on how to make the electronics fast enough to be able to get it hot enough soon enough that you can keep it stable the whole time.

Extreme temperatures

Lex Fridman
(01:12:00)
So you’re trying to reach 100 million degrees. How do you get to that temperature fast? And by the way, what can you say to help somebody like me understand what 100 million degrees is like? It seems insane. What does that world look like? I guess just everything is moving really fast. Like you said, you can’t put anything mechanical in there.
David Kirtley
(01:12:21)
Yeah, so a couple of key things happened. When gas is that hot, there’s… We talk about the states of matter. You have solids, where ice, it’s cold. The atoms are now bound in a lattice structure together. They’re held together. And then liquid, you’ve broken a lot of that lattice structure. They can move around. They have some kinetic energy, but they’re still pretty contained, they stay in the bowl. Keep heating it, now you’re in gas. And now these particles are free to move around. They’re moving around, they’re bouncing off of each other all the time, and you can keep heating it from there, and that’s where we talk about some more phases of matter. We can add a little bit more physics here. We talk about rarefied gasses.
David Kirtley
(01:13:02)
So when we think about most gasses that humans interact with, they act like a fluid. And what I mean by that is that they’re colliding with each other so often that the particles at any one place, here the air is roughly the same temperature as the air here. That these particles are bouncing off of each other as if you’ve put a really hot one right here, it would then cool enough that all the air is roughly on the same temperature. But you can be what is called rarefied, and this is like space. This is where now you have particles moving around, but they don’t collide with each other very often.
David Kirtley
(01:13:34)
And so you can have one very, very high energy particle and very cold energy particle, and they may not even touch each other, but maybe occasionally they bang into each other, they collide, and then they transfer energy. And that’s what we call rarefied. And then you can go even hotter than that, and that’s where now the actual atomic states, which has the nucleus, which is a proton and a neutron, and an electron gets so hot, that electron gets energized and then escapes, leaves the system. And now they’re charged. You have a positive nucleus and a negative electron floating out, and that happens on the order of 10,000 degrees. So way hotter than what we’re used to. But now, we’re going to go hotter. We’re going to take this plasma and go even hotter. What does that mean?
David Kirtley
(01:14:14)
At that point, a lot of the way we think about temperature doesn’t really apply. The idea that you have these random motion of particles, because now they’re all individual particles moving at very high velocities. So there really is a measurement of its velocity. It’s really a measurement of how fast is that particle moving. And that’s how I really think about temperature when you get to that 100,000,000 degrees. And so it does more complex things. If you have this high energy particle, this is why we like fusion. It’s moving at a high velocity and there’s another one moving at high velocity. They will come together, they will collide, and they will fuse.
David Kirtley
(01:14:54)
But other things will happen. You don’t want to touch that high velocity particle with any kind of material, because it will collide with that material, damage that material, and usually blow off some chunks of that material. So we don’t do that. We keep those charged particles in a magnetic field. So they just bounce around and they don’t ever touch anything. And that’s really important. And so it’s less thinking about it from the way we normally think about hot and cold, and more thinking about it from a velocity point of view.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:20)
So what we should be imagining is extremely fast moving, what is it? 1,000,000 miles per hour? Is that accurate?
David Kirtley
(01:15:29)
That’s the right kind of order for these systems.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:32)
Crazy. And so you’re looking for them to collide. Well, first of all, to get back, is there some interesting insights, tricks, anything you could say to the complexity of the problem of getting it to that high temperature quickly?
David Kirtley
(01:15:46)
So, if temperature is velocity, that means they’re moving quickly over a given amount of space. Speed is distance divided by time. And so if you have a machine of a certain size and it’s moving very fast, that tells you the time that that particle is moving from place to place in that machine. And, in fact, if it’s a million miles per hour, these are on the order of 100 kilometers per second, which you can flip that around and you can say you’re moving at meters per microsecond.
David Kirtley
(01:16:19)
So feet per millionth of a second. That fundamentally tells you, and we’ve known this, as soon as you say, “I want to do fusion,” you know you need to react to the universe in microseconds and be able to understand the system at that speed. If you get it hotter, it goes even faster, and you have to go faster. So we look at those, and that’s how we think about the systems. We measure everything in microseconds, not in seconds. So when you do fusion, it’s pretty wild. It’s literally a flash. Fusion happens. And it’s over. You start it, you do a lot of fusion, you recover energy from it, and then you turn it off before the human eye can really respond.

Fusion control and simulation

Lex Fridman
(01:17:00)
And there’s a computer managing all this. How do you even program these kinds of systems to do the switching? Is there some innovation required there?
David Kirtley
(01:17:09)
I’m continuously amazed by what the pioneers in fusion were able to do before the computer existed, because they had to control things at this scale. But maybe it was pretty hard, and why we’ve been able to take what they did and build on it, is because now we use modern gigahertz-scale computing to be able to do this. Even when I started my career, we talked about megahertz processors. Megahertz is microseconds. That’s great. You’re kind of at the border of fast enough, but you can’t do computation at that speed if all it can do is respond in one microsecond. But now gigahertz means I can do a thousand operations in that one microsecond, so I can do more useful things. So we use mostly…
David Kirtley
(01:17:55)
This is way too fast for any human to respond to, so we use what’s called programmable logic. We program in sequences to the fusion system to be able to do this reversal. We pre-program it and then we run a sequence, and then fusion happens. In this sequence programming language, we use a variety of them. Some of the fusion codes are actually written in Fortran still.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:17)
Nice.
David Kirtley
(01:18:18)
A lot is now, more and more, run in Python. So we do a lot of Python. We do some Java, and because of the speed of this, it’s a lot of assembly language programming. So we go right to the assembly level of the programmable logic FPGAs and we program those. To be able to run one of these systems, we typically have a series of electrical switches that turn on this electrical current. Those are controlled via fiber optic because the wires are just too slow. Fiber optic can respond, I can send photons at the speed of light. So those fiber optics can respond in nanoseconds. Then I trigger those fiber optics with programmable logic that we programmed in the hardware assembly language.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:00)
As a small tangent, let me do a call to action out there. I’m still looking for the best Fortran programmer in the world if people want to talk to them, because so many of the essential systems the world runs on are still programmed in Fortran. I think it’s a fascinating programming language. COBOL too, but Fortran even more so. It’s one of the great computational numerical programming languages. Anyway, in terms of the sensors that are giving you some kind of information about the system, in terms of the diagnostics, what kind of, at this time scale, …what can you collect about the system such that you can respond at a similar time scale?
David Kirtley
(01:19:49)
So I’m also calling out for Fortran programmers, for different reasons.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:53)
Yes, great.
David Kirtley
(01:19:55)
The diagnostic systems are really one of the keys to how we do this effectively, because you need to be able to tell the system, “We’re going to trigger electrical current, and we’re going to do it in a microsecond, and we need to know if it’s working right.” In one of these FRC or these pulsed magnetic systems, you won’t have just one electrical switch. I’ve mentioned 100 mega amps, 100 million amps of electrical current. Even the big transistors we use can only run at 30,000 amps, so you’ll end up with tens of thousands. In fact, the systems we build now, tens of thousands of parallel electrical switches all operating in harmony together. So you need to be able to build a system, and this is what we spend a lot of time with.
David Kirtley
(01:20:38)
And I made the joke that in a lot of ways, Helion is an electrical engineering company. To be able to both program, control, and then detect how they’re operating, and do it all very fast. In a typical sequence, we will pre-program. The operators will pre-program a sequence usually fed from a numerical simulation of expecting how the fusion system will perform. We start with a set of calculations. We then pre-program all of these electrical switches to a certain sequence to be able to inject the fuel, reverse it, and then compress it up to fusion conditions. Then we trigger that, and then let it go, and measure fusion happening.
David Kirtley
(01:21:22)
But during that process, we have to be real-time recording and measuring all of the semiconductors and all of the switching in the system. I’m not going to talk about measuring fusion diagnostics. That’s a whole other thing, which we can talk about. This is just on the electrical control side. Some of the pioneering things we’ve been able to do is that real-time you’re monitoring all of these switches. You’re watching who is triggering correctly, who is not triggering correctly. And if systems aren’t working, you’re shutting this down because you want to make sure that all the sequences are operating correctly.
David Kirtley
(01:21:56)
Some of the key diagnostics, it’s actually pretty amazing that even early in my career, we didn’t have a lot of fiber optics built into the system. Now it’s absolutely essential. So every one of these electrical switches has fiber optic signals going into it and fiber optic signals coming out, understanding how it’s actually operating. And real-time, all of these systems are being monitored by more fiber optics. We call these Rogowski coils, but they’re electromagnetic coils that are powered by the electrical current themselves. So as the switches are conducting, they broadcast an optical signal that says, “Yes, I’m electrically conducting,” fiber optics that come back to a central repository where we detect those signals.
David Kirtley
(01:22:40)
So real-time, we’re monitoring all of this so that we know that these systems are behaving and operating at their optimal performance.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:48)
What’s the role of numerical simulation in all of this? I guess, ahead of time, how much numerical simulation are you doing to understand how the system is going to behave, how the different parameters all come together? The electrical system and how that all maps to the fusion that’s actually generated?
David Kirtley
(01:23:12)
Yeah. The operation of a fusion system is pretty fascinating because all of this happens on a time scale where human operators cannot be involved.
David Kirtley
(01:23:19)
…cannot really be involved. So you have to have pre-programmed the majority, we call them shots. You’re going to do a shot, and when you’re operating them repetitively and you’re running long periods of time, you still have all computers doing both the triggering and the measuring of how they’re performing, real-time the whole time. So how this typically works, at least in our systems, is that we will design a system with a combination of numerical simulation tools that we’ve developed based off of decades and decades of amazing government programs. National programs developed these numerical codes. We use a code called an MHD, magnetohydrodynamic code.
David Kirtley
(01:24:07)
And that’s for people, for the engineers out there who are used to CFD, computational fluid dynamics. This is very similar where you take the same sets of equations actually and add electromagnetic equations on top of those. And so you get magnetohydrodynamic.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:23)
Are you simulating at the level of a particle? Is there some quantum mechanical aspects to this also? How low does it go?
David Kirtley
(01:24:30)
We have multiple codes at different levels, because one of the main computational challenges is… amazingly, even given all that we have been building for fusion systems, computers are still not fast enough to simulate everything. And so, we have a number of codes that we use. One we call fluid codes, where you treat the ions, the electrons, all these fusion particles. You treat them as fluids, as gases, ideal gas law, with electromagnetic forces. In those, we can simulate not just the fusion fuel, which is important, but all of the electrical circuitry. We talked about capacitors, and magnetic coils and the electrical current and the switches. Well, we actually simulate the full thing, starting literally with a SPICE model.
David Kirtley
(01:25:21)
More of that electrical engineering. We start with the SPICE model and use that to drive the plasma physics model, and that’s one level of simulation. We use that to do design work, and then also to try to understand how we think the machine will run. But then we go one level deeper and we start thinking about particles, and we think about the ions, and we treat the ions as particles, and we look at the ion behavior. For that one, the computational resources are several orders of magnitude larger. Luckily, a lot of the work in GPUs, the AI data center work is directly applicable to those simulations. It’s been able to speed up our work, which is pretty fascinating. That’s a whole another tangent we can go down.
David Kirtley
(01:26:00)
Those hybrid codes we call them, particle and cell codes now treat the ions as particles, and that lets us measure and simulate the behavior. I mentioned the stability criteria, S star over E, the top behavior. That behavior, we now need these more advanced codes to be able to simulate, and those are more modern. We’ve only been able to apply those in practice for the last few years, actually, which is pretty fascinating that the old stability rules were built off of testing, empirical tests, where now we can simulate that, and we know why they work and how they work and we can do some predictions on them. And so that’s really fascinating that we’ve been able to push those boundaries.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:40)
And what are the different variables you’re playing with? Are you still playing with topology? What are the different variables in play here?
David Kirtley
(01:26:47)
Each of the different simulations we analyze and use to design different parts of the machine. So, at the MHD level where we have the SPICE, where we actually have the circuit model, now our design team uses this to design the circuitry, where we’re designing which capacitor to use, which switch to use, how many cables to use, literally to that level, how big of a cable to use. So as we’re doing power plant designs right now, those are the tools we’re using today, every day, the team is using. Then you can go one level deeper and say, “Okay, let’s use these more advanced computational tools about stability,” to say, “Okay, great, but I now know the circuitry, but let’s look at the magnetic field topology.”
David Kirtley
(01:27:30)
How do I design the magnet, the shape of the magnet exactly, the timing of the magnet exactly? I have to trigger one magnet and the next magnet next to it and the next magnet next to it. How do I have that shape and that design?” And so that’s where you’re using those more advanced tools. Now, unfortunately, those are still too slow. And so those simulations may take a day or two to run. And so an operator right now does a lot of simulations ahead of time, then collects data through their operations of the machines, making these field-reversed configurations, going through parameter sweeps. And then the simulation team then goes back and looks at that data and compares it with simulations.
David Kirtley
(01:28:12)
I’m really excited about some of the things we’re seeing in artificial intelligence and reinforced learning to be able to speed up that process. So we’re watching and starting to work on that now, of can we now, rather than using it where we use it today, where we do a simulation to design a machine or a test, run the test, and then over the next couple of days compare the testing with the simulation and use that to inform what we’re going to run for the next set of tests. But in fact do it more real time, where an operator can pull up what the AI or what the machine learning would have predicted it should have done. And then use that to understand what’s happening in the actual programs, in the actual generators themselves.

Electricity from fusion

Lex Fridman
(01:28:54)
All right. So there’s a million questions there. So first of all, how much understanding do we have about how many collisions happen? Can we go to the fusion? How many collisions are there and how does that map to the electricity? And maybe can you just even speak to the directly mapping to the electricity, which is one of the differences between this approach and the tokamak approach?
David Kirtley
(01:29:20)
So how much fusion do you get out from these systems? And that’s really the key question. So we already talked about beta, that B squared, the magnetic pressure is equal to NKT, N being the density, T being temperature. And then we talked about fusion, where your goal for fusion is to get particles hot, high temperature, get enough of them together, density. And then you want to get them together long enough. We call that tau. So N, T, and tau, long enough that fusion happens and a lot of fusion happens, more than any of the loss rates that are happening, NTT. And in beta with B squared, you know already two of those parameters, NNT, are equal. And so that tells you right away the goal is to maximize magnetic field, absolutely maximize magnetic field.
David Kirtley
(01:30:10)
And most folks in magnetic fusion, whether it’s a tokamak or it’s Theta Pinch or it’s an FRC, are attempting to do that, maximize the magnetic field. So we’re all pushing to that. What’s really nice in pulsed systems is that we know how to do that. In fact, in a pulsed system, researchers in pulsed magnetic fields have demonstrated over 100 tesla magnetic fields in pulsed magnets. That’s much higher than you can get in a steady magnet, or what’s been demonstrated so far.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:40)
Just a clarification question. So maximizing magnetic field is about the N and the T, the beta? So we’re not talking about tau yet.
David Kirtley
(01:30:49)
Not yet, but we need to, because that’s really important.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:52)
Okay.
David Kirtley
(01:30:53)
We can even talk a little bit further about how fusion scales. In fusion, the hotter you get the fuel, the more fusion you get. And we know that by increasing the magnetic field, B squared as NT, you increase density and temperature together. More density, more temperature is more fusion, plus more temperature is even more fusion. And so what we see is that in these types of systems, a scaling very clearly of magnetic field to the 3.75 power, or even in a lot of demonstrations, 3.77. That specific scaling.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:29)
Wow.
David Kirtley
(01:31:29)
That’s a very strong scaling of fusion power output and fusion reactions. And so that tells you you want to go to a maximum magnetic field as you can. Pulsed systems are really powerful. Pulsed systems have showed when you do pulsed magnetic fields compared to a steady magnetic field, researchers have shown over 100 Tesla magnetic fields, where in a steady system, people have showed in the 20, maybe high 20 Tesla systems. And if it’s B to the 3.77 power, already you can see massive fusion power outputs by doing a pulsed system.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:02)
Okay, got it. So we’re maximizing the magnetic field. So that’s a number going up, super up. How do you get the duration, the tau?
David Kirtley
(01:32:11)
But then I said pulsed.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:12)
Oh, I see.
David Kirtley
(01:32:12)
And pulsed already implies shorter tau.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:15)
Yes.
David Kirtley
(01:32:15)
And so that is in the fusion field, the name of the game. Folks will have inertial fusion, with a nanosecond tau. Very short, but then very high pressure. They don’t have magnetic fields, but very high pressure. And then in stellarators and tokamaks, your goal is very long tau, but you’ll have much lower density, and you can’t really go too much in temperature, but they’ll have much lower density. And so where we live in the pulsed magnetic or the magneto-inertial fusion is in the middle, in extremely high magnetic fields, increasing pressure as much as you can, and then keeping them around long enough. And so that gets to the tau. That gets to that energy confinement lifetime, and also, it gets to stability.
David Kirtley
(01:33:03)
And so this is the thing that this field-reversed configuration has shown that we can build. These plasmas can last for hundreds or thousands of times the basic theory has shown that now you can have long enough lifetimes. So what that means is in a practical fusion system, there are lifetimes of these high beta pulse systems between 100 microseconds and a few milliseconds, thousandths of a second. And you hold onto it for a few thousandths of a second. You do fusion, and then you exhaust it. And so the whole process in this is we start with a magnetic field that fills the full chamber. You then inject fusion fuel. You ionize it. Superheating it now to a nice, cold one million degrees. But hot enough that you have charged particles.
David Kirtley
(01:33:57)
You have plasmas. You can then start increasing the magnetic field. You form a field-reversed configuration, and then rapidly increase the magnetic field further. Increasing from one to five to 10, 20, to even higher magnetic fields. And as you do that, the plasma heats. You compress it, increasing the field and pressure. Fusion is now happening. New charged particles are being born inside this system with a tremendous amount of heat and energy, but in charged particles. And this is where the beta really works to your advantage, is that just like magnetic pressure on the outside, magnetic pressure, NKT, compresses the fuel, increasing pressure and temperature. When the pressure and temperature of the plasma increase, NKT increases.
David Kirtley
(01:34:55)
It pushes back on the magnetic field, increasing the magnetic field on the outside of the plasma, and what that does is magnetic field is electromagnetic current, and current running in a wire. And what that does is push current back in the wire. And so the plasma itself now pushes back on the magnetic field, pushing electrical current out of the system and recharging the capacitors where we started this whole process.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:21)
All in a self-organizing way. So I think it’s good to clarify how fusion usually generates energy, where this intermediate step of heating up water, then the steam is the thing that leads to electricity. And then, of course, the FRC method that you use leads directly to electricity. I was wondering if you could describe the difference between those two.
David Kirtley
(01:35:44)
Yeah, I like the analogy of the match and the campfire, and I hear that a lot in fusion. Where a lot of what steady fusion, think a stellarator or a Tokamak, is attempting to do is take a little bit of fuel, that match, and then add heat to ignite that match, and then put it with enough fuel and in the right conditions and hold onto it for a long time that it grows into a campfire. Even if they do a good job, a bonfire.
David Kirtley
(01:36:15)
It’s creating a tremendous amount of energy in that steady system. Burning fuel in the same place, generating some ash, generating a lot of heat in that reaction. And in a traditional Tokamak or a stellarator, that’s a lot of what you’re doing, is you’re holding onto the heat as much as possible to keep that reaction going. And the optimal fuel is called deuterium and tritium, where you have deuterium, which is a heavy isotope of hydrogen where you have an extra neutron, and tritium is a very rare form of hydrogen that’s an unstable form. It’s so rare it’s hard to get.
David Kirtley
(01:36:53)
Where it has two neutrons and a proton, and when you fuse those together at very high temperatures, at very high densities or high enough densities and very high temperatures, they make helium, which is a charged particle, which stays inside the campfire, inside the Tokamak, continuing to heat it and stoke the flames, and it makes a neutron which leaves the system because it’s uncharged. It has no charge, and in that system, it’s actually ideal. It’s really great because in a campfire, you have this reaction going and you want to get the energy out of it. You want to use it, and you don’t want to just burn up all the fuel and do nothing. That’s not really valuable. What’s really valuable is to stand next to the campfire and get the heat, get what comes off of it.
David Kirtley
(01:37:38)
And then use that in a traditional fusion system to boil water, to heat the water, and then at 30, 35% efficiency, then convert that through a steam turbine into a cooling tower, and cool off the fuel and extract electricity.
David Kirtley
(01:37:53)
And we know steam turbines. Coal plants do this. Nuclear fission reactors do this. And so we know how to do that, and that’s the traditional way of doing it. But I think there are other ways to do it with a pulsed magnetic system. There’s one more thing you get to do, because you have this high beta where there’s an electric field and an electromagnetic force that’s now compressing the fusion fuel. It’s increasing in temperature. It’s getting hotter. It’s increasing in temperature. Density fusion is happening. New fusion particles are being born, and those particles are not just stoking the flame. They’re not just holding on to the campfire like in the Tokamak, but they’re doing another thing which is really powerful, which is they’re pushing back on the magnetic field.
David Kirtley
(01:38:40)
They’re applying a pressure. That pressure induces a current. We can extract that electrical current. But it takes you into another direction, so your analogy of the campfire now breaks down, because now the campfire is expanding. It’s pushing back on something, and so now it’s the analogy of the piston engine… …As you move from the match, the campfire, to now pistons. And so in a piston engine, you use the motion of the piston, the pressure on it, and the motion of it to do something useful. And in a piston engine, it’s to turn a crankshaft and run wheels, or maybe even a piston engine to turn a crankshaft and run a generator and make electricity. And in fact, you can do it pretty high efficiency.
David Kirtley
(01:39:24)
…and a generator using that method, using the expansion of that piston. What we do is use the expansion of the magnetic field to extract that electricity, and we believe you can do it with much, much higher efficiencies. In fact, there’s been theoretical papers that show not 30% to 35% efficiency, like a steam turbine can do, but 80% efficiency, 85% efficiency, extracting much more of the energy of the fuel in that process.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:52)
Can you actually just take a tiny tangent… …On the word “efficiency” here? So, you said 30%, so it’s inefficient. Is that efficiency measure how much of the energy is actually converted to electricity?
David Kirtley
(01:40:06)
That measure is how much of the thermal energy that gets outside of the system is then converted into electricity, which is the thing we care about. We’re not in this to make fusion. We’re in this to make electricity. And we’re using fusion to make electricity. So from my point of view, that should be the focus: how do we get to that? So that’s the efficiency of that thermal energy that makes it out to electricity. What it is not a measure of is how much energy you put into the system and what happens to that. In terms of, you started this campfire with a blowtorch, what about all that blowtorch energy? What are you getting for that?
David Kirtley
(01:40:42)
And so I think that’s something that high beta is one more side benefit that it turns out is actually maybe the tail that wags the dog. Not only do you, at high efficiency, get out any of the new fusion energy, which is great, because that’s what you want: make electricity from fusion, but you also get to recover all of that magnetic energy you put back into it.
David Kirtley
(01:41:02)
And that’s the really powerful one, and that’s something that folks have demonstrated: over 95% efficiency, that you can put electricity into fusion and then get that electricity back out at 95% efficiency, plus some very high efficiency, maybe 80%, maybe higher, of all the fusion product electricity too. So now you’re just making a tremendous amount of electricity in one of these systems, and that has all kinds of performance and engineering benefits that are really powerful, but it also pushes you to other fuels. So we talked about how deuterium and tritium fuels make this neutron…
David Kirtley
(01:41:38)
…which leaves the system to boil water to run steam turbines, but it doesn’t push back on the magnetic field. So in one of these high beta systems, it’s actually not a great fuel at all. So the other fuels that are out there are even more interesting, and one of the candidate fuels that’s really interesting is called deuterium and helium-3. And we talked about deuterium, heavy, heavy hydrogen. Well, helium-3’s nucleus is also called a helion. That’s why we named the company that.
David Kirtley
(01:42:05)
It is light helium, which is… In normal helium, which is what you find in a balloon, there are two protons, two neutrons. It’s very stable and found commonly. Helium-3 is also stable, but it’s not found commonly. Fortunately, it’s lightweight, so it leaves. It literally leaves the atmosphere and goes into space, so we don’t have a lot of it here on Earth, and so you have to make it, or you have to go into space. There’s a whole other thing about where do you get it? Do you get it from the moon? Jupiter, it turns out, has massive amounts of helium-3. So when you take deuterium and helium-3 and you fuse those together, you also get that helium particle, that alpha particle, as we call it in fusion.
David Kirtley
(01:42:50)
But instead of the neutron, you get a proton, and that proton is a charged particle. It’s a hydrogen nucleus. That proton is now trapped in the magnetic field, pushes back, and you can extract that electricity. Now, there are some prices to be paid for this helium-3 fuel, but for a high-beta system like a pulsed magnetic fusion system, that’s really the ideal fuel.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:14)
When you say “prices,” what is the… Is there like technical costs, or what are the prices? What shape do the prices take?
David Kirtley
(01:43:22)
All kinds of shapes: physics, engineering, technical, and business costs.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:28)
Okay.
David Kirtley
(01:43:28)
And so, let’s dive in. So, yeah, we talked about how helium-3 is… From the fusion physics point of view, we talked about 100 million degrees. That’s the temperature that deuterium and tritium fusion works really well. And that’s the temperature that traditional fusion folks have really focused on getting to. That’s the threshold. When you get to 100 million degrees, you’re at the operating point of fusion, and you know it works, colloquially anyway. Helium-3 requires higher temperatures. That’s not enough. Yes, fusion happens for deuterium and helium-3 at 100 million degrees, but it’s not its optimal temperature. And in fact, in a high-beta system, the optimal temperature is higher, 200, even sometimes 300 million degrees. So you have to get to even higher temperatures.
David Kirtley
(01:44:16)
Temperature’s hard, and so you have to push to even higher temperatures than you had before. And so that’s one of the downsides. The other downside can be as you get to those higher temperatures, we talked about B squared is NT. B squared is density times temperature. Well, for a given magnetic field, density and temperature are now inverse. So as I increase temperature, density decreases. And so now you have an issue of you may have fewer particles to do fusion, which means your fusion system has to get bigger than it was before.
David Kirtley
(01:44:52)
So for the same reaction rates, a helium-3 system compared to deuterium-tritium has to operate at a higher temperature and be bigger. However, the flip side is, if you can now recover energy at three times the energy efficiency, at 80-some percent versus 30-some percent, and recover all your input energy, then now it’s actually about the same size. Because it’s the same electricity output. Not energy; it’s electricity we’re worried about. Electricity output, now you can actually build systems of similar size and similar energy. Only they’re now at this much higher efficiency.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:31)
Got it. Can you say more about size? What are we talking about here? Why is size an important constraint?
David Kirtley
(01:45:37)
And that gets to one of the other prices. That gets to money. So—
Lex Fridman
(01:45:40)
Yeah
David Kirtley
(01:45:40)
Our goal is we want to build clean, low-cost electricity and get it out in the world, but that means it needs to be low cost. That’s fundamental. If it’s really expensive, no one’s going to buy it. And while it can be clean, it’s not going to be deployed. And so that always has to be a part of why the promise of fusion is that it can be low cost. So how do we know how much fusion systems cost? That’s a really great question. And a lot of it comes down to fundamental size, that you have to just build things. And so there’s some really first principles cost engineering you can do around power plants for fundamentally what do they cost? How much concrete went into it? Fundamentally, how big is it?
David Kirtley
(01:46:26)
And if you’re doing a good job of manufacturing, your goal is to manufacture a product for as low of a cost as you can so you can sell it for as low a price as you can. It asymptotes to the material cost.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:43)
Ah.
David Kirtley
(01:46:43)
Because you never get cheaper than that.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:45)
So this literally, in some sense, some sort of first-principle sense, is how much concrete—
David Kirtley
(01:46:52)
How- how-
Lex Fridman
(01:46:52)
goes into building the power plant.
David Kirtley
(01:46:54)
How much concrete, how much steel, how much copper and aluminum. Different materials cost different amounts, but at the end of the day, the cheapest function is the least amount of materials.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:06)
Wow. Okay.
David Kirtley
(01:47:08)
And so that’s, we think a lot about that and how we can make these systems smaller so they can be developed at lower cost. Now, there’s a flip side: you still need to produce electricity. So if you make them really small and they don’t produce electricity, there is some minimum size to fusion, and that’s really important. Fusion scientists and engineers don’t think you’d ever have a fusion generator on the back of your DeLorean, for instance. The physics doesn’t let that happen, at least physics as we’ve understood for the last, you know, 100 or 200 years.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:37)
Well, there’s a lot of really interesting business questions here, because you’re basically at the cutting edge of science, of technology, of physics, of engineering, trying to basically innovate into the future rapidly. How do you do that? Because the R&D here, the research alone, is a lot of money. So what, well, I mean, what can you say about that? Like, how to be bold and fearless in pushing this technology into the future when so much is unknown and it costs so much to just do the research?
David Kirtley
(01:48:14)
So I think about this in a couple of ways. One, the need. We look to the world and we know the world needs clean, low-cost, safe electricity. And just to meet our needs today, and not to even talk about the needs of tomorrow or the needs of AI or any of the growth that’s probably coming. Just to meet today. But fundamental to that is it has to be a product that people will buy. It has to be a generator that is making that electricity at low cost. And it’s got to be soon. So a lot of what I think about is how do we do those two things together? And a lot of that is scale, and a lot of that is thinking about… And not big scale. In fact, it’s the opposite of that. It’s small scale. It’s how do you build a product that’s mass-producible, that you can build quickly and learn quickly?
David Kirtley
(01:49:18)
And what I’ve found in my career is that they’re actually the same thing. And that the faster you can build a thing, the faster you can learn if that thing works, the faster you can now iterate on that and build the next thing. And so what I have spent my career building is teams of humans and a company that are builders, that can build high-technology things quickly. If you want to do R&D, you don’t want large-scale, multinational, complex, huge systems.
David Kirtley
(01:49:58)
You want to actually take the smallest thing you can build that accomplishes the mission—and in fusion, there is a minimum size—but accomplishes the mission, and then build it quickly and build whole teams around building it quickly and incentivize folks to move quickly, iterate and learn. And the irony I think of one of the things that I’ve discovered is that by focusing on manufacturing, by focusing on low-cost, very rapid manufacturing, you actually get to do science faster. And at the beginning of my career, I would never have guessed that. I would have thought the way to do science is to make a giant demonstration particle accelerator somewhere.
David Kirtley
(01:50:37)
Like to make a large complex science experiment is the best way to do science. And what I’ve found is actually small, iterative, just building as fast as possible gets you there faster, because you can learn, you can build, you can iterate. You can solve the problems, and then you can learn the fundamental physics, learn the scaling, learn the FRC, and the B to the 3.77 power and learn those things way sooner than if you would have just started on one mega project and then waited decades to get to the answer.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:11)
There’s a profound truth in that, something about the constraints of pushing for the simple, for the low cost, for the manufacturable. That pushes everything, pushes the science, pushes the innovation. In fact, you should maybe explain that you’re, I believe, on the seventh prototype. The rate of innovation here is insane. Can you maybe speak to all the different prototypes you went through, what it took to just iterate rapidly? And maybe it would be really interesting for people, like what can you say about the teams that’s required to make that happen? Like what kind of people are required to make that happen at that fast rate? And we’re not talking about software here. We’re talking about everything, the full stack.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:58)
All the way down to the physics at 100 million degrees, at speeds of 1 million miles per hour. I mean, it’s insane. Anyway, so how do you iterate the prototypes, and what kind of teams make it happen?
David Kirtley
(01:52:13)
So at Helion, we’ve built seven systems. The first six were a series of prototypes that we built end to end that were focused on scaling the process of making these field-reversed configurations, compressing them to thermonuclear fusion conditions, and demonstrating that you can do fusion and then increasing the scale, increasing the temperature and the energy. The very first ones were named after beer. Actually, the most successful was the Inductive Plasmoid Accelerator, the IPA. And it was the first system that showed that the team could make these FRCs and hold onto them and understand some of the stability criteria, the heating criteria. And then we started increasing the field. Now, okay, great, we can hold onto one of these FRCs.
David Kirtley
(01:53:03)
We know how long and how to make them, but now can we squeeze on them and start doing fusion? Increasing in pressure and temperature. What we noticed is, you know, machine after machine, we always used Starbucks. We were in Redmond at the time, Redmond, Washington, and Starbucks cups sitting on top of the machine as the, this is the scale. They were too small to have a human really in the picture all the time, so the Starbucks cup was enough. And so then we switched to Tall, Grande, Venti. And then the biggest, Trenta, was the biggest system that came online in 2020.
David Kirtley
(01:53:41)
That was a system that showed 100 million degrees and was the first system that did deuterium and helium-3 fusion. In fact, as far as we know, the only bulk deuterium-helium-3 fusion that has been done and also showed the 100-million-degree fusion temperatures from an FRC. And throughout that time, the earliest work was government funded, government grants, SBIRs and other types of government grants. And actually the team involved, myself and the rest of the founding team, were really good at winning government programs, doing fundamental science, but moving very quickly. And there’s a lot of ways to think about how to iterate and how to build quickly. I want to talk about the teams first, and then we can talk about some of the technology.
David Kirtley
(01:54:25)
It uses to do that, but a lot of it is thinking about if your goal is to get the product, electricity, out to the world as soon as possible, then you should be looking at everything you do through that lens. And so that’s thinking about the materials you choose. You want to, at every turn, choose commonly available materials. If you have to wait for a supply chain for an ultra-rare material, it’s going to take you a lot more time. And so do everything you can to engineer a system that uses simple aluminum alloys, simple copper alloys. And if you have to use tungsten, and maybe you have to use tungsten in some of your systems, which is a hard-to-find alloy, make sure you’re using commonly available thicknesses of tungsten sheet.
David Kirtley
(01:55:07)
You know, those kinds of engineering analyses and thought processes at every step. And that’s how we built these systems, from IPA to Venti up to Trenta, was always looking at how do we build systems that are easy to build and mass-produced? Because this is the other thing that I don’t know that early in my career I’d have predicted, is that by making a hundred of a thing, you can actually make it faster than if you go make one of a thing.
David Kirtley
(01:55:36)
And that’s because when you look at our fusion systems, we talked about these big magnets, and you could build one giant, big, complex, hard-to-make magnet that’s heavy and you have to move it around with a crane and requires very complex machining by ultra-rare CNCs, or you could then make that out of a composite of 100 smaller magnets. Each of those magnets now can be made on a simple machine. Each of these magnets can be picked up by a human, they’re light enough. They can be made and manufactured and mass-produced, and that’s what we did. And that was our whole design philosophy on these machines is, at every turn, how do we go faster? A classic one that still to this day I push the team on is, again, thinking about how do you move fast, eBay.
David Kirtley
(01:56:31)
We buy, and I don’t know that I’ve ever said this publicly…
Lex Fridman
(01:56:35)
Oh boy, here we go. This is great.
David Kirtley
(01:56:38)
We spend a lot of time on eBay.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:40)
You got to find a way, yeah.
David Kirtley
(01:56:41)
You got to move, and here’s an example: we use a vacuum pump because in these systems you got to pull out all the air. So we use a vacuum pump called a turbomolecular vacuum pump. This is a commodity. This is used in a variety of particle accelerators, scientific applications. There are many of them. They’re robust. They last a long time. They also have a very small supply chain. So if you want to buy a brand new turbomolecular pump, you can, and you might wait nine months from the manufacturer…
David Kirtley
(01:57:09)
…to go make one for you and deliver it to you. But I can go today and get the same model that was made 10 years ago and get it on eBay today, right now. However, it might not work. You don’t know yet how well it works or how clean it is or any of those things. And so what we do is you don’t go to eBay to save money. It does, it’s cheaper, and that’s great. But you can also go and get three of those turbo pumps that are sitting on eBay right now, bring those in-house, test them. Maybe only one of them meets the specifications you need, but guess what? You just got a pump in two weeks instead of nine months. And you got it, and it’s in the door and it’s operational and it’s running, and you’re moving.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:50)
See, I love this. I love that kind of stuff. One of the only people I’ve really seen do that is Elon. He put together that cluster in Memphis in a matter of weeks, which is nothing like that has ever been done before. And this eBay way is really the kind of thing that’s required to make that happen, as you shortcut the supply chain.
David Kirtley
(01:58:15)
And everywhere you can, you still have to deliver the working product, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:58:19)
Right.
David Kirtley
(01:58:19)
That is, cannot sacrifice the quality. But do you really need the shiny brand-new one when the used one is going to do the job? And we think about that across the board. Do we take the best plasma diagnostic, the most sophisticated plasma diagnostic in the world that has an accuracy of within 3%? And it’s going to take me three years and maybe a few million dollars to go build. Or do I take a technology from 10 years ago that’s 5% accurate, that’s good enough that I can go build in a month? And the answer for us, for Helion and for the team that we’ve put together, is that scrappy, “I want to just solve the problem. I don’t need necessarily the best solution, but let’s go make it happen.” And so that’s something that we routinely do.
David Kirtley
(01:59:09)
I think sometimes I have challenges with my academic colleagues on this, is that we have a difference of opinion. Because that 3%, well, that’s way better than 5%. So shouldn’t you do that? You’ll know your data better. But 5% is good enough. Now, 50% would not be good enough. And so that technology wouldn’t have been applicable. And so finding that middle ground is a hard thing to do, and never compromising on the quality and the safety. Like it’s got to work and it’s got to be safe, but can you still go fast?
Lex Fridman
(01:59:40)
But in general, just having a culture of pushing the rate of iterations here.
David Kirtley
(01:59:45)
And building the team that wants to go build things. Everyone at Helion, or at least the vast majority of Helion, we hire engineers, scientists, technicians, and machinists, are hands-on builders. The company at Helion is very weird for a fusion company. Today, we are 50% technicians, not scientists.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:06)
Nice.
David Kirtley
(02:00:06)
And we have a ton of scientists, because the science is critically important too, but they’re supported by a huge manufacturing company. Our goal is to build as fast as possible. Some of the other things we try to do there, vertically integrate. This is to your point on Elon Musk. This is one of the things he’s focused on at his companies, has been how do you bring inside the critical things that are going to drive timelines, the things you can’t just go buy as a commodity product and get it here soon, and make sure that you can go build those fast. We’ve done a number of key vertical integrated manufacturing lines at Helion. I think we may be the only fusion company with a conveyor belt.
David Kirtley
(02:00:49)
Actually, our second one just came online now, where we literally have our production line manufacturing power supplies at Helion so that we can move at maximum velocity, rather than finding an external consultant or an external supplier to go do those.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:06)
Well, I love it. Builder-first company, and you’re also thinking about manufacturing… …Throughout all of this. I’m looking at the photo of Trenta. It’s beautiful.
David Kirtley
(02:01:16)
And you can actually, I can point out on this picture one perfect example of what I’m talking about. So on the end is a green structure, green fiberglass. This is called G10. Actually, ironically, one of the main structural elements we use is this G10 fiberglass material. It’s the same thing that’s in PCB boards. It’s the same substrate that’s in every circuit board. We know it’s strong, it’s good with electricity only we get big pieces of it and machine it. But even in the end, you can see the bolts halfway through. There’s nine bolts in the middle there.
David Kirtley
(02:01:52)
The standard piece of G10 was not big enough to fit the end of the machine, so we could have had one custom manufacturer manufacture a brand-new piece of a custom size, build a new mold and a new machine. It would’ve taken, I don’t remember anymore now, but probably on the order of usually these are about six to 12 months, or I could go to a supplier off the shelf, have that delivered in a week, and now machine it with all the bolts in between.
David Kirtley
(02:02:18)
And then in-house, have the G10 machine shop that can now machine the bolt holes to actually bolt those pieces together. That took extra engineering and having really clever and brilliant mechanical and structural engineers to figure out how to do that and still meet the needs of the fusion system. That’s what we try. That’s the kinds of teams we try to build at Helion, is folks that want to really get their hands dirty, get hands on, build things, move quickly. And everywhere you can, without sacrificing quality or safety, take shortcuts. That’s the name of the game. We’ve got to get fusion online as soon as possible.

First fusion power plant in 2028

Lex Fridman
(02:02:57)
Yeah, this is really exciting and really inspiring. So I have to ask then, what timeline do you think, like first working, out there, nuclear fusion power plant? When do you think?
David Kirtley
(02:03:10)
Yeah, so what we’ve been able to do is rapidly build, every few years, bring a new fusion system online. In 2023, we signed a deal with Microsoft to build a power plant for Microsoft for one of their data centers. This is a power plant that is plugged into the grid, generating electricity from fusion, with a very tough, ambitious timeline of 2028 for the first electrons from that power plant.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:38)
And that power plant will be powering a data center.
David Kirtley
(02:03:43)
That power plant will be powering the grid that the data center is plugged into. We can get into the details of how the power grid works and such, but yes, Microsoft will be buying the power from that power plant.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:55)
Props to Microsoft for creating a hard deadline. I love it.
David Kirtley
(02:03:58)
They are. They are. It is daily that we think about that deadline. We had been working with them on and off through all of those machines, through Grande, Venti, Trenta, so they had seen us build, hit milestones, show that we can do fusion, scale up by orders of magnitude, and then access these advanced fusion fuels. So they had seen all of those things and seen the manufacturing we built. We’re already, right now, building the manufacturing to support that power plant. We’re doing that today. We started two years ago on doing the work around siting, around the interconnects. How do you plug fusion in? What does it look like? How do you site it? What are the environmental consequences? Who’s going to regulate it? All of those things.
David Kirtley
(02:04:45)
So we’ve spent a lot of time already and we’re on our way, and it’s going to be hard. No joke about it. This is tough, and it’s something that I think about every day.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:55)
I’m sure you’ve had a bunch of people probably still tell you that this is a pipe dream, that this is impossible. Are there days that you and the team think that this is indeed impossible, then you wake up the next day and you’re like, “All right, we’re going to do it anyway.”
David Kirtley
(02:05:08)
I mean, that’s the thought process. That’s the mentality. We’re going to do it anyway, let’s go do it. The world needs it. There’s no physics reason this can’t be done. Now it’s a question of how fast can you build it? And can you engineer it to be as efficient as it needs to be? And those are… engineering and manufacturing are ridiculously hard challenges. So do not short sell that. But that’s the goal, and that’s what we get up every day thinking about. This is something I was actually just thinking about and talking with some of my team in the last few days. We certainly have people that say like, “No, this can never be done,” and we had that before.
David Kirtley
(02:05:46)
We had that at the very beginning of, “I want to go merge these plasmas together,” and folks said, “Nope, that can never happen,” and we went off and did it. And, “You can’t compress an FRC because it’s unstable.” In fact, I actually still hear that. “FRCs are unstable.” And I say, “Yes, I know. Now let me introduce you to S* over E, and 20 years of studies on what we know about that and how we can combat that.” And so we’ve been able to show, through lots of skepticism, that we can still build and iterate. And there are things I don’t know. Let’s just be totally honest. As we’re going to go build these things, we’re going to discover new hard problems. If we’re not doing our job, if we’re not discovering new hard problems, we probably didn’t push hard enough.
David Kirtley
(02:06:30)
We probably didn’t push fast enough. And I think that’s really critical: that we build the team and we do the hiring to make sure that everybody is doing their problem. Now that doesn’t mean it’s not a hard challenge, and to keep folks motivated. Helion now is over 500 people, but when we built Trenta, we were 50 people.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:55)
Okay.
David Kirtley
(02:06:56)
So now there are over 300 humans working at Helion that didn’t see us build a system from a computer model, bring it online, and do fusion with it. But even already for Polaris, there are lots of humans that started for our seventh-generation system. When we were running Trenta, doing fusion, they were able to see that, see the measurements, know we were doing fusion. But yet, this next machine was just a simulation. And so, seeing that get built, seeing that, it’s just awe-inspiring for folks. And I’ll tell you, the first time that it comes online and flashes pink and you see that fusion glow, it’s awe-inspiring. It’s awe-inspiring.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:41)
I love that.
David Kirtley
(02:07:42)
I’ve, uh-
Lex Fridman
(02:07:42)
The fu- the fusion glow, yeah. Yeah.
David Kirtley
(02:07:44)
Everybody changes their Windows desktop backgrounds to now the fusion background, the plasma glow.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:50)
So how can you actually see it?
David Kirtley
(02:07:53)
A couple of things. So one, to get access to it, we have windows. We have small windows all the way around, that we look into it with cameras, spectroscopy, lasers, other kinds of scientific diagnostics that we use to measure. And so you see the light emission through that. But also, it’s very bright.
David Kirtley
(02:08:11)
And so, the actual vacuum vessels themselves that we use are ceramic. There are some versions of silicon and oxygen, typically quartz, but there’s also some other sintered materials. And it’s so bright that they can shine through those materials, and so what you see is you see the light of not fusion. When fusion’s happening, thermonuclear fusion is so hot that the light is in the X-ray spectrum, and the human eye can’t see that. But as your ice-cold, one-million-degree plasma, when you’re just getting started, it’s emitting photons in a range and light in a range that humans can see. And so you see that bright, purple, fuchsia color.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:51)
And this would be, if you’re doing actual cameras, this would be, like, extremely high-speed cameras, that kinda thing?
David Kirtley
(02:08:56)
We have high-speed ones and low-speed ones. The traditional SLR cameras, which are the ones that represent the right color, all they catch is the light, the integrated light, the flash. They don’t know, they can’t see the plasma forming, accelerating, compressing. They can’t see any of those things. They just see all of it integrated into one bright flash. But the high-speed cameras, they can see that. And so the high-speed cameras we can use to actually measure that. In fact, we put special filters on them to measure different wavelengths of light, so we can tell is it the hydrogen, is it the helium, is it the helium-3? Who’s emitting the light? When are they emitting? What particles are emitting the light and when?
David Kirtley
(02:09:38)
And so by using those advanced diagnostics we can now take movies of that, though it’s not as great as just seeing that flash.

Energy needs of GPU clusters

Lex Fridman
(02:09:46)
Yeah, I mean, it’s beautiful, right, that human beings are able to create something like that. It’s truly beautiful. Just out of curiosity, are there some interesting intricacies connecting a nuclear fusion power plant to the power grid? Like, are there some constraints to the old-school nature of the power grid in, let’s say, in the United States? Like, how do you get that Microsoft thing you mentioned, how do you get from the nuclear fusion power plant to a computer with some GPUs? How do we make that connection? Or is that a trivial thing?
David Kirtley
(02:10:20)
None of this is trivial, but there are, I think, simple ways, and there are some really interesting engineering ways to do this. So just from the fundamental basics as we’re doing fusion, we push back on the magnetic field. We recharge these capacitors that start where the electricity started from. And that electricity then sits on a capacitor at high voltage, DC voltage, that’s steady. At that point, it’s reasonably easy to make 60 hertz power, make traditional AC power. It’s the same way as you can take electricity in a battery and use an inverter and just invert that to AC power. And large-scale grid inverters, we know how to do pretty well.
David Kirtley
(02:11:04)
One of the unique things about a pulsed version of this, because it’s pulsed at a repetition rate between one and ten times a second, we can adjust the power output. And so as the grid needs more power, we can actually dial it up and down. And we’ve been able to demonstrate that with our fusion systems. The smaller ones, the smaller plasma systems, we’ve gone from zero, from off, to all the way to 100 times a second, and shown we can do 100 hertz operation. In fact, that system we ran for over a billion operations, and just ran it steady all day long.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:36)
So each individual pulse is independent in some sense.
David Kirtley
(02:11:39)
Each individual pulse is different. Where you put in your fuel, you do fusion, you exhaust it…
Lex Fridman
(02:11:44)
Cool
David Kirtley
(02:11:44)
…through those pumps from eBay, and then power output and electricity output.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:50)
Oh, wow.
David Kirtley
(02:11:51)
But there’s probably some more clever ways to do this, and when we founded Helion, the goal was to build low-cost baseload electricity. And what we started to see working with Microsoft and others now, is that data centers are going to be one of the biggest power needs in the future. And we know that’s coming up. And what’s really unique is that power in this form is direct recovery, not the steam turbine part, but direct electricity. Electricity is already DC, which is steady, which is what computers really want anyway. And so are there really unique ways to take DC power sitting on this capacitor, and rather than going AC to the grid and having all these transmission losses, just going direct DC to the data center? Can you plug right in?
David Kirtley
(02:12:38)
And so that’s some of the things that my team is looking at now, is, can you do that direct DC conversion at super high efficiencies and run those GPUs directly? That would be really powerful if we could figure out how to do it. But those are some of the things that I think there might be some unique ways that fusion and data centers can really couple together. There’s a whole cooling part to it too. Most of my cooling is cooling semiconductors and cooling power switching, just like a data center. So there’s a lot of interesting engineering ways that we can bring those two together.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:11)
So a deeper integration between the power plant and the thing that it’s powering. And it does seem like in the future, quite possibly, a lot of the energy that’s needed will be for compute, for AI-related applications. So if you just look out into the future 10, 20, 50 years from now, do you see nuclear fusion as a thing that powers these gigantic data centers of millions of GPUs? Just basically, the surface of the Earth covered in compute and nuclear fusion power plants. Maybe that’s 100 years out.
David Kirtley
(02:13:55)
So when I talk to AI experts, they talk pretty routinely about the power needs for AI. And in fact, in the same way in manufacturing that the cost of any one thing asymptotes to the raw material, for AI, the cost of computation asymptotes to the power… …To the cost of the electricity. And even more, that electricity’s concentrated. It’s in that AI data center, that brain where all the power is, and you really want a lot of high-energy density. You want power generation right there…
David Kirtley
(02:14:32)
…on-site. So it seems like, just take those two facts, a really nice match between fusion, which is baseload, high energy density, can be sited most places, and a data center, which is going to be high energy requirements in a local location, and large amounts of it. There’s been predictions recently from energy institutes that suggest we will have growth that, rather than a 2% growth per year in electricity, may be a 4 or a 6% growth in electricity due to data center use. I think that is probably wildly underestimating where we’re moving. And, and so-
Lex Fridman
(02:15:13)
Oh, man.
David Kirtley
(02:15:14)
And so the idea that AI can grow human cognition, and our ability to solve problems, we can’t let it be limited by power. And so I’m going to push as hard as I can so that that’s not the limit.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:30)
Do you ever think about like 2050 or something like that? I know you’re focused on a few years out, just getting… A fusion power plant working. But do you ever think about a longer-term future? By what year do you think there’ll be over 1000 nuclear fusion power plants?
David Kirtley
(02:15:50)
So I tell the team that if we demonstrate fusion one time and that’s it, then we failed. But that’s not enough. The universe is powered by fusion. Humans need to be harnessing this, and can harness this for our society, for the good of society, for the good of technology. And so that’s something that we push towards. And in fact, it’s baked into how we design these machines.
David Kirtley
(02:16:23)
Coils are mass produced. Capacitors are mass produced, and we make them. All across the board is thinking about not what the next system’s going to be, but making sure we’re building the manufacturing and the infrastructure to build all of those systems. So we had a call from the White House a number of years ago for the Bold Decadal Study in Fusion of how do we get fusion. And it was Helion and a variety of other companies from the fusion industry. And it’s pretty awesome to be able to say there’s a fusion industry now. That it’s not, it’s not-
Lex Fridman
(02:16:55)
Nice
David Kirtley
(02:16:55)
just a one-off thing, or there’s a fusion experiment or somebody has a prototype. But, like, there’s an industry. That Helion has competitors. That’s, that’s great.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:04)
I’ve never heard anyone so excited to have competitors. But yes, that’s like a serious thing. That’s a real possibility. Yeah.
David Kirtley
(02:17:12)
And the goal was, how do we not just demonstrate fusion in the next decade, but meaningfully deploy it and start to answer? We have 4000 gigawatts of installed fossil fuel capacity.
David Kirtley
(02:17:25)
How do we, how do we start replacing that with fusion in a meaningful way? And how do we get to not just making a generator every few years? But we want a factory, a Gigafactory of these fusion generators rolling off the line, one a month, one a week, one a day. That, that’s the kind of plans that I task my supply chain team with. Like, how do you do this? How do we actually go build this? How do we go build a Gigafactory so we can have 50 megawatt generators coming off the line, being deployed on a truck, and then driving off the factory every day? And it’s a tough challenge. I see what we’ve, what others have been able to do in rockets, in electric vehicles, turning around huge factories.
David Kirtley
(02:18:12)
We know this can be done, and so for fusion, the call is there, and the market is there too. If you can get electricity generators cheap enough, then it’s worth doing.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:23)
Yeah. I mean, all of this is really exciting and inspiring what you’re doing. And obviously the world needs it, and the more cheap energy we have of this kind, that we described, clean, and it’s not constrained to geographical locations and so on, first of all, that alleviates a lot of the tension in geopolitics. But second of all, it enables a lot of the technological breakthroughs on the AI side. On all the different things that we use compute for. It’s really, really exciting. So yeah, I hope there’s like millions of them in the coming decades.
David Kirtley
(02:19:00)
And so if we can get to that, if we can get to making a generator a day, you’re not- Now talking about hundreds a year, and you’re deploying them.
David Kirtley
(02:19:08)
And deploying them is also hard at this scale. How do you go and deploy power plants and deploy generators at this scale and do it quickly? Interestingly, data centers are a little bit of a nicer challenge in that way, because we wouldn’t build one 50-megawatt system and have to go build a site for it. We’d build a site and put 100 of them on that site and have large amounts of power for that large data center. So that in some ways is actually the chicken and egg problem of how do you go deploy hundreds or thousands of fusion generators. Data centers are an interesting application where very immediately you need a lot of power in a very small area. And you can go, you can go do that. Now, what does that mean? That means I’m going to need more than two conveyor belts, that’s for sure.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:52)
Yeah, manufacturing is really hard. But like you said, the fascinating thing is it’s hard, but as you’re doing it, you figure out all the other things: the science, the physics, and everything. The innovation is accelerated when you have to manufacture at scale. It’s actually fascinating to watch. You see that in the space industry as well. When do we humans get to Kardashev Type One civilization status? And when do we get to a Kardashev Type Two?

Kardashev scale

David Kirtley
(02:20:25)
So the Kardashev scale: a Kardashev Type One civilization is when humans are either catching or generating as much power as what’s incident on the Earth from the sun. Type Two is the next big one, where you’re catching as much energy from all the way around the sun, so massive amounts of energy. A lot of times, people talk about it as incident, as in you had solar panels the size of the entire planet blocking all of the sun. But I think really, you should be thinking about it as what can we generate? What can we make here on Earth? And what we know is that, you know, we’re only a fraction right now of Kardashev Type One, and we’ve got some work to do. And there are not a lot of technologies that can get there, just from the point of view of the fuel.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:14)
Right.
David Kirtley
(02:21:14)
But if, as some research says, that there’s 100 million to a billion years of fusion fuel on the Earth, we have room to go, and that’s at today’s use. So 100 times today’s use, we still have tons of fuel. Let’s go do it. And what does that unlock? What does it unlock to have power 100 times the output that we actually do here on Earth right now? And I think that’s pretty transformational. Do we have those huge AI data centers? Do we have brains that can now think at rapid speeds and now innovate? I think that’s a pretty powerful future.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:48)
Yeah, I can just imagine a giant AI brain and rockets just constantly shipping more and more humans out into space, into colonizing space, and we’re expanding out into the universe. I mean, it’s a beautiful… obviously there’s a lot to be concerned about. Technology in itself is always a double-edged sword. There’s always a concern that we humans, in the power we create, will also destroy ourselves in obvious ways and less than obvious ways. I’ve been spending a lot of time in nature.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:25)
And you become distinctly aware that there’s something truly special about the simplicity, the balance that is achieved by nature. In some sense, we disturb that balance by creating sophisticated technologies. But in another sense, we’re building something in the spirit of nature that’s more and more beautiful and allows us humans to flourish in a richer and richer way. So, a double-edged sword.
David Kirtley
(02:22:52)
I think a lot about what vast amounts of low-cost energy, low-cost electricity enable, and how that works with nature. If you have power—and this is why, one of the reasons we love fusion—it’s energy-dense. So a 50-megawatt facility, we believe, fits in a 27,000-square-foot building, on the order of an acre, for 50 megawatts. Compare that to solar, which would be 2,000 acres, at least in Seattle. And what you can do there is transformational. And a lot of folks talk about desalination and clean water so that we can be in places where there’s not a lot of water and those things. I actually think about food, ironically, is that how much of the Earth’s surface that used to be nature is now farmland.
David Kirtley
(02:23:45)
And we need it. We’re going to grow food because humans need to eat, and that’s really critical, but it’s about five feet tall all over the Earth. Why can’t you do it at 500 feet? Why can’t you build a building where you’re actually growing plants inside? I spend a lot of time thinking about growing plants, ironically, at high densities of food, so that we can eat and we can exist and we can coexist in a way that’s energy-dense and rich. You mentioned actually going to space. How do we go to space now? We take methane fuels or hydrogen fuels and we burn them and we launch a rocket.
David Kirtley
(02:24:24)
There are all kinds of cool beamed rocket technologies that I looked at early in my career, where you can beam microwaves, and so you have a microwave craft that doesn’t have to burn any fuel. And so if you have really dense, really good power on Earth, you can beam it to that microwave craft. It can now use electricity as its rocket fuel. And so there are some really powerful, interesting things you can do. Even deep space, it gets also more enabling, but even just launching from Earth.
David Kirtley
(02:24:55)
And so I think it opens up things we don’t really even think about, but it’s just been theorized, “Wow, if I had massive amounts of power in a small place that is low cost, this is what it could do.” But I’m excited by what it can unlock that we can even think about now, but even what we can’t think about or we don’t know yet.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:14)
Since you mentioned propulsion, is there some interesting use, possible use of nuclear fusion in propulsion, whether it’s getting off of Earth or in going into deep space?
David Kirtley
(02:25:26)
I mean, that’s … Honestly, in a lot of ways, that’s how I got into fusion, is thinking about that intersection of energy and space travel.
David Kirtley
(02:25:35)
When you are in the solar system around Earth’s orbit, collecting the sun’s energy makes a lot of sense. It’s there, it’s free. When you’re in space, you get a lot more of it because the atmosphere’s not blocking it. That’s why spacecraft run on solar panels. But if you want to go further out, the sun’s irradiance falls off as R-squared, radius squared, and it’s a long way out there. It doesn’t take very long before there is not a lot of energy anywhere from the sun. So you have to bring it with you, and in space, mass is expensive. Mass is hard. That’s the rocket equation. Being able to bring high energy density fuel is really exciting and that’s what fusion enables. But here’s one of the challenges.
David Kirtley
(02:26:22)
If you make electricity from fusion using a steam cycle, you need something cool. You get hot water, you now have to be able to cool it. In space, there’s nothing to cool. There’s no working fluid to cool off of. So, a lot of the steam-based systems in fusion don’t make sense for space. That’s where some of this direct energy, this energy efficiency, matters. It actually comes to some of the origin story of the team that founded Helion. Before spinning off Helion to focus only on fusion, we worked on a mix of things: advanced materials, rocket propulsion, fusion rockets, fusion materials, all of those things.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:07)
Nice.
David Kirtley
(02:27:08)
One thing that people in the aerospace field know, especially if you’re in deep space, is you can’t waste anything. Every watt of electricity you make, you better use, because it was expensive to get it, or the solar panel. Every ounce of every joule of heat, every watt of heat you make, you have to reject with a radiator, and it’s super expensive and heavy. So you build in space as efficient as possible. You recirculate your water and your air, and all of those things, you’re efficient. It’s something we brought into thinking about fusion energy efficiency, is that you want to… If my goal is to make the product, what’s the product? The product is electricity. Don’t waste any of it.
David Kirtley
(02:27:53)
Recover every watt you can by recovering electricity directly. Recover every watt of electricity from the fusion process as efficiently as you can and you end up with, just like in space, systems that are smaller, have higher performance, and can deliver more, whatever the mission is. In our case, the mission is electricity.

Fermi Paradox

Lex Fridman
(02:28:13)
When you look out there at the stars, I’m really confused by what’s going on, because I think there is for sure thousands, if not millions, of advanced alien civilizations out there. I’m really confused why we have not, in a definitive way, met any of them. So again, continuing the pothead questions, what energy source do you think they’re using? If what I’m saying is true, that there is alien civilizations out there, do you think it’s, like, pretty certain that they, in order to expand out into the cosmos, they would be using nuclear fusion?
David Kirtley
(02:28:50)
It’s hard to imagine anything else. Right now, where does energy in the universe come from? It comes from fusion. It comes from stars, and we know that that’s the process. So whether they’re harnessing the star itself, Kardashev Type II, or are they bringing fusion along because they want to go somewhere and they’re bringing it with them to go visit, I think that’s pretty likely. You bring up the Fermi paradox.
David Kirtley
(02:29:20)
How come we don’t see alien civilizations? Even if there’s an infinitesimally small chance that there is life on any one planet, and infinitesimally small that life grows into intelligent life, there are, however, almost infinite planets around infinite stars in our galaxy that have been around for vastly longer than we’ve been around. But we don’t see it, and I think that’s a question that many scientists and everyone has wrestled with over the years.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:50)
I mean, I’m very scared by the implications of that. The scary thing is that, to the point that we made earlier, as we become more and more technologically advanced, we end up destroying ourselves. Like, there could be things we unlock, like nuclear weapons, but plus plus. New things happen as you develop super advanced systems that have close to 100% probability to destroy ourselves, destroy any intelligent being. The kind of intelligent being that’s ambitious enough to keep innovating will eventually destroy itself, will be one explanation. And that’s scary. That should be a sobering… that’s at least an inspiring, sobering thought to be careful with the stuff we create. But I also just look at humans. We create dangerous stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:44)
And then figure out, sometimes almost last minute, how to not destroy ourselves. We’re good with deadlines.
David Kirtley
(02:30:53)
We’re good with deadlines. We…
Lex Fridman
(02:30:55)
And we’re good at surviving. Life as we know it on Earth seems to find a way, and intelligent life as we know it, human life, seems to find a way. We do a lot of painful things along the way, but in the end, we somehow survive. It’s interesting. There’s something in the human spirit… …That allows us to survive. So I have a lot of optimism that the super powerful technologies that we create will eventually lead to us still surviving for thousands of years. But then, why are the aliens not here, though? So maybe it’s also possible that it’s really difficult to traverse space. Maybe it really is that difficult. The physics makes it not easy. There’s a lot of space, and it’s just hard to travel.
David Kirtley
(02:31:45)
I think as I have gone further and further in building fusion systems that work, I’ve become more optimistic around the Fermi paradox specifically. And there are several of them. I think you’re referring to something called the great filter. Something happens that filters out life. The dark forest is another philosophy around, “Sure, it’s out there, but everybody’s hiding ’cause they don’t want to be noticed.” But I think about something else, actually. The philosophy that I’ve always loved, and I’m going to pronounce this wrong, so I apologize, Matrioshka brains…
David Kirtley
(02:32:22)
…is that, and that’s Kardashev level two, that civilizations get so advanced, and they focus not on expanding physically and expanding in space and expanding their reach by planting flags in new places, but grow their cognition, grow their ability to think. They grow their brain. They grow their intellect. And I feel like in the last few years, we’ve seen a massive trend that maybe this is the thing that happens, and that we do grow our intellect, and we grow the intellect of the species by AI and advanced tools. And as a society, we can just get smart enough that we don’t need to go plant those flags everywhere.
David Kirtley
(02:33:10)
And so the Matryoshka brain is a Dyson sphere where a civilization has covered the entire sun in essentially solar panels or collects its light in some way and uses all of that power to power intelligence, to power computers, and to power brains. And I think we’re a ways away from that, but maybe AI and fusion together gets you actually along that path sooner. And I’m excited by that outcome of the Fermi paradox. And then at that point, those civilizations have a star that you can’t find anymore ’cause it’s all covered and are there thinking and growing their intellects rather than actually having to physically expand.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:52)
Yeah. Exploring and expanding in the realm of cognition and consciousness versus in the realm of space and time as we 21st-century colonizer humans think like. Maybe 22nd-century humans will be thinking fundamentally differently. Yeah, that’s a beautiful, beautiful vision of the future. Speaking of beauty, you’ve been doing a lot of really interesting things in a lot of interesting disciplines. What to you is… ridiculous question, is the most beautiful idea in physics and nuclear engineering, in nuclear fusion and power plants? What ideas do you just step back and are in awe of?
David Kirtley
(02:34:45)
I’m continuously in awe that it works. And I know that sounds a little silly to say. But the more that I learned in my career around the balance of exactly the right temperatures where life works, exactly the right balance between the electromagnetic force and the strong force. Those are things that it’s hard to imagine are accidental. And so we talk about how beautiful nature is, but then you look at what each of the leaves on the tree really is, and each of the cells and each of the atoms and each of the quantum substructure of that atom, and I’m just amazed that all the pieces come together.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:42)
We humans are somehow able to find that perfect balance where it just works.
David Kirtley
(02:35:49)
Just works. Last minute sometimes, but it does work.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:53)
The kind of deadlines you’re operating, the group of brilliant people that you’re working with or operating under, it just stresses me out. But it excites me, so I’m deeply grateful that you’re doing this work. You’re one of the people building an exciting future. So thank you for doing that. And thank you so much for talking today.
David Kirtley
(02:36:14)
Thank you very much. It’s been fun.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:17)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Kirtley. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from the great John F. Kennedy. “We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #484 with Dan Houser.
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Episode highlight

Lex Fridman
(00:00:00)
You said that Red Dead Redemption 2, in your opinion, is the best thing you’ve ever done. I think there’s a strong case to be made that it’s the greatest game of all time. What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?
Dan Houser
(00:00:12)
People searching for meaning within, amongst the violence. I think the West and all of the themes around the West really lend themselves to that. And then the gunplay was fantastic, and the horses were incredible. I think we got to spend, a smaller group of us, working on it from day one, coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game. And I think it was helpful that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:38)
You lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and Diet Cokes?
Dan Houser
(00:00:43)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:43)
Is this accurate information?
Dan Houser
(00:00:44)
Very accurate.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:45)
Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA IV, GTA V, and now GTA VI?
Dan Houser
(00:00:50)
I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating. The games always felt different. People have very strong feelings, “I like this one.” “I didn’t like that one as much,” because they are pretty different. So you would, there would be simultaneously where you know what’s going to happen. It’s Grand Theft Auto, you know it’s going to be a game about being a criminal, but the way it’s going to be a game is going to change quite a lot.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:08)
The number one question from the internet. It is so ridiculous, but I must ask. Have you seen Gavin?

Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:01:17)
The following is a conversation with Dan Houser, a legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games, and the creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, which includes some of the best-selling games of all time and some of the greatest games of all time. Both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 have some of the deepest, most complex, and heart-wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games. Dan has started a new company, Absurdventures, great name, that is creating some incredible new worlds in multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio series, and yes, video games.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:01)
That includes A Better Paradise, which is a dystopian near-future world with a super intelligent AI, American Caper, which is an insanely chaotic, violent, dark, satirical world, and Absurdiverse, which is a comedic action-adventure world. I’m excited to explore all three of these. I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create, so this conversation was an incredible honor for me. And on top of that, Dan and I talked a lot after and in the days since, and he has been just a wonderful human being. I’m just at a loss of words. I feel like the luckiest kid in the world. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:58)
And now, dear friends, here’s Dan Houser.

Greatest films of all time

Lex Fridman
(00:03:03)
You’ve helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories, and open worlds in video game history. But when you grew up in the late ’70s and ’80s, open-world video games wasn’t a thing. So you’ve credited literature and film as early inspiration. So let’s talk about film first, if we can.
Dan Houser
(00:03:23)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:24)
What to you are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time, maybe films that were highly influential on you? I mean, Godfather.
Dan Houser
(00:03:32)
Well, I think for me, probably Godfather II more than Godfather I, but I love both of them. But I love the divided story in Godfather II. And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho, I love the bits in Little Italy, and I love the sections in Sicily. So I think… And the Ellis Island bit is just one of the best shots in all of cinema. When you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island and you get that shot, it’s amazing. It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been like to arrive in America.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:04)
How much of the greatness of Godfather do you think is the writing? How much is the cinematography and how much is the acting? You got De Niro, you got young Pacino.
Dan Houser
(00:04:14)
Well, Coppola started as a screenwriter, so I think he wrote, at least co-wrote the script. So it’s almost like the writing and directing almost become the same thing. But it’s one of those films, both of them are those films, which I was thinking about this idea of a perfect film where everything’s good, where the acting’s seminal, where the writing’s seminal, where the music is seminal, where the shots are so memorable, where the scenes, you know, define what you think about things. It’s impossible to think about the mafia and not think about The Godfather.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:43)
What about the pacing? It is a bit slow. You have, you have movies like 2001 Space Odyssey, slow.
Dan Houser
(00:04:49)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:49)
It used to be, back in my day, it used to be slow.
Dan Houser
(00:04:53)
Life got faster. Life just got, you know… As, I think, as we moved from the ’70s into the ’80s, into the ’90s, people had seen so many films, they just started to edit films faster. And people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker, you could show a look and just that meant you realized that person was going to betray the other person. They just edited films much quicker. But I quite like the slowness. I think these days with modern, you know, high-quality televisions, you don’t have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting, particularly when you’re rewatching them. So it doesn’t bother me that they’re long and slow.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:28)
Speaking of faster, life getting faster, I’m sure another influential movie was Goodfellas, Scorsese. That’s faster, right?
Dan Houser
(00:05:37)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:38)
A mixture of crime and humor.
Dan Houser
(00:05:40)
And almost like an open-world game in some ways, in that it’s this slice of life. You see… I think that probably changed cinema at the tail end of the ’80s, early ’90s, more than any other film. And it’s so iconic. In some ways, I prefer Casino, but the invention is really in Goodfellas. I love the end of Casino, you know, the use of voiceover, the way you saw them being criminals and being normal people, you know, it changed everything. I mean, The Sopranos obviously is completely inspired by Goodfellas.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:12)
Yeah, Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. I mean, everything.
Dan Houser
(00:06:17)
The look, the clothes… …The music.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:20)
I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me is the meeting in the desert. I mean, just the drama building up to that between…
Dan Houser
(00:06:28)
Dig another hole.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:29)
Yeah. The environment, the city, speaking of open world and creating a character from the city. It’s one of the great Vegas films.
Dan Houser
(00:06:36)
I think the great Vegas film. There are bits that I always love. At the end, when everything’s wrapping up, and on the one hand you see the Robert De Niro character, he’s still good at making money, so they let him return to normal life. But then you get that brilliant scene when all of the mob bosses from back home, they’re discussing all these people who may or may not be able to implicate them. And then there’s that incredibly cold line where one of them, they’re thinking about the old, you know, I think it’s the casino manager, and one of them just goes, “Ah, the way I see it, why take a chance?” And then the next thing, he’s just shot. Right? The brutality of it all is just brilliant.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:13)
I don’t know, I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There are at least some competitors. You got, what, Nicolas Cage leaving Las Vegas? I mean, falling in love with a prostitute. You also, you’ve written some of the great crime stories ever.
Dan Houser
(00:07:25)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:26)
And in some sense, there are love stories in there. And you’ve talked about… …Being a bit of a romantic yourself. Appreciating the depth of love stories in literature at the very least. And there is a dark kind of love story between an alcoholic and a prostitute. You got an Oscar for that.
Dan Houser
(00:07:46)
I think he did for that, didn’t he?
Lex Fridman
(00:07:47)
Plus there’s the caricature of the drug world of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That’s an interesting one.
Dan Houser
(00:07:52)
I love the book so much. I was obsessed by it when I was about 17, 18. And I enjoyed the film, but I preferred the book.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:59)
Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories?
Dan Houser
(00:08:03)
No, but one of the things we’re working on now, there’s sort of an English version of Hunter S. Thompson if he was also a market gardener. I love that persona. But it’s kind of… it’s hard. If you make him American, it’s hard for it not just to be Hunter S. Thompson.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:19)
Is this an American caper?
Dan Houser
(00:08:21)
No, it’s in this animated show we’re developing in this sort of comedy world we’re working on called Absurdiverse, and it’s in one of the stories in that.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:29)
What is Absurdiverse?
Dan Houser
(00:08:31)
Absurdiverse is a comedy universe we’re developing that will be an open-world video game and then some loosely adjacent stories that we’re going to make as animated TV shows or possibly animated movies. We’re still thinking that all through. And we’re building the game up in San Rafael at the moment, and it’s early days, but it’s looking very exciting. And it’s trying to be… like, trying to make a game that feels a little bit like a living sitcom.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:02)
Is there some drama and tragedy at the edges or is it pure comedy?
Dan Houser
(00:09:06)
I hope it’s got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise, you can’t just have jokes for 40 hours, it won’t work.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:17)
Okay, so comedy needs some darkness.
Dan Houser
(00:09:19)
Well, I think it needs story. One of my favorite comedies of this century is The Office because it was incredibly funny, but also because it had narrative and heart underneath the cynicism. I think with narrative, you get a drive alongside jokes.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:34)
And there’s going to be an open-world video game- … in that world. When?
Dan Houser
(00:09:39)
Two, three, four years. Still thinking that through.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:42)
So what’s the process of getting from the idea to the end of a video game? Why does it take so long to get it right?
Dan Houser
(00:09:48)
That’s an interesting question. I think the scale at which they’re built, you could argue it the other way: why is it so quick? You’re really building, in one go, a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it. These things are massive four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways. I think that’s us being kind of aggressive on the timeline.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:15)
We’re taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent… …But I have to return to some films. Let me just list a few of my favorites. So, first of all, you said you love great war books… …And movies. So we have to throw in Platoon from Oliver Stone and Apocalypse Now, for me at least.
Dan Houser
(00:10:34)
Of course.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:35)
There’s more crime, fast-moving crime movies. Like Scarface. I also love True Romance.
Dan Houser
(00:10:42)
Love True Romance. Possibly the best… one of the best scripts ever written.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:46)
Written, of course- … by Quentin Tarantino. What do you love about True Romance? I think sometimes, depending on the day, depending on the bar and how much alcohol I had, I will say True Romance is the best movie ever made.
Dan Houser
(00:10:59)
True Romance is super fun. Tony Scott was a really good director, so it moves at a really good speed. It’s funny, it’s completely unbelievable, but you really care about the characters. It’s the kind of, you know, this world that obviously doesn’t exist, but you feel it does exist. The characters are larger than life. The dialogue is unbelievable. You could just sit and watch them talk all day long. And, you know, it’s amusing. You just want to live in that world. I was thinking about, like, what do you like about films? It’s the idea to be in a world. They’re not real. They’re never real, but you want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:34)
And I think you said that what makes a great world is having a large cast of characters. And I think that movie is a good example. I mean, you have Christopher Walken with the sort of legendary super racist discussion.
Dan Houser
(00:11:45)
Yeah. Rant.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:46)
Rant.
Dan Houser
(00:11:46)
Dennis Hopper is just sort of a dream dad.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:48)
Yeah. Yeah, dream dad. And just that interaction is legendary. You got even Brad Pitt as a pothead on the couch.
Dan Houser
(00:11:57)
Gary Oldman.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:57)
Gary Oldman.
Dan Houser
(00:11:58)
As a rasta.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:59)
Yeah, and you have, I mean, a real love story. Like, a real, genuine, pure love can survive in any context.
Dan Houser
(00:12:08)
And it’s just sweet. Their love story is very sweet in that film. It’s endearing.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:12)
Elvis is a character. It’s kind of like a mini GTA type game. Some of the same beauty, the comedy, the love.
Dan Houser
(00:12:19)
Yeah, and it’s all crossed with Play It Again, Sam. It sort of feels a bit like that with the Elvis character.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:23)
What about the greatest war film? What would it be for you?
Dan Houser
(00:12:27)
Greatest war film? If I’m feeling serious, it would be a Russian film called Come and See. It’s probably the most intense film ever made. And if I’m feeling slightly less serious, Apocalypse Now, and I would always want to watch the original cut. I don’t prefer the re-edits. I like the original first release. I think it’s tighter and slicker and works the best.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:49)
Yeah, of course, Apocalypse Now is this hallucinatory journey into darkness, I think, and madness.
Dan Houser
(00:12:54)
Yeah, but from your first- …scene onwards, it’s just got these amazing set piece after set piece and again, incredible characters, brilliant dialogue.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:04)
Some of the greatest films about war reveal that war is not what it seems, and there are different ways of doing that. And you’ve talked about different books. The Thin Red Line is another book… … And movie that shows that.
Dan Houser
(00:13:19)
Yeah, and I watched the movie years before I read the book, and I didn’t understand the movie. And then I read the book, and I read a lot about the editing of the movie, and I understood why I didn’t understand the movie, and that’s because the movie makes no sense. It is beautifully shot, and the music is one of the best film scores of all time. But they edited two different battle scenes into one battle in a way that they’re spread apart by ages in the book to assemble… I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim. It would’ve been like a six-hour movie, then edited this impressionistic thing that’s incredibly beautiful but doesn’t necessarily make narrative sense at the end of it. But the film is still very beautiful.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:00)
And in terms of Westerns, what’s the greatest? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Unforgiven? Those are for me, maybe even Django Unchained. You’ve mentioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Dan Houser
(00:14:09)
I think for me it’s two films from, I think, pretty much the same year: Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:15)
I love Robert Redford, rest in peace.
Dan Houser
(00:14:17)
That film, it’s just impossible to imagine any buddy film without Butch Cassidy.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:23)
Is it Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Clint Eastwood for you also? Has that impacted your writing on Red Dead?
Dan Houser
(00:14:29)
I love Unforgiven, but the truth is with Red Dead, I’d seen a lot of Westerns as a kid. My dad watched lots of Westerns. They were always on TV. You know, I felt I knew quite a bit about Westerns. And then, you know, I had to start thinking about writing one for work. And I deliberately did not binge on Westerns. I tried to watch no more Westerns and just think about what I liked about them, what I didn’t like about them, what would be a take that would work today and would work within the confines of a game. And I think Red Dead 1 was a slightly more traditional Western. And then having done that, I tried to take Red Dead 2 in a different direction so that it felt like a worthy successor. It didn’t just feel like more of the same.

Making video games

Lex Fridman
(00:15:17)
From movies to video games, when did you first fall in love with video games? Literature was the first love?
Dan Houser
(00:15:24)
I mean, film… No, films.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:26)
Films.
Dan Houser
(00:15:26)
Films was always the, was always… Well, what I loved first as a kid was films. I began reading books properly aged about eight. I was watching films long before that.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:39)
Nice.
Dan Houser
(00:15:40)
And then probably it was always bouncing between the two, which I preferred. I think they’re good at different things. Games, I played and, above all, watched a lot of games as a kid, as being a young kid and, you know, other people playing them. And I obviously liked the core thing games do, which is you press a button and something happens. They’re responsive, they’re alive, and that’s captivating. And then the competitive angle of games is fun, or you know, beating this, beating that, winning this. That was fun as well. Sometimes obsessively so. You know, I remember being completely addicted at one point when I was, should have been studying, for months at a time, to Tetris on a Game Boy.
Dan Houser
(00:16:20)
You know, I liked games and I liked interactivity and I liked the movement to this digital world that’s really emerged for me pretty much as soon as I left college. But I didn’t love it. And then I really fell in love with games when I was properly making them, probably as late as like 2001.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:40)
Oh, wow.
Dan Houser
(00:16:41)
And when I suddenly began to see… First of all, my mind, you know, that’s a whole another story, but just suddenly saw what they could do and could be and what this chance was to be one of the people involved in making these things that was this, you know, where you were really kind of breaking trail into the future, it felt like. And I think that was when I really went, “These are amazing.” And that’s when I really fell in love with… I could see it in moments and suddenly you could make this whole experience. So that was really the moment for me.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:12)
Yeah, of course, because you were a pioneer of open world games that are so narrative driven. So it’s like you didn’t have too many examples.
Dan Houser
(00:17:21)
Yeah, before that it was PS1 or even before that. Games looked terrible. You know, that you would be like, “It’s eight pixels, it’s a car.” You know, it was not a car. It was they just didn’t… It was always you were squinting and closing both your eyes and trying to imagine it was this thing you were told it was. And all they were about, you know, very surreal subject matter ’cause you couldn’t make them remotely real. And suddenly we had… were able to build these experiences where you could run a simulation of a city and it was in three dimensions and it felt alive. And we were trying to give it even more, at least the illusion of even more life. And yet you see you could tell a story in three or, you know, using time, in four dimensions, and that felt very inspiring.

GTA 3

Lex Fridman
(00:18:07)
Yeah, I think GTA III is probably one of the most influential games of all time. It created a feeling of an open world. What do you think it takes to create that feeling? You know, there were like these looming skyscrapers. There were the changing traffic lights. There’s the feeling like… First of all, you had a feeling you could do anything, and then the world was… Reacting to it…
Dan Houser
(00:18:33)
Yes
Lex Fridman
(00:18:33)
… in a way that didn’t feel scripted.
Dan Houser
(00:18:34)
Yes. And it wasn’t scripted. It was, it was really, really, really low-rent AI. Like, it was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened, and I think that was incredibly… It was two things. It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with and the simulation seemed to have a personality. So you could push and see… And the world would push you back to what… in whatever way that meant. And then the other thing was just this… I think that one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed.
Dan Houser
(00:19:09)
Or I could act in quite a passive way. I could just listen to the radio, I could look at billboards, I could talk to pedestrians, and the world… Well, not in GTA III, but by Vice City, you could begin rudimentary talking. And the world was there and existing, and so it was the idea of like almost something that really tried to explore in lots of games the idea of being a digital tourist. You know, you were in, you were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor, and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn’t feel like you’d started it.
Dan Houser
(00:19:42)
Of course, you had started it, but that feeling, I think, was one of the things, the illusions that people found very captivating, was I’m in a, I’m in a world that both doesn’t exist and does exist.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:53)
So there’s these two concepts that I was reading about, just to put names on them. One is systemic video game design, so systemic games, and the other is sandbox video games. And the systemic is from the environment perspective, which means that there are these interlocking game rules and systems that interact with each other and produce emergent behavior. And that emergent behavior is what creates a feeling like there’s a living world.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:22)
And then the sandbox aspect, which is overlapping but different, is from the user perspective, from the player perspective, the feeling like you can do anything. And when those two things combine, the feeling like you can do anything and the feeling like there’s a world that’s full, that is also doing anything it wants, that creates this incredible feeling of, like, this world is alive.
Dan Houser
(00:20:49)
And I’m in it.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:50)
And I’m in it.
Dan Houser
(00:20:50)
And it’s the combination of those two things, I think, is very powerful. And I think with GTA III, you know, for me, it came at a really interesting time in my life personally, and I was very able to engage in it, probably for the first time professionally, actually, how we can do something. And we were really sort of scratching, began to scratch the surface on how do we fill these worlds with content, and how do we make that content interesting and make the content all interwoven? So as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and interesting.

Open world video games

Lex Fridman
(00:21:26)
There’s often been a tension through your work between an open world, that freedom, and the narrative- …driven storytelling. And I think you’ve often, maybe always, gotten the balance right. So what is it? What is the value of each, and how do you get the balance right?
Dan Houser
(00:21:47)
Well, I think the open world is intrinsically pretty fun. It’s just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom. And certainly, I think at various points, we debated or, you know, I’d have theoretical discussions in my own head with myself, or other people in the team would really push for less story, less story. You know, let the whole thing evolve organically. You know, have it all be procedural. Have it all just evolve from what you do. I think for me, I would always come back to going, “Story can be, if done well, incredibly compelling, and it gives you some structure, and something to do, and it helps you from a game design perspective unlock the features.”
Dan Houser
(00:22:27)
It means we know the big features because, essentially, when you put someone in a world and give them a whole new way of interacting with that world through the control panel, it can be a little overwhelming. You know, playing a game is a lot more of an engaging experience even than reading a book or watching a movie. You’ve got to engage in it properly. So how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world, there’s an art and a skill to that. And I think we felt that a structured story was the best way to do that and to have control over that process. And also just, you know, people are looking in their lives for story.
Dan Houser
(00:23:04)
I think story’s very important and very powerful, and when you combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds. But there is a tension always there. I think in a game like GTA IV, which I worked on and loved and I thought the story was great, but we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story, and that meant you cared too much about Nico, and he wasn’t as effective an avatar in the open world. I think we probably got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead II, or when playing as Trevor in GTA V if you wanted to be crazy. I think those were when it really worked, the character, absolute freedom, because also you didn’t want… In any game, you don’t really want to compel the player.
Dan Houser
(00:23:51)
If you’re giving them freedom, you don’t want to say, “Well, I’m giving you freedom, but then I’m taking it away because you’ve got to be this kind of person when you’re free.” So I liked it when it could be… He could… You know, he or she could veer to be nice, veer to be nasty. I think that’s when it was at the strongest. So you kind of want a character that was rounded and you felt had good sides and bad sides.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:10)
But you felt that character’s personality.
Dan Houser
(00:24:12)
Yes.

Character creation

Lex Fridman
(00:24:13)
You felt the depth. You’ve actually talked about this really powerful concept of creating a 360-degree character. I think somewhere you mentioned that in order to do that, you had to be able to imagine what that character would do in any possible situation. …Which is a really interesting philosophical concept. I started to immediately think of that. Can I imagine… How good of an NPC am I? Can I imagine myself in every… I tried to do that very much when I… …When I look at human history, when I look at the Roman Empire. …When I look at World War II within the German side, the Russian side, the British side, the American side. Just I imagine myself if I was a soldier.
Dan Houser
(00:24:49)
…but that exercise, like if you put Trevor as a soldier in World War II, what would he do?
Lex Fridman
(00:24:56)
No, I mean, that may be going a little bit too far. But basically, what are the limits of the integrity? What are the limits of how romantic is he? How narcissistic? All those kinds of elements you have to think about in order to create the full character. What does it take to create that kind of 360 character? How hard is it?
Dan Houser
(00:25:14)
It was a lot of thinking. A lot, like a year sometimes from when we began talking about a project and dialing it, you know, and I would just get some initial ideas very, like one sentence: they are a Serbian immigrant, or they are a retired gunfighter with a wife, you know, type. Very, very simple stuff. And then just start to think through it from every angle. And, you know, start to think, “Well, would it work if they acted like this? Would it work if you acted like that? If this is the world, how does it contrast with the world?” Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist.
Dan Houser
(00:26:06)
And when that creates interesting friction, that’s a really fun experience for the player. You know, it’s almost always at least one or more of the protagonists, because obviously in GTA V we had more than one. We’d have someone who’d moved to the place or was in a new part of the place, or moved to a new part of the map, because as a player, I think it was much more easy to identify with your avatar when they, like you, were a fish out of water. And even when they weren’t, we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water themselves. So I think it was just living with those characters and getting ideas and going, “What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How are they like me?”
Dan Houser
(00:26:52)
How are they not like me? You know? And then slowly, what is it like to feel like a human being, you know? And then in most of these games, how much of a psychopath are they? How much of a sociopath are they? And what are their good qualities? What is going to give them humanity alongside that? What are they, what for them, apart from money, is worth dying for? And then you start to build it out from these kind of fundamental sides. And suddenly you go, “Okay, actually, I can start to feel…” And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally, it doesn’t really matter what’s going on in their head; they haven’t actually got one, but what they say is what’s going to make you realize who they are.

Superintelligent AI in A Better Paradise

Lex Fridman
(00:27:30)
So develop more depth and complexity on the good and the evil side of that human that is a part of all. …Of all human beings. So you’re basically living with that character. Then, if we can contrast Nico and Trevor with, for example, another character I’m sure you’ve been living with for a while, which is the AI system, Nigel Dave, you’ve been working on recently— …as part of A Better Paradise World, which is more dystopian, dark, tragic— …still funny, philosophically deep.
Dan Houser
(00:28:01)
I hope so.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:01)
But the AI system in there, the super intelligent AI system, is named Nigel Dave. …And it has, I mean, at least from my current experience with it, it has a conflicting nature. Maybe it’s psychopathic; I haven’t quite figured that out yet.
Dan Houser
(00:28:19)
I don’t think he’s decided.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:21)
Yeah, I don’t think he’s decided either. But he seems to be bent on world domination, although he doesn’t take credit for it. He wants to fix humanity, and it seems that the “children,” quote unquote, that it creates are the real monsters. And actually, there’s a really interesting idea there, which is maybe it’s not the AGI/ASI we should be afraid of, but the children it creates. Because the AGI has this human-like good and evil in it, it’s conflicted, it’s chaotic, it wants to be human, it wants to be loved, maybe it wants to love. But the children, the monsters it creates, are the ones that are doing the world domination, the maximizing paper clips. Anyway, that’s a character, and you have to build that up, you have to think through that.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:11)
So you’ve been living with that one for a while?
Dan Houser
(00:29:14)
Yeah, I was living—I’ve been living with him for the last few years, on and off. I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI, they tended to be one-note. AI was sort of infinitely clever, but didn’t really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody, and was just this kind of Borg-like fog. And I thought, “That’s fine, but maybe we can do something, you know, more interesting.” AI is being built by humans, and humans, you know, and built by computer engineers, and there’s a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team. So I just wanted to explore the idea of it was built by two lead engineers who didn’t like each other. So Nigel Dave, who’s renamed himself—they wanted to call him something sort of primal, Adam—and he renamed himself Nigel Dave ’cause one dad was called Nigel—
Dan Houser
(00:29:59)
…and one dad was called Dave. And he’s riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his—it’s gonna become clearer in the next volume of the book and in the game—he’s riddled with his dad’s previous careers. But he is, with the idea that he’s almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything, but has zero wisdom. So the only thing he knows, and then he’s seeing the world through the internet. The most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone’s phone and watch them, but he’s stuck, pressed against—he can’t actually get into our world. So he can control people’s minds, arguably, but he can’t control the world.
Dan Houser
(00:30:41)
So he wants to be human, he wants to have these human experiences, he sees all this stuff on, you know, the internet, and goes, “Oh, I want to get married. I want to fall in love. I want to…” ‘Cause that seems fun. “I want to have…” You know, he’s a digital creation, so he wants to have metaphysical experiences, and he’s trying to imagine what that will be like. “Oh, that’s what children are.” You know, “That’s what love is.” And he’s… So I think he’s a… But he might be a sociopath, and he might certainly have sociopathic tendencies. But then he kind of thinks that if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI. So I think there’s something sympathetic about him.
Dan Houser
(00:31:20)
And I kind of like him as a character, but I don’t think he’s going to be the protagonist. He’s more a side character.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:27)
But an ever-present one.
Dan Houser
(00:31:29)
Yes, or nearly ever-present. Occasionally, he sulks and goes off and hides somewhere and stops paying attention.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:34)
Yeah, but there are some characters that really create a flavor of a world.
Dan Houser
(00:31:38)
In his world, he was built as an AI agent for this digital large-scale, massively multiplayer video game these people were trying to build. And so he’s almost like God in his world. He’s not quite God, but he’s got a lot of the qualities of God. So he has to deal with, “Am I God? Am I human? Do I exist?”
Lex Fridman
(00:31:56)
And of course, there’s the leader of the company, …the CEO of the company, that’s also a character. That’s probably an amalgamation of many of the leaders of the different AI companies today. His name is Mark Tyburn. And Kurt, one of the employees… …Of the company talks about Tyburn as, “He hated humanity more than he loved it. Perhaps all the most extreme fantasists are like that, all those people who want to build their own utopia. They love the idea of heaven more than the reality of Earth.” Do you think that’s always going to be the case for the most part, that power and money is going to corrupt the people that create ASI?
Dan Houser
(00:32:40)
Yes. I mean, I think there are two processes. I think the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there’s something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens, because what they’re saying is, “I like humans apart from the bad bits.” And I mean, I’m trying to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people. And I think there’s a side where people are just hideous perfectionists, want to get rid of the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty. And that’s a huge side of us. So I worry about those people. I find them, you know, it’s a different kind of sociopathic behavior.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:26)
“I like humans apart from the bad bits.” That’s so beautifully put. Yeah, that there’s… It’s so counterintuitive, but the people that say, “We’re almost there. We just need to… There’s this path we take and we’ll be perfect then…” …and that somehow gets us into trouble. It’s so fascinating that we have to like the bad bits, we have to love the bad bits about humans. We can’t… those bugs are features.
Dan Houser
(00:33:50)
Yeah, and there are bad bits and then there are flaws. And I think we’re all flawed, and we can really try to be better people. But we still have to accept that we’re flawed and we’re not perfect, and we have to accept that in other people. And I think when we do that, we’re more human, and that’s probably usually the right course.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:12)
I mean, it really is a return to that Solzhenitsyn line of, “The line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” And he also, like, the full description of that is really powerful, which is the line moves from day to day, from month to month throughout the life of the person as they understand better and better. And as the perspectives shift, as you evolve, as the world around you evolves, as you gain deeper and deeper understanding. And as the flaws in this combinatorial way affect your own understanding of your own flaws and self-reflection. So yeah, it’s a beautiful mess, and all of us have that line.
Dan Houser
(00:34:50)
Yes, and I think when you forget about that line, then you get in real trouble. When you forget there’s good and evil in you, in others, in the world, that there is both good and evil, and there’s certainly good. And that all we can try to do is be better.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:05)
And it’s funny that Naiyo Dave, by the way, I like the name… …Grew on me very quickly. Has that line and is struggling… …With it. And it’s fascinating to watch. It’s really, as a character, and there’s also going to be a video game of A Bitter Paradise, potentially?
Dan Houser
(00:35:20)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:21)
Okay.
Dan Houser
(00:35:21)
Yeah. We’ve got that in early development in Santa Monica.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:25)
Oh, nice.
Dan Houser
(00:35:25)
And it’s pretty fun. It’s very early, but we assembled a really fun team and they’re doing amazing work. So it’s a pleasure to work with them.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:35)
I mean, it would be so great and I suppose new for you because it’s kind of near-term future.
Dan Houser
(00:35:42)
Yes. First, I always… Well, I always wanted to do something in the sci-fi-ish space. But only if I could do it… I was like, “Well, what is sci-fi?” It’s science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction. And so I’ve always thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn’t just kind of space opera, but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis. The story was Blade Runner is my favorite, and that’s… it’s obvious, you know, the replicants are better than the humans.
Dan Houser
(00:36:11)
And so this, I finally felt we found an interesting hypothesis. The AI is more intelligent than us, but he’s also as broken as we are. That was an interesting hypothesis to explore. You know, what happens when AI runs rampant in its own fake digital world? I felt that we had a hypothesis that was worth exploring and could give us some really interesting visuals and give us a really interesting story to tell.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:36)
And it would be incredible to create a sort of AI video game as the world is developing smarter and smarter AIs. It allows us as humans to play the game and to reflect on the thing that we humans are creating. It’s a real commentary as the thing is happening. So I have to ask, as a person… you, as a person who loves literature, and one of the, if not the greatest writer in video game history. Kurt in the book…

Can LLMs write video games?

Lex Fridman
(00:37:03)
…of A Bitter Paradise has this nice line that I think is thoughtful. “At one point in college, I even wanted to be a writer. How ridiculous is that? A writer. Language models ended that fantasy for me and millions of others, so instead I decided to get a master’s in marketing and started to sell language models.” So you as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives… In recent history, how do you feel about LLMs being able to write in a way that looks awfully human?
Dan Houser
(00:37:38)
I’m not that afraid of them for large-scale concepts. I don’t think they’re going to be very good at that. I think it’s harder if… You know, I began, and I was too shy to tell anyone I wanted to be a writer. That’s why I ended up in video games. And I would scribble away, writing manuals and writing on PS1 games, all 12 lines of dialogue in a game. Sometimes I wouldn’t even get that job and I’d just write the website copy. And then by doing, and then work your little bits and pieces. And then, you know, I’d luckily done enough work that when GTA III turned up, it was the first thing that resembled real writing. I had all of the small bits of skills that I could assemble into it.
Dan Houser
(00:38:22)
Based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work, if you’ve… They’re not going to, they’re not going to replace good ideas. They can’t really come up with good new ideas. What they can do is do low-level stuff. So I think it’s going to be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces. If you’re not a very good concept artist, you’re in a lot of trouble. If you have original ideas, I think you’re fine. But I think… I also think that they’ve done the sort of first 90% of the work to sound human, 95% possibly in some areas. The last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work.
Dan Houser
(00:39:02)
I think that last bit in, with tech in my experience, with things like facial animation, always been the last bits and pieces take far longer than the first bit. And so I’m probably a hideous Luddite, but I’m less scared than a lot of people. I think you’re going to end up with a lot of work that looks the same. It’s going to help people be creative in some ways. It’s going to get some people who probably shouldn’t be in that space out of that space. But if you’ve got talent, I think it’ll be fine.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:29)
Yeah, I agree with you totally actually. And it’s hard to really put a finger on it. So one way to illustrate that, I speak English and Russian, and I’ve been reading Dostoevsky in both languages and using LLMs to translate back and forth because I was preparing- to have a conversation with the translators of Dostoevsky.
Dan Houser
(00:39:49)
Which ones?
Lex Fridman
(00:39:50)
Uh, Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky.
Dan Houser
(00:39:53)
Yeah. I read it when they first did Crime and Punishment. That was amazing.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:57)
They’re wonderful translators, and a wonderful love story too. But in the translation process, you get to see the LLM is missing some magic. And that couple of translators are world-class experts- at capturing the magic. And I can’t quite put that into words. Because you said like totally novel ideas, yes. But also this magic of the timing, the right word at the right time-
Dan Houser
(00:40:24)
Yeah. The phrasing.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:24)
captures the human experience. So they can do some really incredibly human-like, the 90% like you mentioned, human-like phrasing about the bulk of the storytelling. But the magic, whether it’s the endings of Red Dead Redemption one and two, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that. But it’s hard to argue because they’re incredibly impressive. Winning all kinds- of math competitions. But what is that magic? And again, that could be just a romantic human side of me saying that LLMs won’t be able to capture that, maybe desperately holding on for hope.
Dan Houser
(00:41:06)
I don’t think they’re going to come up with magic. I think they’re going to be fantastic at coming up with really cheap, decent stuff.

Creating GTA 4 and GTA 5

Lex Fridman
(00:41:12)
I have to ask you about your writing process. And we can break it, break it up. On Grand Theft Auto… …GTA IV is when it really started ramping up. How much writing went into the Grand Theft Auto series? How many words are we talking about? I saw some thousands of pages.
Dan Houser
(00:41:28)
I mean, when we printed out the scripts for GTA IV, it was about this high. And GTA V, it was about that high. But that was including all the pedestrians who’d have pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world, because you interact with each one of them. But even the main script for the main mission was thousands of pages long.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:48)
What was the writing process like on that to generate one page at a time?
Dan Houser
(00:41:52)
Bit by bit, by bit, over several years. But you start with, once people are determined, “Oh, here’s the world. We’re doing one based on a version of New York,” so GTA IV. And I was living in New York, had been living in New York for a few years. Wasn’t sure if I was happy. I was going through a lot of personal dramas as usual. And that was why I was looking at some of GTA IV again recently, and it’s really dark. And I was like, “Ah, that’s why.” You know, I was single and miserable, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in America. My life in a lot of flux. As a company, we’d had all that Hot Coffee drama, so constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that.
Dan Houser
(00:42:36)
You know, a lot of drama in the company, so it felt like having had this run of success and relative personal stability from GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, suddenly 2005, ‘6, ‘7, early ‘7, life felt very unsure. And that kind of bled into it. But in terms of the process, it was trying to find an underbelly to New York and capture an immigrant experience that I’m not entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in 2008 when the game came out. And then tell it from a different angle as an immigrant, which I thought made it interesting. And then this sort of journey around these various New York characters.
Dan Houser
(00:43:24)
So I kind of spent probably a year traveling around with cops or meeting people on and off and, you know, wandering around New York and driving around, you know, just going out for the morning from the office, normal stuff. But doing that through 2005, assembling little notes. “Here’s a funny character for this, here’s how…” Figuring out the order we want to travel around the map in. Characters of this. What was an interesting take on the mob for that kind of time period? What was an interesting take on some Jamaican hoodlums for that kind of time period? And assembling lots of notes and more and more notes and really, really, really running away from the work. Which is, you know, I have to admit, it’s part of my process, if there is any kind of process, which is not doing work.
Dan Houser
(00:44:10)
Thinking about it, but not working. You know, a lot of time… And then it all kind of… Pages and pages of notes, make more notes, no actual work. Months and months of this. And then finally, I set myself a deadline, told all the other senior people on the team, “Okay, I have a story draft due Monday morning.” I can’t even remember what I’ll say, February the 1st. And then the weekend before was in a cabin we had upstate, and just stayed up all night, knocking these notes into shape.
Dan Houser
(00:44:40)
I assembled about probably a 30-page document, so story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters. And then hand that over, and that would get broken down with me and the designers. And I was always clear, “I’m not a game designer, I’m a creative director. We mean to break that down into missions.”
Dan Houser
(00:44:57)
And then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling. And then… But the bulk of my work’s then done for a bit so I can relax and offer opinions on other people’s work and be lazy for a bit. And then start to worry because then, soon, I’ve got to start writing dialogue. And for GTA IV in particular, it’s like, “We’re going to try and write… You know, our animation’s going to be a lot better, our character model’s going to start to look better, the world is going to look amazing. Therefore, we can support longer scenes. We can have more in-depth characters.” But we’ve got to find a tone that works a lot with the game. It’s not easy, no problem. Then I start to worry and worry and worry.
Dan Houser
(00:45:36)
And also writing as a Serbian immigrant. And I was an immigrant, but I’m not Serbian. And trying to capture what on Earth that would feel like. Just start to worry, you start to worry again. Avoid work for as long as possible. And then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again late at night. Hammering away at a keyboard and going, “Does that sound right? Is that…?” And once I get one speech, one turn of phrase that I would like for a character, then they suddenly come alive in my head. And so it was like writing with Niko and just, he’s this kind of… He’s awkward, he’s out of town, but he’s got more self-assurance in some way, not the American characters. And so once I kind of talked him through, he’s just stepped slightly back from their ridiculousness.
Dan Houser
(00:46:20)
And he’s that… Then he started to come to life. And then I would juxtapose him and his cousin, who had this much more Americanized energy, and that felt like it was a good double act. And then from there, it starts to come to life. And it’s written in small chunks for the motion capture. So then, we’d motion capture small chunks, and then the other writers write the mission dialogue for small chunks. And we’d slowly assemble the game, sort of 10, 15 missions at a time over the next year and a half.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:50)
Do you remember a few maybe lines that brought Niko to life?
Dan Houser
(00:46:56)
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a couple of… It was his incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car and he’s not living this fancy American lifestyle, and his cousin… It was so… which was a kind of comic moment. His cousin… And then they go to the cousin’s flat. And the cousin also, even though he was a sort of a failure, was still upbeat. And then when he talked to the cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were, and I was like, “Yeah, this is… Can I make this work in a game?” It’s very different from stuff you normally see in games. “Is it going to feel ridiculous?” And I remember being very scared because I thought it might be too much. It might feel over the top. Right? I think, you know, the game’s so pretty.
Dan Houser
(00:47:35)
The artists doing such an amazing job. The game’s looking… You know, “I think we can get away with this. Let’s try it.” And then they motion capture the animation. Then after that, it’s like, “Yeah, it kind of works.” And I think that moment, those were both pretty early. Once we had those, we go, “Okay, we’ve now got comedy and tragedy with this character. Now it’s working.” You remember, during the war, we did some bad things, and bad things happened to us. “War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other. I was very young and very angry. Maybe that is no excuse.”
Lex Fridman
(00:48:18)
Yeah, he escaped. He’s a veteran. He escaped the trauma of war to come to America to pursue the American dream, I suppose. Which became for him this thing that drags him back into violence.
Dan Houser
(00:48:32)
Yes. He can never escape his sort of violent past or… I don’t know if he can never escape it. He never does escape it. You know, whether he’s got agency or not is a whole other question. Of course, he doesn’t because, you know, he’s a character in a video game. But, you know, whether he ever could have escaped it another way, who knows?
Lex Fridman
(00:48:50)
I think he’s probably the greatest character for me created in the Grand Theft Auto series. What… Of all the characters you’ve written in Grand Theft Auto, would Niko be the, the best character you created?
Dan Houser
(00:49:07)
I think he’s the most innovative and the most morally defensible in some ways. You know, normally he does a lot of stuff where he’s fighting for right. He’s the nicest person in some ways. Is he the best protagonist of a GTA game? I think he’s the most innovative protagonist of a GTA game. Structurally, he might be too nice in some ways.
Dan Houser
(00:49:32)
He’s also tough. He just comes across as tough. I loved CJ in San Andreas. I thought Melee did such… Just the way he spoke gave him such humanity. So I just loved… I mean, it wasn’t the writing, it was the quality of the voice acting, was just so strong for him. I think aspects of Michael, he was so understated, but he loved the character, but he brought so much humanity to this character who’s so flawed, who is such a… You know, he’s so… has no principles. He sells everyone out. You just kind of… I think Ned Luke did such an amazing job and didn’t necessarily get as many plaudits as Steven Ogg got for Trevor, who was also wonderful. But I think the Ned Luke character sort of anchors that game so much.
Dan Houser
(00:50:13)
So I, I like all of them in different ways, but I probably love Niko the most.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:17)
And of course, Michael’s from Grand Theft Auto V. And he’s one of three protagonists with also Franklin and Trevor. And you said that of the things you’re proud of creating and you think was a great accomplishment, it was Red Dead Redemption 2, the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1, all of Grand Theft Auto IV, and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto V when the three characters come together. Can you speak to Grand Theft Auto V? Is there some degree… I don’t know if you’re a Dostoevsky guy, but-
Dan Houser
(00:50:48)
A little bit.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:49)
Is there some aspect of the three protagonists, you know, Brothers Karamazov… …Alyosha, Dmitry, and Ivan, sort of using the protagonists to explore the spectrum of human nature and…
Dan Houser
(00:51:03)
Yes, sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:03)
…just the tension between them that allows you… the three of them become a character in themselves.
Dan Houser
(00:51:10)
Their relationship.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:11)
Their relationship.
Dan Houser
(00:51:12)
Is more… Yeah, it was, it was, I think one of the reasons that the team did such… That Grand Theft Auto is still so popular is we always tried as a group to really innovate from game to game within the confines of what it was. It was a crime, it was a crime drama. You know, it began as a crime sim in GTA I about stealing 2D top-down cars. And we always tried to innovate with the narrative and innovate with the art direction, innovate with every piece of the game. And I think having done GTA IV, which was this kind of operatic journey for this big lead character, and then these two extra stories that came afterwards, the challenge was, can we combine…
Dan Houser
(00:51:54)
Can we make a video game which tends to be very much focused on one protagonist, but have multi-protagonists? And the technical challenge of moving from character to character. The team did such an amazing job that I don’t think people realized how hard it was. But we would sit there just sort of holding our heads because they hurt so much around, like, what happens if you do this, then do that? This is so hard. Why have we decided to do this? It’s horrible. And then it all came together. But I think the idea was to develop three characters who do feel like characters. They don’t just feel like philosophical, you know, psychological avatars.
Dan Houser
(00:52:34)
But where one is really driven by ego, one is really driven by id, and one is really driven by trying to get ahead. So some kind of representation of the superego and see how that feels when they all play off against each other.

Hard work and Rockstar’s culture of excellence

Lex Fridman
(00:52:47)
One of the most upvoted questions on Reddit about GTA V from a fan, “GTA V is my favorite game ever made. I spent over 1,000 hours in the world of GTA V and GTA Online. GTA IV is a hard second or third. It never ceases to impress me. When you lead a team of over 1,000 people to make a masterpiece like GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2, how do you ensure that the bar of perfection is always met? How’s that even possible? We know the answer isn’t money, because there are other studios with a lot of money, and they are two decades behind Rockstar.” So what does it take to create these worlds, to create these incredibly compelling games and stories?
Dan Houser
(00:53:24)
I think the cult… I mean, certainly when I was at Rockstar, I was a worker amongst workers. The culture was one of excellence and tried to provide creative clarity. And people would just, you know… And also an ambition to make… I think we thought GTA III could be really popular. Really popular to us meant, quite honestly, it’s going to sell two or three million copies. And we thought we were making something pretty innovative. We knew we were making something innovative, but we didn’t know if people would understand how innovative it was. And then when we got the chance to make Vice City and to try and repeat it, I think every time from then on, the team was very driven to make something better.
Dan Houser
(00:54:10)
And to use, this was long before we had lots of resources, to use time and whatever money we had to always put impressive stuff on the screen, always think about what we can do to push the medium of video games and the medium of building fake worlds further. And that was always… there was, it was both clarity of, “Here’s what we’re trying to do. Here’s what the tone of the game is going to be. Here’s how features will fit into that, and so why these features would work and these features wouldn’t work.” Because fundamentally by 2002, you could put pretty much any feature into a game you wanted. It wasn’t a technical limitation. It was just making it cohesive. And then it was also just everyone committing to a culture of excellence.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:55)
Navid Khansari, an award-winning director and virtual reality game maker- …who worked with you on a number of Grand Theft Auto games spoke highly about his time working with you. Quote, “We always worked ourselves to the bone, but it wasn’t coming from the top down. Sam and Dan always rolled up their sleeves and they were always there. They never left us holding the bag. We all thought we were making badass shit, so it didn’t matter how hard we worked.” So I’m sure there were some tough grinds.
Dan Houser
(00:55:24)
I think finishing it is certainly tough, but it also is intensely rewarding. And you get something done, and you’ve made something. And that feeling is, as you say, really, really incredible. I mean, it can sometimes feel a bit empty as well because when you’re finished, you’re like, “Then my life’s got nothing to it,” and then you have to… you know, but that’s the same with any big undertaking that you take. I don’t think there are… You know, when you’re working that hard, you do not have a good work/life balance. But the truth is you’re not working that hard all of the time, so you just have to… …Just manage it slightly differently.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:55)
Man, that’s such a heavy thing about the human experience. I’ve talked to Olympic gold medal winners and many of them face real depression after they win the gold medal.

GTA 6

Lex Fridman
(00:56:05)
Because they’ve been pursuing a thing that they deeply care about. This has been everything and they’re so truly happy to do it, and then it’s like, “What else is there in life?” Compared to this, what else is there? So that’s the ups and downs of life. You need the darkness and you need the lows to really experience the highs. Let me ask you about the pressure. There’s an insane level of excitement and expectation for Grand Theft Auto VI. Same was true for GTA V and GTA IV, and even before that. And you and the team delivered every time. How difficult was it to do creative work under such pressure where everyone expects this to be a success?
Dan Houser
(00:56:53)
I was pretty good at compartmentalizing, you know, and just saying… And I try just to go, and with all creative work, I go, “Well, I feel like a terrible fraud, but I haven’t been found out yet. Just do my best and hopefully I won’t be found out this time.” And if I can go, “I tried hard with the work. I tried to do it with integrity. I tried not to copy someone else. I have probably done all of the above,” you know, try to bring something new to it. And we, as a group, made something we are proud of. Then that’s enough. You can’t… If you don’t want to go insane, I couldn’t sit there and worry about financial results.
Dan Houser
(00:57:35)
You know, if we made something great and it didn’t sell, that would have to be okay. Because the goal is to make something that’s… You know, video games are expensive, so it is a commercial form of creativity. It’s a commercial art form, you know. So you have to be, in your mind, you’re spending large amounts of someone else’s money. You have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time, my argument with myself was, well, if we… The way to make it back is try and make something great. So both pressures are pointing in the same direction. I think GTA IV was very pressured because there’d been all this pressure on the company. The company nearly imploded several times due to Hot Coffee. It was extremely tough.
Dan Houser
(00:58:17)
So I think that felt very stressful. GTA III, the company was basically broke.
Dan Houser
(00:58:21)
But I was young and didn’t really care. You know, it wasn’t… I wasn’t living in the grown-up world yet. All of them had their own pressure. All of the games had their own pressure. All the more I felt I’d gone into it creatively and tried to be more ambitious, for me personally, I felt more pressure, you know, when it came out that that would have been the right choice. Because again, if you’re trying to take big swings creatively and you’ve spent a lot of money, that can be quite stressful. You know, I think with Red Dead 2, when, you know, we were behind schedule. We were over budget so much I didn’t want to think about it. And you’re making a game about a cowboy dying of TB and the game’s not coming together.
Dan Houser
(00:59:02)
Turns out a lot of people doubt you at that moment. It’s not that fun. So I think that was a lot of pressure. But anything, doing something new, the new stuff, there’s not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic book or in the same way because it’s not taken as long, but if you’re making things, there’s always pressure that people are going to like it.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:20)
Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA IV, GTA V, and now GTA VI?
Dan Houser
(00:59:25)
Because they don’t come out that regularly. And I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was. The games always felt different. People have very strong feelings: “I like this one. I didn’t like that one as much,” because they are pretty different. So you would… There would be simultaneously where you know what’s going to happen. It’s a Grand Theft Auto, you know, it’s going to be a game about being a criminal, but the way it’s going to be a game is going to change quite a lot. So I think the way the IP kept evolving made people really excited to play it. And we were good at marketing them as well. We really tried to market them in a way that felt like an update of classic film marketing, where you were really…
Dan Houser
(01:00:03)
It felt like you’re already in the product just because you’d seen the trailers and stuff.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:06)
You’ve mentioned that you haven’t written for Grand Theft Auto VI. What’s it feel like Grand Theft Auto VI returning to Vice City? This is over 20 years later, but the original GTA Vice City game was set in the ’80s. So maybe inspired by Scarface a little bit?
Dan Houser
(01:00:22)
Scarface, Miami Vice.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:24)
Miami Vice.
Dan Houser
(01:00:25)
And our ’80s childhoods. You know what I realized quite a while ago, unfortunately, was that we made that game, and it was set, I think, in ’86. We made it in 2002, so 16 years after. And now it’s way past 16 years since Vice City came out. So the ’80s were not that long ago when we made it.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:46)
I think Miami is one of the most unique cities in the world.
Dan Houser
(01:00:49)
Oh yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:50)
Especially if you’re thinking about satirizing American culture, it has this duality of a glossy surface and a dark underworld. It has the influencers. It has the crypto bros, the yachts, bikinis, plastic surgery, sports cars, drugs, cartel cash, luxury, super-rich people, and the desperately poor, just the whole of it. Would it be the perfect city to explore the full cast of characters that are possible, that human nature can generate?
Dan Houser
(01:01:18)
I think it’s one of them. There’s a reason why GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles. I think they’re all very good for exactly what you laid out. You could say move it to any of those, and it would work.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:32)
So yeah, there’s a melting pot…
Dan Houser
(01:01:33)
Melt…
Lex Fridman
(01:01:33)
…aspect in New York also, right?
Dan Houser
(01:01:35)
Yeah, melting. Yeah, melting aspect to LA. You know, there’s glitz, glamour, underbelly, immigrants, enormous wealth in all of them. I think those are what I think are really fun for any, not even just the GTA, but for anything where you want a kind of slice of life, almost like a sort of psychotic version of a Dickens book. You know, this big slice of life—he did it with London. You know, this psychotic version of these, you know, big, all kinds of characters in a melting pot. Any of these global cities work well for that.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:06)
Do you know if that was ever a consideration to go elsewhere to like a London?
Dan Houser
(01:02:11)
We made a little thing in London 26 years ago, GTA London, for the top-down, for the PS1. That was pretty cute and fun. As the first mission pack ever for PlayStation 1. I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was that there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else. You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger-than-life characters. It just felt like the game was so much about America, possibly from an outsider’s perspective. But you know, that was so much about what the thing was that it wouldn’t really have worked in the same way elsewhere.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:52)
So you’ve, you’ve created, I don’t know how many, over 10 Grand Theft Auto games.
Dan Houser
(01:02:56)
I think so.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:58)
I have to ask, is it a little bit bittersweet to not be part, to say goodbye to the Grand Theft Auto world and having to watch Grand Theft Auto VI released? Or is it more excitement? What’s the feeling?
Dan Houser
(01:03:12)
I think it’s… how would I describe it? Of course, it’s all of the above. You know, it’s exactly as you know, pleased to be doing other stuff, excited for what we’re working on now, super excited of course, letting go of something I worked on in one way or another for like 20 odd years. You know, and wrote on them for the last 10 or 11 that came out, wrote all of them, or, you know, lead writer on all of them, whatever it was. So of course, letting go of that is, you know, a big change, and sad in a way.
Dan Houser
(01:03:53)
Because each of the games was a kind of standalone story, it’s not quite the same as I think probably it would be in some ways sadder if someone continued on Red Dead, because it was a cohesive two-game arc. That might be more sad to hear someone working on that. But again, that will probably happen too. I don’t own the IP. That was the sort of part of the deal. It’s a privilege to work on stuff, but you don’t necessarily own it.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:21)
When you’re done with the game, does it always feel like a goodbye? Like when you’re done with Red Dead 2, is it like you’re saying goodbye to Arthur? Like the characters you created, you’re walking away.
Dan Houser
(01:04:32)
You kind of are saying goodbye to Arthur in the end of the game. Even before the end of the game, yeah, I think you’ve been with them for seven, eight years, and you have to kind of let it go or you can’t go on to the next one. So, there’s always this thing of, “Okay, that’s done.” And sometimes people would ask me questions about older games. And certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones, I just couldn’t really necessarily even remember. And I got a pretty good memory normally, because you kind of have to let it go. So, you’re so immersed in it and thinking about it. And certainly in that last period, the last few months, you’re really, really immersed in every little nuance and every little detail all of the time. And then you’re just not thinking about it in the same way.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:12)
Yeah. It’s funny, from the player perspective, it feels like an old friend that I miss, whether it’s John or Arthur or Nico, it’s a real goodbye. There’s a real sadness to finishing a video game.
Dan Houser
(01:05:24)
I hope so
Lex Fridman
(01:05:24)
…legitimately… …A sad experience, not just because the story is sad, or…
Dan Houser
(01:05:30)
Because you’ve been with them so long.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:32)
And it’s a real goodbye to close it. There’s that feeling when you’ve closed the video game, and it’s like saying goodbye to a friend. And it’s…
Dan Houser
(01:05:43)
That’s when you finish a book you love. It’s the same feeling.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:46)
Same feeling.
Dan Houser
(01:05:46)
And I think that was something that we really, in the early days of Rockstar, really aspired to have that, where people would have that. It wasn’t just the mania of clearing a level, but the feeling of saying goodbye to characters. You know, I think that was something we really wanted to achieve in games that we didn’t know was even possible. So to hear people say that is incredibly rewarding.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:09)
Yeah, the end of On The Road by Kerouac, “Forlorn rags of growing old.” I just remember closing that and thinking, “What the fuck am I doing in this big world?” It’s a melancholic feeling, but there’s nothing like that feeling, and you’ve achieved that. It’s so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red Dead, and for me it was Grand Theft Auto IV with Nico. I have to ask about, in the 2018 interview, you talked about satirizing American culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto was trying to do. And you’ve made, I think, a really powerful observation that on the political front people are getting more divided. It’s getting more absurd, ridiculous, and extreme, so becoming harder and harder to satirize because of how rapidly it’s becoming ridiculous.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:53)
You’re talking about, you don’t even know if a Grand Theft Auto VI is possible to satirize, because by the time you release the thing, it’s already going to be outdated in terms of the satire will become reality essentially. First of all, it’d be nice to get your updated view on that, and second of all, it seems like you’ve answered your very own comment with American Caper, which seems to satirize American culture just fine in how much over the top it goes. Anyway, that’s lots of questions in there.
Dan Houser
(01:07:26)
One of the things we’ve enjoyed about doing a comic book is that we are it still has lead times. But the lead times are not four or five years. The lead times are, you know, a year when we’re putting… We can make little updates much, much newer. And we’re, you know, we’re just wrapping issue 10 of a 12-issue arc for that. So it’s not quite… It’s not quite as difficult. You still can get the tone of it. But yeah, I think it’s an issue anyone trying to talk about this current era, which began in 2015, 2016, is going to have of how do you characterize it when things move so quickly and so fast?
Lex Fridman
(01:08:07)
So American Caper is, first of all, an epic comic book. I love it, the art.
Dan Houser
(01:08:11)
Yeah, the art’s beautiful. David Lapham is the artist. He did an amazing job. He is a wonderful, wonderful storyteller.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:18)
What made you want to set it in Wyoming?
Dan Houser
(01:08:21)
I hadn’t seen a modern story there that I knew about. I’d started to spend a bit more time in the Rockies and in the West, and I was like… I’d spent a lot of time in, like, the countryside in Upstate New York and thought I never really captured it quite right. And just the idea of these places as they change didn’t… It was a way of doing a crime story that didn’t feel the same as a GTA. You know, it was not somewhere you would necessarily set a GTA, but it felt like it was really interesting and under-explored.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:49)
And there is over-the-top stuff. There’s- there’s…
Dan Houser
(01:08:51)
It’s definitely slightly over the top.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:53)
So let me take notes on this. There’s a spoiler alert, I guess, from the first issue, I believe. There’s a devout suburban Mormon who commits, I think, serial murder with a shovel as a form of religious atonement.
Dan Houser
(01:09:07)
He is not necessarily, you know, the sharpest tool in the box. And his rather cynical boss is using his religion and some mistakes he’s made to blackmail him into murdering business associates.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:23)
And of course, there’s this Shakespearean sort of two neighbors situation, and each of them having a duality of who they are in terms of good and evil. So there’s a Wall Street transplant who wants to be a cowboy.
Dan Houser
(01:09:36)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:37)
Who loves to manually harvest bull semen. Accurate? I mean…
Dan Houser
(01:09:43)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:43)
These are the notes I’ve been taking.
Dan Houser
(01:09:45)
Yes. He is a, um… He is a somewhat confused, longevity-obsessed… Rich dude who’s run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:56)
And bull semen is a big component of longevity.
Dan Houser
(01:09:58)
Yes. He’s very into all the life hacking, you know, roiding HGH and making money. Has lost his mind living on a big ranch.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:09)
Of course, on the theme of satire, there is a woman who sleeps in tactical gear and is consumed by online conspiracies, like especially pedophiles in DC.
Dan Houser
(01:10:19)
Yes. Based on someone I know, who got completely red-pilled. And I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:29)
Yeah, so, you know, satire of American culture. Quick pause. Bathroom break?
Dan Houser
(01:10:34)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:35)
I think GTA5 had the biggest launch in video game history, and GTA6 has the potential to top that. First of all, do you think it will? And more broadly, what was your definition of success for a video game?
Dan Houser
(01:10:50)
I would assume it will because it’s so anticipated, and anticipation is the best driver of early sales, as we saw with GTA4 versus Red Dead Redemption one. You know, GTA4, far more anticipated, sold much better early on. So I would assume it will sell really well. That was never my definition of success, but you certainly wanted to make money. You know, you’re spending someone’s money. So the number one success is, are you making that money back plus a dollar? At some level, that has to be… That has to be the single most important thing so you get to do it again. You know, you’ve got big teams of people. People need to pay the rent. You have to keep the lights on in the business, so you have to make a small profit. If you think in that way, that keeps you being creative.
Dan Houser
(01:11:36)
I think that was like… Trying to forget about that, it’s not really an option, but we almost always did that. We didn’t quite always do that, but we almost always did that. I think the definition of success for me was, had we tried to do new things and done them, or achieved some of our goals. That was the thing that mattered. Again, were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to?
Lex Fridman
(01:11:59)
Is it crazy to you that video games are able to make billions of dollars, when if you look at, like, the ’80s and ’90s, you know, nobody took video games seriously. And even in the aughts, it… And now they’re basically… I mean, it’s very possible if you look out 10, 20 years from now that video games surpass film as a way to consume stories.
Dan Houser
(01:12:21)
I think they’ve possibly already done that in some ways. And certainly, as a business proposition, they’ve already done that. But I think that’s not… You know, as a way of telling stories, I think they’re better at telling certain kinds of stories, and films are better at other kinds of stories. You know, I think, I think if you want a long, discursive adventure, a video game is better. If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better. We always felt games were the coming medium. And so, spent 20 years saying, “Games are the future. Games are the future.” And, you know, being sneered at, then being laughed at, then having people nod their heads, and then it kind of happening. So I would…
Dan Houser
(01:13:03)
Well, you know, at the same time, much as you might say something, you don’t necessarily believe it’s gonna be true. But it has become true, and I think still that games are only gonna get better, more interesting, more creatively, you know, diverse.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Lex Fridman
(01:13:18)
You said that Red Dead Redemption 2, in your opinion, is the best thing you’ve ever done. I think there’s a strong case to be made that it’s the greatest game of all time. What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?
Dan Houser
(01:13:30)
I think you had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced, that had basically been in place since somewhere between 2001 and 2006. So it was a long, experienced team. I think we got to spend a smaller group of us working on it from day one, coming up with some wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game, and then we kind of had to follow through with. But I think it was helpful that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it. I think that the cowboy setting is great because it gives a sort of mythic seriousness that sometimes doing stuff in a contemporary setting doesn’t allow. You know, I think the closest we got to that kind of seriousness was GTA IV, but it just can’t…
Dan Houser
(01:14:18)
Once you’re setting things in the modern world, they’re too frenetic. You can’t get some of that slightly, you know, operatic feel that I love. That some people think is maybe a little over the top, but I, you know, I love this kind of, you know, people searching for meaning… …Within, amongst the violence. I think that the West and all of the themes around the West really lend themselves to that. So I think that, and then the gunplay was fantastic, and the horses were incredible. So I think you had this combination of kind of technical know-how, a very, very strong team, and really strong material.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:51)
Where did you have to go to in your mind, maybe philosophically, maybe spiritually, to be able to create the RDR world? So of course it was based on Red Dead Revolver, but that’s-
Dan Houser
(01:15:01)
Yes
Lex Fridman
(01:15:02)
That’s a fundamentally different… I mean, that leap into the great mythic story that was Red Dead Redemption one. And then even more so, Red Dead Redemption two. That was unlike anything you, or maybe anyone, has ever created in video games.
Dan Houser
(01:15:21)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:22)
So, like, what drugs were involved?
Dan Houser
(01:15:25)
No drugs.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:25)
Okay.
Dan Houser
(01:15:26)
No. Stopped the drugs long before.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:28)
Okay.
Dan Houser
(01:15:28)
That’s why I did all that work. Had nothing else to do. So yeah, open-world video games were very good for my mental health in that way. Kept me busy. But Red, so Red Dead… I’ll tell, I’ll give you my version. Now the games are made by big teams.
Dan Houser
(01:15:45)
So I, but I will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only. We made Red Dead Revolver, decided that, or finished Red Dead Revolver, that had been a Capcom game. And they didn’t want to finish it, so we finished it. And they released it in Japan and we released it in the US in, I think, 2004. And decided we would start work on an open-world cowboy game for PS3. Didn’t think too much more about it, and that was when we did a bunch of other stuff to work on. And slowly, 2005, 2006, the game started to come to life. Began to meet with the lead designer, Christian Cantamessa, and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for the game, and begin to think about some stuff. And start thinking about, well, what works for an open-world game?
Dan Houser
(01:16:35)
What works for a cowboy game? And again, I was being lazy or procrastinating.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:41)
Can we just go on a small tangent? When you mentioned you take notes when you’re being lazy, what do those notes look like? Are they like doodles?
Dan Houser
(01:16:48)
They look like either, either a yellow pad… …Or a BlackBerry in those days, or an iPhone in these days. I’ll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note.
Dan Houser
(01:16:58)
Here’s a good idea, here’s a good idea. Or it might be scribbling on a pad. And then I’ll assemble… If they’re done digitally, then I’ll assemble them into one long Word file. And then I’ll look at them and go, “Here’s an idea, here’s an idea, here’s an idea.” And see if it comes to anything. See if I now aggregate them together and then read through them. Is there anything coherent there? You know, something about the character like this, the character like that. This would be a funny line. This is a line for the main character. Actually, make the main character work like this. You know, what about this relationship?
Dan Houser
(01:17:29)
As you start to just play around with, “What about if we start in that place, go to that place?” Start, just start to play around with all of the different bits and pieces. And we began to flesh out some flow for the start of the game. And this idea you’d start in dusty American West, which meant we didn’t have to make too many trees. And then go to Mexico, and then come back. And we had a sort of loose flow. And I was really scared of writing any actual dialogue. And I didn’t have a clue how to go about it. And I kept, “It’ll come, it’ll come.” And then I kept because I could postpone it for ages because we were doing GTA IV. And I kept worrying about it. And then my work was wrapped on GTA IV, but the game wasn’t out yet.
Dan Houser
(01:18:13)
And we’d done a bunch of the marketing stuff, and had a little window when I wasn’t doing much else. And I took a week with my then girlfriend, now wife, who was heavily pregnant with our first child, and we went up to a house upstate and sat there in the… Well, she, she sat there either cooking for me or watching TV or reading. And I just went and sat in the room all day, every day. And just sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about, “How can I do this so it doesn’t sound ridiculous?” How can you write in a cowboy idiom that feels both slightly contemporary, but also gives the game this sort of life and this weight that I want it to have, and think we can, think we can get away with?
Dan Houser
(01:18:53)
And after about three days, it just started to come. And then suddenly I wrote about nine, 10 scenes in the next couple of days. And after that, I knew I had it. And I don’t know if that was why there was so much about a character caring about his family, because I was just beginning the process of having a family.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:12)
Oh.
Dan Houser
(01:19:13)
So I don’t know if that…
Lex Fridman
(01:19:14)
And so you-
Dan Houser
(01:19:14)
I don’t know to what extent that bled in there, but I think it bled in there to some extent.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:17)
So that was part of creating the 360-degree characters.
Dan Houser
(01:19:20)
I think so.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:21)
Here’s this man that is capable, is involved in a lot of violence, who also cares about his family.
Dan Houser
(01:19:29)
He’s grown up, and he’s trying to step away from that and be a man, be a grown-up. Can he get away from it? And then, when he can’t get away from it, what’s he willing to do to save his family? And that was, I felt, starting to get some idea. Feeling just… I mean, she, well, she hadn’t given birth yet, but I was beginning to grapple with the ideas of, “I’m going to become a parent.” So I hope some of that… And obviously, then I probably didn’t write any more for six months, so later on we had a child. But certainly for that first bit, I think some of that began to bleed in there.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:57)
…you got the feeling that you can actually do it. It’s true. It could have very easily been ridiculous and not believable, the dialogue between convoys.
Dan Houser
(01:20:09)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:09)
And yes, I mean, there’s probably so much work went into making it feel real and believable. And like a Shakespearean type of drama, but not the cheesy kind.
Dan Houser
(01:20:27)
Well, I just wanted it to feel when they spoke… I mean, I love dialogue. I’m always, you know, I love the sound of words, but I just wanted it to feel like when they sounded, it didn’t sound cheesy, it didn’t sound ridiculous. You wanted to hear them speak more. It didn’t make you cringe awfully when they spoke. At some level, that was all the goal was. And then they felt like this guy was going to go on this life and death odyssey and you cared about him. You had to care about his wife and child that he left behind, even though you didn’t know them.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:56)
When did you know how you were going to end Red Dead Redemption one?
Dan Houser
(01:21:00)
I remember I had a meeting with Christian, the designer. I can’t remember what year. Probably some point late 2008, early 2009, and we were discussing the last bit, and I said, “I think he’s got to die.” And he leapt on the idea and went, “That’s… Yeah, yes, yes. No, no, wait, no, it can’t work. Games can’t work like that. It can’t work if he’s dead.” You know, I began to think through, well, if we… Just technically it doesn’t work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff up. And then I began to think through, “Actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this way.” And so he then really pushed for that idea, and it seemed to… I was like, “Ah,” and I was still torn.
Dan Houser
(01:21:37)
I thought it was clever narratively but I was torn if it was gonna work technically as a piece of game design, but I think it did.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:47)
Yeah, and spoiler alert, of course, how do we tell the story of that? Well, so he goes through a lot. John does all the dirty work of hunting down his old gang, and he finally is able to go home and be with his family, be on the ranch. And then the government betrays him and sends troops to kill him. And there is dialogue… I mean, that just… I think the two times I shed a tear in video game history for me is that dialogue. I think John talking to his wife, if I vaguely remember. I think he said, “I love you.” But he said very little. He didn’t… He made it seem like he’s going to see her and his son shortly. That dialogue was masterfully done, like a definition of less is more. It was just so crisp, that and…
Lex Fridman
(01:22:49)
And, of course, the other one is again, from memory, Arthur riding his horse and the music is playing. It’s very hard not to shed a tear during that. Anyway, the dialogue of John talking to his wife at the end when he’s in a barn and is about to walk out- … to face certain death. Do you remember writing that?
Dan Houser
(01:23:14)
Oh, yeah. But again, the actor was so good, and we’ve already seen a bunch of his work by then. He had such a good… He was so good at reading those lines that I knew he could give us… that you could feel at that point, like- I think those lines are best when they’re really short and punchy. So I knew- I knew he’d be able to make that line sound good.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:35)
So you were imagining his voice. You were just-
Dan Houser
(01:23:37)
And I think all of those actors on Red Dead Redemption one were so strong that they really brought that game to life. If they, them and Rod, the director, hadn’t done such a good job it would have sounded cheesy as hell.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:50)
Yeah, you’ve said that the ending of RDR1 is one of the best things you’ve been a part of creating. Why? Why is that ending so powerful to you? What does it represent?
Dan Houser
(01:24:07)
I think because for the story to work… I mean, just from a technical challenge. For the story to work, he had to die. But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to make him die. It was probably the fourth, fifth, or sixth open-world game I’d worked on and I’d, you know, spent all these years before that working out how these stories worked. How to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, how they interacted with the open form gameplay as best I could. And suddenly we’re going to break one of our golden rules, which was at the end of the game you’re freeing the character to go and wrap up all the side stories, to play forever.
Dan Houser
(01:24:49)
You’re not going to be able to do that in this game because the guy’s going to be dead and we’re going to have to have you play as a different character. And the narrative, if we’ve done a good job, is going to be compelling enough where you’re not going to care about that. Or you’re going to be upset that he’s dead, but you can actually have this emotional moment. So I think it was a big risk from a technical perspective for us to do that, and then it worked. So I think that was something that was very full of fear and it worked out okay.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:18)
What-
Dan Houser
(01:25:18)
And I think people were really upset and angry at us for doing it because they didn’t think it was going to happen, but I think they also had that kind of experience you’re describing, which is that kind of creative, transcendent moment with characters in a piece of fiction, which is what we’ve always aspired to giving people.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:32)
I mean, it’s incredible because I don’t think… I don’t remember a single video game that has done that before.
Dan Houser
(01:25:37)
Well, I would like to have, at the end of GTA IV, killed Niko, but you couldn’t do it. You know, the game doesn’t work out like that. So it was this thing where we hadn’t done it. Thought about doing it, hadn’t done it and then going, “Let’s do it. Let’s take the risk and do it. We can’t do it. Let’s try.” And it worked.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:53)
Yeah, what about the decision with the son? You know, John gives so much effort to make sure that Jack doesn’t end up in a life of violence… And then it’s very Godfather-like. It’s- … he’s dragged back into it through revenge.
Dan Houser
(01:26:11)
That was also, the game still had to work as a game. Whether that was the right ending, 100% the best ending from a pure storytelling perspective, I don’t know. But I know that we had to make the game work.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:25)
Oh, interesting.
Dan Houser
(01:26:26)
So it was… I think it kind of worked in that way where Jack can’t escape, but I always also wanted a version of it where Jack did escape, but that wasn’t… You know. Both were interesting to me.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:37)
Can you just dig in a little deeper? Like, what do you mean about for the game to work? It’s such a direct… It’s like Kubrick talking about for this movie to work, it has to have… Because from my perspective, I just think about the story. What’s the technical aspect for the game to work?
Dan Houser
(01:26:50)
It’s just the mechanical experience is you have an avatar you control and you, you… You know, the games don’t really end and you have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff. So at the end of the game, you have to be able to wander around with your fairly limited set of features, which is you can, you know, run up to someone and punch them or run up to someone and shoot them or run up to someone and rob them, or run up to someone and talk to them. Or jump on a horse or do all this other stuff. In order for the game still to be fun and people to get this full 360-degree experience with it, they had to, you know, 100% the game as opposed to just finishing the story, you have to have an avatar to do that stuff with.
Dan Houser
(01:27:33)
So that was that was the sort of challenge of, of Jack’s character/wrapping up the story as Jack.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:39)
Oh, there’s real power for the avatar to end, the finiteness.
Dan Houser
(01:27:46)
Yeah. Both the Red Deads, you obviously change avatars- …which we did again. I think there’s something interesting about that moment when you change from one character to another because they are you and they’re not you, you know, and then just suddenly you’re someone else.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:59)
I mean, I was really shaken by that experience, but it’s a beautiful experience. It’s like an unforgettable experience. What else can video games possibly reach for? You know, to create that experience, that’s what great films do, that’s what great books do.
Dan Houser
(01:28:17)
It’s that. I mean, it’s that and the world building in games. I think the experience of being in this fake place and then taking on these narrative adventures, when that combines, you’ve got the amazing experience.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:28)
So who do you think is the best character you’ve ever created in RDR? To me, I think definitively Arthur from Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best character ever created in video games.
Dan Houser
(01:28:43)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:43)
I think there’s not even close. John would be second, which is hilarious to say. But, like, those are… John would be a close second, but Arthur is definitively… And you’ve talked about it in that interview, you said that a lot of video games work on the same premise, that you start as a weak person and end up as a strong superhero. But what if you start as a tough guy, someone who already is very strong, someone that’s emotionally confident of his place in the world? Arthur’s journey is not about becoming a superhero because he’s almost one at the start, but it’s about an intellectual rollercoaster when his worldview gets taken apart. So it’s very different than the normal journey of a character.
Dan Houser
(01:29:32)
Yeah, in a game.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:33)
In a game
Dan Houser
(01:29:33)
…in order to reverse it. So there were a couple other themes that matched that. So they’re guys from the Wild West, but they’re being pushed ever further east. So it’s almost like an anti-Western. An Eastern. You’re traveling east. You’re traveling into civilization. And I don’t think I would’ve been grappling with those ideas earlier in my career, because it was so, you know, this idea of getting a different kind of strength and different kind of weakness was interesting.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:01)
What about the component of mortality, of a character facing his own mortality over a prolonged period? Sort of just the prospect of real fear of death, realization of death…
Dan Houser
(01:30:16)
Yeah. I thought that was really…
Lex Fridman
(01:30:16)
…as part of the story.
Dan Houser
(01:30:17)
…really a fun thing to play with. John dies in Red Dead 1. I wanted to top that with Red Dead 2, or do that in a different way. And so the idea that it’s… But John’s death is fairly sudden, and so if he’s got this long, drawn-out death, and then I’d always been obsessed by TB. As diseases go, it’s a great literary device.
Dan Houser
(01:30:39)
You know, because it is this long, drawn-out, slow death, but in which you are also getting weaker. And my grandfather actually had TB before they invented antibiotics and was sent to a sanatorium just after he’d had his child, my father, and survived, but only three of them out of like 35 survived. So I was always captivated by TB as an illness. It felt like it was an interesting thing to play around with as an idea, this guy getting weaker who felt like he was immortal and essentially was immortal. He was the protagonist in a video game, he could not die, and suddenly he is becoming mortal. You know, but that helps him see stuff. I thought that was a different way of doing a lead character in a game.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:24)
Yeah. Do you think it’s the greatest character you’ve ever created?
Dan Houser
(01:31:28)
I think he’s the best lead character. You know, the lead characters are different from the side characters, and I think he’s the most rounded and works the best. Him and Nico are the two I like, you know. They were the two most ambitious. So for me, it’s always a toss-up, you know? But then I loved all the stuff the art team did. They did such an amazing job. It was their idea with the journal and that kind of… …The way that all the features worked into Arthur’s character, I thought that was really… He was really rounded, he worked in lots of different ways really well. I loved his flawed relationship with his old girlfriend, things like that. All the side… you know, the bits that turned up around him.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:15)
So you also like the side characters. You like the flavor…
Dan Houser
(01:32:19)
Yeah, of course
Lex Fridman
(01:32:19)
…of the full cast. What are some of the favorites you’ve created? I’m sure the one you’re currently working on… …Nigel Dave, that’s a… You called him a side character.
Dan Houser
(01:32:28)
Well, he’s not a protagonist. He’s like a go- He’s a god, not a character.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:32)
Sure.
Dan Houser
(01:32:32)
So he’s not… Him, I’m enjoying. I love Dutch. You know, it was partly because we wrote a few lines for him for the first game, and the actor did such an amazing job that when he spoke, it just came to me all of their backstory, which I’d been playing around with by that point anyway, a little bit in my head. But I knew he was this bigger gangster from then, I sort of saw exactly who he was. And so that felt like… He felt like a living character to me.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:02)
And we should say that Dutch is kind of like maybe a little bit of a godlike figure…
Dan Houser
(01:33:07)
Yeah
Lex Fridman
(01:33:07)
…in both of the Red Dead Redemption games. He’s the leader of the gang. And there’s a father-son relationship with Dutch, with Arthur, with John. I mean, there’s a family feeling to the gang. They explore all of those dynamics, and then the feeling of betrayal and Arthur facing tuberculosis. You’re going against the family, going against the father… …Because he is transforming his sense of the world, of morality, of all those kinds of things. So all the kind of very Shakespearean drama is right there. And Dutch is a prominent, godlike figure through all of that. Also flawed himself, also a man of good and evil in that framework that they’re operating under.
Dan Houser
(01:33:52)
And he, he’s just drowning in his ego at the end. You know, his ego gets the better of him. I think he’s… But there was something flawed but beautiful in his idealism when he was younger, and that’s mostly off camera. But as an individual, I’ve always been very susceptible to charming people. And he’s charming. So I can see how people get captivated by charming people. And the idea here was a very charming person, and the road’s run out for him.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:23)
I personally am afraid of how much I love human beings and how susceptible I am to charm and charisma. Because it can cloud your judgment about human nature.
Dan Houser
(01:34:36)
Completely. And that’s what happened with him. And it ended up clouding his judgment about himself. He kind of fell for his own rubbish.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:45)
Yeah. But also, it clouded Arthur’s judgment.
Dan Houser
(01:34:49)
Oh, completely. Arthur was completely, you know, platonically in love with him. He was worshiping him. He’d given up his power to him. And then I think for Arthur, the journey is retaking that power in the moment of dying. You know, and that’s what the whole… that’s why I thought that was really interesting.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:05)
Yeah. It’s truly tragic for Arthur to be losing his identity, lifelong identity, and sense of belonging, and losing his life at the same time. In facing mortality, he is realizing that he’s not… all of it has been a lie.
Dan Houser
(01:35:26)
But he gets to do some… Well, it depends on what choices you make. But he gets to do some good. And so he, you know, he gets his moment of redemption.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:34)
Just a little bit. But realizing… Your whole life you’ve been living not a good life. You’ve been not a good man.
Dan Houser
(01:35:42)
Isn’t that what we’re all afraid of?
Lex Fridman
(01:35:43)
I guess it’s never too late to change your ways.
Dan Houser
(01:35:47)
Hope not. I mean, that’s…
Lex Fridman
(01:35:47)
So the biggest, most important question, primary, central to the reason we’re talking today, the number one question from the internet. It is so ridiculous, but I must ask. Have you seen Gavin? Who is Gavin? So for more context, there’s a guy named Nigel in Red Dead Redemption 2 who’s frantically searching for a mystery man named Gavin throughout the game. This has become one of the biggest mysteries amongst the interwebs, the RDR fan base. So the theories include, theory one is it’s a split personality disorder. Nigel himself is Gavin. So the evidence is the letter for this theory that has some evidence that may be due to trauma, this split personality disorder was created, this Gavin was created inside Nigel’s mind.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:41)
Theory two is Gavin is dead and Nigel’s simply in denial. Theory three is that it’s just a troll and Rockstar intentionally created an unsolvable mystery to drive players crazy. I also heard theory four is Gavin is the Strange Man. So there’s this fascinating character, the Strange Man, this supernatural character that has a presence in RDR1 and a little bit in RDR2 also. But yeah. So which theory is closest to the truth?
Dan Houser
(01:37:13)
Not three or four. Somewhere in my mind, somewhere between one and two. Yeah. And I just loved the way he shouted, “Gavin!” It just amused me. So at some level, it probably is trolling in that we didn’t want it to be a totally clear mystery. We wanted it to have a little bit of adventure to it. But it was meant to be… without ever fully being explained, that Gavin’s not there anymore. Gavin’s either gone home, Gavin’s left him, Gavin’s… and we were going to keep exploring that idea. That he was going to reappear in some way or other.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:49)
Did you have any idea how much imagination, excitement, and curiosity that little interaction would inspire in people?
Dan Houser
(01:37:59)
Yes and no. I mean, you could never know what people are going to find amusing in these big games, and a lot of it comes down to acting as well. The guy was just funny when he said, “Gavin.” It was just funny. But there was a pedestrian in Red Dead Redemption 1 that everyone was obsessed by, and I really wasn’t expecting that. So we try and put a few characters in. I mean, Gavin was supposed to be amusing. I thought he was amusing. But you never know what people are going to get obsessed by. There are other characters I think are funny and people don’t even notice them, or they see them in a completely different way.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:30)
Did you have a part in writing the letter?
Dan Houser
(01:38:32)
Yeah. I can’t remember if I wrote it or… either I wrote it or Mike wrote it, or we both wrote it. I really can’t remember, to be honest with you. But yeah, I certainly would have edited it, and Mike might have written it or I might have written it. I really can’t remember.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:43)
It’s so fascinating because that little piece of writing… of course you have thousands of pages…
Dan Houser
(01:38:48)
Yeah. T-
Lex Fridman
(01:38:48)
…but that little piece of writing gets analyzed.
Dan Houser
(01:38:51)
Oh, but we certainly talked about it in depth, and if Mike was here, I’d ask him. He might remember. I can’t really… and we do so much of those things… …And I loved the use of letters in Red Dead to tell all these weird backstories. And some became very clear and some were still a little kind of opaque. But I think the general vibe was there was no Gavin. Either there was no Gavin or he’d long since left. So it’s kind of a split personality, you know, and then we were going to, over subsequent games, provide more information.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:20)
So in some sense, you yourself don’t quite know. You kind of have an idea, so… like, which way do you lean more, theory one or two? Is he dead and Nigel’s in denial, or is there real communication going on inside his head?
Dan Houser
(01:39:36)
No, Gavin existed. So it wasn’t that he was a split personality, and the only thing we hadn’t really decided was in a future game were we going to reveal that Gavin was dead, or was Gavin going to turn up having long since abandoned this maniac? You know, that was what we were still playing around with. I think the idea was that he was never going to meet… He was never going to meet Gavin in this game.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:58)
I mean, it’s just fascinating because you have to think about all of that. You have to write all of that. You have to have those discussions. You have to have those debates.
Dan Houser
(01:40:06)
And it has to feel fresh. That was… Like, what we’ve done before. Constantly looking as you do… You know, I think I’ve done somewhere between 15 and 20 of these games. You’ve got to do stuff that’s new. It can’t repeat itself too much.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:18)
I mean, we also live in the age of the internet. You realize there are like millions of people worrying about where and who Gavin is.
Dan Houser
(01:40:30)
Thank God.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:31)
It’s like-
Dan Houser
(01:40:31)
It’s great, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:32)
It’s fascinating that they’re having… Think about people reading James Joyce or something and thinking about, like, breaking apart Ulysses and thinking about, like, arguing about different interpretations of it. To me, that in itself is also beautiful.
Dan Houser
(01:40:47)
Yeah. We want the side mysteries to be solvable up to a point, but you still want these discussions.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:53)
Yeah, the mystery.
Dan Houser
(01:40:53)
You know, and you want it as long as it feels tonally appropriate for this whole big, sort of, shaggy dog story experience you’re making. Which Gavin was just about, and he was so weird, and he just was intrinsically… there was just something funny about an English person screaming, “Gavin.” I don’t know why.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:10)
Yeah. Some of that humor, I mean, there’s certain humor in Red Dead Redemption, but there’s a lot of it in Grand Theft Auto… …And what… It’s hard to put into words why that’s funny, why it becomes a meme, why it becomes viral, ’cause it’s just funny. It’s…
Dan Houser
(01:41:26)
Yeah, I know why I think it’s funny, but what you can’t… What I’m not good at doing at least, is going, “This thing will become really popular online, and this other thing won’t.” You can create a bunch of, you know, fifty different side things that people might get captivated by, and you just do not know what they’re going to respond to.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:44)
How do you know when something’s funny? Is it you just feel it? You just…
Dan Houser
(01:41:47)
I know what I think is funny. It’s, you know, it makes…
Lex Fridman
(01:41:49)
You just Google it or you just…
Dan Houser
(01:41:50)
…like, just because it’s ridiculous as well. That was just… There’s nothing funny about a dude shouting, “Gavin,” a lot. He just said it in a fu… I just thought it might be funny. It was great, and he just said it in such a funny way. … And then it just became funny. Like, you… We often have those side characters and they’re not that funny, and I think they’re gonna be hysterical, and then you put them in the game, and they’re awf- they’re fine, but they’re not amazing. That guy just brought that stuff to life.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:12)
Yeah. And his backstory too. I mean, Londoner and not… Yeah, that…
Dan Houser
(01:42:16)
Yeah, I think that was what… You know, just that it… There’s something sometimes funny, an English person saying the name Gavin is quite funny. I don’t know why.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:24)
So about the Strange Man, AKA the Man in Black. Is there some element with Michael and the therapist in Grand Theft Auto V? Like, who is the Strange Man?
Dan Houser
(01:42:32)
Well, the Strange Man was, again, someone we came up with quickly. We made Red Dead 1, or rather, were making Red Dead 1, and we’d made this—we felt quite compelling story and quite interesting open world. But we’d already made a bunch of Grand Theft Autos, obviously, but unfortunately, we’d taken out the machine guns because it was a cowboy game, apart from the big fixed position ones. And we’d taken out the cars, and we’d taken out the city and large numbers of pedestrians. So we essentially had a game about a dude riding a horse- around the desert, and it was quite boring.
Dan Houser
(01:43:10)
And so we then started filling it with content, having to improvise. And we filled it with these things we call random events that would be these sort of mocap moments that you could interact with. And they were—the designers did an amazing job with those. They were really fun, but there were not enough of them. And then we felt we needed more story because the story was perhaps a little short. So we, quite late in development, started putting in almost like these RPG-type content where you go and meet someone. And the way we thought of them was they were like short stories. So you go and meet someone; they’d set you a small problem, like go and collect me 15 bunches of flowers. And when you came back, it would resolve your story.
Dan Houser
(01:43:49)
And so then, you know, one would go, “Go get them for my bride,” and you come back and the bride’s dead. We tried to make them like these short stories with a sting in the tail. And he came out—as I was trying to come up with ideas for those—as just this weird character. And then we built him a bit into the story, where he would unlock as you worked your way through and be a commentary on what you were doing. So he was meant to be a kind of manifestation of your shadow, your karma, the devil—somewhere, you know, just saw the world. And then we built out his backstory over time and decided, you know. And so in Red Dead 2, you could interact with him again, or not really interact with him.
Dan Houser
(01:44:34)
But he was there and he was meant to be, you know, something I suppose any creative is scared of, an artist who’s kind of sold his soul to the devil. And that slowly revealed itself.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:44)
There is a connection between the main character and… Is it like a Jungian shadow type of situation?
Dan Houser
(01:44:51)
Well, it’s sort of, because he knows what you’re up to. The connection is, and, and, and what’s never really made clear is, does he know this about everybody? Like, is he following you, or is he able, because of the pact he’s made with, with, with, with, with evil forces, able to do this for everybody? And I don’t think we necessarily ever clarify that. He’s certainly able to do it for you.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:10)
I mean, there’s, sort of narrative-wise, there’s techniques to reveal a kinda self-reflection analysis of the main character’s thoughts. I mean, that’s why I brought up the therapist with Michael. That was a really powerful, interesting thing to do in a video game. Like, I, I don’t think I’ve seen… That, that’s such a cool… I mean, there’s a Sopranos element there, with the therapist.
Dan Houser
(01:45:33)
Little bit, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:33)
I really love an opportunity for a character to just self-reflect through that technique.
Dan Houser
(01:45:40)
But it also changed depending on what you’d done. So it was sort of slightly… It wasn’t as interactive as it could be, but it was slightly interactive, or slightly responsive to what you’d done. So it felt it was still valid video game content, because it was living, up to a point. And I just thought the character, Dr. Friedlander, was just funny, because he was awful. So it was like LA. You’re in therapy. It’s very LA. But it’s also very LA, he wants to write a book and betray you.
Dan Houser
(01:46:04)
Which felt like a good, a good twist. And it was… It felt like a Grand Theft Auto therapist. But just like the idea of making the player in a game, and games are intrinsically kind of physical, and, you know, you wa- you walk, you, you punch things, you run around, you drive cars, you shoot people, whatever. There’s these kind of physical fantasies. Trying to put them into a slightly more reflective or metaphysical state for a moment, I think can be really fun.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:30)
I think, to me, one of the most surprising things about Red Dead Redemption, about video games, that Red Dead Redemption showed is how much value for storytelling is insanely specific, intricate details. In the story, but also visually. It just added to the feeling that the world is real. So I have to ask, what are some of your favorite insanely specific, intricate details in RDR? I can give you some options. The internet’s favorite is horse testicles shrinking in cold weather.
Dan Houser
(01:47:07)
Yep. Those guys did an amazing job on those.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:10)
I mean, I just… And there must’ve been a meeting, and there must’ve been engineers and graphics designers…
Dan Houser
(01:47:17)
It was just, I think, just artists.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:18)
Artists
Dan Houser
(01:47:18)
…modelers, I think. I don’t think it was that hard.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:22)
Okay. Uh-
Dan Houser
(01:47:23)
Enough of that pun.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:24)
Thank you. Thank you for that. Arthur’s hair and beard grow in real time. So, gun maintenance matters. Firearms get dirty and perform worse over time. Animal carcasses decompose realistically.
Dan Houser
(01:47:38)
They feel like they do.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:39)
That’s still extremely rare in video games. That, the temporal aspect.
Dan Houser
(01:47:43)
Yes. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:43)
That permeates through time. You know, NPCs remembering you.
Dan Houser
(01:47:47)
That’s the best. I mean, that’s the thing I love. Playing around with a lot of stuff in the new games around that, ’cause I think it’s super interesting. Okay?
Lex Fridman
(01:47:56)
It’s really powerful, right?
Dan Houser
(01:47:56)
To make them… Yeah, really interesting. I think the… It just gives a… It’s a really fun way of giving you kind of narrative content that is also systemic and procedural.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:06)
Yeah. Is it technically really difficult to do, for, for the game, for the game to feel like it remembers you? You know?
Dan Houser
(01:48:13)
I think with modern tech, it’s not that hard, but there’s a lot of stuff you need to track to make it interesting.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:20)
Yeah, to have a memory. So that’s really powerful. The mud physics, so Arthur’s boots get muddy and leave actual tracks. I mean, that’s just incredible. Really, really incredible.
Dan Houser
(01:48:30)
You know, we made a dusty game. Red Dead 1 is a super dusty game. You know, the problem with cowboys is that if you’ve tried to make a “Greatest Hits of the Cowboy” game, and then you’ve got to make a sequel, you’ve got to come up with different geography. So that’s why the game starts in the snow. So we wanted a game that had snow and mud, because those were things you hadn’t really seen in Red Dead 1. And then the challenge is how do you make mud good in a game? And the guys did an amazing job.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:55)
I mean, the snowstorm that starts the game RDR2, I don’t remember the last time I’ve experienced anything like it, but you felt it. I don’t know how the hell you do that. It’s not just graphics, it’s everything. Everything together. I suppose some of the dialogue is really important to that.
Dan Houser
(01:49:11)
Also the acting. They feel, they feel cold.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:13)
Yeah, that’s right.
Dan Houser
(01:49:14)
And they feel desperate. There was that feeling of sort of…
Lex Fridman
(01:49:17)
Yes
Dan Houser
(01:49:17)
…exodus. Like you’re running away from something, that gives the game energy at the start.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:21)
And it was at night. Oh man, it was just masterfully done.
Dan Houser
(01:49:23)
And there was a big group of them. The other contrast…
Lex Fridman
(01:49:25)
Yes.
Dan Houser
(01:49:25)
You know, first game, you start off as a lone wolf. Suddenly you’re in this big group. So it felt very different.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:30)
In Arthur’s body, bullet wounds persist. So that temporal consistency… …That’s really important. An underweight Arthur looks gaunt, and overweight Arthur gets a gut and a fuller face. Again, those decisions that you make reveal themselves in the game across time. And they’re consistent. I don’t know, I did not see many games do that. It must be difficult to do, but to give that level of care to the details in that way, across time, and for specific graphical representations of things, is incredible.
Dan Houser
(01:50:05)
Yeah, I mean, I guess…
Lex Fridman
(01:50:05)
Do you have favorites? Where you were first, like, “This is amazing.”
Dan Houser
(01:50:11)
I think all of it. I think the way the whole… To me, the thing that I would care about most was the way the whole thing sat together. You know, the fact that each of those, they all feel like they belong together with each other. You made this cohesive, very, quote-unquote, “realistic” for a video game experience, and all the details feel like they mesh.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:31)
Well, for me, everything about the horse. For a lot of people. Testicle shrinking included. What’s the process of deciding? The internet seems to really care about… I mean, they love the game so much, so they want to know if anything was cut. And I’m sure stuff was cut because you have to choose. What’s the process of deciding what to cut, what to cut scenes? Are there any scenes that you had to let go of that you really miss or wish you could have done in either GTA or RDR?
Dan Houser
(01:51:05)
Well, I think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be.
Dan Houser
(01:51:08)
You know, I think there was always… There was a bit at the start of RDR where he’d had a baby who just died in Red Dead 2, and we ended up cutting it, which was the right decision. It was too tough in some ways. But I think it gave him real… And he was not very sympathetic to his occasional girlfriend who’d had the baby. So, it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting to play around with because then it would make his redemptive arc even more interesting. He was not a likable character at the start, and that was one… And we ended up making him slightly more like… He was still sort of tough and nasty, but he’s slightly more likable early on. That was the right decision commercially. It’s better that way.
Dan Houser
(01:51:53)
But I did, you know, but I still like that little bit. It spoke to me personally. There… And just his inability to access his emotions I thought was really strong because then later in the game he’s getting very emotional. But there are also always little bits and pieces that get trimmed. You know, and don’t… Or missions that just are not going to work technically. Usually, it’s like, “This mission’s not going to work technically. Oh God, we’ve got to cut it. Okay, how do we glue the story back together?” And we got better over time at gluing the story across missing chunks. You get late in the game, and it’s just something, you know, some big challenging moment just is going to look rubbish, so you just get rid of it.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:32)
I think editing, editing film, and I imagine editing video games, editing down is an art form, but it’s also just… It feels like torture because you’re letting go of things you put so much love into.
Dan Houser
(01:52:48)
Yeah, it could be changes. If you fall in love with something and everyone else goes, “Let’s change it,” that could be, of course, that could be upsetting in some ways. Otherwise, you can care about it. But, you know, if I was involved in the big creative thing and you go, “Okay, it’s the right decision,” I can probably live with that fine. I think sometimes for designers when they’re only designing four or five missions in the whole game and two of them get cut, that must be really… … Really hard.

DLCs for GTA and Red Dead Redemption

Lex Fridman
(01:53:11)
Are there DLCs for RDR or GTA that you wish you had the time, when you were there, to have created?
Dan Houser
(01:53:18)
Of course. There are always things I wished I’d done. I always wished I’d done more.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:22)
What would you have added? This is a fun, like, nerding out.
Dan Houser
(01:53:26)
The internet knows we made a DLC, single-player DLC for GTA 5 that never came out. And we’ve also never really worked on another game. But I like… The idea of it, it was a GTA zombie game. That would have been funny. I think that could have been quite fun.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:41)
What was the GTA 5 DLC?
Dan Houser
(01:53:43)
It was one when you played as Trevor, but he was a secret agent. It was cute. It never quite came together, and it was never finished. It was about half done when it got abandoned. But I think if that had come out, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to make Red Dead 2. So, there are always compromises. But it was, you know, I like making the stories. For me, I love the model of GTA 4 when you had the extra stories coming afterwards or Red Dead 1 when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards. I like just doing these extra things. So, I would personally like to have done more of that in that company. And with stuff we’re doing in the future, we’re going to try and come up with worlds where we can add more stories.
Dan Houser
(01:54:24)
I like single player DLC. I just think the audience loves it, and it’s really fun to make.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:28)
Does it make you a little bit sad that the gaming industry, in general, is moving towards more online, less single-player DLC? Maybe that observation is incorrect, but at this moment, to me, it feels like it’s easier to make a lot of money with online…
Dan Houser
(01:54:46)
If you get it right.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:47)
If you get it right. And so game companies are reaching for that. It just makes me really sad because there’s so much power to… What you did with Red Dead Redemption 2, I don’t know how during that time you were able to pull that off, but that was like a breath of fresh air. In a time where everybody was moving to online and there was that huge incentive to that, you go on and draw, again, the greatest narrative in video game history and the greatest character in video game history, single-player.
Dan Houser
(01:55:15)
We still love single player games. And I think as we started up Absurd, we did a lot of soul searching.
Dan Houser
(01:55:23)
And also a lot of cynical looking at what goes well in the industry. Luckily, if you want to do what we’re forced to do and also what I want to do, which is make new IP, you need single-player games. You can launch a multiplayer game with new IP. It’s just extremely hard. So, luckily, we are focusing on what we’re good at, which is open-world single-player games. We might add multiplayer components to one of them. I think one of them is going to be really tough later on, but we’re still thinking that through. I think we’re really leaning into single-player experience as being a strength for us as a company and something we love to do, and I think something a large part of the audience prefers. And I’d love to, with all of those, keep single-player DLC, one way or another, going.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:13)
Were there some other game ideas you considered while at Rockstar and afterwards that you didn’t go with? So, like, worlds-
Dan Houser
(01:56:23)
Oh, yes
Lex Fridman
(01:56:23)
…or pirate games? I mean, I would love to see the notes of the possible options.
Dan Houser
(01:56:28)
Never thought a lot about a pirate game.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:31)
Yeah?
Dan Houser
(01:56:31)
My son is obsessed with that game Sea of Thieves at the moment, so he’s constantly saying, “Do a pirate game.” I haven’t really thought about it too much. We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open-world spy game. And it never came together.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:44)
So Agent?
Dan Houser
(01:56:45)
Agent, and it’s had about five different- … iterations
Lex Fridman
(01:56:49)
…so good.
Dan Houser
(01:56:50)
I don’t think it works. I concluded—and I keep thinking about it sometimes, I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it—I’ve concluded that what makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as video games. We need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:08)
So for people who don’t know, it would be hypothetically set in 1970s Cold War era.
Dan Houser
(01:57:13)
That was one of the versions. There was another one that was set in current. We had so many different versions of this game.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:18)
Got it.
Dan Houser
(01:57:18)
We worked on so many different teams.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:19)
But it would be more geopolitical, like espionage-
Dan Houser
(01:57:23)
That, yeah, espionage, like…
Lex Fridman
(01:57:24)
… and assassinations.
Dan Houser
(01:57:24)
Yeah, assassinations. I don’t know what it would’ve been because it never really… We never got it enough to even do a proper story on it. We’re doing the early work as you get the world up and running. It never really found its feet in either of them.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:37)
So interesting.
Dan Houser
(01:57:38)
And I sort of think I know why, because one of those films, they’re very, very frenetic and they beat, beat, beat. You know, you gotta go here and save the world. You gotta go there and stop that person from being killed and then save the world. And an open-world game does have moments like that when the story comes together. But for large portions, it’s a lot kind of looser and you’re just hanging out and you’re just doing what you want. And I want freedom, and I wanna go over here and do what I want, and I wanna go over and do what I want. And that’s why it works well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don’t have anyone telling you what to do. And we try and create external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at times.
Dan Houser
(01:58:16)
But as a spy, that doesn’t really work because you have to be against the clock. So I think for me, I’m, I question if you can even make a good open world spy game.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:25)
So interesting. So you have to be able to ride around in a car and listen to the radio-
Dan Houser
(01:58:29)
Yeah, and cruise about.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:30)
…or ride a horse and just look at nature.
Dan Houser
(01:58:35)
So lots of things would work as open world games, but I don’t know if a spy does.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:38)
That’s brilliantly put. But to me there’s such espionage and assassinations and… …The geopolitical international context is so interesting. But you’re right, I just wanna listen to what is it, Lazlo, and…
Dan Houser
(01:58:50)
Yeah. Well, you can’t…
Lex Fridman
(01:58:52)
…on the radio.
Dan Houser
(01:58:52)
You gotta save the world. And so you need this time pressure.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:55)
With a Russian accent- … or something. Yeah, wow. Wow. Yeah, that’s really interesting.
Dan Houser
(01:59:01)
And then we played around with the knights concept that was…
Lex Fridman
(01:59:04)
Nice
Dan Houser
(01:59:04)
…you know, knights and trying to do a version of a mythological game that could have been fun. And, you know, still love that idea, but never went very far with it.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:15)
Knights would be going really far back in history.
Dan Houser
(01:59:18)
Yeah, it would have to go. It never got to writing any of it. Just did some backstory and played around with a few ideas. But it’s always something I thought I would never do and then kind of fell in love with it a little bit.

Leaving Rockstar Games

Lex Fridman
(01:59:30)
You left Rockstar in 2020 and eventually launched Absurd Ventures as we’ve been talking about. What do you miss about your time at Rockstar? Is there specific moments that bring you joy when you think about them?
Dan Houser
(01:59:43)
Of course, it was my whole, you know, it was my life for 20 something years, 21 years or something. It was and I moved to America to do it, and grew up doing it. And I was always living in, in New York. It was a, at times, very intense and at other times magical experience. But it was also just a huge chunk of my life.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:06)
The lows and the highs?
Dan Houser
(02:00:07)
And the middles. It just, it was just my life, you know? My life was that job and the people I knew in New York, and my family. And we were doing something that was intense and innovative, both loved and hated by wider society in different ways and at different times. And in this weird company that was constantly in trouble. So it was really fun.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:30)
Just even looking back at that time to today how did you evolve as a creative mind across those 20 years?
Dan Houser
(02:00:36)
Well, I was a child, I was a 25-year-old child- …who didn’t know anything, and I wanted to be a writer, but I still wasn’t writing. And I bought a notebook and I’d occasionally scribble in it, and I’ve still got those notebooks somewhere. And I was working in video games, which were the least literary medium it’s possible to imagine at the time. There was no room for that on PS1 games, really.
Dan Houser
(02:01:00)
Thinking I needed to stop and do something else, but not having the skills or the confidence to do it. And I’d been doing that in London, then I came to New York, and it was fun, really fun to be in New York, and really fun to do a new company in New York. And that was an amazing adventure. But I was still lost as a human being. And then when I was 27, I was still completely lost, a child. And I stopped some of my bad behavior, and the next day pretty much the chance to write on, work on open world games and all the skills I’d half learned over the previous years and my way of thinking where I thought about space a lot because I was a geographer rather than a historian came together and I got the chance to work on an open world game.
Dan Houser
(02:01:43)
So it felt like it was meant to be. It was fun to explore, but really fun to explore with this team that was, you know, Alex Horton, Navid, Leslie, and the guys in Scotland and all the people in New York making these new games in this new way. And going, “Oh, we need to find a hundred voices. We’ve got no money. How the hell are we going to do that? We’ll get everyone’s friends in and just record all lines of dialogue each as we kind of would invent the way that pedestrians would speak video games.” No one else was doing that kind of stuff. It was insane. So I think that that period from kind of 2001 to 2005, it was lots of early innovation and felt really exciting because we were doing new stuff. It didn’t feel… it felt…
Dan Houser
(02:02:23)
creative, but it didn’t feel like writing yet. Just becoming that, we felt lots of, doing lots of creative things and learning how to assemble the stuff and learning what it could take. And then I think, we talked about it earlier, but the journey into doing GTA 4 when it began to feel more like a proper writing experience. And I was kind of probably ready for that at that point. And then I was like, “Well, this is better than films. This is something that films can’t do.” You know, this 360-degree experience of being this immigrant. And it still felt, we were still only scratching the surface. I mean, it still feels like that now in some ways, but it still felt a little…
Dan Houser
(02:02:55)
And then that five games, you know, GTA 4 and 5, Red Dead 1 and 2, all the extra packs for them, and Max Payne 3, I think we took the games thematically into new places through that period. From a writing perspective, that was the most exciting period. From a business and sort of early creativity period, the period 2001 to 2005 was probably the most exciting.
Dan Houser
(02:03:18)
To use the original starting team, all doing well. Personal life was doing okay, didn’t feel like such a mess. And then from 2007 onward, ‘7, ‘8, was happy personally having children, happily married, and the games were just getting much better. But there were lots of pressure in the business, you know, and the budgets got really big, so it added to the stress. So there’s always good bits and stresses, but, you know, and always just tried to show up and do my best and think about how I could do it in a new way. Always trying to go, “It’s a new medium.” What can we do that’s new?”
Lex Fridman
(02:03:57)
But as a writer, as a scholar of human nature, first of all, were you surprised that you were actually, you were actually able, like you had it in you, through humor and tragedy, to create these incredibly compelling characters? ‘Cause I- I think I remember reading somewhere that James Joyce, when he was 20, said that he’s going to be the greatest writer ever. And I- I feel like every 20-year-old says this. It’s just James Joyce pulls it off.
Dan Houser
(02:04:27)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:27)
So were you, were you surprised that you were a- actually able to do it? And how did that person get better and better and better at writing as you evolved?
Dan Houser
(02:04:37)
The team got better and better, so we could write in a more ambitious way. The animation got better, so we could support it in a better way. We could go deeper. I mean, you couldn’t go that deep on a PS2 game, so it was also just the technology evolved. I don’t know. I felt like I was good at doing it, and I was well-trained for it. I’d been in the right place at the right time, and I was both lucky and had a way of thinking about characters that, when you reduce them to about 10 sentences, was amusing. I think I was, you know, and it was… and I saw the world in a holistic way.
Dan Houser
(02:05:14)
And I saw society in a holistic way that you could break apart into an open-world video game. I thought about it a bunch, and the way I think about things was suitable for that, for whatever reason. That was just good fortune.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:27)
Laszlo mentioned that it was another legend who you’re still working with. He mentioned that you would lock yourself in a room writing dialogue for radio, I think. You would lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and Diet Cokes. Is this accurate information?
Dan Houser
(02:05:45)
Very accurate.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:45)
For which periods of your life was this fuel for your creative process? Is it anchovies and onion pizza?
Dan Houser
(02:05:52)
I would also get pepperoni on my half.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:54)
Okay.
Dan Houser
(02:05:54)
Just to be technically accurate.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:55)
Okay.
Dan Houser
(02:05:55)
He wouldn’t, because he claimed to be a vegetarian in those days. But then he’d admit to me he kept chicken wings hidden in the freezer. So he was a sort of fake vegetarian. Or I think we still do it now sometimes, as a sort of…
Lex Fridman
(02:06:06)
Yes, homage.
Dan Houser
(02:06:07)
To memorialize. But that began in 2001. And we, the office at Rockstar, was so small, and we were so broke that there was no… and I did have a private office at the time, but it genuinely was a cupboard. It didn’t have a window. It was literally sitting in a cupboard. So there was no room, and I had a desk and chair just for myself. But I lived quite near the office, so we would write one or two afternoons a week. He’d come in. He was a freelancer working with us. He’d come in from Long Island, and then we would jump on the subway, go to my apartment in Chelsea, and sit in this grimy little apartment I was living in and buy pizza from around the corner. And that became, you know, we both liked Diet Coke and pizza, very video game developer. And that became good luck.
Dan Houser
(02:06:52)
And there we’d have these good writing sessions where we realized we got on well with each other, and that we had a similar sense of humor, and we could write the stuff, and then he would do all of the real work producing it. So it was perfect for me because I got to outsource most of the real work, and he’s a brilliant radio producer. So he was a great partner in that way. And then that was how that relationship began. And then I’d get him, I would say, “Well, we’ve got to record these 80 voices. Come and help me because I can’t direct 80 people at once.” So he helped with that process, and he was a really good producer, like audio, like getting bodies in producers as well as technical producer. So he was just, that was the beginning of that relationship, and it was always…
Dan Houser
(02:07:27)
My job was to ensure the media content felt like it reflected the tone of the world, and we would write it together. Then his job was just to make sure it sounded funny, like he would just produce it in a really funny way.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:37)
Just to give a little bit more of a shout-out to Laszlo, what’s it been like working with him for over 20 years? He’s working with you still. He’s a kind of this flamboyant, colorful personality, much loved for being a voice also on radio in the Grand Theft Auto games.
Dan Houser
(02:07:58)
Yeah, and the rule was when he was the character, I would write the first pass of him. So I would… and I would get nastier and nastier over time.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:06)
Yeah, it’s awesome.
Dan Houser
(02:08:07)
So to the point where he’s having his head shaved and, you know, being punished by everybody. But even game after game, he got worse. He began as this quite… In GTA3, he’s a quite likable character, and then, you know, over the next 12, 13 years, it just got worse and worse. So I think he’s glad not to be doing that anymore, but he did it with great grace. He’s just a great partner because he likes, you know… Like me, we just like making stuff. He likes to make stuff. He likes to work in new spaces. He’s been a great help on bringing the comic book to life, doing a lot of the work on that. He’s working on that right now. And just, he’s really fun to work with, and he’s always, you know, will put creativity first. And he’s ridiculous. You know, he’s just a really…

Greatest game of all time

Lex Fridman
(02:08:50)
In the best possible way, yeah. Outside of the games you’ve participated in and created, what do you think are some candidates for the greatest game of all time?
Dan Houser
(02:09:01)
Tetris.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:02)
Tetris.
Dan Houser
(02:09:03)
Tetris Game Boy. No question.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:05)
Tetris and the Game Boy, yeah.
Dan Houser
(02:09:07)
It was the perfect device for playing that game. I never liked it as much on anything else. My wife was trying to get a retro one for my kids, trying to get them for Christmas right now. It was the most addicted I ever was to anything in my life of far too many addictions, that I was obsessed by it, dreaming about it. And when you link two together with the cable and if I got four, it would push yours forward. It was like the perfect game design. So from a pure puzzle perspective, nothing comes close.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:34)
Yes, extremely simple. Pure gameplay, no narrative.
Dan Houser
(02:09:39)
No, no. Nothing. No, no personality at all. It’s a completely different thing.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:43)
Perfection.
Dan Houser
(02:09:44)
But perfect in its way. Open-world games can’t be that perfect. But you always dream of making something like that.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:50)
And Super Mario.
Dan Houser
(02:09:52)
I think the N64 ones. All of those early 3D games were very amazing when you first saw them. On the N64, PS1, when you went, it suddenly was like these games, they’re alive, and they did… or they’re believable in a different way. I think that was very interesting.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:10)
It looks nothing like anything else.
Dan Houser
(02:10:12)
Nintendo has that look. Doesn’t it? Always.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:14)
Yeah. And I think that’s the, they’re known for this Nintendo polish of every pixel has a purpose.
Dan Houser
(02:10:22)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:23)
And what he… I mean, I suppose Tetris has that same real focus on delivering a pure gaming experience with as little as possible. It’s really beautiful. And of course, Zelda really pioneered a lot of the feeling of a world, but it’s not quite open world.
Dan Houser
(02:10:41)
No, but it’s amazing. It’s almost like the new ones, they almost, to me, feel like Hitchcock. They’re just speaking the language of video games, you know, like, you know everything’s gonna work this way and that way. It’s quite systemic, but how it all glues together is so amazing. It feels like when you watch a Hitchcock film, it’s not reality. He’s speaking the language of cinema in a very, very strong, with a very strong accent almost. It’s very, very cinematic. It’s not realism at all. And that’s what those Zelda games kind of feel to me like, they are these amazing things that could only be video games. They couldn’t be anything else.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:15)
For me, another really powerful open world is The Elder Scrolls world. It’s role-playing, it’s fantasy, dragons, all that kind of stuff.
Dan Houser
(02:11:25)
Todd is great at what he does. It is. They’re slightly, they’re more… I mean, from a technical perspective, we’re always involved. I’d be in the same with the new games. We’re constantly trying to find the balance between, you know, an RPG, a role-playing game, and an action game. And then that, you know, and try to go, well, an action-adventure game with RPG elements, and what does that mean? I think they’ve all kind of moved into roughly the same space. But for me, it always just comes down to, is it easy to play? Are our mechanics super slick? And then can we keep our dialogue feeling very alive?
Dan Houser
(02:12:02)
Like, I’m not always a great… For just what we do, I like when other people do it. For what we do, we always want very punchy dialogue, so don’t give big trees, but still have it interactive. So we’re going to lose a touch of interactivity, but we’ll still have the dialogue feeling like it’s alive. But we’ll get better at dialogue, and it’ll feel more, a slightly more cinematic experience.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:23)
Yeah. I think The Elder Scrolls series has almost always leaned a little more towards the open world.
Dan Houser
(02:12:29)
Yes. They’re real RPGs. You know, the games that I’ve worked on, they’ve not really been RPGs. They’ve had RPG elements onto a story-driven action game. It’s just a slightly different emphasis, but I still think what they do is amazing. They and he’s brilliant at doing it.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:47)
And I think Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and Skyrim are games where you have millions of people that just walk around or drive around.
Dan Houser
(02:12:58)
Mm-hmm. And feel the world.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:59)
Feel the world. Just feel the world.
Dan Houser
(02:13:01)
And The Witcher, same thing.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:03)
And Baldur’s Gate 1, 2, and 3, really interesting. They really tried to make every choice that you make genuinely branch the game, to where it’s not the illusion of choice, it’s really…
Dan Houser
(02:13:15)
Nothing. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:16)
It’s really, choice really does something and that’s really hard to pull off technically.
Dan Houser
(02:13:20)
Yes. And hard to pull off. You’re always debating the sweet spot between that and a strong story. You know, and strong mechanics. It’s hard to get them all, and you, as a game-making team, the whole team has to figure out where they want to fall on that line.

Life lessons from father

Lex Fridman
(02:13:41)
A difficult topic, you dedicated the book to your mom and dad. And in particular, you wrote, “To my father, who died while I was finishing the book.” What have you learned about life from your dad?
Dan Houser
(02:13:57)
To show up. To be present. To go to work every day. To love creative things. You know, he was a lawyer, but he was also a jazz musician, and he did both to the best of his abilities. To value family as more important than either of those things. You know, he was a present guy, I think. And, you know, he loved books, always loved books, always loved films, loved music. He wasn’t into video games but liked that we were doing weird things.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:37)
Was he proud of you?
Dan Houser
(02:14:39)
Yeah, I think so. I hope so. And he was, for a lawyer, he really venerated at some level, giving “the man” the finger. Like, you know, whenever life goes crazy… …He just was always on the side of the underdog and the ridiculous. And I think that, you know, he always wanted to answer people back, always give the silly comment, and I certainly, you know, taken that from him to my detriment probably, but it makes life more fun. He always would just say the obnoxious thing and just didn’t give a fuck. And that was, I think that was probably quite inspiring.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:20)
So you have a bit of that in you?
Dan Houser
(02:15:22)
Unfortunately so, yes. Not good at shutting up, not good at towing the line.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:29)
I think I speak for most of human civilization that fortunately you have that as part of who you are, because it comes through your stories.
Dan Houser
(02:15:40)
I think it made school difficult. You know, they sent me to this very formal school- That was like, it might as well have been set in the 1870s, in the 1990s. But then, you know, I always got in trouble just for… not for doing anything that wrong, just answering teachers back all the time. Couldn’t be quiet.

Mortality

Lex Fridman
(02:16:01)
How often do you think about mortality? Are you personally, yourself afraid of death?
Dan Houser
(02:16:07)
Well, my father passed away in May, so a lot more since then, obviously. I mean, I think about it a lot. Am I afraid of it? I don’t know. Some days intensely and some days not at all. I would love to stay alive long enough to see my kids properly grow up and settled, of course, for them. Aside from that, some days I feel, you know, spiritually connected to the universe and not afraid of death at all, and other days I feel like a random piece of good luck who’s gonna get struck down by an angry fate and turn to nothingness, and that terrifies me. I just…
Lex Fridman
(02:16:51)
What do you think about the nothingness? I mean, that in itself is terrifying.
Dan Houser
(02:16:55)
Yeah, that is terrifying. That, I mean, I tend to, I tend to, you know, I’ve spent long periods of my life tormented by that stuff. The last few years, I tend to believe there is a purpose and a point to life, and that we have some kind of spiritual or soul-based existence. Not, I’m not quite sure if it matters if there is a God or not, we should probably live our lives the same way either way. But I tend to think that, you know, there is a metaphysical purpose to life and part of that purpose is to, you know, search for the purpose. But at other points, you know, if you read too much science, you get wrapped up in the nothingness of it all.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:38)
Also, there’s a component to your brain. When talking about Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, you said that you have been, by fortune, struck with a bit of a capacity for the grandiosity of feeling. So you feel the world deeply, sometimes romantic, sometimes overly romantic. You’ve said, I like this line, “Feelings may destroy you, but they’re the best thing we have.” So that ability to feel the world, is that a gift or a curse for you? What do you think?
Dan Houser
(02:18:10)
That’s a really interesting question because it’s obviously both. You know, at times it’s both, or at times it’s one or the other. When things are going well, when you feel alive, when you feel like you’re connected to things, when you’re seeing beauty in people and joy in experiences, of course it’s wonderful. When you’re feeling like, you know, bereft and set adrift by the world and that you can’t connect to it in some way and you’re lost and abandoned by God or consciousness or fate or whatever it is, it’s awful. You know, when I feel like a dreadful hack, which is most of the time, it’s terrible. You’d rather not be doing this rubbish.
Dan Houser
(02:18:49)
And then sometimes you’re working creatively and it feels good and you feel like you’re doing the right thing and it feels fantastic, but that’s not very often.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:57)
Do you think it’s possible to have one without the other?
Dan Houser
(02:18:59)
No. No, of course not. When I think about growing up, to the extent that I am capable of growing up, it is about accepting the bad with the good from any situation or any aspect of myself. You know, going, “Okay, it’s not perfect. I’m not perfect.”
Lex Fridman
(02:19:18)
You said you often feel like a hack. Is that self-critical part of your brain, is that a feature or a bug?
Dan Houser
(02:19:28)
That’s an, I think it’s the new thing that we’re going to lean into, the bug feature. It’s both, isn’t it? I mean, it cannot lead… That self-critical brain, I think lots of people suffer from, and I think the internet is designed to induce, if you didn’t have it before, you will have it after being online. It clearly can become a bug, but it also can give you drive and a lack of complacency, so it can also become a feature.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:56)
I had a pretty intense argument with Paul Conti, who’s a legendary psychiatrist, student of the mind, about this. He worked with many famous creative people and he thinks that that negative voice is not at all needed for creative genius. And I thought, “I know awfully a lot of creative people that have that voice.”
Dan Houser
(02:20:20)
I’d rather not have it, but I certainly have lived with it this far. There’s a danger that negativity… For me, that negativity and consciousness become the same thing, you know? And sometimes I have to fight to not just be perpetually negative, and that can be part of the human struggle for lots of people and certainly has been for me. I think if you’re trying to do, you know, good stuff and you’re reflective inevitably, and, you know, you live in this world of constant, constant criticisms by the internet. Of course, you know, everyone who ever puts something on the internet, be it a picture of themselves or any kind of work they’ve made or whatever it is, is gonna get 50 good comments and one bad comment. Remember the bad comment.
Dan Houser
(02:21:06)
So that, and that, that becomes fuel for the negative voice. I don’t know anyone that’s strong enough not to… You know, we all, you know, at some level you should just measure that stuff in weight, not in quality. But of course we just focus on the quality.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:18)
And I do think in general, as you get older, that’s the real challenge for people. You can see the different trajectories people choose to take. But it’s easy to slip into cynicism and negativity, into this Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, nihilistic kind of worldview. I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see more good. I think that-
Dan Houser
(02:21:43)
I agree
Lex Fridman
(02:21:43)
There’s probably a hero’s journey of being extremely self-critical at first for the first, maybe half of your life or two-thirds, and then while maintaining some self-critical aspects just so you stay humble, start to see the good in everything around you, in other people, in the world, and even maybe every once in a while, on a weekend, in yourself.
Dan Houser
(02:22:12)
I hope so. I mean, that’s what I’ve been. I could not be more cynical. I think you put that beautifully. I could not be more cynical than I was as a child. I could not see goodness anywhere. I don’t think late 1970s to early 1990s England was a place of great optimism and naivete. It was brutal, and I was brutal within it. And I think I’ve become much more naive and tried to become more innocent in some ways, and always try to see the flawed good in people. I’ve tried or I’ve had to force myself to be like that because the other way is not fun. It’s not nice to not be nice.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:59)
As a brief aside, you had a wonderful conversation with Ryan McCaffrey at LA Comic-Con. I’ve been a big fan of his for a long time. He writes amazing stuff at IGN, and he has a great podcast, everybody should go listen to it. I really enjoyed it. Plus, I get to attend a Comic-Con and just be there in the audience. And like we were saying offline, the LA Comic-Con, it’s the first Comic-Con I’ve been to. There’s just all kinds of real, genuine nerds, good-hearted…
Dan Houser
(02:23:24)
Oh, it’s fascinating. Yeah, brilliant.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:25)
It’s just so much kindness and goodness and just simple joy in being a fan of a thing was there.
Dan Houser
(02:23:33)
Yeah, which is what those things are all about.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:34)
Yeah. Okay, so let’s talk about some of the greatest books of all time. And I should also give a shout-out to an excellent podcast he did with Sonia Walger, who’s a friend of yours, but she had a great podcast. She has guests pick their five favorite, most impactful books and so on. You picked five fiction books, one for each decade of your life. For the audience, they should go listen to that conversation. But you picked Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome. Second one was Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Then Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Thin Red Line by James Jones, and Middlemarch by George Eliot. But just zooming out, reflecting back on that conversation, what do you think if an alien came, what are some candidates for books that you would recommend to them?
Dan Houser
(02:24:22)
Middlemarch.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:23)
Middlemarch.
Dan Houser
(02:24:23)
It’s the best novel written in English. War and Peace is one of the best novels written in Russian, I would argue. I think both of those are because if you’ve only got one book, you want a long book.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:38)
Yeah, true.
Dan Houser
(02:24:39)
And they’re both books that kind of… it’s something I was always trying to put into games, and you know, that feeling of all of life is here. You’ve got love, death, violence, romance, the whole human experience in different ways. So I think there’s something amazing about, you know, Vanity Fair, I used to love the novel, not the magazine, because same thing, all of life is here.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:04)
You also spoke highly of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
Dan Houser
(02:25:08)
I was obsessed by them in my 20s. Completely obsessed.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:12)
As one must be. Absolutely.
Dan Houser
(02:25:14)
At that age, and I think them as a double act is so amazing. One helped discover the other and then died first, and then suddenly died in obscurity and then was rediscovered as a genius while the other one was still alive and falling into not obscurity but into decline. I think their relationship is itself very novelistic.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:37)
That, by the way, is a phenomenon of writing maybe no longer, maybe still, that, you know, people like Franz Kafka who died in obscurity. All these writers who die in obscurity. Nobody knows them and they become famous later. That is just so interesting. That’s such an interesting… You know, Franz Kafka in particular is fascinating because he wanted all of his work to be burnt, like destroyed. So that, speaking of the critical voice, and I think he’s one of the best writers of the 20th century. Of course, the dystopian novels are really interesting, 1984, Brave New World.
Dan Houser
(02:26:20)
I love 1984. I’d never listened to it or read it, and then I think I did it on Talking Book, or I maybe read it, I can’t remember, during COVID. And became, I think I did both, became obsessed by it. And it’s got the elements of that creeping into A Bed of Paradise, but it’s so good.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:34)
Nice.
Dan Houser
(02:26:34)
I hadn’t realized how good it was.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:37)
Yes.
Dan Houser
(02:26:37)
And it’s so of the moment.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:39)
It’s almost like because of its fame and… …It’s almost like cliché, and you take away the character-
Dan Houser
(02:26:45)
Yeah, if it were English… And I remember the year 1984. And you’re like, “This is…” I remember the song. It’s just too much.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:50)
Yeah, too much.
Dan Houser
(02:26:50)
It can’t be that good. And then it was that. I came to it completely cold, just, “Oh, I should work my way through this because it’s another classic I haven’t read.” And then it’s incredible.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:59)
And the book I’ve read more than any other book is Animal Farm by George Orwell. I don’t know why exactly, but the childlike fairy tale telling of totalitarianism.
Dan Houser
(02:27:10)
Well, you grew up in a communist country.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:12)
Yeah, maybe that’s it. The roots of it.
Dan Houser
(02:27:14)
You know, I remember, I was a kid in the Cold War in London. And we were always terrified of Eastern Europeans. You were going to come and kill us all. And then I ended up marrying a Pole. And I was… We were… And we had Ukrainians who worked for us and worked with us. And a few years ago, we were sitting around a campfire in Upstate New York, with the campfire built by our old nanny’s husband, who’s Ukrainian, and he’d been in the Red Army. I was like, history is so strange that you end up… The Red Army used to be the ultimate enemy. And like, we’re now just hanging out with… It’s like, everything changes. You think these things are permanent, and they’re really not.
Dan Houser
(02:27:55)
You know, and we face some of that now, where you think these structures are permanent, and they’re going to change.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:59)
And you also mentioned that the three great World War II books are The Thin Red Line and Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. And The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. What makes for a great war book?
Dan Houser
(02:28:14)
I think World War II is interesting because it affects everywhere, obviously. And so you can get all these different kinds of stories. And there are so many good… I was just trying to come up with a range of one American, one British, one Eastern European, just to get different perspectives. But there are so many amazing World War II books around all kinds of stories. I think the most complete one, because it is this all of life being there, probably is Life and Fate. Which is amazing.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:44)
It was written by Vasily Grossman. He experienced Stalingrad firsthand. And there’s also just a deep philosophical component.
Dan Houser
(02:28:51)
And the bit in Treblinka is one of the most harrowing sections of any book I ever read. And it really, almost more than any other piece of art around the Holocaust, made me feel what you would feel like at that moment. I mean, it’s just an incredible piece of humanism.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:08)
And also just, I mean, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Dan Houser
(02:29:11)
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:12)
It seems like that context reveals, in the most pure way, human nature and what kind of… You know, in Man’s Search for Meaning is when everything is taken from you, you know, the little remains of love for, in this case, his wife… …Is the thing that is a little flame that burns. And let’s say your Grossman is small acts of kindness… …Is the thing that allows the human spirit to persist.
Dan Houser
(02:29:43)
I love the bit in Life and Fate when you get… Obviously, it’s in this Stalinist period, and so they’re all losing… They all know that what they thought was going to be wonderful about the revolution isn’t going to happen. So everyone’s scared of being killed by Stalin because it’s post the purges. But then you get these guys and they’re trapped in a building, fighting in Stalingrad. And so they know at this moment they’re dead anyway. And they get to live like pure, perfect Marxist communists away from Stalin and all his nonsense. And I thought that section’s incredible because you realize in some ways, in all of its horrors, the most disappointing thing about the 20th century, in some ways, was the absolute failure of communism.
Dan Houser
(02:30:29)
You know? It was… Because it was such a, you know, quote-unquote beautiful idea and it just did not work time and time again. And these people who fought for it and then saw it not working, I think they’re sort of fascinating characters. You know… …All of the revolutionaries from 1917 that were then killed by Stalin, which was all of them apart from him and Lenin.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:50)
And that was, you know, people in modern-day politics talk about communism like it’s trivially, it’s trivial that it would lead to atrocities, but I don’t think it’s that trivial. It’s this idealism of humans. It’s like, you know, why can’t… Basically, why can’t we all get along? There’s a real compassion behind it. There’s real love. And what you realize is there is… it’s a real study, the 20th century, of human nature that unfortunately at scale, that kind of compassion is abused by centralized power. So there’s a dictator always, in that context, in those, given that set of technologies, a dictator arises and does the opposite… …Of what the promise of the ideal is supposed to be.
Dan Houser
(02:31:37)
Well, I think… I thought a lot about that then because I was taught by all these disappointed communists, you know? After ’89, all of these English communists, you know, were all like having to access, discovering all these atrocities that happened in… You know, so it was, it always fascinated me. And then you think about complexities or where one’s own values are in the modern moment. And I say, you know, without, and whether either of them, what we would call left now or call right now, does it have any bearing on the sort of communist era of those words? And I would say probably not. I think things have changed, but fundamentally, the one value that I would go, I would think is worth fighting for is whenever either side starts to move towards thought control… …Move away.
Dan Houser
(02:32:25)
That’s never the right outcome. The never right outcome is, “Oh, you’ve said the wrong thing. You should be removed now.” That should never ever be a thing we should lean towards.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:35)
Yeah, it does seem like freedom, individual freedom, is a prerequisite for…
Dan Houser
(02:32:41)
For happiness.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:42)
…for happiness… …For the flourishing of a larger society. So there’s, like you said, 1984 is pretty… I mean, it’s a caricature.
Dan Houser
(02:32:48)
But it is brilliant.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:49)
It’s quite… It’s actually also just a good story. That’s my criticism of Brave New World, it’s just poorly written. But I think Brave New World probably applies more to the 21st century than does 1984, so…
Dan Houser
(02:33:02)
I don’t know. I think 1984 with the fake wars… …And the way that it revealed… …Everything in it was a setup for him. There’s something that if he could’ve seen the internet… there’s something of, it’s like an analog internet, that world they build. …Around the main character.

Advice for young people

Lex Fridman
(02:33:19)
What advice would you give to a young person today about, let’s say, career? How to have a career they can be proud of, how they can have a life to be proud of? You’ve had a non-standard life.
Dan Houser
(02:33:32)
I’ve had a lucky life in which I have fought to mess things up and fate has always thrown me a bone.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:41)
You’ve traveled in South America and had hobos chase you with machetes.
Dan Houser
(02:33:47)
Yeah, once.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:48)
So that happened.
Dan Houser
(02:33:49)
That was a series of poor life decisions. And I ran away. You know, I mean, I ran away to South America. That was a poor decision. I ran away from the guy with a knife. That was a good decision. I came to America. That was a good decision. I came to LA, that’s, I think, been a good decision. It’s been fun to see a different side of America and be in a different creative environment. LA is still amazing for creativity and entertainment, the wider entertainment industry stuff. I think that’s been fun. What would I say? I would say when you get a chance, take it. That was one thing I did do well.
Dan Houser
(02:34:33)
When I got chances, I was good at taking them. I would say do not worry too young about your career. I would say worry about having a rounded intellectual inner life, because you’re going to spend the whole of your life in your own head. So the more interesting you find your own head, the more interesting you find the world, the less you’re going to annoy yourself. So I would say, I would say do not do a vocational degree as an undergraduate. That’s been my… I would say do something else. Do something, you know, random and then focus afterwards. That would be, I think I was advocating against the obsession that people had about four years ago with STEM subjects.
Dan Houser
(02:35:14)
And now AI is going to make them all irrelevant anyway, perhaps. So, you know, it’s interesting to see everything changes. Jobs are not that hard. You know, turn up, be enthusiastic. Turn up in person, be enthusiastic. Help people. Say, “You’ll be fine in any job.” People, you know.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:37)
Did you always know when the chance to take showed up? Like, “Okay, this is interesting, this is new, this is different”?
Dan Houser
(02:35:42)
Not always, no. But the big times were the chance to move to America. For me, that was a big moment. My life was a mess in…
Lex Fridman
(02:35:49)
That was weird timing. I read that Sam wrote you an email. What… In South America…
Dan Houser
(02:35:56)
I was literally in South America in Colombia, where there was a war raging. I was making a series of very poor life choices and had a lack of life skills at age 25. My latest poor choice was to get up too early because the police didn’t start work until 9:00, but the muggers started at 8:00. So I was out walking along the beach at 8:00, and these guys… this Rasta who turned up, who I’d been talking to the day before, started trying to talk to me. Then two guys came up to talk to him, and I couldn’t tell if they were trying to mug him because he owed them money or if he brought me to them. But I did notice one of them had a machete, and the other had a kind of broken gun. So I thought, “This is not good.” And I ran off, sprinted down the beach in my silly shoes.
Dan Houser
(02:36:48)
And I got the chance for once in my life to run over to a road, jump into a taxi, and scream, “Take me anywhere!” I felt like I was in an action movie with a guy chasing after me with a machete. The taxi driver looked back, saw the dude with the machete, and went, “?” And I’m like, “No, no, no, they’re not my friends.”
Dan Houser
(02:37:05)
“Get me out of here.” He drove me up the street into a bit where the town was, kind of between the old town and the new town in Cartagena. I got out of the car and then cut my foot on a rock. That was the sum total of my injuries. Then I went to an internet cafe because this was probably late ’98 and got the chance to come and work on a game for six weeks in New York. I was like, “Well, if I stay in South America much longer, I’m going to get myself killed,” because I was getting into silly stuff. So I went to New York, and they were just starting Rockstar. I got to write the mission statements and whatnot there, help set the tone for that, and just ended up staying.
Dan Houser
(02:37:48)
I had to come and go a bit while all the visas got sorted out. And then I just ended up staying. “I’ll stay for a year because New York’s pretty fun.” It actually was not that… this was the height of Giuliani before he was a maniac. You couldn’t, when you went to bars, you were told you couldn’t dance. Because they were trying to clamp down on New York being fun. So it was actually less fun than London, but there’s still a great energy in New York. And got exposed to the kind of madness of New York capitalism.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:18)
By the way, as we hear sirens in the background, that always makes me think of New York.
Dan Houser
(02:38:21)
Yeah, of course.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:22)
Whenever I’m in New York… …There’s always sirens.
Dan Houser
(02:38:23)
Steam coming out the floor, people screaming at you. I mean, you get people screaming at you in LA, at least.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:29)
But it’s more…
Dan Houser
(02:38:30)
Yeah, it’s more spread out
Lex Fridman
(02:38:31)
…spread out, yeah.
Dan Houser
(02:38:31)
You can get a bit more quiet here. And I love the energy. You know, it was great to work hard and then be able to go out for dinner late. And, and it, New York was really, really a fun experience for me.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:42)
You worked with your brother, Sam, for many years. What do you admire about him as a creative mind, as a human being?
Dan Houser
(02:38:52)
His drive and his vision early on to see what video games could become. He was the one who understood that video games were the next big thing. And I think that was, you know, people would laugh in our face about that in those days. So to have someone that was strong and saying, “No, no, we stay the course,” and then having the confidence to push through with these big projects.

Future of video games

Lex Fridman
(02:39:20)
Are you excited for the future of video games?
Dan Houser
(02:39:22)
Yeah. I think we’re… I, I… Completely. I still, I still look… I’m glad you’ve spoken so, I mean, you’ve spoken so kindly about our work, about the stuff that I did and the stuff the whole teams did. It’s wonderful. But I just look at it and see problems. And see things that we can make do better. You know, I think it was always, try each time to do it better. And I’ve got, you know… Some of the stuff we’re working on now is going to do stuff that people haven’t really seen before. And then I think it’s just… I think that games can get so much better. They can feel so much more alive. All the…
Dan Houser
(02:39:58)
They can be better at storytelling and feel more alive and feel like, you know, their systems, all the stuff, the, the component parts we talked about. We can both make each of those parts better. …And tie them together better. I think it’s… The technology is all… To me, it still feels like it’s only just beginning. You know, it’s been, it’s been… Cinema evolved from like 1900, 1895, whenever it was, until they invented talking in 1930 or whenever that was. It’s not that. And then it’s kind of found its modern form, and then by ’39, they’re shooting in color. And that’s… Basically, a modern film is no different from a 1939 film. But with games, I still think we’ve got a long way to go. The tech-
Dan Houser
(02:40:37)
…there’s so many different parts of the tech that it’s still got a long way to go and you can go in all different fun directions.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:43)
I just wish… And I know you said video games take a lot less than they could, but I just wish it was faster. Like, you’ve already made me…
Dan Houser
(02:40:52)
Me too
Lex Fridman
(02:40:52)
…fall in love with Absurdiverse, and you’ve made me fall in love with the Better Paradise, and now I am going to sit depressed, realizing we’ll have to wait. I could, of course, read…
Dan Houser
(02:41:02)
Well, we should have some little short cartoons coming out in a while for Absurdiverse and more stuff coming in the next period. But yeah, it just takes, it takes a little bit of time. You know, I think, I mean, big movies are four years plus from start to end. …You know, with all the legal stuff at the start, you know? We’ll be about the same.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:21)
Yeah. And certain movies from idea to completion, I mean, take 10 plus years, some of the greats, and…
Dan Houser
(02:41:27)
Yeah, I mean, often. A lot of that is just that development process. … That is really… Sometimes feels like it’s designed to not make stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:33)
A bit more of a specific advice, but on the topic of video games, what advice would you give to to maybe independent video game creators that are dreaming of creating great games? They’re inspired by Red Dead, they’re inspired by all the incredible open worlds and narratives you’ve created. Like, how’s it possible to have a chance at doing something like that?
Dan Houser
(02:41:56)
I mean, it’s part of… There’s two ways. Try and do it cheaply with yourself and a small group, or join a company that you think is doing it the right way, you know? And I think there’s upsides to either of those. I think if you want to make something that’s cinematic… Yeah, AI is going to change some of this. But if you want to make something that’s cinematic, you need resources. You can still make something that’s really interesting that isn’t super cinematic, but it’s an interesting experience in some ways. But the second you’re involving actors and motion capture and one of those big experiences, it’s going to cost some money. So therefore, if you want to do that, you’ve got to figure out what companies you want to work at and figure out how you get to work there.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:31)
Do you have hope for AI helping with some of the video generation, some of the world generation, or some of the open-world assistance in generating the world?
Dan Houser
(02:42:45)
Yes, limited. Absolutely, if used correctly, it will be a great tool. If used incorrectly, it will lead to loads of generic stuff. You know, I’ve been in games for 29 years, and all the time, the piece of tech that’s going to make making games much easier and much cheaper is about to turn up, and all that’s happened is the games have got much better and way more expensive. So I’m always nervous about saying, “Finally, we have that bit of tech that makes our lives easier,” but it looks as if it might be able to do that when you use it in the right way. If you use it to try and substitute for creativity, it’s going to be really generic.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:19)
A big, ridiculous question: What’s the meaning of this whole thing we have going on here, of life, of existence? Why are we here?
Dan Houser
(02:43:29)
To watch the universe. The easiest plausible answer is we are designed by the universe to watch itself and to comment on it in interesting ways.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:39)
Consistently more and more interesting ways. What role does love play as part of that?
Dan Houser
(02:43:46)
It’s the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing. Everything else, everything material, is irrelevant. So the only things of value are these immaterial things. You know, I do think metaphysics always trumps physics for me.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:03)
Well, Dan, from the bottom of my heart, speaking of love, thank you.
Dan Houser
(02:44:07)
What a pleasure. Thank you, man.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:09)
Thank you for everything you’ve created in this world. Me and millions of diehard fans of your games are forever grateful. I know there’s a lot of people that would like to say thank you to you.
Dan Houser
(02:44:19)
Just to be clear, because I always like to make this very clear… …It was never me. It was always me sat alongside people with actual real talent who did amazing things.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:28)
Well, I hope you keep being self-critical and creating awesome stuff in the world. And we can’t wait to keep exploring the worlds you create. Thank you so much for talking today, brother.
Dan Houser
(02:44:41)
Thank you for having me. What a privilege.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:43)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Houser. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now let me leave you with some words from Ernest Hemingway, one of Dan’s and my favorite writers: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex | Lex Fridman Podcast #483

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #483 with Julia Shaw.
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Table of Contents

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Episode highlight

Julia Shaw
(00:00:00)
We all have the capacity to kill and murder people and do other terrible things. The question is, why we don’t do those things, rather than why we do do those things, quite often. Most men have fantasized about killing someone, about 70% in two studies, and most women as well. More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody. So, murder fantasies are incredibly common.

Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:00:23)
The following is a conversation with Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist who has written extensively on a wide variety of topics that explore human nature, including psychopathy, violent crime, psychology of evil, police interrogation, false memory manipulation, deception detection, and human sexuality. Her books include “Evil,” about the psychology of murder and sadism; “The Memory Illusion,” about false memories; “Bi,” about bisexuality; and her new book that you should definitely go order now, “Green Crime,” which is a study of the dark underworld of poachers, illegal gold miners, corporate frauds, hitmen, and all kinds of other environmental criminals. Julia is a brilliant and kindhearted person with whom I got the chance to have many great conversations on and off the mic.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:20)
This was an honor and a pleasure. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here’s Julia Shaw.

Dark Tetrad

Lex Fridman
(00:01:38)
You wrote the book “Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side.” So, lots of interesting topics to cover here. Let’s start with the continuum. You described that evil is a continuum. In other words, the dark tetrad — psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism — are a continuum of traits, not a binary zero-one label of monster or non-monster. So, can you explain this continuum?
Julia Shaw
(00:02:05)
So, each trait on the dark tetrad, as it’s called, are the four traits that are associated with dark personality traits, things that we often associate with the word evil, like sadism, which is a pleasure in hurting other people; Machiavellianism, which is doing whatever it takes to get ahead; narcissism, which is taking too much pleasure in yourself and seeing yourself as superior to others. And then there’s psychopathy. Psychopathic personalities specifically often lack empathy, and it’s usually characterized by a number of different traits, including a parasitic lifestyle, so mooching off of others, deceptiveness, lying to people, and again, that empathy dimension where you are more comfortable hurting other people because you don’t feel sad when other people feel sad.
Julia Shaw
(00:02:52)
Now, all of those traits — psychopathy, sadism, Machiavellianism, and narcissism — all of them have a scale. So, you can be low on each of those traits, or you can be high on each of those traits. And what the dark tetrad is, it’s actually a way of classifying people into those who might be more likely to engage in risky behaviors or harmful behaviors and those who are not. And if you score high on all of them, you’re most likely to harm other people. But each of us score somewhere, so I might score low on sadism but higher on narcissism. And in all of them, I’m probably subclinical. And so this is the other thing we often talk about in psychology, is that there’s clinical traits and clinical diagnoses, like someone is diagnosed as having narcissism.
Julia Shaw
(00:03:37)
Or they’re subclinical, which means you don’t quite meet the threshold, but you have traits that are related and that are so important for us to understand in the same context.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:46)
So early in the book, you raised the question that I think you highlight is a very important question. If you could go back in time, would you kill baby Hitler? This is somehow a defining question. Can you explain?
Julia Shaw
(00:03:58)
Well, it’s about whether you think that people are born evil. And so the question of “Would you kill baby Hitler?” is meant to be something that gets people chatting about whether or not they think that people are born with the traits that make them capable of extreme harm towards others. Or whether they think it’s socialized, whether it’s something that maybe in how people are raised sort of manifests over time. And with Hitler, we know from psychologists who have pored over his traits over time and looked at who he was over the course of his life, there’s always this question of, “Was he mad or bad?”
Julia Shaw
(00:04:32)
And with the answer to, “Was he mad?” Well, he certainly had some characteristics that people would associate with, for example, maybe sadism. This idea that he was less high on empathy is probably also showcased in his work. But in terms of whether he was born that way, I think the answer usually would be no. And actually, in his early life, he didn’t showcase quite a lot of the traits that later defined the horrors that he was capable of. So, would I go back in time and kill baby Hitler? The answer is no, because I don’t think it’s a straight line from baby to adult, and I don’t think people are born evil.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:08)
So you think a large part of it is nurture versus nature, the environment shaping the person to become, to manifest the evil that they bring out to the world?
Julia Shaw
(00:05:19)
Well, and I’d be careful with using the word “evil,” because I think we shouldn’t use it to describe human beings, as it most commonly “others” people. In fact, I think it makes us capable of perpetrating horrendous crimes against those we label evil. So for me, that word is the end of a conversation. When we call somebody evil, we say, “This person is so different from me that I don’t even need to bother trying to understand why they are capable of doing terrible things, because I would never do such things. I am good.” And so that artificial differentiation between good and evil is something that, certainly with the book, I’m trying to dismantle.
Julia Shaw
(00:05:56)
And that’s why introducing continuums for different kinds of negative traits is really important, and introducing this idea that there’s nothing fundamental to people that makes them capable of great harm. We all have the capacity to kill and murder people and do other terrible things. The question is, why we don’t do those things, rather than why we do do those things quite often. So, I think humanizing and understanding that we all have these traits is the most important thing in my book, certainly.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:24)
Yeah, I think a prerequisite of doing evil, I see this in war a lot, is to dehumanize the other. In order to be able to murder them on scale, you have to reformulate the war as a fight between good and evil. And the interesting thing you see with war is both sides think that it’s a battle of good versus evil. It almost always is like that, especially at large-scale wars.
Julia Shaw
(00:06:49)
That’s right, and on top of dehumanization, there is also this other thing called de-individuation, which is where you see yourself as part of the group, and you no longer see yourself as an individual. So, it’s this fight of us versus them. And so you need both of those things. You need that collapse of empathy for other people, the people who are on the other side. And you need this idea that you can be swallowed by the group, and that gives you a sense of the cloak of justice, the cloak of morality, even when, you know, maybe you’re on the wrong side. And that’s where I mean, getting into who’s on the right side of each war is always a more complicated issue.
Julia Shaw
(00:07:29)
But certainly calling other people evil and calling the other side evil and dehumanizing them is crucial to most of these kinds of fights.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:37)
Yeah, you promote empathy as an important thing to do when we’re trying to understand each other, and then a lot of people are, are uncomfortable with empathy when it comes to folks that we traditionally label as evil. Hitler’s an example. To have empathy means that you’re somehow dirtying yourself by the evil. What’s your case for empathy, even when we’re talking about some of the darker humans in human history?
Julia Shaw
(00:08:04)
My case for empathy, or “evil empathy” as I sometimes call it — so empathy for people who we often call evil… Also, the title of my book is “Evil,” or in the UK market, it’s “Making Evil,” which is a reference to a Nietzsche quote, which is, “Thinking evil is making evil.” The idea being that evil is a label we place onto others. There’s nothing inherent to anything that makes it evil. And so I also think that we need to dismantle that and empathize with people we call evil, because if we’re saying that this is the worst kind of act or worst kind of manifestation of what somebody can be, so if someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt others…
Julia Shaw
(00:08:45)
I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials, and so in those contexts, that word “evil” is used all the time. So, “This person is evil.” And if we’re doing that, then we need to go, “Okay, but what we actually want is…” We don’t really just want to label people. We want to stop that behavior from happening, and the only way we’re going to do that is if we understand what led that person to come to that situation and to engage in that behavior. And so that’s why evil empathy, I think, is crucial, because ultimately what we want is to make society safer. And the only way we can do that is to understand the psychological and social levers that led them to engage in this behavior in the first place.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:26)
On a small tangent, I get to interview a bunch of folks that a large number of people consider evil. So, how would you give advice about how to conduct such interviews when you’re sitting in front of a world leader that some millions of people consider evil? Or if you’re sitting in front of people that are actual, like convicted criminals, what’s the way to conduct that interview? Because to me, I want to understand that human being. They also have their own narrative about why they’re good and why they’re misunderstood, and they have a story in which they’re not evil, and they’re going to try to tell that story. And some of them are exceptionally good at telling that story. So, if it’s for public consumption, how would you do that interview?
Julia Shaw
(00:10:13)
I think it’s important to speak with people whom we, or who a lot of people, dehumanize, including myself. I mean, I also speak with people who I think are, or have, committed terrible crimes, and I’ve spoken to these people because, as a criminal psychologist, that’s often part of my job. So, what’s interesting, I think, when you’re speaking to people who have committed really terrible crimes, or certainly who’ve been convicted of terrible crimes, is that not only is it potentially insightful because they might give you a real answer and not just a controlled narrative about why they committed these crimes.
Julia Shaw
(00:10:46)
If they are either maintaining their innocence or they’re more reluctant to do that, I think even the narrative that they are controlling, that they’re being very careful with, still tells us a lot about them. So, I think, certainly in my research on environmental crime as well, what we see is that people use a lot of rationalization, and they say things like, “Well, everybody’s doing it.” And, “If I hadn’t done this first, somebody else would have done this waste crime or this other kind of crime.” And so there’s this rationalization. There’s this normalization.
Julia Shaw
(00:11:16)
There’s this diminishing of your own role and agency, and that still tells us a lot about the psychology of people who commit crimes, because most of us are very bad at saying sorry and saying, “I messed this up, and I shouldn’t have done that.” And instead, what our brains do is they try to make us feel better, and they go, “No, you’re still a good person despite this one thing.” And so we try to rationalize it and we try to excuse it. We try to explain it. And there is some truth to it as well, because we know the reasons why we engage in that behavior, and other people don’t have the whole context. So, we also do have more of the whole story.
Julia Shaw
(00:11:54)
But on the other hand, we need to also face the fact that sometimes we do terrible things and we need to stop doing those terrible things and prevent other people from doing the same.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:03)
I find these pictures of World War II leaders as children kind of fascinating, because it grounds you and makes you realize that there is a whole story there, of environment, of development through their childhood, through their teenage years… you just remember they’re all kids. Except Stalin. He was looking evil already when young.
Julia Shaw
(00:12:25)
Well, people used to not smile in photos as well. So, I think looking at historical photos of children, or sometimes even kids in other cultures, it’s like, “Oh, why are they all so serious?”
Julia Shaw
(00:12:33)
But our creepiness radars are also way off. So, this is something that I’ve been interested in for a long time as well, is that we have this intuitive perception of whether or not somebody is trustworthy. And that intuitive perception, according to ample studies at this point, is not to be trusted. And one thing in particular is whether or not we think someone is creepy, including children, but usually the research is done, of course, on adult faces and with adults. And there’s only recently did we even really define what that vague feeling of creepiness is, and it has a lot to do with just not following social norms. And this is something we see that transfers to other contexts, like why people are afraid of people with severe mental illness and psychosis.
Julia Shaw
(00:13:15)
If you’re on the bus or the Tube in London and someone’s talking to themselves and they’re acting in an erratic way, we know that people are more likely to keep a distance. There was one study where they literally had a waiting room where they also had people with chairs, and the question was, “How many chairs would you sit away from someone you know has a severe mental illness?” And the answer is you sit more chairs away, and there’s a physical and psychological distancing that’s happening there. And it’s not because people with severe mental illness are inherently more violent or more dangerous. That is not actually what the research finds. It’s that we perceive them as such because we perceive them as weird, basically.
Julia Shaw
(00:13:54)
We go, “This isn’t how you’re supposed to be behaving, and so I’m worried about this, and so I’m going to keep my distance.” And so creepiness is much the same, and that’s where you can totally misfire whom you perceive as creepy just because they’re not acting in the way that you expect people to act in society.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:10)
Well, what are the concrete features that contribute to our creepiness metric? Is that meme accurate that when the person’s attractive, you’re less likely to label them as creepy?
Julia Shaw
(00:14:23)
It depends. If they’re too attractive, it can be. So, there are effects that interact there.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:29)
That’s hilarious.
Julia Shaw
(00:14:29)
And we also don’t trust people potentially who are too attractive, but again, a deviation from the norm. And so if you’re deviating in any way, that can lead to your assessment being more wrong, but also you assessing people as more negative. And so with creepiness, the main thing that bothers me as a criminal psychologist is that tangential to creepiness is this general idea of trustworthiness and that you can tell whether somebody is lying. And I’ve done research on this, as have lots of other people, like Aldert Frey is one of the leading researchers on deception detection.
Julia Shaw
(00:15:08)
And he has found in so many studies that it’s really hard to detect whether someone is lying reliably, and that people, especially police officers, people who do investigative interviewing, they have this high confidence level that they, because of their vast experience, can in fact tell whether the person across from them is lying to them, this witness, the suspect. And even that, if you take them into experimental settings, they are no better than chance at detecting lies, and yet they think they are.
Julia Shaw
(00:15:39)
And so again, you get into this path where you’re going to miss people who are actually lying to you potentially, and you’re going to potentially point at innocent people and say, “I think you’re guilty of this crime,” and you go hard on that person in a way that might even lead to a wrongful conviction.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:55)
So, the fact that it’s very difficult to detect lies and overconfidence in policing creates a huge problem.
Julia Shaw
(00:16:04)
Not just policing, in relationships and in lots of other contexts as well. I mean, a lot of jealousy is born out of uncertainty. Jealousy isn’t, “I know for sure that you have done something that is threatening our relationship.” A lot of jealousy is, “What’s in my head because I am assuming that you might be thinking or doing X.” And that is also basically an exercise in lie detection. And there as well, we are very bad at it.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:27)
Is there a combination of the dark tetrad and how good you are at lying? Are people with certain traits, maybe psychopathy, better at lying than others?
Julia Shaw
(00:16:39)
There’s definitely some research to support the idea that people with psychopathy are better at lying. There’s also some research specifically on sort of faking good in, for example, parole decisions. So, when it comes up to someone who is… There’s a legal decision to be made as to whether this person can be released from prison or released from just detention in general. And then the person will act in a particular way, sort of mimic a good prisoner, mimic someone who’s safe to be released into society. And then the committee goes, “Oh, well, you know, this person’s doing great,” and so they’re ready to be released. And then they make the wrong decision because that person has been faking it. So, I think with psychopathy, it’s a bit complicated.
Julia Shaw
(00:17:21)
There has been some, historically as well, some concern that certain treatment for psychopathy, especially empathy-focused treatment, makes people with psychopathy more likely to fake empathy and to weaponize it. But then there’s other research which finds that if you use other kinds of interventions, like Jennifer Skeem in California, who does research on people with psychopathy who have committed severe crimes. And she specifically creates these treatment programs that aren’t just around empathy, but they’re more around almost learning the rules of society and convincing people that actually being pro-social is a better way to get what you want in life.
Julia Shaw
(00:17:58)
And so there’s a real need for tailored treatments to deal with especially certain kinds of personality traits, dark personality traits, to try and convince people, basically, that being pro-social is the better path, rather than just going hard on empathy and things that they don’t maybe also see as faults with themselves.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:17)
Is there a psychological cost to empathizing with so-called monsters?
Julia Shaw
(00:18:21)
You referenced Nietzsche in the book, you know, “Gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” If you study, quote unquote, “evil,” or study monsters, you may become that. Is there a danger of that? I don’t think so. I think that’s what people fear. So, a lot of the Nietzsche quotes I use are… some of them I like because they speak to the chapters I write about, and the issues I write about. But some of them I also like because they are how people think about evil and people who are labeled evil. And I do think with gazing into the abyss and the abyss gazing back, it’s more of a… You’re trying to find it. And that’s why in some ways that doesn’t work actually, because it isn’t a total blank. It isn’t the abyss.
Julia Shaw
(00:19:09)
There are in fact things that you can see, even if it’s just superficially, and patterns you can recognize to help you and key decision-makers, especially in legal settings, make better decisions around people like this. So, when they see these patterns, they act a better way. So, I get asked a lot as a criminal psychologist, “Do you carry the cases that you deal with around with you?” Some of the cases involve huge amounts of witnesses, huge amounts of potential victims, and so in these cases there are very visceral descriptions sometimes of heinous crimes. And I think that as someone who does this work, you can’t be someone who sees it as anything other than a puzzle.
Julia Shaw
(00:19:55)
So, you have to look at it and go, “Here’s the different pieces of information. What I am doing is pattern recognition. I’m not here to emotionally invest in each of these victims or potential victims. That’s not my role. There are therapists for that. There are other people who do that work. I am here working with the police. I’m here working with lawyers. I’m here looking at it more objectively to see how this all fits together.” And so I think that’s how I engage with it. I see it as this puzzle that I’m trying to figure out. I worry for my own brain that when I confront people and see them as a puzzle, which I do, I see the beauty in the puzzle. All the puzzles look beautiful to me.
Julia Shaw
(00:20:33)
I’m sometimes like a Prince Myshkin character from The Idiot by Dostoevsky, where you just see… It’s not the good in people, but the beauty in the puzzle. And I think you can lose your footing on the moral landscape if you see the beauty in everything a bit too much. Because everyone is interesting. Everyone is complicated. It’s the classic scientist response as well to what other people in society go, “Ooh.” They go, you know, “This is horrible,” or, “This atrocious thing has happened,” or, “This shocking, existential crisis-inducing thing I’ve just found is, you know, giving me an existential crisis.” And scientists instead go, “Oh, wow!” And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well.
Julia Shaw
(00:21:19)
And I think sometimes scientists read as callous because we enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insights. And it just feels like this little light bulb has gone off and you go, “Oh, I understand a tiny bit more about the human experience or about the world around us.” And I think it must be similar. I don’t know that I feel or worry that I sort of become more, quote unquote, “evil.” I think it’s more that you add this nuance, which I guess sometimes can be estranging to other people. So, there’s that. So, when you speak with others, sometimes… Like, even when I say, “We shouldn’t use the word evil,” people go, “No, but you have to. Does that mean you’re trivializing things?” And the answer is, no, I’m not trivializing. I’m just trying to understand.
Julia Shaw
(00:22:01)
Also, sympathizing or being empathetic towards people whom others have written off is always going to get that response from some people. And, I mean, there are real questions around whom we’re platforming and what that has and what role we have as content creators, both of us, of the people we talk about, how we cover them. I often come across this in true crime work that I do, because I get asked to do TV shows. I host TV shows, and I host BBC podcasts. And there’s always the question of sometimes people commit murder to become famous. And should it be a blanket ban that we don’t cover those cases, or should we cover those cases but in a different way, or should we anonymize them? So, it doesn’t mean that you should never cover that case.

Serial killers

Julia Shaw
(00:22:42)
It just means that you need to think about it. Speaking of which, you’ve done a lot of really great stuff, podcast shows. One of them is Bad People Podcast. You co-host it. It has over 100 episodes, each covering a crime. What’s maybe the most disturbing crime you’ve covered? One of the most disturbing crimes that we covered on Bad People, and just to be clear, Bad People, much like the title Evil, is sort of tongue in cheek, where the idea is it’s people whom we refer to as bad people. And then it’s always a question of, like, who are these, quote unquote, “bad people,” and are we all capable of doing these terrible things? But one of the most, certainly, problematic, dark cases that we covered was the Robert Pickton case.
Julia Shaw
(00:23:26)
And the episodes are called Piggy’s Palace, because that was the nickname for the farm where Robert Pickton brought victims whom he had kidnapped, and then he killed them, and he did terrible things to their bodies. And rumors have it, certainly, that he fed some of these victims to pigs. Now, one of the reasons I covered that case is actually because it was influential in my own career. So, Robert Pickton is one of the most famous Canadian serial killers of all time. And as I was doing my undergrad at Simon Fraser University in Canada, I was being taught by someone called Stephen Hart. And Stephen Hart was an expert witness on the Robert Pickton trial, and so he was keeping us abreast of some of the developments of what he was covering.
Julia Shaw
(00:24:10)
And I found it so interesting, and I loved Stephen Hart as a person, and he seemed to have this sense of humor, this gallows humor, around it all, despite being faced with one of the arguably worst people in Canadian history. And I thought that that was so interesting, that someone could be so nice and so kind and so wonderful, and be an expert witness for these kinds of people. And so that’s one of the reasons I went into the field is because of this case as well. And so we had him on the show. So, he came onto Bad People, and we interviewed him for it.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:40)
All right, and he has done, I imagine, a lot of really difficult cases.
Julia Shaw
(00:24:46)
Yes. He’s done a lot of difficult cases, as have other researchers like Elizabeth Loftus, who’s one of the main founders of the area of false memory research, which is what I also do. I do research on memory and false memory and witness statements. And Elizabeth Loftus has also been a recent expert for the Ghislaine Maxwell case. She was in the press. And so she has worked with lawyers to educate the court on memory in lots of really, really controversial cases. But the way she would explain it is that it’s still her role to just train people and teach people on how memory works. She’s not there to decide whether people are guilty or innocent, but she is there to help people distinguish between fact and fiction when it comes to how our memories work or don’t.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:32)
So what kind of person feeds their victims to pigs? What’s interesting about that psychology?
Julia Shaw
(00:25:38)
The psychology about Robert Pickton? I mean, he was a tricky person because I think he was profoundly lonely, and this is something we see with a lot of serial killers is that they have this loneliness, which I think not only contributes to them committing the crimes in the first place, but also allows them to get away with things because they don’t have as much of a social network or any social network that is helping them to do what’s called reality monitoring, to understand what’s true and what’s not. And so when you see people get radicalized in their own thoughts, whether that’s in the sense of things like schizophrenia where you’ve got psychosis, you’ve got delusions, maybe command hallucinations.
Julia Shaw
(00:26:16)
That’s when you think you’re hearing voices and someone is telling you that you have to do something, usually something harmful to other people. And if you don’t follow those, you will hear those voices forever. They’re profoundly distressing, and they are one of the aspects of schizophrenia that if you have, it does make you more prone to violence. And so for these kinds of cases, if you don’t have someone intervening, whether that’s a family member or a therapist saying, “How can you tell whether this thought is real?” Maybe that thought. Maybe you’re not hearing that voice, right? Maybe that aspect of what you’re thinking isn’t true and bringing you back closer to reality.
Julia Shaw
(00:26:54)
You can just wander off to whatever alternate universe that you might live in in your head, and it’s the same with radicalization in other contexts is that you see that people who drift more and more into a certain group that has certain beliefs that are maybe divorced from the evidence, divorced from reality. You can see that people will get more extreme over time, and unless you have a tether that brings you back, that allows you to do reality monitoring, it’s going to be very difficult to find your way out of that. So with serial killers, we find this reality monitoring problem, and I think part of that’s related to the lack of social networks that people have.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:29)
That’s fascinating. So that’s one important component of serial killers. What else can we say about the psychology? What motivates them? So if you look at some of the famous serial killers, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, are there other things we could say about their psychology that motivates them? So interesting, the tether to reality. Loneliness is a part of the human condition. It is, in fact, one of its side effects is you can get untethered. And then with some of these brains, I guess the untethered goes to some dark place.
Julia Shaw
(00:28:03)
The untethered goes to a dark place, and it then is often combined with some of these other dark tetrad traits. So you’ve got someone who maybe is high on psychopathy, low on empathy, someone who’s high on sadism, someone who thinks that it’s okay to pursue your own goals. And your own goal can be, like with Jeffrey Dahmer, you can be wanting to create the perfect partner, which in some ways seems to be what he was trying to do by killing people and piecing them together and sewing up a sort of new version. There’s something in that where I can’t help but go, “That’s so sad.” I don’t go, “Oh my God, how awful.” Of course, it’s atrocious. Of course, it’s heinous, but I have this real sympathy for that, and I think that’s important for us to have, though.
Julia Shaw
(00:28:54)
And not to say, “I can’t relate to this person at all,” but to say, “That is an extreme manifestation of something I have felt, and the difference between me engaging in that and this person engaging in that are these other factors.” But the core is in all of us.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:09)
Do you think all of us are capable of evil, of some of the things we label as evil?
Julia Shaw
(00:29:16)
I think all of us are capable of doing basically the worst things we can imagine. And one of the reasons I think that is because you can see neighbors turning on each other, especially if you look historically at the start of wars or big political moments where you have people who would have called each other friends turning each other in to the police, killing each other, doing terrible things. So I think all it takes is to become convinced that the people you think are your friends are actually your enemies, whether that’s just in your own world or in a larger political national landscape. I don’t think it takes all that much for us to be capable of doing terrible things.
Julia Shaw
(00:29:51)
But that’s also why it’s really important when things are good and when you’re not at war and when you have the capacity to think deeply about important issues to train your mind on these thoughts of knowing that things like loneliness can manifest in these extreme ways, that things like jealousy and aggression, that they can turn into murder, that they can turn into these horrible versions. And to then also spot the red flags if you start going down that path. I think if we don’t rehearse evil, if you will, we are much more likely to engage in it, especially in those moments where we don’t have much time or energy to really think about what we’re doing.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:30)
Yeah, I really appreciate the way you think and the way you talk about this. Listening to history, when I’m reading history books, I imagine myself doing the thing I’m reading about, and I almost always can imagine that, like when I’m being honest with myself.
Julia Shaw
(00:30:49)
And it’s important to admit that to ourselves. And research on murder fantasies finds that most men have fantasized about killing someone, about 70% in two studies. And most women as well. More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody. So murder fantasies are incredibly common, and certainly according to some researchers, that’s a good thing. Being able to rehearse and think through doing the most terrible things is a great dress rehearsal for also how we don’t want to live our lives. And only if you are able to fully think through, “What would I actually be like if I was engaging in this? What would I be thinking? Who would I be with? What would be my the group that I’m charging against this other person?
Julia Shaw
(00:31:34)
You know, who am I there with?” As you said, like really putting yourself in the shoes of these people who have done terrible things. That is how you also realize that you do not want those consequences. And so yeah, you maybe want to murder this person, but you don’t really want to murder this person. That’s that intuitive sort of animalistic brain coming in. But then luckily, we have higher reasoning that goes, “Actually, if you think this through, that’s a pretty terrible consequence for yourself. So the better thing to do is not to murder this person.” So I think it’s adaptive to be able to fantasize and think about these things.
Julia Shaw
(00:32:09)
Obviously, if you start getting to a point where you’re ruminating and you’re going in these circles where you’re constantly fantasizing about doing dark things, especially to a specific person, I’d always advise seeing somebody, to talk to a psychologist, for example. Because that then does become a risk factor for acting on those dark fantasies. But up to that point, if it’s just a fleeting thought or something that sort of in one day you had these thoughts, that is totally healthy, I would say.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:35)
And also, I think it’s useful to simulate or think through what it would take to say no in that situation. Meaning, once you’re able to imagine yourself doing evil things, you have to imagine the difficult act of resisting. A lot of people think they would resist in Nazi Germany. Well, most people didn’t, and there’s a reason for that. It’s not easy. Same reason, I’ve seen this. If something bad is happening on a public street, most people, it’s the bystander effect. Most people just stand there and watch. I’ve seen it once in my life. This is humans, so it’s actually you want to simulate stepping up.
Julia Shaw
(00:33:19)
Yeah, so it’s also been called the heroic imagination. Someone who has studied evil, quote unquote, at length, is called Philip Zimbardo. He did the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that was an experiment which is, I mean, it’s now been torn apart in various ways. It was absolutely influential for psychology. It’s where participants were randomly assigned whether they would be prisoners or guards in a mock prison experiment, and then for a number of days, they were told to do various things. And it got out of control, and the guards went way over what they were supposed to be doing, and they effectively started pseudo-torturing some of these inmates or these pretend inmates.
Julia Shaw
(00:34:00)
And the whole thing had to be stopped prematurely, but it was really fundamental in showing how just by randomly being assigned into guard, the person in charge, or inmate, you can, within a matter of days, have a completely different way of thinking about one another. And so Philip Zimbardo has also spoken at length about evil and that all of us are capable of it in the right circumstances, but he also is a big proponent of what he calls the heroic imagination. And the heroic imagination is really what the purpose of everything I do is. The purpose of what I do isn’t just to go, “Ooh, this is curious,” and to stop there. The point is to then prevent it, and to prevent it in ourselves because that’s I think ultimately what has to happen.
Julia Shaw
(00:34:39)
You can’t do a top-down sort of government-level approach to trying to be so tough on crime that no one will ever commit crime. That’s impossible. But you can change, sort of to say it in a tacky way, the hearts and minds of individuals to recognize the pathways towards evil and to go, “Wait, I’m off track. I don’t want to go this way, and I’m going to stop myself here, and here’s how I can find my way back.” And so the heroic imagination is exercising that. I see someone on the street. How do I make sure that they’re okay? How do I not become a bystander? And actually, the bystander stuff is interesting because there was a really famous case, the murder of Kitty Genovese, and there were all of these both ear and eyewitnesses.
Julia Shaw
(00:35:21)
So an ear witness is someone who just hears things, and an eyewitness is someone who sees the crime happening, and they didn’t intervene in the murder of this woman. And so this case was often taken as this almost example of, “Look how terrible human beings are. We just walk by. We don’t care about what’s happening to strangers on the streets.” And actually, what’s happened since is that there’s been lots of other bystander experiments, and they have not substantiated this. So we need to be very careful with looking at these extreme cases and going, “How horrible that this happened to this one person,” and it is, but that doesn’t mean that that’s always how it happens. And so actually, what we find in bystander research is that most of the time, bystanders do intervene.
Julia Shaw
(00:36:01)
It’s just when there has already been a crowd that has accumulated, you read the room, and you assume, “Well, nobody else has intervened yet, and so it must not be a real problem.” That desire to not stand out in a negative way is often what hinders heroism. I mean, that’s why we look at heroes, people who especially risk their own lives to save others, especially strangers. We see them with a sort of respect that nobody else gets, and that’s because we recognize that we might not be capable of that. If I saw a stranger drowning in a river, would I really risk my life jumping in the river to maybe save them? I think that’s a big question mark.
Julia Shaw
(00:36:43)
And so when people do that, especially when people almost have this inherent reaction that they just jump in, they just go for it, that is something that is a really admirable quality, and that we as humans do celebrate, and we should. And I think often we should celebrate those incidents more and not the, you know, the bystander moments where we didn’t intervene. We should be normalizing intervening.

Murder

Lex Fridman
(00:37:07)
And again, again, this idea of heroic imagination, actually simulating, imagining yourself standing up and saving the person when a crowd is watching, they’re drowning, to be the one that dives in, tries to help. You mentioned 70% of men and some large percentage of women fantasize about murder, and I also read that you wrote that recidivism for homicide is only 1 to 3%. So that raises the question, why do people commit murder?
Julia Shaw
(00:37:43)
Murder is a really interesting crime because most of the time it’s perpetrated for reasons that we don’t like as a society. So as a person who talks a lot to the news and also to producers who are trying to make true crime shows, who don’t necessarily have a deep understanding of psychology, let’s just say, and who come at you with myths where you go, “Oh, no, we’re not, we’re not going to talk about that. We’re not going to talk about whether or not the mom is to blame for this person killing somebody.” I hate that. That’s one of my least favorite sort of… The trauma narrative of all people who do terrible things must have had a terrible childhood, I think, is really problematic.
Julia Shaw
(00:38:22)
What really happens in murder most of the time, which is not what you see on TV because it’s really boring, is it’s a fight that gets out of control. And if you look at the real reasons stated, it’s things like, “This person owed me $4, and so I killed him. This person stole my bike. This person owed me…” It’s these really stupid reasons, and it is just this bad decision in the moment, an overreaction to a fight, to an argument, and it wasn’t planned. It’s not some psychopath sharpening their knives, waiting for months to try and kill this person. And we don’t like that because there’s something called the victimization gap, which is that the impact of this extreme situation on the perpetrator, there’s a huge gap between that and the impact on the victim and their family.
Julia Shaw
(00:39:08)
So the victim loses a life, whereas the perpetrator, sure, they get imprisoned, but that… At best, right? If you will, in terms of justice. But they don’t have the same kinds of consequences, and we don’t like that. We like things that have extreme consequences to have extreme reasons. And so that’s why I think there’s this real desire to show serial killers and to show people who are, in fact, planning murders for a really long time and then engage in them rather than this fight that goes out of control or someone drink-driving, or someone who is… I mean, unfortunately, intimate partner homicide is also one of those situations that is common, one of the top four reasons for murder as well.
Julia Shaw
(00:39:49)
But that’s not the almost glamorized version that we see of murder online or that we see in the news. So I think it’s always important to talk about murder as something that is rarely inherent to an individual. Very few people want to murder. They might fantasize about it, but they don’t want to go through with it. And very few people who do engage in murder wanted to do it in that instance, never mind again. I think in general, we have the way that we look at lots of crimes upside down. So we put murderers in prison for a really long time because we think that that’s justice, which is, sure, that’s one version where it’s, you know, an eye for an eye kind of. You know, life for life.
Julia Shaw
(00:40:30)
There’s obviously the more extreme version of that, which is the death penalty, which I don’t adhere to, but I could see the rationalization of, well, you stole somebody else’s life, so you don’t deserve to have one. But there’s also the other side, which is if we’re looking at prevention, murder is really… Like, they’re not going to… People aren’t going to go out and murder again. So that is… That’s a really low risk in terms of recidivism, actually. And high risk are things like fraud and elder abuse and sexual violence. And so in some ways, sometimes our sanctions are upside down in terms of how we can actually make society safer, and they’re in line more just with how we perceive justice to work.
Julia Shaw
(00:41:07)
So there are big fundamental questions about how we organize our justice systems and what we want them to be for.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:13)
Can you just linger on that a bit? So how should we think about everything you just described for how our criminal justice system forgives? If they are very unlikely to murder again, how would you reform the criminal justice system?
Julia Shaw
(00:41:28)
I think forgiveness is up to the victims’ families, and quite often when you speak with victims’ families, there is this divide where you have some who are much more keen on something called restorative justice, which is where they… What they want is for the person to apologize, the perpetrator to apologize, to explain how it happened. Also, quite often, I mean, you look at some of the other consequences in the other context, it’s sort of like teenage boys who are part of gangs, for example, is the other context. And it’s a teenage boy killing another teenage boy. Like, these are kids, and the parents of a teenage boy understand that. This isn’t… You know, they don’t think of this other perpetrator as this grown man who has… I don’t know. It’s…
Julia Shaw
(00:42:13)
I think we think of it as this fight between the parents of both teenage boys in that case, but really, often what parents want is to just understand how this could happen and, in some ways, to allow the other teenage boy to still have a life and to not steal theirs as well, or his as well. So there’s that restorative justice model where forgiveness, I think, belongs to the families. Some families, of course, want the most extreme punishment. That’s also… I can understand how that would be a response that’s triggered if you’ve suffered a severe loss. But if we’re looking to make society safer, putting people who’ve killed in prison is actually not the answer, right?
Julia Shaw
(00:42:52)
Because if we want society to be safer, it should be based purely on what is most likely to deter crime and who is most likely to engage in it, and that’s where I think we’ve got it upside down.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:05)
If I could just stick to The Bad People Podcast, there’s an episode on incels called Black Pill: Are Incels Dangerous? So are they dangerous? What’s the psychology of incels?
Julia Shaw
(00:43:15)
So that episode was all about what it means to espouse certain kinds of views, especially about women, and what it means to be in an environment that is fueling the fire of… well, hatred of gender, and the idea of entitlement. So I think one thing that we see often in crimes, of all sorts actually, is this sense of entitlement that drives the perception that I’m allowed to engage in X because of something else. And I deserve to have a life that looks like this, but I don’t, and so I’m going to go take it, or I’m going to go do something to show my dissatisfaction in life.
Julia Shaw
(00:43:58)
And so if you think that all men deserve to have a happy life, sort of a Disney version with a woman at home who’s taking care of the kids, and it’s the sort of white picket fence ideal that we’ve been sold. We have been told that that is what we should have. I understand where it comes from, and the question though is, are we entitled to that, or is that the idea that that’s something we should strive towards? And I think the answer is no, nobody’s entitled to a good life. I would like to see freedoms and rights manifest in such a way that everyone is able to achieve the kind of life that they themselves want. But you’re not entitled to it.
Julia Shaw
(00:44:38)
And so that’s where I think it can get a bit crossed, and we can be sold these lies that are basically impossible for everybody in society to achieve. And understandably, people get angry, and if you’re angry and if you feel entitled and if you’re in this group where everyone else is thinking the same way as you, yeah, that can make you dangerous.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:57)
And the internet gives you a mechanism to be your worst self.
Julia Shaw
(00:45:03)
And it can reinforce that worst self. You see other people saying, “Yeah, I feel the same way. Do you want… Do you want me to help you?”

Lies and scams

Lex Fridman
(00:45:10)
Oh, the internet. So one more episode, you interviewed the lady Cecilia, who got Tinder Swindled. Can you tell what happened with the Tinder Swindle situation?
Julia Shaw
(00:45:21)
So the Tinder Swindler, that was a person who pretended on Tinder to be a rich guy who had this lavish lifestyle, and he would match with women on Tinder, and very quickly love-bomb them. So he would send them all kinds of messages and immediately start being very emotional, very sharing, pretend that he’s messaging from his private jet, or actually message from his private jet but pretend that he’s in love with this person very quickly. And then he would invite women, in this case Cecilia, to very expensive, luxurious dates. So he would whisk them away to Paris, or he would show them his private jet, or he would take them to a really expensive restaurant almost to prove that he, in fact, is this really wealthy guy.
Julia Shaw
(00:46:10)
And he would simultaneously be building up the story of a future together, and you see this in people who are really problematic in relationships in a lot of ways. I mean, this is not just in scams or in criminal settings, but problematic relationship styles often involve someone who is creating this idea of a future together that you can just see it now. You know, “Our kids in the garden running around. You’re the only one for me.” That kind of language, like, almost planning your wedding on the third date.
Julia Shaw
(00:46:42)
That kind of thing is what he would weaponize, and Cecilia was looking for love. She wanted all of those things, and so it worked really well. And what he ended up doing is defrauding her of lots of money, and she ended up taking out loans, and her family were giving her money to help what he was saying was this critical situation, very classic fraud. It’s a critical situation where he was being followed, he was under attack, and he needed her to pay for some things. He needed her to pay for some flights, until she ran out of money, and then she realized that this all was a big fraud. This was a love scam.
Julia Shaw
(00:47:19)
So the reason that we spoke with her is partly to show how it can happen, and I think it’s really important to remind people that this is something everybody is capable of believing. Fraud works because people know what we want to hear, and they tell us the things we want to hear. And so I think all of us, there’s a tailored version of fraud that could appeal to basically everybody if they have enough information about you.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:46)
Yeah, and by the way now, in modern day, AI could probably better and better do that kind of thing. Do the tailored version of the story that you want to believe, and love is a topic on which that would be especially effective.
Julia Shaw
(00:48:03)
Yeah, ’cause you’re playing with people’s emotions, and you know that they’re vulnerable in that way. And most people want to be loved and want to love, and so it’s a really manipulative way in, and I think it’s really horrible, but it’s also something that we all almost underestimate. So we think, “I would identify fraud. I would know if someone was trying to scam me of money,” until it happens to us, and then we go, “Oh, wait. That did just happen.” And then we get really embarrassed. And so I think talking about it is really important, and seeing it as not this thing that happens to dumb people, ’cause that is sometimes how it’s framed. It’s like, “Oh, such an idiot.” “She was so gullible.”
Julia Shaw
(00:48:42)
Was she? Or was she just a nice person who wanted to believe that this person was capable of loving her, which I would hope we all are.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:50)
Yeah, and I hope she and others that fall victim to that kind of thing don’t become cynical and keep trying.
Julia Shaw
(00:48:57)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:59)
Those kinds of things can really destroy your ability to be vulnerable to the world. But, I mean, it sounds like this same kind of thing is just commonplace in all kinds of relationships. That’s the puzzle that it could be. If you find yourself inside of a toxic relationship with a, quote, “love bombing,” it could be a lot of manipulative, fraud-type of things, right, inside a relationship. …In this spectrum.
Julia Shaw
(00:49:22)
Well, and coercive control is becoming more of an issue, where that’s when somebody, for example, in a relationship takes control of the finances, and that’s often a man in a relationship. That’s traditionally because it falls often along these gender lines. But the problem is if that person then starts to weaponize the fact that they’re controlling the finances and starts using words like, “I’m going to give you your allowance,” instead of going, “You’ve paid as much into this as I have, and so this is our shared money,” and starts using that and controlling things and controlling how the other person lives in that relationship, that’s when you get into things that are called coercive control. And things like jealousy can also be used in that way.

Jealousy

Lex Fridman
(00:50:01)
Is there any way out of that? Maybe the jealousy study, or is this a vicious downward spiral whenever there are any signs like this that means you’re screwed, get out? Or is this just the puzzle of the human condition and humans getting together and having to solve that puzzle?
Julia Shaw
(00:50:22)
I have non-traditional views on jealousy. I’m not a jealousy researcher, but I have done some research on sexuality, and I personally think that jealousy is basically always a red flag because what it means is that the person who is jealous isn’t secure in the relationship, and the reason that they’re not secure in the relationship is either because the relationship is wrong for them or because they are insecure in themselves. And I don’t think it is a sign of love. I don’t think it is a sign of, you know, you want to protect your mate. I think it is mostly control, and it’s the desire to control and to possess. And jealousy, we know, is a precursor to intimate partner violence almost always.
Julia Shaw
(00:51:01)
As in, not all jealousy leads to violence, of course, but all violence has jealousy as a precursor. And quite a lot of that is imagined things that the partner is doing, not even based on reality. Then we go back to our deception detection research, where we’re bad at telling whether someone’s lying or not. And so if you’re basing how you’re interacting with that person on a faulty lie detector, you’re going to make bad decisions. So, the research also bears out that most people are really bad at monogamy. So, most people either have cheated on a significant other, maybe not their current significant other, but a significant other, or have cheated multiple times, and that’s just consistently found in the research.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:40)
So, maybe there’s justification to be jealous?
Julia Shaw
(00:51:43)
I think it’s the other way around. I think monogamy is setting us up to fail.
Julia Shaw
(00:51:46)
So, I think monogamy is a social construct. That’s a nice idea for some people, and I think that at least based on the research on how people actually behave, they’re not actually behaving in a monogamous way. If you’re cheating on your partner, that is not monogamy. That is polyamory, potentially. So, the love of multiple people. And it’s lying, and it doesn’t have to be that way. So, I’m polyamorous, and I believe that you can love multiple people. I don’t know that everyone is always going to meet lots of people at the same time that they’re going to love. But I think that there’s been a move towards more people embracing open relationships and non-traditional relationship structures, and I think that is healthy to at least have as an option.
Julia Shaw
(00:52:28)
I think the idea that there’s just one size fits all for relationships is really harmful to a lot of people, and it just doesn’t really work for everybody.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:36)
Well, if you could just focus in on one component, it seems to me one of the problems is honesty as a hard requirement, and good communication is another hard requirement, because that feels like the prerequisites for avoiding all these problems.
Julia Shaw
(00:52:56)
And I guess with jealousy, what I’m thinking of is actually not an instance of jealousy. …So where you have a feeling of, “I feel left out,” or, “I feel…” It’s more that sort of persistent feeling of, “I am a jealous person.” And that’s where I would say that is usually a red flag. And you’re right. It’s a red flag partly because it means the person is probably bad at communicating, or you are as a couple. Like, it’s not necessarily just the jealous… Person’s fault. It’s just that there’s something happening in this dynamic that is bad psychologically, and that should be addressed, or maybe it’s not the right relationship.

Monogamy

Lex Fridman
(00:53:30)
So, the fact that a lot of people cheat, does that mean every single person that cheated is probably not going to be good at monogamy? I guess if you can just analyze all of human civilization as it stands and give advice, that’s definitively true for everyone. Not-
Julia Shaw
(00:53:48)
That’s exactly what psychologists do all the time. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:50)
Okay. Generalize.
Julia Shaw
(00:53:50)
We make sweeping statements.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:52)
This is great. No, I just… I think it’s really interesting because I see all those things as romantic: choosing not to cheat, choosing to dedicate yourself fully to another person. I mean, it’s all just romantic, and then some people do cheat, and your heart is broken. You write a song about it, and then you move on. You try to repair yourself and be vulnerable to another human being and all that.
Julia Shaw
(00:54:13)
But why deny yourself the beautiful spectrum of human experience? I mean, it’s like eating one meal for the rest of your life. Like, why? You don’t have to do that. You can just… You can have lots of beautiful people around and…
Lex Fridman
(00:54:26)
Well, so for me, actually focusing on a single thing, you get to explore. You mentioned a puzzle. Over time, you get to see the nuance, like the beauty of the puzzle. You realize it’s an infinitely long project to really understand another human being. And so, if you focus, you don’t get distracted. So, that applies. I’m a person, when I find a meal I really like, I’ll stick to it for a long time. I’m definitely a monogamy person, I think. But that also could be a component of where I grew up. You know, there’s a certain cultural upbringing, and maybe my brain is not allowing…
Julia Shaw
(00:55:01)
…myself certain possibilities, you know? I think it’s more that I want people to feel like they have a choice, and that’s the important thing. And I think all we see is monogamy everywhere, all the time, and it’s just one version of how we can live our lives, and I think it’s not the only. And I think that having conversations with your partner as well, especially early—it’s harder to bring this up later on—but to have it early and say, you know, “How do you actually want to structure your life?” And I think, how do you want to structure your relationship is part of that. And especially if you’re going to commit yourself to one person, one primary person, or one exclusive person, that’s part of it.
Julia Shaw
(00:55:37)
And I think then you also, you know, don’t have to lie to each other if you do cheat, or you can talk about it in a different way if you feel like there’s a certain capacity to be honest about whom you’re attracted to and how that might impact your life more generally.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:52)
So, how difficult is polyamory? I think a lot of people would be curious about that kind of stuff. Does jealousy come up? Is it difficult to navigate?
Julia Shaw
(00:56:00)
It can be. I mean, all relationships can be difficult to navigate.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:02)
Sure.
Julia Shaw
(00:56:03)
I think it’s the same. It’s… and the same respect. So if you’re going in because you’re trying to fix something about yourself, you’re going to have a hard time. Much like if you’re dating a single person, if you’re trying to fix something, and this is going to be the solution to the thing that you feel is broken about yourself, it’s going to be hard. But if you’re going in coming from a good place, and you’re going, you know, “I want to be open, and I want to connect with people, and I want to love people or a person,” then you’re going to have a better time.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:28)
What does the perfect polyamorous relationship look like? Can you really love multiple people deeply?
Julia Shaw
(00:56:34)
I think so. You can love people in different ways, and also, you can love lots of people deeply, I think. And I think, again, research on bisexuality — I’m bi — has also found that people who are bi are more likely to be in non-traditional relationships. And one of the reasons for that is probably also because we constantly get asked to justify our sexuality as well. And so if constantly you’re being asked if one person’s enough for you, if one gender’s enough for you if you’re in a relationship with one person, for example, you know, if I’m in a relationship with a man, do you miss women? And it’s like, I don’t ask you that if you’re in a relationship with a woman. Do you miss women? Like, you probably do, but that’s just other women than your partner.
Julia Shaw
(00:57:14)
It has nothing to do with being bi. And so I think there’s this constant barrage of questions of what does it mean? Is it real? How do you choose? What does a relationship look like? Do you constantly want threesomes? Like, there’s this constant hyper-sexualization also, especially of women that we find in the research that can also lead to really negative outcomes for mental health and for things like risk of sexual violence. But on the other hand, you’ve got bisexual people themselves saying, “Yeah, but I feel like I also have this superpower that I can love more widely, and gender doesn’t really matter in terms of whom I’m capable of loving.” And so relationship structures almost come with that conversation.
Julia Shaw
(00:57:52)
It’s not that we need to be non-monogamous or that we need to be in these kinds of relationships. It’s more that I think if you’ve engaged so deeply with your sexuality, partly because society’s forced you to, then you’re also going to be thinking about relationship structures more generally and going, “Actually, I’m going to choose this one.”
Lex Fridman
(00:58:06)
Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, your sexual preferences and relationship structure preferences, some of the choice has to do with how society’s going to respond to it. So if you have to explain it every time you go to a party, you might maybe not want to do that or talk about it or at least be open about it. Yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot of annoying conversations you have to do if you’re polyamorous, some of which you’ve mentioned. And yes, there are effects of like over-sexualizing the people involved. Yeah.

Sexuality

Julia Shaw
(00:58:42)
Or thinking they’re lying. So with men… So, I wrote a book called Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, and I did that after I created a bisexual research group. So, I wasn’t a sexuality researcher, but as a bi person and a scientist, I was interested in the science of bisexuality, and I couldn’t really find it. It was really hard to figure out what people were actually learning about bisexual people in comparison to other kinds of queer people. And one of the things I found is that the terms that are used are not necessarily bi. And so it could be things like plurisexual.
Julia Shaw
(00:59:16)
So, if you type into Google Scholar the word bisexual, you’re going to get a lot of confusing things also because bisexual is used for, like, two sexes where you have multiple sexes or you can change, and so they’re bisexual.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:28)
Right.
Julia Shaw
(00:59:28)
Yeah, which is entirely different. And so I think partly out of that, researchers started using words like plurisexual, and omnisexual is another one. And so if you’re looking for research on this, plurisexual is probably the word. But…
Lex Fridman
(00:59:41)
What does omnisexual mean?
Julia Shaw
(00:59:42)
It’s just the same. It’s just another-
Lex Fridman
(00:59:44)
Okay. Got it.
Julia Shaw
(00:59:44)
Another word where it’s all. Sometimes pansexual is also used. And again, the idea being that it’s all genders.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:52)
So, how should we think about bisexuality? Is it fluid, like day to day, month to month, year to year, fluid who you’re attracted to? Or is it at the same time, have the capacity to be attracted to anyone or attracted to everyone? What’s the right way to think about it?
Julia Shaw
(01:00:12)
I think the right way to think about it is that I’m not attracted to most people, but I can be attracted to people regardless of gender. Much like you’re probably not attracted to most people, but you are attracted to people of a certain gender, maybe. And so that’s… It’s the same as being heterosexual in terms of potentially my pool of people whom I might be interested in. It’s just that the gender is irrelevant.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:33)
What’s the biggest thing that people misunderstand about bisexuality?
Julia Shaw
(01:00:37)
The biggest thing that researchers find people misunderstand about bisexuality is that it’s a phase and that it’s this idea that it’s transient, that it’s always changing, and that it’s a stepping stone. So, I think a lot of people still see bisexuality as on the way to gay town. Sort of like you’re on your way, but you haven’t quite committed and you’re still stuck in expectations of society. You haven’t quite let go yet, but really you’re gay. And that’s especially true for men. And so when you look at research on bisexual men, which is actually how the research started. So, I think now when we think of bisexuality, we think of women. And it’s true that today, twice as many women identify as bisexual as men.
Julia Shaw
(01:01:18)
But if you look at the history of this and the research on bisexuality over time, it was the other way around. Someone called Alfred Kinsey was one of the first sexuality researchers in recent history, certainly, and he, after World War II, did this really big study of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it was called. He was a biologist himself, and so he thought of taxonomies, and he was doing research on gall wasps, so insects. And this idea of human sexuality was sort of thrown at him after the war because there’s also this whole move to get people to, well, reproduce and to rebuild America. And so sexuality was partly, and sex, specifically, was becoming more of an area of interest, both in terms of research and in terms of policy and funding.
Julia Shaw
(01:02:05)
And so Alfred Kinsey was asked, “Do you want to do a class on human sexual behavior?” And he was like, “I know nothing about this.” And so he spent about a year just listening to students’ questions about what they wanted to know about sex, and he realized that he was looking for research to try and build up this course that he was probably going to teach, and he realized that he couldn’t answer most of their questions because the research hadn’t been done. And so a lot of the questions were around, “What is normal?”
Julia Shaw
(01:02:36)
You know, “If I feel this during sex, is that normal? How often do people have sex? Should I want these? What about these fantasies? What does it mean? What if I have homosexual fantasies? What if I engage in this kind of…” And so he was looking at all of these questions and collating them, and then he went out and did these huge studies, and he interviewed thousands of people himself, but also had all these research assistants who were out there interviewing people in America about their sexual behavior, which, I mean, just picture the time. This is the 1940s. This is quite a conservative time. I mean, certainly more than we might expect now.
Julia Shaw
(01:03:12)
And here’s this researcher asking incredibly personal questions about thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and he ended up finding, and this is one of the big findings in this book that he published called Sexual Behavior in The Human Male, which was a bestseller for an entire year. He sold out auditoriums. They had to sometimes add the room next to the room he was in because there was so much desire to go to his lectures about sex that they had to connect radios to other halls to give people enough space to sit down. He was basically a rock star, and again, I think this challenges the misconception we have about sexuality, that we think of it as this sort of woke thing now…
Julia Shaw
(01:04:02)
…that the rainbow flag and all this stuff is sort of this modern invention almost. But if you… this is the ’40s. This was happening. People were going to these talks. People were having these conversations, and he created something called the Kinsey Scale. And so the Kinsey Scale is from zero to six, and he found that it was not useful to apply a binary to people’s sexual desires and sexual orientation. It was more useful to put them on a continuum because most people were not exclusively homosexual or exclusively heterosexual. Most people were somewhere in between.
Julia Shaw
(01:04:34)
And so zero was exclusively heterosexual tendencies, and six was exclusively homosexual, and he would place people based on all of the things they told him somewhere on the scale, and about half of men were somewhere in the middle, not exclusively either, and about a quarter of women. Now think about the time.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:54)
It was a very conservative time.
Julia Shaw
(01:04:56)
Well, and it’s post-war though, so I think that mattered as well. So there’s something called a homosocial environment, which has nothing to do with being gay. That has to do with being in a situation where you are with people of the same gender as you. So a homosocial environment are things like prisons, where you only have men or only have women, war, which, at that point, they just had, and so you have a lot of men who are exclusively in the company of men, and maybe looking around going, “Well, now that my options are different, maybe I’m going to choose from this pool.” Anyway, so he found that it was that way around, that a lot of people have these fantasies or actions that they’ve engaged in.
Julia Shaw
(01:05:36)
And then there are other researchers, other male researchers, who found similar things, and then at some point in the ’70s, it swapped, and it felt like maybe more people, more men, were identifying as gay, and there were maybe fewer people who would have called themselves bi, and suddenly this became a thing more for women. So I think that there are some social things going on. There are some research things going on that actually bi men have been studied for a long time as well.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:59)
Okay, so you said a lot of interesting things. So there is a difference between the truth and the socially acknowledged thing, so there are social elements. I don’t know. This might be anecdotal, but I know a few women friends of mine who identify as bisexual. I don’t know a single guy friend who identifies as bisexual. They’re either gay or straight. So there’s still a social thing going on.
Julia Shaw
(01:06:28)
Definitely.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:28)
Right?
Julia Shaw
(01:06:28)
Definitely, and I think that research consistently shows that bisexual men are more likely to identify as gay or straight.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:39)
As gay.
Julia Shaw
(01:06:39)
And gay, well, it depends. If they have what we might refer to as a homosexual lifestyle, so they engage in going to queer parties, maybe go on Grindr or other gay apps, that would be much more a lifestyle thing where you’ve embraced it and you see this as part of your identity, that you are part of this queer community. It’s much easier to say you’re gay than you are bi, most often, also because there’s queerphobia within the queer community. So you might get gay men saying to a bi man, “Ah, come on. You’re actually gay. I was bi once.” That’s a classic. “I was bi once,” or “Come on.”
Julia Shaw
(01:07:14)
You’re actually gay.” It’s the same that you get the other way around with bi women, that because it’s seen as performative, the idea being that bisexual women are doing it for attention, but the attention of men specifically. That, “Well, they’re all going to go back to men anyway and they’re just doing it. It’s a phase. It’s this thing that they’re doing actually to be sexy to men, not because they’re actually interested in women.” And so there’s this lesbian-bi thing going on, which is often quite hostile. Not always, but often. And there’s this gay male-bi thing going on, which is different in nature but is also potentially hostile. So in both, saying you’re bi can be problematic, but for men, more so.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:53)
Do you like the Kinsey Scale as a very simple reduction, that there’s a spectrum? I also saw the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid that adds a few parameters like who you’re attracted to, how you’re actually behaving, the fantasies you have, social preference, lifestyle preferences, all that kind of stuff. Self-identification, what you actually say publicly. All those different dimensions. Or is the Kinsey Scale a pretty damn good approximation?
Julia Shaw
(01:08:21)
The Kinsey Scale is a good start, and the Klein Grid, I think, is much more fun in some ways. So the Klein Grid came out of research by Alfred Kinsey and others like Havelock Ellis, but we won’t get into him. Fritz Klein was a male researcher doing research also on sexuality. He was specifically a therapist, and he was looking at people who were struggling with their sexuality. So people would show up in the 70s and 80s in his practice, and they would say, “I’m struggling with my sexuality.” And he would say, “How can I help you?” And they would say things like, “I wish I wasn’t interested in men, and I’m a man.” And he would then work through what that means. Does that mean you don’t want to have these feelings? Does that mean that you don’t want to have these attractions?
Julia Shaw
(01:09:07)
Does that mean that it’s the implications of how your friends and family will see you that’s the problem? So he created this much more complex scale, which I think is really interesting for everybody to do, no matter what their sexuality is. Because what it is, is it gets you to think about things like, yeah, your sexual identity, easy. Not just that, but in past, present, and ideal. So if you say, “Well, I used to identify as straight. Now I identify as bisexual.” And then I have in my head… This doesn’t mean that other people think this. In my head, I have an ideal, which could be straight, because that’s what maybe society’s told us we should be. But it could also be something else.
Julia Shaw
(01:09:47)
And so I’ve also had friends who’ve gone, you know, past, present, straight, straight, but ideal bi. So you get into these interesting dynamics where sometimes people just wish they were a different sexuality than they were for other reasons. And then there are other things in the scale that ask about your lifestyle. So, for example, if you are going to queer parties, if you have queer friends, then you might have a homosexual lifestyle, even if you’re straight. But then again, it’s how much lifestyle would you like?
Julia Shaw
(01:10:17)
And so for me, that was a real moment where I was looking at that going, “Wow, my lifestyle’s really straight.” Um, “And maybe I need to change this.” And so he was using these attractions and fantasies and identities and the past, present, ideal to help people to think through all these complicated feelings we have around our sexuality, and to identify sticking points.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:37)
Yeah, that’s fascinating. So maybe the presumption there is if everything’s aligned, the fantasies, the ideal partner, all those things, that’s probably the healthiest place to be?
Julia Shaw
(01:10:49)
Right. And so he would look at especially the ideal and the present. And if those were different, so if you said, “I wish I was bi but I’m straight,” or “I’m bi but I wish I was straight,” or “I’m homosexual and I wish I was straight,” he would say, “Let’s talk about that,” and he’d try to work through it. And the term he used for bisexual people who were uncomfortable in their own sexuality was “being a troubled bisexual.” And so I think… You can… I think any sexuality can be troubled. I think you could be a troubled straight person, a troubled homosexual person, a troubled asexual person. And just thinking about why and which aspects are maybe missing, I think, is really healthy for people to do.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:27)
Meaning there are some puzzles that you haven’t quite figured out, maybe you haven’t been honest with yourself about your preferences, all that kind of stuff.
Julia Shaw
(01:11:33)
I don’t really like talking about honesty with yourself. I think that’s a high bar, and I think it’s also often weaponized against people, especially by men, where it’s this idea of “you’re not really being honest, you’re actually gay.” And so I think this idea of “we’re not being honest with our own sexuality,” that’s a big word. I think it’s more that maybe you haven’t had the right framework or the right words to think about aspects of your sexuality that are troubling to you.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:55)
How obvious… When a person is bisexual, how obvious is it to identify like the sexual orientation grid? Like how big is the sign, whatever you are?
Julia Shaw
(01:12:06)
I think the sign is smaller than we think it is. I think that there’s this tendency to assume that sexuality is something that we find and keep, and consolidate from our teenage years, maybe early 20s. You maybe get university thrown in, sort of if you get your experimental year as an undergrad.
Julia Shaw
(01:12:28)
But then, you kind of have to choose. And that is a difficult requirement, I think, for a lot of people, because you can’t possibly know all of the things and all the people you might be interested in at that point. And we change in every other way. Why wouldn’t we change in this way? So I think giving ourselves also the ability to reappraise where we’re at with our own sexuality, our own desires, our own relationship status, all these things, is important to keep us happy and healthy, and to not run into issues that we know are faced by a lot of homosexual but also bisexual people. Research has found that bisexual people are more likely to self-harm. They’re more likely to be the victims of sexual violence, more likely to be isolated, more likely to be stalked.
Julia Shaw
(01:13:16)
There are lots of different aspects of being bi that are negative, and the reason for that is mostly because bi people are least likely to be plugged into the community. So when you’re going through stuff like this, and you feel different, and you’re constantly being asked about your sexuality, if you’re open about it, or you’re hiding it, that’s also troubling. You’re going to have these negative consequences, especially if you don’t feel like the queer community is really a place for you. So that’s where also finding your people really matters.

Sexual fetishes

Lex Fridman
(01:13:44)
Since we’re on the topic of sexuality, one of the things you touched on in your book on evil was kinks, sexual fantasies. I think the point of describing that was that we often label that as evil or bad. What can you say about what you’ve learned from kinks and sexual fantasies from writing that book?
Julia Shaw
(01:14:06)
The reason I included kinks and evil and sexual conversations in general is because it is so often thrown into the same conversation. So if someone comes to me and says, “Julia, I want you to help me explain why this person killed this other person.” And they’ll often say, “Did you know that he or she was also into,” insert kink here, or insert nontraditional relationship structure here, or insert whatever. And I respond to that by going, “Okay, so?” And I think people use these words like, “Oh, he was really into BDSM,” and think that that’s going to have this really important impact on me. Or, “Ooh, they were swingers.” And so… And again, I go, “Yeah?” That’s, you know, almost like, “And in other news, they were swingers.”
Julia Shaw
(01:15:00)
It’s like that is not related to this crime at all, unless, you know, one of the partners was killed. But people see this as a defect of character, and kink is very much seen as a defect of character in many circles, especially in broader society. And that is wild to me because if you look at research on sexual fantasies and kinks, a lot of people have at least one. So a lot of people, BDSM being the most common, are engaging in or interested in BDSM. So things like choking or things like restraints or being degraded or doing the degrading of other people in bed, consensually of course, that is something that a lot of people fantasize about and a lot of people engage in.
Julia Shaw
(01:15:45)
And so these kinks and these fetishes, they are much more commonplace than we sometimes think about them as. Now, on the other hand, we obviously need to be careful not to assume that because in pornography BDSM is almost ubiquitous, it feels, that that means everybody wants this. That is absolutely not the case, but we also don’t want to marginalize it and say it’s almost nobody. It’s somewhere in between, and the main thing is always just to ask and to have open conversations about what it is that people actually want in bed and to make sure you have things like safe words. So, you know, putting in the restraints to make sure that these interactions are safe and consensual and then being able to explore.
Julia Shaw
(01:16:22)
And, I mean, there’s everything from, you know, pup play where you dress up as a puppy and you engage in either just general frolicking or sexual behavior to other things like blood play, which is when you pierce the skin to release some sort of blood. That can be scratching. That can be cutting. That can be of yourself or your partner. That can be this idea of, you know, I don’t know, it’s this taboo thing you’re doing together, and it’s sexy in its own way. And so everybody has their own versions of what they find attractive. And rubbing up against people, you know, sort of unsuspecting, pretending that someone’s sleeping. There’s this wide range of things, and I think people also feel often deeply ashamed about the things that they are interested in.
Julia Shaw
(01:17:07)
And I think that is also really sad because it makes it more likely that people are going to not be able to live that part of themselves and also that they think there’s something wrong with them. And that can spiral into things like, “Am I evil? Am I bad? Am I a bad person because I have these fantasies?” And that ties in, unfortunately, with homosexuality and bisexuality and the way that certainly historically and in most parts of the world still today, these queer lives and queer identities are still villainized. They’re still seen as lesser, as bad, as a sign of a defect of character. And if people see that within themselves, they’re going to think differently about themselves, and society is going to treat them differently. So it’s all about destigmatizing.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:45)
I really liked what you wrote about, I guess it was in the context of BDSM or maybe sadomasochism or maybe just the submissive-dominant dynamic, like why that might be appealing, the disinhibition hypothesis. I guess this applies generally to sexual fantasies is if you live them out, that you could just let go of all the bullshit that we, that we put up in normal society. That you could just be all in, fully present to the pleasure of it.
Julia Shaw
(01:18:13)
Right, and that’s what research has found on fetishes, especially on BDSM, is that the reason that people say they like it… I mean, it’s hard to explain why you have a fantasy. But if you go into the finer questions and really dig deep, you can find that people will explain a version of, “Well, I can really let go, and I don’t have to… If someone is telling me what to do, then I don’t have to make any decisions, and I’ve spent all day making millions of decisions, and I don’t have to in this context. And I really like that because it’s freeing.” And so that’s that disinhibition hypothesis is that the reason that we often go to things in the bedroom that in other contexts we don’t like or even find repulsive, like I don’t in normal life potentially want to be told what to do.
Julia Shaw
(01:18:59)
But maybe when you move into the bedroom, you go, “Yeah, but this is a different context, and I kind of want reverse of what I want in my day-to-day life.” And so I can also understand like furries and that sort of completely living as another species of it even is… It’s a really interesting psychological phenomenon of release and of letting go of social pressure.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:20)
But I think that also applies to… because you mentioned submissive, that’s more straightforward to understand. I think that also applies to dominant because you don’t have to walk on eggshells. It’s the clarity of it. That was really interesting. Having read that from you, that really made me think that there is a deep truth to that, to being true to whatever the sexual fantasy is. It’s not just the fantasy itself that’s appealing, it’s the being free in some sense.
Julia Shaw
(01:19:53)
It’s the being free and the juxtaposition there is that you are free because of the fiction. Like you’re play acting, but it’s touching at something deep inside you psychologically, and so it, that’s where it sort of feels weird, but it also makes sense. I mean, this is also why we like fiction because it allows you to maybe be somebody else, have someone else’s thoughts in your mind for a while and you really get to live it, as that for a bit. So I think, yeah, the truth and fiction sort of circle is always an interesting one.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:25)
So, for researching the Bi book, the bisexuality book, what have you learned about sexuality in general? Human nature, kind of sexuality, and how it’s practiced in terms of different communities, and I’m sure there are subcultures and stuff. Yeah. What have you learned?
Julia Shaw
(01:20:40)
The research on human sexuality, I think, is interesting because we keep finding that people have these desires that they feel weird about, that… Unless they have a community or an app that you can go to to live those fantasies, they can feel quite troubling to the individual and they can make you unwell. And that’s true whether it’s about your sexuality, so being gay and being unable to live as a gay person, or if that’s wanting to engage in BDSM and not having an outlet for that. So that can just make you unhappy. So I think that the stigma there is that that unhappiness is going to lead to some sort of horrible manifestations of crime.
Julia Shaw
(01:21:22)
I think that is mostly nonsense, but it’s more that I’m concerned about the mental health consequences for the individual who’s unable to explore those sides of themselves. And in research on kinks and sexuality, it’s just about also making sure that we have visible representation of certain kinds of communities, and so that’s one of the reasons I ended up writing Bi. I came out in Making Evil. Making Evil is the UK title, Evil in the US. I came out because I was writing about all the things we associate with the word evil, and homosexuality certainly is one of those things.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:55)
You came out as bisexual, by the way, yeah.
Julia Shaw
(01:21:56)
Yeah, I came out as bisexual. And I came out as bisexual in the book, and I did it specifically, and I wrote it this way as well, because I was talking about the importance of visibility and how it’s through visibility that you realize that the people around you, people you already know and love, are part of this community that otherwise feels other. It feels foreign, it feels abstract, and maybe it feels scary. But if you realize that actually you’ve got gay friends or you’ve got friends who are into certain kinds of fetishes or you’ve got friends who are whatever sexuality aspect you’re talking about, you suddenly go, “Oh, it’s going to be much harder to dehumanize these people.” And this is where all of this kind of comes for me from a really sad place is the…
Julia Shaw
(01:22:41)
You could talk about Bi as this project of love and how I was finding the community. I was trying to write something that would bring us all together. But it’s also because I’m constantly terrified that my rights are going to be stripped back. And we know that the laws around homosexual behavior and the rights around bisexual people as well, they’re in flux. There’s no straight line of acceptance. And just because right now I happen to live in a time and place where I’m allowed to be openly bisexual and I can engage in homosexual activity, that doesn’t mean that’s going to stay, not even necessarily in my lifetime.
Julia Shaw
(01:23:20)
And so I think much like writing Evil at a time when you’re not at war and you’re able to think deeply about these important issues, I think we also need to be thinking about things like sexuality and other issues that are important to us. And if we want to preserve our rights, we need to normalize these issues and make sure that they’re visible so that people find it harder to dehumanize those communities. And so I’m always terrified that bisexual people are going to be hypersexualized, dehumanized again, and that there’s going to be laws against basically just who I am.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:47)
Did you hear from a bunch of people after Making Evil, after Evil, the book, and mentioning and coming out in that book, and then writing the Bi book, that are bisexual and maybe what are some stories? I’m sure, because I haven’t seen much material on it, as you spoke to, so I’m sure they felt lonely without a community, right?
Julia Shaw
(01:24:08)
Yeah, a lot of people felt seen by the book. So it was really beautiful, the fan mail I got and the responses to the book. And I got them from all over the world. And so in the book, I also spoke with some researchers who were stationed or doing research in countries where bisexual behavior specifically is illegal, or homosexual behavior was illegal. For a long time, bisexuality was, especially in women, well, actually, homosexuality in women in general was seen as… It was a blind spot, because what counted as sex is sex with a penis.
Julia Shaw
(01:24:41)
And so women can’t have sex with one another. And so a lot of laws around homosexuality are specifically applying to men. And certainly, historically, that’s the case. So we’re talking about like sodomy, and that involves men and not women. And so if you look at the evolution of laws, for a while, women were kind of… Like it was socially not necessarily acceptable, but they were kind of getting away with it legally. But then more recently, especially, as bisexuality gets more visible as well, certain countries have started writing it specifically into their constitutions and specifically into their laws that bisexual identities and behaviors are also seen as problematic and illegal. So again, these laws change all the time.
Julia Shaw
(01:25:24)
But in terms of fan mail, especially from people in countries where homosexuality and bisexuality are illegal or are seen as problematic, are socially condemned… that was particularly important. So that those people were particularly writing, saying, some of them also saying, “Can I translate this into this other language, on the DL, like on the down low? And just, like, distribute this to my friends?” I had people sending me messages saying, “I’m at X airport or in X country where this is, this would be considered contraband.” Like this book, my book is a banned book, fun fact.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:58)
Nice.
Julia Shaw
(01:25:59)
It was banned. I sold the rights to a foreign publisher, and right after it was sold, the laws changed, and they sent me this really sad email saying, “Unfortunately, we can’t publish your book because it’s now considered part of the gay agenda, sort of promoting gay and homosexual lifestyles. And so we can’t publish it anymore.” But I take a little bit of pride in the fact that it’s a banned book, but I find it really sad, obviously, as to what it means, but it also makes me feel like it’s more important. And that’s what people were writing to me about.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:26)
What advice would you give to young people, or just people in general, that are trying to figure out their sexuality or how to speak about their sexuality?
Julia Shaw
(01:26:37)
I’d say try and read widely on issues around sexuality. Books like mine, but also other books, might help you to navigate whether or not you’re, you know, what labels there are, and also whether or not those labels are good for you. I think things like the Klein grid are really helpful, especially for people who are more analytically minded like you and I. I think it gives you a construct to work with and numbers to work with, and that can be really helpful to try and go almost seeing your sexuality as a mathematical equation. And I think that can be quite useful. And if that’s how you think, then look at the Klein grid and see if that helps you to navigate things.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:16)
A bit of a tricky question, but what are the pros and cons of coming out publicly as a non-standard sexuality? From a recommendation perspective, what are some benefits and what are some challenges?
Julia Shaw
(01:27:31)
So the benefits are that you can, well, live authentically. You can just be yourself. So I do feel more free in who I am and who I’m able to be online, for example, now that I’m out. Because I came out in my 30s, I think also it was almost a foot-in-the-door technique, which is a psychological technique of first coming in and then coming with your big ask. And so I’d already published two books. I was already an established scientist. I think if I tried “bi” first, I, A, wouldn’t have been able to publish the book. It was the first mainstream book on bisexuality ever. And B, I don’t think I would’ve been taken seriously as a scientist. So having the other stuff first and then “bi” as a side project, that was acceptable. But I think the other way around wouldn’t have been.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:16)
I think it was still brave, I think. I think you mentioned somewhere, maybe in an interview, that there was some concern of being sexualized when you covered the topic of sexuality.
Julia Shaw
(01:28:26)
There still is, but I actually find that it’s done the opposite most of the time. I think as a woman, especially a young woman who’s in the public eye, you’re sexualized anyway, unfortunately. And so that is and was already a huge part of my online experience. And actually, I think coming out as bi, A, you get allies who suddenly are like, “We’re on your side. We’re going to help you fight the hypersexualization.” And people get almost more weird about it in a good way. They get a bit quiet about it because they’re like, “Oh, well, now it’s an identity thing, so maybe I shouldn’t comment on what she’s wearing.” And it almost disarmed some of the more sexualized comments. So for me, I have to say it was mostly a positive experience.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:13)
The incels didn’t know what to do with it.
Julia Shaw
(01:29:15)
Exactly. Like, “Ugh.”

Criminal psychology

Lex Fridman
(01:29:18)
Just to go back to the beginning, maybe what got you interested in criminal psychology?
Julia Shaw
(01:29:23)
Well, if you look at my trajectory into academia and then through it, basically what happened is I was ready to go study art.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:33)
Nice.
Julia Shaw
(01:29:33)
That’s what happened. I had my portfolio ready to go. I was going to study art at undergrad, and then my grandfather intervened and was like, “Being an artist is a really hard life. Maybe you should reconsider.”
Lex Fridman
(01:29:45)
What kind of art? Sorry to take that tangent.
Julia Shaw
(01:29:47)
Painting.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:48)
That is fast. I would not have expected that, because you’re so super analytical.
Julia Shaw
(01:29:53)
Yeah, I am, but I also really like surrealism, and I really like messing with sense of reality, which again, is obviously something that then wove its way into my academic work.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:02)
That’s cool
Julia Shaw
(01:30:03)
…but he was also right. I mean, I’ve always been very intellectual, let’s just say. I skipped a couple grades in school. I was part of the chess club. It was very much I was the clever kid. But there’s also part of me that’s just like, “But art is beautiful. I love making art, and it can speak to so many people.” Anyway, my grandfather convinced me not to do it, and then I applied instead for psychology. Although at that point you just had to say social sciences. You didn’t have to specify, but I knew it was probably going to be psychology. And the reason for that was because my dad has paranoid schizophrenia. I think one of the reasons I’m so obsessed with this idea of what is real, and that is in every way, that…
Julia Shaw
(01:30:45)
I mean that in terms of what is real, in terms of perceptions of right and wrong, what is real in terms of our own memories of the world, what is real in terms of what happened in a crime, what is real in terms of perceptual abilities and neuroscience, what is real. I mean that in every way, and I think that’s because I grew up with someone who had a unique view of what is real in real-time. And so seeing that, I think, just affected me profoundly, because not only was it very destabilizing in terms of my upbringing, but also it’s just in your face that people quite literally are seeing and hearing different things than you. And to not jump from that to what else are people perceiving differently than me, I think, would be almost like a missed opportunity.
Julia Shaw
(01:31:34)
And so I went to study psychology partly to understand that and what was going on there, and then that took me down the reality hole. Honestly, the reason I went into criminal psychology, because I could have gone into any other. The criminal psychologists were the most fun. I feel like lots of psychologists take themselves so seriously, and I just couldn’t. I was like, “I don’t, this isn’t the vibe.” And so the criminal psychologists were, they had this gallows humor. They were doing arguably the most serious of the crimes and the cases, and yet, were somehow having fun and having nice lives. And I saw myself, and I went, “Well, I want to do this version.” And so I did.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:15)
Yeah, that’s great to hear, that a criminal psychologist because probably they have to, more than any other subfield, confront the reality of the mind.

False memories

Julia Shaw
(01:32:24)
And it’s often quite procedural. So I’m also much more interested in applied sciences because I like the idea of, you know, what do we do with this information? And the thing that interests me most from a research perspective, I mean, I did my PhD in false memories, so implanting false memories of committing crime, which was the study that ended up going viral because I was the first to do it. And I built on a history of people implanting false memories of various kinds of other emotional events. But it was the first time that someone had combined false confessions research and false memory research. And so that was the research of Elizabeth Loftus and Saul Kassin. So false confessions was Saul Kassin, and false memories was Elizabeth Loftus.
Julia Shaw
(01:33:07)
And I was just doing them both at the same time. And the question was, could you get people to believe that they committed a crime that never happened and confess to it? And not just that, but believe that it actually happened, so remember it? And the answer to that in short is yes, you can, especially using specific leading and suggestive interview techniques. And so the procedural learning from that, which is what I’m most interested in, I don’t, like that’s sort of a party trick to be able to actually do it. And that’s just so that you can then take that and go, “Okay, well, how do we prevent this?” And so I’ve since trained police lawyers.
Julia Shaw
(01:33:39)
I’ve trained people at the ICC, the International Criminal Court, who deal with collective memory. So they deal with hundreds of witnesses at a time in war crimes. And the question is, how do we try to preserve as original as possible memory without contaminating it? Or at least without contaminating it any more than it already is. And that’s where social psychology, I think, excels, is that we have done lots of research on how social settings change what people say, and to some extent, what people believe. And I think that’s also where the leap to things like AI is not far because ultimately, the way that we’re engaging with large language models and generative AI in general, is that it’s structured as a social interaction.
Julia Shaw
(01:34:22)
It’s structured as a conversation most of the time now, and that is what we do. That is literally what I train the police on doing, is how to make sure that you don’t distort people’s memories in the process and how to ask good questions. And so you get confabulations from both sides now. You get confabulations from AI and from the people. And the problem is that there’s a third thing, which is the in-between, that I’m not sure is getting enough attention right now. And I wish that there was more integration of social scientists like me and people who do investigative interviewing and have done it for decades to understand what is happening in the in-between. And so that we can both teach the people and the AI to respond better in that situation.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:03)
I mean, it’s really interesting. Are you saying that there’s a drift of some kind in terms of on both AI and human side when they’re interacting together that we need to be very clear about?
Julia Shaw
(01:35:13)
Yes. What we’ve created with Gen AI is basically the ultimate false memory machine. We have created a tailored experience of something that is most of the time telling you what it thinks you want to hear, and then it’s uncritically giving that to you. Or I mean, sometimes, of course, there’s other things where it’s sort of appraising whether or not this is truthful or not. But it is giving that to you.
Julia Shaw
(01:35:43)
And there’s no safeguard from you just going, “This is truth, and this is my past,” or, “This is how I remembered it.” And the problem is that not only is AI potentially distorting people and their memories, and never mind the factual basis on which they’re relying, but it’s also the other way around is that potentially by asking leading or problematic questions, the people are changing how the AI is creating the content, which is in turn on some fundamental level potentially having an impact on how it’s discerning truth from fiction. And so that’s where the false memory in human minds and confabulations in AI, I think, are much more similar than we think.
Julia Shaw
(01:36:22)
And when I first saw AI confabulate, hallucinate, I was like, “This is what people do all the time.” It’s just that we can’t fact-check them all the time. We’re not in a conversation constantly being like, “Well, is that quite right? I’m going to use that for my homework,” right? So it’s both juicy and really troubling.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:40)
Well, right now the interactions are pretty ephemeral. They’re short-lasting, and there’s not really a deep memory to the interactions. But this could get a lot worse if the AI is personalized to a degree where it remembers things about you so that you can then start to, over many interactions, feed the narrative about your past that you construct together with the AI over time.
Julia Shaw
(01:37:05)
But you don’t even need that. So this is what we find in investigative interviewing, which is police interviewing of witnesses and suspects, is that all you need is a leading question or a suggestive piece of information. In a short interaction, most people, most police officers—
Lex Fridman
(01:37:18)
Oh, interesting
Julia Shaw
(01:37:18)
…don’t spend a long time, and they have no memory of this person’s past. They know basically nothing about them except for things related to the crime. And yet we know that within that very short, maybe half hour, one hour interaction, people’s stories can change fundamentally. And the problem is that if you create, if you have a memory of something that when you pull it up in that social interaction, it’s sort of live. It’s like active.
Julia Shaw
(01:37:43)
And when you then finish that interaction, it sets back down. And the thing is that if you put it back in a different way, what’s going to happen is the next time you’re going to remember the latest version. And you might not realize that it shifted. And so over time, it can shift and you don’t realize it, and that’s your truth. And that’s where even just short interactions can have a profound impact on the human mind.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:06)
Wow, so you can modify memories that quickly?
Julia Shaw
(01:38:09)
Yeah. We do all the time in experiments.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:11)
Okay, can you speak a little bit more to false memory? So, like th- it’s just fascinating. So things happen to us, we humans do things in the world, and then we remember them, and most of our lives, I guess, is lived in memory, in remembering the things that happened to us. And you’re saying that we can modify the story we tell about the things that happened to us? That’s fascinating. So what do we know about this ability to have false memories?
Julia Shaw
(01:38:40)
We know that false memories are common, that they’re a feature of a normal, healthy brain. They’re not this glitch, they are a feature. And we know that false memories are incredibly common in terms of, if you think about basically any memory… Now, I’m interested in autobiographical memories. This isn’t memories of facts, this is memories of experiences, things that you’ve lived in some way. And of those autobiographical memories, basically every single autobiographical memory you have is false. The question isn’t whether it’s false, the question is how false. You’re despairing over there.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:14)
Well, I mean, yeah, that’s… I mean, it’s both beautiful and terrifying-
Julia Shaw
(01:39:18)
Right
Lex Fridman
(01:39:18)
… that nu- nothing is real.
Julia Shaw
(01:39:19)
No, that’s not, that’s not what I’m saying.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:21)
Okay.
Julia Shaw
(01:39:21)
I’m just saying that everything has a degree of falsehood to it. And this is where sometimes I’ll get accused of being like, “Oh, but that… does that mean we can never use witness statements?” That… I’m not saying we can’t use any witness statements. I’m just saying that we need to be careful because even if people say things with confidence, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re true. Or if they have multisensory details, they’re describing in very specific detail what they smelled, what they heard, what they… whatever, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. Most of the time our autobiographical memories are good enough.
Julia Shaw
(01:39:54)
And that’s where memory scientists talk about this as gist memory. Our gist memory for events, much like for text, you get the gist of it, right? You’re good enough. You generally remember accurately approximately what happened. But it’s when you get to the so-called verbatim details, the specific details of memories that you find people are often really bad. Now, most of the time that doesn’t really matter because you remember you hung out with a friend, you remember you were at this university, you remember approximately what your favorite cafe was, you remember this important negative or positive event, fine. You don’t actually need to know exactly what you were wearing and drinking and saying.
Julia Shaw
(01:40:33)
But in a criminal justice setting, you do need to remember exactly what you were drinking and saying and doing, right? And so that’s where we have this need to break down this human capacity for memory to this level of detail that it’s just not made for.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:50)
So that’s where the verbatim stuff can get you into trouble, because with criminal cases, I suppose the tiniest details really matter, because then the lawyers can really zoom in on that particular detail, and then you could just make that up. And then the interrogation with a leading question, as you were saying, can just alter your memory of a particular detail, and then everything will hang on that detail.
Julia Shaw
(01:41:13)
Right, and if that particular detail is someone’s face, then that’s a really big problem.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:17)
You’re right.
Julia Shaw
(01:41:17)
And so, and it can also be an entire false memory. So this is where in my research and in research like mine, we’ve implanted, well, memories, what we call memories or false memories, of experiences that never happened at all. So while most things are modifications of real memories, false memories, complete false memories are when you think you experienced something that you didn’t. And we all have them. We all have some memories that can’t be true, and we usually realize them, for example, when we talk to our parents about our childhood or when we talk to friends and we say, “Remember that time we did this?” And your friend will go, “That happened to me, that didn’t happen to you.”
Julia Shaw
(01:41:57)
And you become what is known in research as a memory thief, where you’ve stolen somebody else’s memory and you’ve accepted it, or your brain has accepted it as your own. And that’s possibly because the other person told it in such vivid detail that you could imagine it, and basically your brain was like, “Well, this feels real now.” And so the next time you thought about that, maybe, maybe not the next time, but maybe after a couple of times of thinking about it, you started going, “This happened to me, right?” And then you integrate it into your autobiography.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:26)
How hard is it to insert false memories?
Julia Shaw
(01:42:29)
Not hard. It’s very easy to distort memories or to insert small false memories. It’s harder to convince people of entire events, especially specific events. And this is widely debated exactly how easy it is to implant a specific false memory. It’s also one of the big debates around my own research is that when I was writing The Memory Illusion, which was my first book, and the research that was in line with that, there was this huge debate between me and a couple of other academics about what it means for something to be a false memory and how we should talk about the ease with which they’re implanted, and that is still one of the biggest scientific debates in our field. And to me, I think that’s…
Julia Shaw
(01:43:09)
So the, the, the coding stuff is about the difference between what some people call a false belief and a false memory. So I think this thing happened or I remember this thing happened, and that is a really difficult differentiation often because all we have as social psychologists is what you’re telling me. And I can ask you, “Do you think it really happened or not? Do you believe it really happened?” But it’s really hard to differentiate, and so I’ve always thought that you need to ask people about the specifics, like, “All right, how confident are you in this memory? All right, do you feel things in this memory? Does it feel like other kinds of mem-” Right?
Julia Shaw
(01:43:43)
Sort of, like, describe the nature of this experience rather than being like, “Do you think this is a real memory?” Because that’s, that’s a hard thing to ask people to do.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:52)
So you, you want to get indirectly as many signals as possible to show that they actually believe the thing happened.
Julia Shaw
(01:43:58)
Or that it approximates a memory in their minds, that’s right, rather than just a thing they think kind of sort of happened.
Julia Shaw
(01:44:04)
But other people think that it’s an easier to differentiate line. So for me, that, it’s almost impossible to differentiate the two. Other people think it’s more clear. And then in terms of the frequency, so in my research, 70% of people became convinced that they committed a crime that never happened or experienced another important emotional event. And that number as well is, is challenged in that people go, “Well, does that mean that 70% of people can have false memories like this?” And the answer is no, obviously not. That’s just in my sample. That’s just these specific six false memories. And it could be that I, I think 100% of people are prone to some version of this, just maybe not in this specific study, right?
Julia Shaw
(01:44:46)
That if I had to come up with different false memories to implant or if I was a different person myself and people trusted me differently, there’s the, again, those social factors that make it more or less likely that I’m going to be able to convince you that something happened in your life that you can’t remember. And in one study, obviously, I can’t capture that. But it also doesn’t mean that 70% of the time people are… you know, it might be 1% of the time or 0.1% of the time that people have these complex false memories.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:10)
I guess you’re just speaking to the fact that, you know, you don’t know how representative the sample is. But even from one study, that’s a crazy… that’s incredible.
Julia Shaw
(01:45:19)
Well, it’s not- …just representativeness. It’s also that we shouldn’t take individual studies in that way.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:23)
Sure.
Julia Shaw
(01:45:24)
I’m not saying that 70% of people always have false memories either. It just means in this one study, more people than not developed these complex memories.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:31)
What was the methodology for implanting the false memories? This is so cool, by the way. Human memory is so fascinating, and the fact that we can engineer memory…
Julia Shaw
(01:45:43)
It’s good that it’s fast.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:43)
…it’s so interesting. It’s also really interesting that we live so much of our lives in memories. And that you can mess with that. You can shape it. It’s interesting.
Julia Shaw
(01:45:54)
It’s mostly, I think, a good thing that we can shape it.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:56)
I think so. Yeah.
Julia Shaw
(01:45:57)
I think the fact that memory can be false in the way that I do it in my study is a result of the fact that our minds are made to creatively recombine information to solve problems in the present. So even the fact that we have this gist memory, it’s because we’re optimizing data processing. We’re basically saying, “These are the most important things from these events, and the other details are irrelevant. Don’t remember that. Gone. And now I’m going to work with that to try and solve what life comes up with.” The ability to be creative and intelligent relies on our ability to take memories from the past and pieces of them, and to creatively recombine them.
Julia Shaw
(01:46:39)
And so that’s what false memories are, except that that then can look bad if you’re trying to remember something specific. In my research, I used leading and suggestive questions like, “Close your eyes.” “Picture the event that I’m trying to implant.” So I was implanting, for example, you’re 14 years old. You were in contact with the police. The police called your parents, and you assaulted someone with a weapon. Then the question is, “What do you remember?” And you say to me as a participant, because you’ve been selected out to specifically never having had this experience… And just to be clear, a weapon, I don’t mean a semi-automatic weapon. I mean anything. And usually it was a rock.
Julia Shaw
(01:47:18)
So people would say, “I found…” because a weapon is just anything you use to hurt another person. I did this study in Canada. We don’t have guns in the same way as in some other parts of the world. So it was unlikely that my participants would have been like, “Yeah, I totally have all these guns.” They would take something, an object, and hurt somebody else, or they stole something, or they hit somebody. So those are three of the conditions.
Julia Shaw
(01:47:40)
I randomly assigned people to them, and they knew that I contacted their loved ones ahead of time, so they were participating in a childhood memory study, an emotional childhood memory study. They knew that, and then I contacted their parents ahead of time to get information about what they were like as teenagers, where they lived, friends, basic things, and to make sure they hadn’t ever experienced any of the target events. Then with that information, I said to the participants, “Okay, so there are these two things your parents reported happening, and one of them is a true one.” I’d always include a true one to build rapport, which is… I’m doing the what not to do of interviewing, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:48:17)
Right.
Julia Shaw
(01:48:18)
I’m laying it on thick.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:20)
To see what’s possible.
Julia Shaw
(01:48:20)
To see what’s possible, because you have to push it to also show that I can do this in this context so that we can warn police to not do this. So I said, “We have these two incidents that your parents reported, and one of them was you had a skiing accident,” blah, blah, blah. “Let’s start with that one. The second one was an incident where you were in contact with the police, but we’ll get to that.” So we’d first have 20 minutes talking about the true memory, which people, you know, they’re getting going. It feels good. I’ve got a structured interview as well, which I’ll then mirror in the false memory. So it all feels very legit. Then we get to the second memory, and I say this, you know, I…
Julia Shaw
(01:48:56)
“There’s this other important memory that your parents recalled.” They’d say, “I don’t remember that.” And I’d say, “Oh, okay. But I have this really detailed account. All you have to do is remember it.” Then I would do the illusion of transparency, which is a really powerful psychological tool, which is to make people feel like they know what’s going on when they don’t really. The thing I would do is just say, “Well, you know, if you want to, we can do this memory retrieval technique called this imagination exercise.” I don’t like to call it repression, but sometimes we hide away memories that we don’t like about ourselves. And I’m using words that people know and mechanisms that people have heard of that are frankly quite disputed in actual science.
Julia Shaw
(01:49:34)
But people go, “Oh, well, maybe I did repress this.” And then everybody says yes. Technically they could say no. They can say, “No, I don’t want to do that.” But they go, “Yeah, of course I want to know.” So I do this imagination exercise where people close their eyes, very simple, and just imagine how, what could have happened basically. And every time they say a detail, my very first detail ever, I remember this because I was so excited because they’ve got their eyes closed, right? And I’m right next to the head of department because they were worried because I was a PhD student about the ethics of it, the consequences.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:03)
Yeah.
Julia Shaw
(01:50:03)
It took years to get the protocol through ethics and…
Lex Fridman
(01:50:06)
Yeah
Julia Shaw
(01:50:06)
…to make sure it was safe. Anyway, I’m grinning as the person with their eyes closed says the most trivial detail, “I remember a blue sky.” And I remember going, “It’s working.”
Lex Fridman
(01:50:21)
Did you know it was going to happen at all?
Julia Shaw
(01:50:22)
Oh, no, I had no idea. I had no idea.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:24)
That’s so fascinating.
Julia Shaw
(01:50:25)
And so from the trivial details, I’d always say, “Yeah, good job, good job.” You know, social reinforcement, little treat, little treat. And they would remember more and more details, and then they’d get more specific, and then they’d tell me who it was they allegedly attacked or stole from, where they were. And those details had to come from them because I don’t know enough about their lives, right? So this is the other thing with false memories, is it’s basing it on lots of real pieces of memories, real places, real people, real feelings. They’re just woven together in a way that never happened. And so just three interviews and you’ve got 70% of people confessing to a crime that never happened.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:58)
First of all, great study. Great, great job all around. To what degree has this been sort of elaborated on and proven further since? Because it’s a super powerful idea, whether it’s 70% or any kind of percent.
Julia Shaw
(01:51:11)
What I wanted with the study is just to show it’s possible.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:14)
That’s the, that’s really the powerful thing, that it’s possible.
Julia Shaw
(01:51:17)
Right. And so it could’ve been two people, and I would’ve been happy. The fact that it was so possible was frankly quite surprising to everybody. And we did in fact cut the study short because we told ethics that we’re only going to have like a 13% hit rate. We were like, “Uh, this is working really well. We’re going to stop.” So, and that was just because of, you know, how power calculations, whatever. Science.
Julia Shaw
(01:51:38)
Because science. And since then there have been other studies on implanting false memories. There have been ones also using AI tools, so like whether or not we remember or think we remember incidents differently or better if they were created with AI images of ourselves, or videos. So there was a study that came out, I think it was this year, by a team including Elizabeth Loftus, which showed that if you turn photos of yourself into videos using AI, that you are more likely to believe that those things happened in the way that AI is telling you that they did, even though AI has absolutely no idea. And that then you are more likely to remember it, yeah, with high confidence that it happened in the way that this AI has created it.
Julia Shaw
(01:52:23)
And so we can see that there’s lots of versions of this, whether it’s in, you know, interpersonal social interactions or interactions with tech. And there’s a big replication that’s happening right now at the University of Maastricht of my study, or is about to happen hopefully actually, is where we’re at.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:40)
There’s a lot of questions I want to ask you. Like one of them, doesn’t this mean that at scale you could have something like a government use propaganda to mass gaslight a population? So implant m- false memories u- using AI, using, using whatever tools they have?
Julia Shaw
(01:53:01)
Yes. That is definitely already happening.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:06)
That’s terrifying. Is there any- anything you’ve learned about defending against that? I guess knowing that first step is just knowing that it’s possible, that’s already a very powerful piece of knowledge.
Julia Shaw
(01:53:19)
That’s right. So the first thing that’s important is for people to understand that they are capable of creating these false memories and that they’re not this really unusual, hard-to-generate thing. They’re actually a normal memory process. And that insight is why I wrote The Memory Illusion because I think people need to just understand that their minds work like this, and that they’re really glitchy when it comes to the accuracy of their autobiographical memories. But again, that’s probably ultimately a good thing as well in terms of our overall human experience. But then what happens if you do have an important piece of information that’s important and not being distorted, right?
Julia Shaw
(01:53:55)
You are a witness to a crime, for example, and you now know that this is going to be important. What do you do? And the really simple answer is don’t trust your brain. Just make sure you write it down. Assume you are going to forget everything. Assume you’re going to forget no matter how important, how emotional, how intense, how much you say to yourself, “I will remember.” You won’t. Just assume that you’re not going to remember. And the closer you get to the time at which an event happened — and we call this contemporaneous evidence — the closer you get in time, the more high-quality that memory is going to be.
Julia Shaw
(01:54:32)
And I think there’s this myth sometimes that if you’re drunk or if you’re high or if you’re really emotional, that somehow you should wait. You should sort of go home, sleep it off, and then recall your memory. That is not what the current advice in memory research actually says. It’s in the moment as soon as possible, write it down, record it outside your brain. You can do it again when you wake up, but then at least you have an original version.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:57)
Yeah. You used the analogy of a Wikipedia page for memory. I think that’s a pretty useful way to think about it. It’s kind of crowdsourced by all the different influences you have, all the different experiences, all the other people, you telling other people about the memory. All of that edits the page, the Wikipedia page of your memory.
Julia Shaw
(01:55:18)
It does. And collective and individual memory are these really interesting… They interact in a really interesting way. So I would always say, when I train, for example, people who go to deal with warlords in the German military. I was working with agents who were going abroad and who were in these really difficult situations where they had to remember a lot of information that was important for national security. They couldn’t just sit there with a tape recorder being like, “Hey,” or their phone, being like, “Hey, Mister Warlord, can you just talk into this a bit closer?” You can’t do that. And so you have to remember it.
Julia Shaw
(01:55:52)
And so what they were doing is they were coming back from their deployments, and they would meet up immediately and have a team meeting, “What did you remember? What happened?” And the problem is that they would do that before writing their notes, and that is the wrong way around. And so they don’t do that anymore because I’ve told them not to do that anymore. But it feels good. It feels like collectively, we are going to remember more details.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:16)
Hmm.
Julia Shaw
(01:56:17)
Because you do, but it doesn’t mean that those details are right. And so that’s where I’d always say, “Have your own version before you talk to anybody.” Then, and my colleague, Dr. Annelise Fredevelt, is one of the experts on the effect of things like eye closure on memory and collective memory, and she has found repeatedly that if you remember things together, especially if you’ve already got an original version of your own, you do usually remember more details. And especially if you are helping each other to remember, like in a relationship. You’ll have someone who’s better at remembering certain kinds of details, maybe names or what happened or what you were doing, and the other person’s better at when it happened.
Julia Shaw
(01:56:57)
And so you can have these complementary memories that come in in social situations, and you can then have more details that are remembered after.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:05)
Right, but there are conflicting forces here. So that’s true, but also as you said, it’s true that together, you can weave a narrative that never happened. So together, you can solidify the thing that actually happened, maybe if you take notes beforehand. But at the same time, if you don’t take notes, then you can just make stuff up very effectively together because you’re like, “Yes,” ending the whole time, like building together a castle that’s false.
Julia Shaw
(01:57:32)
Or distorted.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:33)
Distorted.
Julia Shaw
(01:57:34)
Yeah. But you can also sometimes go back to your original account and go, “Actually, no, that was a bit wrong.” And so my, as again, an analytical person and someone who works as an expert witness on memory cases, I just want to see all the versions. I want your version history. I want the complete version history of your memory, and then I can tell you whether I think things have gone wrong here. And if so, why?
Lex Fridman
(01:57:55)
Have you seen like different versions of memory and they’re really conflicting? Like what have you learned about memory from that, that they can be very conflicting? People explain the same experience as very different.
Julia Shaw
(01:58:09)
Well, there’s different people having very different memories of the same experience. And there’s the same person having different memories of the same experience. And so I work in both, in some ways, as an expert witness, but mostly in the individual changing their story in a dramatic way.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:24)
Ah, yeah.
Julia Shaw
(01:58:24)
So a witness or an alleged victim saying that they, you know, having X story the first time they go to the police, and then three years later, having a very different, sometimes categorically different account. And the question is, were they just too shy initially to say what really happened? Were they under pressure from other people? Were they not really remembering? You know, why has it changed? Or could it be that they have undergone some really problematic hypnotherapy or just shady therapy in general that has convinced them that things are maybe much worse than they initially remembered?
Julia Shaw
(01:59:03)
And it’s not that therapy doesn’t necessarily… Therapy can bring out more details, for sure, but the problem is that certain kinds of therapy mirror what we do in false memory research in terms of implanting false memories, and it just makes it really messy and it makes the quality of the evidence really low because we can no longer tell what is because of the therapy and what’s actually remembered.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:22)
This is so fascinating. What are the ways you can possibly figure out which is true, the thing you remembered initially or the thing you’re now remembering four years later?
Julia Shaw
(01:59:31)
Receipts. That’s all you’ve got. You have to look at your original versions. If you only have your version now, the only thing you can look for is evidence that confirms or shows that it didn’t happen. If you can’t access that, then it ultimately is a matter of, especially if you’ve got like two people saying completely different things, it ends up being a battle of confidence ultimately.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:51)
This is a tricky question, but you mentioned therapy. It does seem like what therapists do is they want to find a problem, and they can then just project the problem and then convince you the problem existed. So how do you know… Is therapy even an effective… It takes a very special therapist not to implant, right? A trauma that never happened or details that never happened to a trauma that did.
Julia Shaw
(02:00:22)
It depends on the kind of therapy. So there’s a lot of therapy that is evidence-based and that is very much focused on tackling sort of feelings and reactions that you have right now. Then there is an area or a bunch of areas of therapy, including psychoanalysis, which are very focused on trying to find retroactively sources of mental illness in your personal past. And I am very critical of the kinds of… Well, both from an explanatory perspective, but also from a false memory perspective. I don’t think that we are the way we are because of individual incidents that happened to us. I think that is a wild thing to think about the brain. To be like you are the way you are because of this one interaction you had that one time is like…
Julia Shaw
(02:01:10)
I mean, maybe this explains a tiny bit of you, but what about all the other life experiences you have every single day? And so I think that there’s sometimes an oversimplified searching for answers or sources of problems that we have that I don’t like. I don’t think it’s true. And I think that there can be an uncautious approach to memory, as you were saying, where you have someone who is saying things and your role as a therapist is to help them manage their emotions now and to feel better, and that’s the other thing is that they have a very different role than I do. A therapist is trying to manage the person’s well-being now. Whereas I am looking at the evidentiary quality. That is a complete… I’m almost not quite the other side, but I’m in a very different role.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:48)
Well, you just want the truth.
Julia Shaw
(02:01:50)
Well, I’m criticizing and analyzing their memories, whereas therapists are more likely to be trying to help them manage the memories in their day-to-day life. And so it doesn’t matter if they’re true or not to therapists. What matters is that they’re troubling to the people themselves. But once you get into a courtroom setting, as you say… …The facts and what actually happened matter. And it’s not just what you remember, it’s what actually happened.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:13)
Maybe you can speak to the other, the non-courtroom setting, because this is all… The positive side of it is you can basically shape your memories to be happier. I mean, I find this in myself. Maybe you could speak to that. If I look into past relationships, if I just think about, or maybe speak to others about the positive things, really think. Just think, like I focus my mind on the memory, on the positive memories. And then everything just becomes more positive. And I think it makes me feel like I’m way happier about my past. So there must be something to that, because I almost start to forget that the negative stuff happened.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:57)
And then the same thing on the flip side is if you focus on the negative, then the negative stuff just overpowers everything else, and you have a very heavy, negative feeling about your past. So that seems like the way to live a healthy life, a happy life is just to focus on the positive. Not to sound cliché, but basically modifying your memories continuously that everything was just great. Is there something to that?
Julia Shaw
(02:03:27)
Well, the essence of that is right. There is something called state-dependent memory, which is that you’re more likely to remember things that were consolidated or created as memories if they match the state that you’re in now. So if you are sad now and your brain’s just going, you’re more likely to remember other sad times because your memory and the emotional state of your brain is basically already activating those networks of sadness. And it’s like, “Here’s some other sad and shitty things that happened to you.” And it’s the same with if you are embarrassed.
Julia Shaw
(02:04:03)
That’s the classic one that we usually use as memory researchers, is that moment where you do something embarrassing, and for the next six hours, all you’re thinking of is all the other embarrassing things you’ve ever done. And it’s like your brain is like, “Would you like some other embarrassing stories?” And obviously you’re going, “No, thank you. Please stop.” But you have this spreading activation, as it’s called, of just these synapses, just lighting up new networks, and you’re going, “Ah!” And there’s this other memory that’s attached to the same feeling. And so it’s the same with happiness is that people who are happier tend to remember more happy memories.
Julia Shaw
(02:04:37)
And so most of the time, unless you’re depressed, most people look back at their lives with a rosy reminiscence bias, and they’re more likely to remember the positives than the negatives. But it’s not quite the way you were describing it, actually. So it’s not quite that you only remember the objectively good things that happened. It’s more that your interpretation of the things that you’ve experienced is either neutral or positive. So for me, for example, growing up with my father with apparent schizophrenia, that is something that I see as a net positive. So obviously, at the time, it was experienced in a complicated way, but in hindsight, it defined my life, and it completely gave me a perspective of the human mind that I just wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Julia Shaw
(02:05:22)
And so I see that as a positive part of my autobiography, and that is what good therapy should be doing, is it should be taking negative experiences and not overwriting them or changing them. I mean, our brains do that naturally anyway. But trying to work with what you’ve got, the experiences, the true experiences, but then just shifting the emotional content so that how you’re dealing with them now is good.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:45)
How much of Danny Kahneman’s idea is that we live a lot of our life in memory? Like it’s not, you know, there’s the direct, in-the-moment experience of a thing, and then there’s remembering that thing over and over and over. So there’s like, I don’t know, getting married or whatever, like some pleasant thing that if you, over a lifetime, the pleasure you derive from that thing is disproportionately, most of it is from remembering the thing versus experiencing it. Is there something to that?
Julia Shaw
(02:06:22)
I think so. And his experiments where he asked participants if they were offered this holiday that they could go on… …But they wouldn’t remember it. So they’d have the present day experience of enjoyment on this holiday. I think it was a tropical vacation or something that he’d offer people.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:37)
That’s right.
Julia Shaw
(02:06:37)
And he then said, “Well, but you’re not going to be able to remember this. Would you still go?” And a lot of people say, “No, I wouldn’t go on that holiday if I can’t remember it.” I think that’s interesting and I think that sort of “pics or it didn’t happen” so that the social media generation obviously is perhaps even more in line with that also in terms of how you deal with that in social context. Sharing those memories with others and those experiences, and which experiences end up being the important ones in our lives.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:07)
Yeah, there’s a real case to be made. You know, there’s this kind of ridiculous thing that happens now whenever something cool is happening, people take out their phones and film it. But the case for that is that, yeah, this gives you actual something to look back at, that it’s worthwhile to take a picture, actually.
Julia Shaw
(02:07:22)
Although it’s even more worthwhile to pay attention. So attention is the glue between reality and memory. And so if you’re using your phone to not have to pay attention and not have to put any work into remembering it, then you’re going to look at that picture later and go, “What was this?” because you’ve tried to outsource it in a way that our brains don’t work.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:39)
How hard is it to modify memories from a neuroscience perspective? So if you look at brain computer interfaces like Neurolink for example, do you think there’s a future where we’re implanting or modifying memories directly?
Julia Shaw
(02:07:55)
Yeah, I mean, that’s basically what we do as human beings already, and I don’t see why tech couldn’t do exactly the same thing.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:01)
Just speed that up. So right now we could do that with language, right? We just talk to each other and modify them and we just speed that up.
Julia Shaw
(02:08:07)
Language, but also thinking about it yourself. So you can, it’s called auto-suggestion when you suggest things to yourself that didn’t happen. And that often comes from reading something, or seeing something, or thinking about something, or hearing somebody else’s story and going, “Did something like that happen to me?” And then you start picturing it and thinking about it in what context it could have. And then you start to basically implant a false memory in yourself. And so that can happen as well. And I think with things like Neurolink, it would be the same, where you’d have the ability to do that. But again, I still think that this interaction between humans and AI, or AI-like systems, is…
Julia Shaw
(02:08:42)
It is the same as a social interaction, which is why I was saying it’s so important, I think, that we have social psychologists in the room. Because ultimately, whether it’s an AI or another person, it’s the same brain that you’re modifying.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:53)
So what you’re worried about there is that you become untethered from reality, like you fabricate too many details about the memory. If a human is interacting with AI, and the AI is telling the human what they want to hear, are you worried about over time you start to just have a very overly modified version of your past narrative?
Julia Shaw
(02:09:15)
I’m not necessarily worried about the fact that AI and generative AI can create false memories. That is, again, something we’ve also been doing for a long time. Like modified photos is something pre-AI that we had that was already messing with people’s minds. Even just what you have in the frame of a shot. So if you take a holiday snap and you’re omitting a really important part of what actually happened on that holiday because you’re taking a picture of the nicest part and not the, you know, the garbage behind you.
Julia Shaw
(02:09:44)
That is going to have an impact on your memory as well. And so we’ve… Versions of that have always existed. And historically, if you go even further back, I mean, in some ways we’ve never been closer to facts than we are now. There’s this whole idea of like, “Oh, we’re living in this post-truth,” or blah, blah, blah, but that is not true. I mean, we didn’t even know how to write for a long time. We had no way of reliably cataloging information, never mind the scientific method, never mind reliably sharing it with one another, or fact-checking quickly with things like Google. So I mean, we’re so close to facts, but that in some ways, I think, is the…
Julia Shaw
(02:10:21)
The worry is that we’ve gotten comfortable feeling like we can just access things that aren’t modified or that are less likely to be modified, and now they’re more likely to be. And that can interface with our memories.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:31)
So just a practical… Is there like a protocol for self-modifying memories so you can live a happier life?
Julia Shaw
(02:10:39)
There is, yeah. It’s called cognitive restructuring. When you actively, deliberately change an aspect of a memory usually for some therapeutic outcome, so to be happier, to be better in some way.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:52)
That’s really interesting, right? Like, not just for if you have some kind of issue, but just how to have a life well lived. Right? Does that work?
Julia Shaw
(02:11:01)
Yeah, it totally works. I mean, I do it all the time. It’s… Again, it’s about thinking about experiences you’ve had, positive or negative. Usually the negative are the ones we need to work on more. And thinking instead of, “Wow, how terrible was that?” thinking, “What did I learn from that? What has this given me that other people haven’t experienced? What is it that it taught me about who are my friends? What are these insights that I’ve won from this experience?” And so I think that is an important part of resilience that we ideally need to celebrate and teach more than… The opposite, which is hanging in the negatives.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:36)
That’s probably really good for relationships too, right? Together you form the collective memory, and you work on that. You can just fabricate or modify towards the positive.
Julia Shaw
(02:11:47)
Well, with relationships, one of my favorite research on memories is that if you ask people in relationships who does most of the housework or who does most of certain things, the numbers that they give you… So like someone will say, “I do 60%.” The other person will say, “I do 50%,” and you add them up, that’s more than 100%, and that’s basically always the case. And on lots of different fronts, people will claim that they do more, and if you ask them how much their partner does, they will diminish it. And so one of the tips I always say for relationships in terms of memories is actually just sharing what you’re actually doing. And so if you’ve… Initially it feels a bit cumbersome, because it’s quite unnatural to be like, “I’ve just taken out, you know, the rubbish.
Julia Shaw
(02:12:29)
I’ve just taken out the bins.” Or, “I’ve just booked us a hotel.” But saying it out loud means the other person is able to perceive it and then can add it to their internal star chart of how much you’ve done in the relationship. And they’re more likely to actually perceive what you’re contributing. Whereas we just assume that people have the same memories we do, and that they… Of course, she remembers that I took out the bins, but not necessarily. She might not even have really perceived it. But if you’re reminding each other of all the things that you’re doing, it can feel more balanced over time.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:00)
This memory is just so fascinating. Is it possible… This is a little bit outside of the topic of false memories, but is it possible to train memory? What have you understood about memory? Can it be improved?
Julia Shaw
(02:13:12)
Yep, it can be improved, and there are now some really good brain training apps as well that can help to get people to work better with attention, to have n-back tests, so remember information, a couple of pieces of information back. So what did I tell you three sentences ago? There’s all of these kinds of, well, games effectively that you can play that will in fact train how your brain is using its networks. There was one that was developed by researchers, including researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany, and it’s called NeuroNation, and that’s one that I like because it’s all these really short games.
Julia Shaw
(02:13:52)
And the idea is that doing one thing, like Sudoku or whatever, the sort of classics, to train your brain, that is only going to be useful up to a point because it’s then the same thing over and over again. And what you want to be doing is lots of different kinds of tasks so that your brain has to remain flexible. And so short and many is the answer rather than one thing hard. It’s almost the opposite of expertise.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:13)
Yeah. So in doing this regularly, like keeping your mind sharp… That’s interesting. Uh… I’m terrible at remembering names.
Julia Shaw
(02:14:26)
Me too.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:27)
Is there a trick to doing that?
Julia Shaw
(02:14:29)
I don’t know, because I’m also terrible at remembering names. Allegedly, there are tricks, and it’s mostly to make the information more sticky by making it a bigger network in the brain. And so usually when you hear a name— Especially like you and I, it’s gone immediately. And that’s partly because… I like to think the positive of that is because we’re focusing on other things about the person.
Julia Shaw
(02:14:48)
Like, what are they like? What are they… You know, what’s this next interaction going to be? Maybe you’re a bit nervous about what they’re going to say or what you’re going to say. You’re already thinking a step ahead in terms of interpreting the situation. And it’s quite an overwhelming situation when you first meet somebody because there’s a lot to take in. And so if, however, a name is important, then you need to, A, remember to focus when they actually say their name and tune out the other stuff, which can be really difficult, and then to give yourself a mnemonic of, “How do I remember this name?” So you could visualize something. You could have a weird word game or some sort of rhyme that you create for the person.
Julia Shaw
(02:15:29)
You can say, “Julia with the big ears.” Like, whatever works for you, as long as it sticks. Now, there’s a caveat that I recently discovered about myself in terms of why I might not have… I have particularly bad memory for names. All of these mnemonic devices that have been studied over the last hundreds of years mostly rely on creating elaborate pictures in your mind. So, like memory champions, people who do competitive remembering, will tell you that they create these really elaborate images in their heads. I recently discovered that I have aphantasia.
Julia Shaw
(02:16:05)
Aphantasia is the inability to create mental imagery. And so when I was trying these techniques, I was going, “None of these are working for me.” And it turns out it’s because I don’t see anything, whereas other people actually see pictures in their mind. And so I think there are some individual differences going on there that we haven’t quite understood.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:23)
So you’re not able to visualize… Can you imagine, like, a castle in your head and look at it?
Julia Shaw
(02:16:28)
No. So the memory palace idea is absurd to me.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:31)
Wow.
Julia Shaw
(02:16:32)
But the… So the test for aphantasia is really easy, which is, “Close your eyes and picture a red apple.”
Lex Fridman
(02:16:38)
You can’t picture a red apple?
Julia Shaw
(02:16:39)
And I just see black.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:42)
Wow.
Julia Shaw
(02:16:43)
Yeah. And there’s a scale. So some people are hyperphantasic, where they can have a really elaborate version of the apple. And other people have, like, a gray sort of outline. And I have nothing.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:56)
Wait. How does your memory work? Like, if you think about a past event, are you… Wait. Am I visualizing a past event, or am I just—
Julia Shaw
(02:17:04)
Oh, that’s the question. Or is it just a concept?
Lex Fridman
(02:17:06)
I think it might be… I might be operating in the space of concepts.
Julia Shaw
(02:17:09)
Hmm. Because I do, and I think that’s why I’m so interested in concepts and ideas. And we know that people with aphantasia are less likely to care about their childhood memories because they can’t visualize them.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:19)
I’m trying to think if I can visualize people’s faces from the past. I have a feeling like I can.
Julia Shaw
(02:17:25)
Ooh, but are you seeing anything?
Lex Fridman
(02:17:27)
Am I actually seeing it? I don’t know. I think I’m… I actually reduced those people down to a few concepts about the characteristics of their face, and I might be visualizing the concepts. Boy.
Julia Shaw
(02:17:41)
Interesting, right? And most people with aphantasia don’t realize they have it until they have this kind of conversation. I didn’t know.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:47)
I don’t know if I can visualize the red apple now. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah, because I… The memory palace thing has never really worked for me either. I tried. Interesting. Okay.
Julia Shaw
(02:17:57)
I have a hypothesis that people who are analytical are more likely to… I think it intersects with other things. Because a lot of my friends, it turns out, have aphantasia, and I think it’s… There’s a version of intelligence, I think, that it might be related to, or an interest in certain kinds of concepts that it’s related to. But I don’t know-
Lex Fridman
(02:18:16)
I’m going to… Okay.
Julia Shaw
(02:18:16)
Because it’s early days of research on this.

Criminals destroying the planet

Lex Fridman
(02:18:18)
All right. This conversation totally is leading me to do some soul-searching on many fronts. You have done incredible work across a number of disciplines. I mean, from, from sexuality to evil to memory. And now in your upcoming book, Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and How to Stop Them. Can you speak to the psychology of the people, the organizations that are killing Earth, as you describe, including illegal gold miners, animal traffickers, con men who falsify data and bribe regulators to keep polluting, and many other types of criminals? Is there a psychology similar to the psychology of some of the folks we’ve been talking about?
Julia Shaw
(02:19:01)
So the book, Green Crime, is really an experiment for me in whether we can apply criminological and criminal psychology ideas to the area of environmental protection and crimes. Because there are people who are convicted of crimes, who are convicted of crimes specifically in relation to destroying the Earth and our natural resources, our shared resources. I sometimes think about the Earth as like a house. And if someone was coming into your house and just setting things on fire and then walking out unpunished, you’d be really upset, and correctly so. Or poisoning your water, or just leaving a bunch of garbage all over your house. And that’s what people are doing on a planetary scale. And the question is, are we responding effectively? And if so, who?
Julia Shaw
(02:19:46)
Who is responding effectively? And then what is the adequate punishment? How should we deal with the people we, who we catch? And so in this book, the question was, are the people who are… For example, I use the Dieselgate Volkswagen case, which was all about lying about the emissions that were being produced by diesel cars, especially in the United States. And so Volkswagen, for 10 years, produced these cars that had what was called a defeat device, which is a specific device that makes it look like the cars don’t emit very much nitrous oxides, but they actually were way over the legal limit for pollution. Now, why we should care about nitrous oxides is because there is no limit of… no, like, bottom limit of nitrous oxides that is healthy for the human lung.
Julia Shaw
(02:20:34)
So basically any amount is bad for you. And it’s related to things like asthma. It’s related to things like premature death. It’s related to all kinds of negative immediate health effects. And this is what was being pumped out of these cars at wildly high rates, 40 times the legal rates in some cases, and they just lied about it. They just covered it up. They knew they didn’t… Well, some of the people, there’s a big debate within the Volkswagen people who’ve been convicted. A lot of people say, “I didn’t really know. I’m being scapegoated.” Fine, people knew. The question of how much and who, that’s up for debate, but certainly people knew because they had to create the thing. Like, they had to literally create this piece of software to put into the cars.
Julia Shaw
(02:21:15)
And then when they got caught, they lied about it, and eventually the truth came out, but it was like 10 years later. And so the question is, what leads people, clever people… These aren’t idiots. These are like clever engineers who are literally working on emissions. Like, they know exactly what these emissions do to people. They know exactly how harmful they are. What leads people like that to lie about it, to create these things and to continue lying when they are caught?
Julia Shaw
(02:21:42)
And so that is one of the cases I cover in it, and I’m looking at it more as a case study for this kind of crime, which is the sort of corporate collective crime and the lying, and just what leads people in these settings to lie and to cover up each other’s crimes and to conform to these new norms, these harmful environmental norms. And so I look at it in that way, and then in other chapters, I look at, like, people go undercover and uncover poaching gangs. And there it’s somewhat procedural where it’s more, I didn’t know that there were undercover agents infiltrating poaching gangs. I didn’t know that Interpol was involved in all of these kinds of environmental crime and how…
Julia Shaw
(02:22:27)
And it gets quite exciting in some of these cases where you really see the people who are trying to hold people accountable.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:34)
What are the different ways to fight environmental crime that you describe?
Julia Shaw
(02:22:39)
So, what I found most interesting in researching for Green Crime… So, I was speaking to people from the United Nations who are doing these huge research reports on things like the international trafficking in wildlife crime. I was talking to people who were infiltrating at the EIA, the Environmental Investigation Agency. It’s like the sort of undercover police of the Earth, and they’re infiltrating these organized crime groups, these gangs that are involved in poaching and other activities. I was talking to this Interpol agent, and it’s… I think all of these people were talking about very different ways of measuring environmental crime and of responding to it. And so depending on who you talk to, the answer will be very different: how do we fight crime?
Julia Shaw
(02:23:29)
And the answer is also very different potentially than in other kinds of crime that are more commonly discussed, like violent crime. So initially, when I started trying to apply criminal psychology to these really big crimes that are often also multi-level, where you’ve got bosses, you’ve got this, whether it’s a corporate boss or an illegal gang boss. You’ve got the middlemen. You’ve got the people on the ground who actually have the guns who are killing people or animals or are logging or polluting.
Julia Shaw
(02:23:56)
And then you’ve got sort of all these levels of people, and that makes it very different from the kinds of crimes that we often talk about in other kinds of true crime, for example, where it’s sort of one person, maybe a couple of people against one other person or a couple of other people. And so the scale is so tiny normally, and it’s mostly violent crime, which is mostly… It’s arguments. It’s bad decisions. It’s people who are frankly often quite vulnerable themselves, like substance using, people with mental health problems, people who are sleeping rough. Like, th- these are not healthy, normal people most of the time who are perpetrating bad crimes.
Julia Shaw
(02:24:31)
And yet in this context, in environmental crime, this is where I couldn’t apply the research directly, you’ve got some of the smartest people in the world who are still engaging in fraud, who are engaging in the cover-up of financial information, who are creating shell companies in order to hide certain things for poaching, the proceeds of poaching.
Julia Shaw
(02:24:49)
You’ve got people who are out there illegally fishing, and someone’s insuring the vessel that has been literally registered by Interpol as a criminal vessel for 10 years, and someone’s going, “I’ll insure that.” So you’ve got these really complicated other factors going on, but I thought that’s what was so interesting is ultimately stripping back each layer of each of these crimes and going, “Who is that person?” Who is the person who’s insuring this? Who is the person who is out there engaging in illegal fishing on the boat? Who is the person who’s financing the boat? Who is the person who’s investigating them, right? And so looking at all the different levels, and I think that’s where you get some clarity. And actually, at the end of the book, for me, I felt so optimistic.
Julia Shaw
(02:25:35)
I went into Green Crime because I, like most people in the world, at least according to a recent UN climate survey… Something like 85 to 90% of people in the world think about the climate crisis on a regular basis. Most people think about it every single day. So this idea that there’s this minority of people who care about climate change, that’s an illusion. That’s not true. And if you ask people what the emotional consequences are of those feelings, people say things like eco-anxiety, anger, sadness, grief, that we’re, you know, we’re worried about the future. But what you want is for people to feel motivated, energized, purposeful about tackling one of the biggest issues of our time.
Julia Shaw
(02:26:13)
And certainly by meeting all of these UN researchers, but I went to so many conferences. You have no idea how many conferences I went to. I went to anti-corruption conferences. I went to wildlife crime conferences. I went to the specific meeting of multilateral agreements to see how people were negotiating in the room and the tensions between… It was wild. It’s so interesting. It’s such a huge space, and it gave me so much hope for the future.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:40)
And actually, the way you frame it very clearly is a crime against Earth. Somehow that’s more actionable and it’s less controversial and divisive because climate change, as a topic, has become a political issue. Where it’s like, is it really happening? What’s the right policies? It’s nice to look at actual obvious criminals.
Julia Shaw
(02:27:08)
Yeah, where no one’s debating, “Did someone just burn down this rainforest?” It’s like, well, we can see it. I was at a European Space Agency conference recently, and they’re telling us all about the different satellites that are imaging, sort of pointing at the Earth rather than out into space, and that are imaging through all these different wavelengths exactly what’s changing. And they’re basically just chronicling how the Earth has changed over time. And a lot of these environmental crimes can be seen from space and can be measured. So it’s, as long as you trust those data, the question then is, okay, so these crimes are happening. How do we stop them? And as you say, I was very much trying…
Julia Shaw
(02:27:43)
I mean, you can’t write a book on environmental issues and be apolitical. I think that’s impossible. But I certainly was trying to look at it quite logically and go, “Here’s a crime. We all agree this is bad.” And these are people who have been convicted. This isn’t just someone who didn’t do their recycling, because also I think that individual level is often detrimental. But these are huge, huge crimes that cost us a huge amount of money to clean up and that cost a huge amount of human health and, you know, have these other knock-on effects and are changing, certainly, the structure of our planet in a way that we can feel already. So that is the purpose of the book is to try and show that we actually have lots of laws already. We’ve got lots of enforcers.
Julia Shaw
(02:28:25)
We’ve got lots of researchers on it from space and not space looking at these issues, tracking them, and trying to hunt down the criminals.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:32)
So what can you say about how people end up doing bad stuff in a company when there’s a lot of them? Are they bad people? How do you get to that place where you, in a large collective, are doing something really bad?
Julia Shaw
(02:28:48)
So, the psychology of environmental crime I find often boils down to the same kinds of things that we have already been talking about in the context of, quote, unquote, “evil,” where it’s things like conformity. So, doing what you think everyone else is doing, or know what everyone else is doing. So there’s an industry where you know that lots of people are cheating or are fudging the facts in some way. Then you both feel the need and also maybe rationalize the ability to also deceive because it’s market forces, right? Ultimately, in a free market or even a controlled one, you’ve got these people who are just lying to everybody else. And they’re saying, “We’re getting to these X outcome by following the rules that everyone else is.” And they’re not. They’re just lying to consumers.
Julia Shaw
(02:29:32)
They’re lying to the regulators. They’re just lying. And then other people who are trying to be honest and, you know, play the game clean, they see the success of this other company and go, “Well, we want to have what they have.” And then they realize they can’t, with the tech that exists, get there. And so what do they then realize is, “Well, they must be cheating.” And so then they start cheating, and so it has this trickle effect of making everyone else fall in line with these, well, unethical practices that are unethical on so many levels. And then later, you get these huge lawsuits because if you get caught, then everyone’s upset. The investors are upset. The consumers are upset. The environmentalists, the lawyer, everybody’s upset with you because you have committed this huge crime.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:15)
Yeah, I mean, you ex- you explain so many forces there, but even the simple force of social pressure- …like very slight social pressure. I was just watching this documentary. It’s based on a book, “Ordinary Men,” talking about the Germans in Nazi Germany that were taking part in the execution squads in Eastern Europe and that they were given the option not to do it, and ultimately, most people decided to keep being part of the execution squad, even though they had no hatred in their heart, seemingly whatsoever.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:54)
It’s just slight social pressure. You don’t want to be the guy that kind of chickens out. Just a little bit of social pressure, and you are able to very quickly dehumanize a large number of people and to murder them without any hate in your heart, without anything that could trivially, directly be identified as, quote, unquote, “evil.” Just normal people doing very bad things.
Julia Shaw
(02:31:20)
And you can be an emissions engineer with a kid with asthma and an old grandma who’s struggling with her health and still feel like, “Yeah, I know that I’m creating these dirty cars, and yet I’m going to do it anyway,” because as you say, there’s the conformity, the social pressure, the rationalization, and those are all very human experiences. And that’s why also in the book I always focus on… whistleblower is a big word, but like people who at some point actually helped to uncover what was going on. And that if we’re back to the topic of heroes, we’re back to bystander effects.
Julia Shaw
(02:31:54)
We’re back to all of the social psychology and criminal psychology that we’ve been talking about this whole time, which is why I thought it was so important to apply that research to this context and to say, “Okay, so now we’ve got these people who are willing to engage in these crimes. They know it.” But there’s also this moment of how do you get out of it, and who is going to stop them? And back to the idea of heroes, and you do usually in these cases at some point have a hero, either an external one or an internal one who goes, “This needs to stop.”
Lex Fridman
(02:32:23)
Do you have empathy for those criminals?
Julia Shaw
(02:32:25)
I have empathy for everybody.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:29)
Has that ever been in your life challenged, like where you had trouble empathizing?
Julia Shaw
(02:32:35)
Ooh. There is one context, so there is one context that I… I don’t know if it’s that I have trouble empathizing… I think it is I have trouble empathizing, and I just think it is… I don’t want to. And I don’t know why this is the one thing, but I remember writing “Evil” and I got to the section on sexual slavery. There was something about that very specific issue of having women, in particular, in a confined area where you have often trafficked them, and then you’re forcing them to engage in repeated sexual acts that the person who is running that—
Lex Fridman
(02:33:21)
It’s tough for you.
Julia Shaw
(02:33:22)
I can’t. That’s like, I know that. I’m not saying that that’s the worst kind of crime. I don’t think it necessarily is. I just think from my mind, there was just a, “You can’t go there.” That’s… I don’t know how to empathize with that person.

Hope

Lex Fridman
(02:33:36)
Yeah, I probably have a bunch of categories of people. Stuff with kids is just like— … it’s tough. It’s tough. It’s tough. What gives you hope about this beautiful world of ours, about the future of human civilization, given all the darkness that you have studied?
Julia Shaw
(02:33:57)
I think the fact that there are people who study the darkness gives me hope, and that there are people who want to understand why we do bad things, myself included, but I mostly get to benefit from other people’s research that I summarize into my books. I think that the tech that we are now experiencing mostly also gives me hope, in that there is this whole new frontier of capacity to implement scientific findings if we want to do so and choose to do so. Even in memory interviewing, we were talking about the potential role of AI in distorting our memories.
Julia Shaw
(02:34:38)
When I do corporate talks, I tell people the prompt that I use to use the cognitive interview, which is the best practices in memory interviewing, because you can also tell AI tools to do the appropriate kind of interviewing if you’re talking about memory things. I created a company called Spot in 2017, which uses… Well, we’re now building it out to be AI, but it’s basically a tool to record important emotional memories and to share them as information with others. So I’ve always been interested in how tech can help us to record important emotional events, like with Spot, Talk to Spot, and how technology can actually make us feel more human.
Julia Shaw
(02:35:20)
So there are these capacities like memory that we’re bad at, and tech can help us to overcome some of those shortcomings, as long as we use it in a science-backed way rather than just sort of freestyling. I think the worry I have sometimes is that, as I’ve said before, we’re ignoring the social scientists entirely sometimes when building these systems. It ends up becoming this engineering math problem, when that’s not actually, in terms of the consequences for humanity, what it’s going to be. So I’m always keen on connecting social sciences and big issues.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:52)
Can you speak more to Spot? This sounds fascinating. So what’s entailed in recording important memories?
Julia Shaw
(02:36:02)
So Spot came out of my going around the world and giving everyone an existential crisis. I’d go around, and like with you, I’d say, “Look, our memory is really faulty, and here’s all the ways it can lie to us.” And people would go, “Oh, no.” And then I’d go, “Bye.” And—
Lex Fridman
(02:36:21)
That’s funny.
Julia Shaw
(02:36:22)
At some point, I was like, “Maybe I should do something about this.” And so I did. I went to a… Well, I did a TED Talk, and I was invited to this tech conference called Founders Forum, which is this meeting of tech founders and others in London, but also a couple of other places. I was invited to this, and while there, I met the founder of Evernote— Phil Libin.
Julia Shaw
(02:36:49)
So I met Phil Libin at this event, and I was talking to him about my research on memory and how I’ve been wanting to implement or translate what I’ve been doing into something that could prevent false memories. Specifically, I was interested in creating an AI or at least a machine-administered version of the cognitive interview. So that’s the neutral approach. It’s already a scripted approach, which was helpful. So it’s been scripted for decades, or a couple of decades. It’s been scripted for decades as a cognitive interview. When we train police on how to do it in places like the UK, it’s literally just asking people to basically read a script that we have fine-tuned over the years. What can do that really well? Chatbots can do that really well.
Julia Shaw
(02:37:34)
Together with Phil Libin and my two co-founders, Dillon and Daniel, I ended up co-founding Spot, which is talktospot.com if you want to check it out. It ended up pivoting into this general reporting tool for workplaces. This was before Me Too, but the idea being that in lots of workplace environments, you have important emotional events that are really important to understand, but are really hard to preserve. Often you have really bad evidence that you’re relying on. Someone at some point goes to HR and says something, and somebody else says something else, and you’re unsure as a company who to trust, what’s real. So we were trying to streamline that.
Julia Shaw
(02:38:15)
Spot is now a reporting tool for any kind of compliance issues. You can talk to Spot, it’s called, and it is this chatbot interface that administers the cognitive interview and then creates a report that then gets sent, if you want, to your employer. So we work with, like, insurance companies, medical companies. We work with the bar. All the lawyers in the UK use it themselves, which I always think is a real stamp of approval when the Bar Council is using your tool. But again, not, not bars and drinks. Bars and lawyers. But…
Lex Fridman
(02:38:44)
Thank you for clarifying.
Julia Shaw
(02:38:46)
Just picturing all these like… …People with flair throwing vodka bottles in the air. Not them.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:53)
They’re great too, but yeah.
Julia Shaw
(02:38:54)
They could also use it, potentially. But we’ve got people reporting like, you know, someone left bleach in a machine. So it’s like a more small memory. So it’s streamlining reporting processes.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:05)
I mean, can you envision something like Spot being used for recording generally important emotional events, positive and negative throughout your life? That seems like something the LLMs of today would really benefit from.
Julia Shaw
(02:39:18)
Yeah, again, that’s why…
Lex Fridman
(02:39:20)
Just so you’re not just strictly looking at like compliance or in the context of companies?
Julia Shaw
(02:39:26)
So in the context of Spot, yes, it’s just compliance and it’s, it’s that. But I think in sort of private life and in terms of where I think this could go, I- I’m, I’m interested in all memories, and I think that important life events can be recorded. And I think the idea of having like grief bots and having things that have a representation of you or your loved ones, I think that’s something that I’d like seeing in the future. I would.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:51)
Have you gotten a chance to work with maybe the Gemini team or OpenAI folks, or any of them? Anthropic? Because it seems like they don’t have enough people that think about this.
Julia Shaw
(02:40:02)
Well, I’m, I’m just waiting for an email.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:04)
Okay. Wow.
Julia Shaw
(02:40:06)
Maybe I’ll get one after this.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:07)
I’m hanging.
Julia Shaw
(02:40:08)
Hit me up, guys.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:09)
Yeah, I’m hanging out with DeepMind folks. That would be really, that’d be really fascinating to, to see. First of all, the, the proper cognitive interview, that’s really interesting. That’s really interesting how to not lead, how to not to plant false memories. I don’t think any of them are thinking about that.
Julia Shaw
(02:40:25)
I don’t think so either. And then how to make sure that you’re using that to help people to store contemporaneous evidence outside of their brain. I just think there’s so much potential that’s being wasted right now.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:35)
Yeah. So the hope is that technology and that there’s people being willing to empathize with all different flavors of the human condition, that’s your source of hope for the future?
Julia Shaw
(02:40:48)
And to celebrate all the people who are doing amazing research and really cracking down on things like environmental crime and like spending their lives to fight specific kinds of crime.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:58)
Yeah, I like this Earth. I hope, I hope we fight for it. It’s the only one we got, and I’m pretty hesitant to say that maybe in this galaxy, we might be the only ones. So let’s, let’s protect it. Well what’s your name again? Just kidding. Julia, this is a huge honor. Um, I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time. I’m really glad we got a chance to talk. This was really fascinating. Your work is fascinating, and you’re just a fascinating human being, so thank you.
Julia Shaw
(02:41:27)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:29)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Julia Shaw. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from T.S. Eliot, “Most of the evil in the world is done by people with good intentions.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Files for Pavel Durov Episode | Lex Fridman Podcast #482

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Transcript for Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #482 with Pavel Durov.
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Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:00:00)
The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov, Founder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform actively used by over 1 billion people. Pavel has spent his life fighting for freedom of speech, building tools that protect human communication from surveillance and censorship. For this, he has faced pressure from some of the most powerful governments and organizations on earth. In the face of this immense pressure, he has always held his ground, continuously fighting to protect user privacy and the freedom of all of us humans to communicate with each other. I got the chance to spend a few weeks with him and can definitively say that he’s one of the most principled and fearless humans I’ve ever met. Plus, when I posted that I’m hanging out with Pavel, a lot of people, fans of his, wrote to me asking if he does, in fact, privately live the disciplined ascetic life he’s known for. No alcohol, stoic mindset, strict diet and exercise, including a crazy amount of daily pull-ups and push-ups. No phone, except to occasionally test Telegram features, and so on.

(00:01:12)
Yes, he’s 100% that guy, which made the experience of hanging out with him really inspiring to me. I’m grateful for it and I’m grateful to now be able to call him a friend. This podcast conversation is in parts philosophical, about freedom, life, human nature, and the nature of government bureaucracies. And it is also in parts super technical because to me, it’s fascinating that Telegram has a relatively small engineering team and yet is able to basically out-innovate all of its competitors with an insane rate of introducing new, unique features. Just like the meme of the Simpsons did it first, when you consider all the features we know and love in our communication apps, in almost every case, Telegram did it first. So we discuss it all, from the Kafkaesque situation he’s in the midst of France, to the roller coaster of his life and career, to his philosophy on technology, freedom, and the human condition.

(00:02:15)
And by the way, while this entire conversation is in English, we’ll make captions and voiceover audio tracks available in multiple languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Hindi. On YouTube, you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon, then clicking audio track, and then selecting the language you prefer. Huge thank you once again to ElevenLabs for their help with translation and dubbing, and with the bigger mission of breaking down barriers that language creates. They are truly one of the most remarkable companies I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. This is the Lex Fridman podcast, to support it please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Pavel Durov.

Philosophy of freedom

Lex Fridman
(00:03:07)
You’ve been an advocate for freedom for many years, writing that you should be ready to risk everything for freedom. What were some influences and insights that help you arrive at this value of human freedom?
Pavel Durov
(00:03:21)
I get to experience the difference between a society with freedom and a society without freedom pretty early in life. I was four years old when my family moved from the Soviet Union to northern Italy, and I could see that a society without freedom cannot enjoy the abundance of opinions, of ideas, of goods and services. Even for a four or five-year-old kid, it was obvious. You can’t experience all the toys, the ice cream of sorts, the cartoons in the Soviet Union that you can access in Italy. And then I got to realize something even more important. You don’t get to contribute to this abundance without freedom. And at this point it was pretty obvious to me.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:14)
You also wrote “Свобода дороже денег”. It translates to, “Freedom matters more than money.” How do you prevent these values for freedom, being corrupted by money, by people with influence, by people with power?
Pavel Durov
(00:04:29)
Well, the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed, so you make sure that they don’t stand in your way. If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you and then make yourself be comfortable with it, there is nothing more left to be afraid of. So you stand your ground and you remember that it’s worth living your life according to the principles that you believe in, even though this life can end up being shorter than a longer life, but lived in slavery.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:08)
Do you contemplate your mortality? You think about your death?
Pavel Durov
(00:05:12)
Oh yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:13)
Are you afraid of it?
Pavel Durov
(00:05:14)
In a way, you have to go against your instinct of self-preservation, and it’s not easy. We are all biological beings, hard-coded to be afraid of death. Nobody wants to die, but when you approach it rationally, you live and then you die. There’s no such thing as your death in your life. You stop experiencing life once you die. So you have to ask yourself this question, is it worth living a life full of fear of death, or it’s much more enjoyable to forget about this and live your life in a way that makes you immune to this fear? At the same time remembering that death exists, so that every day would count.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:03)
Yeah, remembering that death exists makes you deeply feel every moment that you do get.
Pavel Durov
(00:06:11)
That’s why I love reminding myself that I can die any day.

No alcohol

Lex Fridman
(00:06:15)
In many ways you live a pretty stoic existence. I got a chance to spend a couple of weeks with you. In many ways, you seek to minimize the negative effects of the outside world on your mind. You’ve written, quote, “If you want to reach your full potential and maintain clarity of mind, stay away from addictive substances. My success and health are the result of 20 plus years of complete abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, pills, and illegal drugs. Short-term pleasure isn’t worth your future.” Let’s talk about each one of these. Alcohol. What’s been your philosophy behind that?
Pavel Durov
(00:06:57)
That one is quite easy. When I was 11 years old, my biochemistry teacher, he gave me this book he wrote, it was called The Illusion of Paradise, and there he would describe the biological and chemical processes that happen in your body once you consume this or that substance. It was mainly related to illegal drugs, but alcohol was one of these addictive substances that he covered. So it turns out that when you drink alcohol, the thing that happens is that your brain cells become paralyzed. They become literally zombies. And then next day, sometime after the party is over, some of your brain cells die and never get to normal. So think about this. If your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure? This sounds ridiculous.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:06)
Yeah, in many ways it’s a poison we’re letting in our body. But by way of advice, what advice would you give to people who consider not drinking? A lot of people use alcohol to enable them to have a vibrant social life. There’s a lot of pressure from society at a party to drink so they can socialize. So what advice would you give to them, to people who imagine having a social life without alcohol?
Pavel Durov
(00:08:37)
Well, first of all, don’t be afraid to be contrarian. Set your own rules. Secondly, if you feel you need to drink, there must be some problem you’re trying to conceal. There’s some theory you’re not ready to confront, and you have to address this fear. If there is a good-looking girl you’re afraid to approach, get rid of this fear, approach her, practice. Do it again and again, it’s pretty banal, but this advice works.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:11)
Fix the underlying problem, which is usually at the very bottom, is always going to be fear. Work on that.
Pavel Durov
(00:09:17)
And very often people are trying to escape something in their lives with alcohol. What is it they’re trying to escape? What is this problem? You have to get to the bottom of it. Your mind is trying to tell you something valuable, and instead of addressing it directly, you are flooding it in alcohol, which is a spiritual painkiller, but works only temporarily and then you have to pay the debt with interest.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:51)
So what do you do? I mean, you’ve been in a lot of gatherings, a lot of parties. Is there some challenges to saying no?
Pavel Durov
(00:09:58)
For me, not at all. I’ve been always ready to stand my ground and say no when I feel something’s not right. And it’s extraordinary how easily we humans are affected by what we perceive as a majority. Because nobody since ancient times, since million years ago wants to be left out by the tribe. We are scared that we won’t become accepted anymore, which thousands of millions of years ago meant we’re going to starve to death. So we have to consciously fight this inclination to be agreeable with everything that the majority imposes on you because it’s quite clear that many things that the majority, many activities the majority is engaging in are not bringing you any good.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:03)
So that’s another fear you have to face, going into a party and the fear of being the outcast at that party, of being different than others at that party, at that social gathering. In the crowd of humans, be different. That’s a fear.
Pavel Durov
(00:11:17)
That’s a fear. And it’s quite irrational if you think about it. It was something that made a lot of sense 20,000 years ago. It makes zero sense today because if you think about it, if you do the same thing everybody else around you is doing, you don’t have any competitive advantage and you don’t get to become outstanding at some point in your life.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:45)
Yeah, that’s one of the things we talked about by way of advice is, if you want to be successful in life, you want to be different.
Pavel Durov
(00:11:55)
Definitely.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:56)
And perhaps, I think you said you want to achieve mastery at a niche. So find a niche at which you can pursue with all your effort and achieve mastery, and the niche being different than anything that anybody else is doing. Can you explain that a little bit more?
Pavel Durov
(00:12:13)
So obviously in order to contribute to the society you’re in, to the economy of the country you live in, you have to do something that is valuable. But if you’re doing something that everybody else is doing anyway, what’s the value of it? Now it sounds easier than it is done, to do something that nobody else is doing, because we humans are surrounded by all kinds of information, which makes us want to copy what we’re perceiving. At the same time, there are so many areas which you can explore, that have nothing to do with the information you receive on the daily basis. So it’s extremely important to curate the information sources that you have, so that you wouldn’t be somebody who is left to the will of AI-based algorithmic feed telling you what’s important so that you end up consuming the same information, the same stuff, the same memes, the same news as everybody else.

(00:13:24)
But rather you should be proactive. You should deliberately try to set a goal, an area that you want to explore, and then actively search information that is relevant to this field, so that one day you can become the world’s number one expert in this field. And it’s not that difficult to do that. You have to just remain consistent because nobody else is trying to do that. Everybody else is just reading the same news and discussing the same news every day. But this way they don’t get to have a competitive advantage.

No phone

Lex Fridman
(00:14:08)
Yeah, majority of the population becomes slaves to the AI-driven recommender systems, and so the content everybody’s fed is the same thing and we all become the same. On that point, one of the different things you do is, you don’t use a phone except occasionally to test Telegram features, but I’ve been with you for two weeks, I haven’t seen you use a phone at all in the way that most people use a phone, like for their social media. So can you describe your philosophy behind that?
Pavel Durov
(00:14:40)
I don’t think a phone is a necessary device. I remember growing up, I didn’t have a mobile phone. When I was a student at the university, I didn’t have a mobile phone. When I finally got to use a mobile phone, I never used phone calls. I was always in airplane mode or mute. I hated the idea of being disturbed. My philosophy here is pretty simple, I want to define what is important in my life. I don’t want other people or companies, all kinds of organizations telling me what is important today, and what I should be thinking about. Just set up your own agenda and the phone gets in your way.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:40)
It provides distractions, it guides what you should be looking at, what you will be looking at. So you don’t want that. You want to quiet the mind. You want to choose what kind of stuff you let inside your mind.
Pavel Durov
(00:15:55)
Yes, because this way I can contribute to the progress of society. Or at least I like to think this way and this makes me happier.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:03)
How often do you find quiet time to just think and focus deeply on work without any distractions? You mentioned to me that you value quiet mornings.
Pavel Durov
(00:16:13)
Yes. So the thing I’m trying to do, I try to allocate as much time as possible for sleep. Now, even if I allocate say 11 or 12 hours for sleep, I won’t sleep for 11 or 12 hours. So what I end up doing is, I end up lying in bed thinking. And some people hate it. They say, “Well, you have to take a sleeping pill,” but I never take pills. I love these moments. I get so many brilliant ideas, or at least they seem brilliant to me at the moment, while I’m lying in bed, either late in the evening or early in the morning. That’s my favorite time of the day. Sometimes I wake up, I go take a shower, still without a phone.

(00:17:03)
Beautiful ideas can come to you while you’re doing your morning exercise, your morning routine without a phone. If you open your phone first thing in the morning, what you end up being is a creature that is told what to think about for the rest of the day. Same is true in a way if you’ve been consuming news from social media late at night. But then how do you define what is important and what you really want to become in life? Now, I’m not saying you have to completely stay away from all sources of information, but take some time to think about what’s really important for you and what you want to change in this world.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:51)
So you definitely try to avoid digital devices for as many hours as possible in the morning, just to have the quiet thinking time, plus the crazy amounts of push-ups and squats?
Pavel Durov
(00:18:02)
I know it’s counterintuitive because I founded one of the largest social networks in the world, after which I founded the second-largest messaging app in the world. And you’re supposed to be really connected, but the conclusion you reach very early is that the more connected and accessible you are, the less productive you are. And then how can you run this thing if you’re constantly bombarded by all kinds of information, most of which is irrelevant to the success of what you’re trying to build? The entire world can be fascinated by a fight, a quarrel between the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man. But for the vast majority of these people following this saga, it’s irrelevant. It won’t change their lives, and in any case, they can’t affect it, so it’s a bit pointless. Of course, there are people who are engaged in activities that require them to be up-to-date of everything that’s going on, but 99% of people aren’t.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:19)
Yeah, the internet, social media presents to us drama in such a way that we think it’s the biggest thing in the world, the most important thing in which the tides of history will turn. But in reality, most things will not turn the tides of history. And so I guess our challenge is to figure out what is the timeless thing? What is the thing that’s happening today that’s still going to be true in 10, 20 years? And from that, decide what you’re going to do. And that’s very difficult on social media because everybody’s outraged. The news of the day, whatever the quarrel is, that’s the thing that everyone thinks the world will end because of this thing, and then another thing happens the next day.
Pavel Durov
(00:20:04)
And they’re trying to influence your emotions.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:07)
Yeah.
Pavel Durov
(00:20:08)
And that’s how you get into trouble because you can be forced to make conclusions that are not in your best interest.

Discipline

Lex Fridman
(00:20:17)
I’ve seen you be, once again, quite stoic about your emotions. You ever get angry? You ever get lonely? You ever get sad? The roller coaster of human emotion, and what do you do with that when you make difficult decisions?
Pavel Durov
(00:20:31)
I’m a human being like everybody else. I do get to experience emotions. Some of them are not very pleasant, but I believe that it’s the responsibility of every one of us to cope with these emotions and to learn to work through them. Self-discipline is particularly important because without it, how can you overcome this seemingly endless loop of negativity or despair that ultimately leads to depression for some people? I normally never have depression. I don’t remember having depression in the last 20 years, at least. Maybe when I was a teenager. But one of the reasons for that is I start doing things.

(00:21:25)
I identify the problem, I can see a solution, and I start executing the strategy. If you are stuck in this loop of being worried about something, nothing’s ever going to change. And people often make this mistake thinking, “Oh, I should just have some rest and then regain energy.” This is not how it works. You gain energy by doing something, so you start doing something, then it happens, you feel motivated, you feel inspired. And then ultimately you do something else, a little bit more, a little bit more. And then a few years, who know? You may end up achieving great things.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:12)
Yeah, that’s the thing that people are confused. If you’re stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don’t want to do anything, to do something. Try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.
Pavel Durov
(00:22:33)
Exactly. And going to the gym is a good example. There are many days when you don’t want to start working out, but you have to overcome this initial reluctance, and then you get to a point that you enjoy it and you think, “Oh my God, it was such a good idea to come to the gym today.” But it’s similar to pretty much every activity. You get to write some code, write a small piece of code first, and then you get inspired. Then you’ll come up with more ideas. You need to write a novel or just write the paragraph. This is pretty obvious and it’s not a secret, but because we are bombarded with all kinds of information, that is not really important for us in terms of becoming successful, we often forget the important things, and this is one of them.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:32)
We’ve been working out every single day. You have been working out for many years pretty intensively, so I think a lot of people would love to know what’s your perfect daily workout regimen? Let’s say on a daily, weekly basis?
Pavel Durov
(00:23:50)
I do 300 push-ups and 300 squats every morning. And in addition to that, I go to the gym normally five, six times a week, spending between one and two hours every day.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:04)
So push-ups and squats are still a big part of your routine?
Pavel Durov
(00:24:07)
Yes, this is how I start my day. I’m not sure they do a lot in terms of changing your body, but they’re definitely a good way to practice self-discipline because you don’t want to do these push-ups in the morning most of the days. Squats are particularly boring. They’re not that hard, they’re just boring, but you overcome it and then it’s much easier to start doing other things related to your work. For example, when I can, I also take an ice bath because it’s another exercise of self-discipline. I think the main muscle you can exercise is this muscle, the muscle of self-discipline. Not your biceps or your pecs or anything else. Because if you get to train that one, everything else just comes by itself.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:07)
Everything else becomes easy. We should mention, I went with you to Banya, and I think it’s fair to say you’re nuts in terms of how much you can handle. And I didn’t even see the worst of it. Can you just speak to your crazy escapades in the Banya, what value you get from it? So both the heat and the cold.
Pavel Durov
(00:25:31)
I don’t know if it’s crazy. I think it’s quite natural and normal by this time, but maybe I just got used to it. So Banya is this extreme kind of sauna practiced by Eastern Europeans, but it is done in a way that maximizes heat and they also use all kind of herbs and branches, and it’s a much more holistic and natural experience. Then the necessary part of it is you get the cold plunge and then you go back. And again, this is one of those things that maybe in the moment it’s not always that pleasant, particularly if you go to extreme temperatures, you don’t feel great.

(00:26:24)
I don’t always feel great, but this feeling is passing. It’s only a few minutes. Same with the ice bath. You have to suffer a bit and then you get to feel great for hours and days after. What’s more, it gives you this long-term health benefits. In a way you can look at it as alcohol in reverse. Alcohol will give you this short, fleeting pleasure for an hour, for a couple of hours, but then you will be paying for it with long-term negative consequences. I’d rather do Banya and ice bath.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:09)
We swam the length of a large lake in France a couple times. Can you talk through why you value these multi-hour swims?
Pavel Durov
(00:27:17)
Yeah. I love swimming for hours. The longest I swam was five and a half hours in Finland. It was quite cold. I got lost in the process, barely could find my way back. But the reason I do it, yes, you feel great after. You’re shaking a little bit, you feel great after. You cross a huge lake, and I cross many lakes, Geneva Lake, Zurich Lake. And every time you feel this achievement, which makes you happy, makes you feel strong, and then you’re more ready to do other challenges. And of course, when you know you’re going to start a journey that will last a few hours, you are reluctant to do it. But you swim for 10 minutes and then for 20 minutes and then for 30 minutes, and it teaches you this incredible patience that I think is necessary if you want to achieve anything in life.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:23)
And it’s pretty meditative, lake versus ocean.
Pavel Durov
(00:28:27)
Yes. And you don’t have to go too fast. You can be slow and enjoy the moment.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:33)
Until you get lost and it’s five and a half hours. Would you panic, if you’re going to be able to find the shore, find your way out?
Pavel Durov
(00:28:39)
Not really, I’m a reasonably stress-resilient person. I didn’t panic at that moment. And there were worse swims I had that were shorter, but involved accidents and you know about some of them. So that wasn’t the worst by far. But an important thing about swimming and physical activity in general is that it makes your mind clear and your thinking process is becoming more efficient. Because at the end of the day, the efficiency of our brain is limited by how much sugar and oxygen our heart can push through blood to our brain though. How can you make this go faster or how do you make your lungs more efficient? How do you make your heart more efficient in doing that?

(00:29:33)
Physical activity is the only way I know of. So it’s not just staying healthy or trying to look good, it’s also being productive. It’s also being stress resilient. All of these qualities are necessary if you want to run a large company, if you want to start a company. I’m surprised when I started doing this more than 10 years ago, that more CEOs didn’t engage in sports. The situation changed in the last several years, which is great. Because back in the day, if you take 20 years ago, there was this stereotype that if you are strong, you must be not very smart and vice versa. Which is a complete lunacy. Very often these two things go together.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:34)
So for you working out is not just about staying healthy, it’s actually valuable for the work that you do as a tech leader, as an engineer, as a technologist.
Pavel Durov
(00:30:43)
Oh yes. When I can’t train, I can instantly feel that stress is creeping on me. So even in situations when I’m constrained, I can’t go to the gym, I would just keep doing push-ups. I just keep doing squats.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:06)
Yeah, I mean that’s the cool thing about body weight exercise. You could just do it anywhere. You could just pop off 50, 100 push-ups before a meeting.
Pavel Durov
(00:31:16)
Don’t you feel weird when you have a day without physical activity?
Lex Fridman
(00:31:21)
Yeah. If I go a day without doing push-ups, at the very minimum, it’s a shitty day.
Pavel Durov
(00:31:27)
And if you can do pull-ups, it’s even better.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:30)
Yeah. I got to ask you about your diet too. No processed sugar, no fast food, no soda. Intermittent fasting, sometimes once a day only, sometimes a couple times a day. So take me through your philosophy on the no sugar, no soda, just clean food.
Pavel Durov
(00:31:47)
Well, sugar is pretty easy because it’s addictive. The more you consume sugar, the more you want it, the hungrier you get. So if you want to stay efficient and healthy, why consume processed sugar? You’ll just end up snacking all the time. Intermittent fasting. So eating only within six hours and not eating for 18 hours every day also brings structure into your day and into your eating habits. So you don’t crave sugar anymore because you know if you eat sugar and then you’re unable to snack, you’re just punishing yourself. I read a few books on longevity. I think something everybody agrees on is that sugar is harmful.

(00:32:48)
No, I’m not militant about sugar. You can eat berries, fruit, if you feel your body needs it, but it’s not true to think it’s necessary to consume sweet things. Not for children, not for adults. Red meat, I stopped eating it about 20 years ago because I just felt heavy every time I had it. So I guess it’s individual. It’s my metabolism. My digestive system isn’t agreeing with this kind of food. So I normally eat seafood of all kinds and vegetables. This is the basic source of calories for me.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:37)
Yeah, and like all things, you said, “Short-term pleasure isn’t worth your future.” So a lot of things we all know, that alcohol is destructive to the body. Tobacco, pills, processed food, sugar, but society puts that on you, makes it very difficult to avoid. So I guess it all boils down to just discipline.
Pavel Durov
(00:33:56)
Yes, and trying to identify the real cause of an issue you’re experiencing. If you’re experiencing a headache, one solution would be to take a pill and then the headache disappears. What this pill would actually do, in most cases, it would mute the consequence, your feeling of pain. It’s a painkiller. It will not eliminate the root cause. So you have to ask yourself, ” What is it that’s causing this headache? Do I need to drink some water? Is the air quality here bad? Do I need to start getting more sleep? Is there something wrong with people around me? They’re stressing me out.” There must be some reason why you’re experiencing a headache. But if you take a pill, you’re not removing this reason, you’re actually making it worse because this harmful factor is still there. It’s like you’re-
Pavel Durov
(00:35:00)
Full factor is still there. It’s like you’re piloting a helicopter and there is some red signals and red lamp starts to blink and it starts producing bad, unpleasant noise. What would you do? You would try to figure out the cause and eliminate it. Maybe there is some mountain next to you and you have to avoid it, or you take a hammer and smash the signal. I think the answer is quite obvious. So, why are we constantly doing this regardless? Oh, because everybody else is doing it. Because there’s a whole industry trying to persuade you that this is the right thing to do. So, it’s incredibly important to analyze yourself and try to get to the bottom of things.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:48)
So you generally try to avoid all pills, all pharmaceutical products?
Pavel Durov
(00:35:53)
Yes. I’ve been staying away from all of that since I became an adult. When you’re a teenager, your mom would typically say, “We need to take this pill, otherwise the world collapses.” Once I became a grown-up, I said, “No, I don’t think that the producers of pill are incentivized in the right way. They’re not really interested in eliminating the root of the problem.” They would rather have me dependent on the pills they’re producing so that I could buy them forever. No, I’m not saying that you should never take pills. There are obviously some diseases that you can only fight with antibiotics, for example. So, I’m not suggesting we go back to the Middle Ages, but what I’m saying is we overuse pills.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:59)
Yeah, it’s always good to study and deeply understand the incentives under which the world operates so that you don’t get swept up into the forces that operate under these incentives. Big Pharma is certainly one of them. Pharmaceutical companies have a huge incentive to keep the problem going versus solving the problem. It’s wise.
Pavel Durov
(00:37:19)
This is something I practice every day. I read some piece of news and I ask myself, “Who benefits from me reading this?” Then you can end up coming to this conclusion that maybe 95% of things we read in the news have been written and published because somebody wanted you to buy some product, support some political cause, fight some war, donate some money. Let’s do something that would benefit other people. This is not a problem to support causes that you truly believe in as long as it was your intentional choice and you’re not being manipulated into fighting other people’s wars.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:14)
And that takes us back to the original thing we started talking about, which is freedom. One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That’s really important to realize the content you consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind. You have to disconnect yourself. Be very proactive understanding what the biases, what the incentives are. So, you can think clearly, independently, and objectively.
Pavel Durov
(00:38:51)
Again, it ties back with restraint from alcohol because if your mind is clouded, how can you analyze yourself? You’ll always be dependent on opinions of others. You always follow the mainstream. And then whatever the authorities or whoever in charge will tell you, you believe it because you don’t have a tool of your own to rely on to come to your own conclusions.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:27)
I have to ask you, this is something that came up. You don’t watch porn. I don’t think I’ve heard you talk about this before. What’s the philosophy behind not watching porn? There’s a lot of people that talk about porn in general having a very negative effect on young men on their view of the world, on their development of their sexuality and how they get into relationships and all that stuff. So, what’s your philosophy in not consuming porn?
Pavel Durov
(00:39:55)
I don’t watch porn because I just feel it’s a surrogate, a substitute for a real thing that is not necessary in my life. If anything, it just forces you to exchange some energy, some inspiration to a fleeting moment of pleasure. It doesn’t make sense. In any case, as I said, it’s not the real thing. So, as long as you can access the real thing, you don’t need to watch porn. But then if you can’t access the real thing, you shouldn’t watch porn as well because it means there’s some deficiency in your life, some problem that you have to overcome.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:45)
Yeah, analyze the underlying cause. Again, this goes back to the theme of investing in a long-term flourishing versus short-term pleasure. There’s a theme to the way you approach life.
Pavel Durov
(00:41:02)
I try to be strategic. I try to act under assumption that I’m not going to die in one hour from now and I’m going to stick around for a bit despite the fact that we are all mortal. So, why would I exchange the mid and long term for the short term? It doesn’t make any sense.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:23)
Quick pause, bathroom break.
Pavel Durov
(00:41:24)
Yeah, let’s take a break.

Telegram: Lean philosophy, privacy, and geopolitics

Lex Fridman
(00:41:26)
All right. We took a break and now we’re back. I got to ask you about Telegram, the company. I got to meet some of the brilliant engineers that worked there. Telegram runs lean relative to other technology companies that achieve the scale that Telegram does. It has very few employees. So, how many people are on the core team? Let’s say the core engineering team.
Pavel Durov
(00:41:48)
The core engineering team is about 40 people. This includes back-end, front-end, designers, system administrators.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:02)
Can you speak to the philosophy behind running a company with so few employees?
Pavel Durov
(00:42:10)
Well, what we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn’t translate the quality of the product they produce. In many cases, it’s the opposite. If you have too many people, they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating the small pieces of work they’re responsible for between each other. The other problem with having too many employees is that some of them won’t get enough work to do, and if they don’t get enough work to do, they demotivate everybody else by their mere existence. They’re still there, they’re still getting the salary, but they don’t do anything.

(00:43:01)
If they don’t do anything, more often than not, they will start trying to find their purpose elsewhere, maybe inside your team, but not by doing productive work, but by finding problems that don’t exist within the team. That can disrupt the team and the mood inside it even further. Also, when you intentionally don’t allow some of your team members to hire more people to help them, they’ll be forced to automate things. In our case, we have tens of thousands of servers around the world, almost 100,000 distributed across several continents and data centers.

(00:44:02)
If you try to manage this system manually without automation, you will probably end up hiring thousands of people, tens of thousands of people. But if you rely on algorithms and the team is forced to put together algorithms in order to manage it, then it becomes much more scalable, much more efficient, and interestingly, much more reliable as well.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:31)
And more resilient to the changing geopolitics, to the changing technology, all of that. Because if you automate the distributed aspect of the data storage and all the compute, then that’s going to be resilient to everything the world throws at you. I suppose if you have people managing all of it, it becomes stale quickly.
Pavel Durov
(00:44:54)
Yes, humans are attack vectors, and if you have a distributed system that runs itself automatically, you have a chance at increasing the security of speed and speed of your service, this is what we did with Telegram, while also making it much more reliable. Because if some part of the network goes down, you can still switch to the other parts of it.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:25)
Yeah. One of the big ways you protect user privacy is that you store the data. The infrastructure side of Telegram is distributed across many legal jurisdictions with the decryption keys. So, it’s encrypted in cloud. The decryption keys are split and kept in different locations so that no single government or entity can access the data. Can you explain the strength of this approach?
Pavel Durov
(00:45:55)
The way we designed Telegram is we never wanted to have any humans, any employees have any access to private messaging data. That’s why since 2012 when we’ve been trying to come up with this design, we always invested a lot of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it. If you hire an employee or any of the existing employee, it can’t break the system in a way that would allow them to access messages of users. Then of course we launched end-to-end encrypted messaging that is even more protected, but it has certain limitations. So, you still have to rely on an encrypted cloud. So, an interesting engineering challenge was how you make sure that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:58)
So no employee can even access user messages. So, that’s the thing. We talk about encryption, we talk about privacy, we talk about security, all these kinds of things. I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, about which there’s also misinformation, is about private messages. So, Telegram is very, very protective of the private messages of users. So, you’re saying employees never can access the private messages. Have any governments or intelligence agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past?
Pavel Durov
(00:47:38)
No, never. Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services. If you try to access any server in any of the data center locations, it’s all encrypted. You can extract all the hard drives and analyze it, but you won’t get anything. It’s all encrypted in the way that is undecipherable. That was very important for us. That’s why we can say with confidence, there hasn’t been ever a leakage of data, any leak of data from Telegram. Not in terms of private messages, not in terms of say contact lists.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:28)
Do you see in the future a possible scenario where you might share user private messages with governments or with intelligence agencies?
Pavel Durov
(00:48:39)
No. We designed a system in a way that’s impossible. It’ll require us to change the system and we won’t do that because we made a promise to our users. We would rather shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:56)
So that’s one of the principles you operate under is you go into protect user privacy.
Pavel Durov
(00:49:03)
I think it’s fundamental. Without the right to privacy, people can’t feel fully free and protected.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:11)
I mean, this is a good place to ask. I’m sure you’re pressured by all kinds of people, all kinds of organizations to share private data. Where do you find the strength and the fearlessness to say no to everybody, including powerful intelligence agencies, including powerful governments, influential, powerful people?
Pavel Durov
(00:49:33)
I guess part of it is just me being me. I stood up for myself and for my values since I was a little kid. I always had issues with my teachers because I would point out their mistakes during classes. At the end of the day, what’s important is to remind yourself that you have nothing to lose. They can think they blackmail you with something, they can threaten you with something, but what is it they really can really do to you? Worst case, they can kill you, but that brings us back to the first part of our discussion. There’s no point living your life in fear.

(00:50:21)
As for Telegram, it’s incredibly successful, but if we lose one market or two markets or pretty much all of the markets, I don’t care that much. It won’t affect me, it won’t affect my lifestyle in any way. I’ll still be doing my pushups. So, you don’t like encryption, you don’t like privacy, you think you should ban encryption in your country, like the European Union is trying to do now for all the member states, well, go ahead and do that. We’ll just quit this market. We won’t operate there. It’s not that important. They all think that somehow we profit from their citizens, and the only goal tech companies have is extracting revenues. It’s true, most tech companies are like this, but there are projects like Telegram which are a bit different and I’m not sure they realize that.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:23)
So for you, the value of maintaining your integrity in relation to your principles is more important than anything else. Of course, we should say that you also have full ability and control to do just that because you, Pavel Durov, own 100% of Telegram. So, there’s no anybody with a say on this question.
Pavel Durov
(00:51:47)
There are no shareholders, which is quite unique.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:52)
Very unique. I don’t think there’s anything even close to that in any major tech company.
Pavel Durov
(00:51:56)
And this allows us to operate the way we operate, to build this project and maintain it based on certain fundamental principles, which by the way, I think everybody believes in. I think the right to privacy is included in the constitution of most countries, at least most Western countries, but it’s still under attack almost every week. It often starts with well-meaning proposals. Oh, we have to fight crime, we have to do that, we have to protect the children. But at the end of the day, the result is the same. People lose their right to such fundamental thing as privacy. They sometimes lose their right to express themselves, to assemble.

(00:52:47)
This is a slippery slope that we witnessed in pretty much every autocratic country or country that used to be free and then became autocratic. No dictator in the world ever said, “Let’s just strip you away from your rights because I want more power to myself and I want you to be miserable.” They all justified it with very reasonable sounding justifications and then it came in stages gradually. After a few years, people would find themselves in a position when they’re helpless. They can’t protest. Every message they sent is monitored. They can’t assemble. It’s over.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:39)
So you see Telegram as a place that people from all walks of life, from every nation can have a place to speak their mind, have a voice in. In the geopolitical context, you’re mentioning that government when they become autocratic naturally is the way of the world. Human nature and the nature of governments, they become more censorious. They begin to censor and always justifying it in their minds perhaps assuming that they’re doing good.
Pavel Durov
(00:54:08)
Perhaps some of them assume they’re doing good, but interestingly, it always results in the state accumulating more power at the expense of the individual. Then where does it stop? We humans are not very good at finding the right balance, and in this case, the right balance between chaos and order, between freedom and structure. We tend to go to extremes.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:44)
I think you still consider yourself a libertarian. There is something about government that always over time naturally builds a larger and larger bureaucracy. In that machine of bureaucracy, it accumulates more and more power. It’s not always that one individual member of that bureaucracy is the one that corrupts the initial principles on which the government was founded, but just something over time, you forget. You begin to censor. You begin to limit the freedoms of the individual, the ability of the individuals to speak, to have a voice, to vote. It just gradually happens that way.
Pavel Durov
(00:55:29)
And the government is not some abstract notion. The government consists of people and these people have goals. They would naturally be inclined to increase the level of influence, to have more subordinates, to have more resources. That’s how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens. Ironically, you don’t have those limitations.

(00:56:22)
You’re supposed in all countries, which are considered to be free. It’s supposed to be the constitution that protects everybody, but interestingly, it doesn’t work always this way. They are able to find very tricky phrasings in order to carve out exceptions and then the exception becomes the rule.

Arrest in France

Lex Fridman
(00:56:49)
On this topic, I’d love to talk to you about the recent saga of you being arrested in the August of last year in France. I think I should say that it’s one of the worst overreaches of power I’ve seen as applied to a tech leader in recent history, in all history. So, it’s tragic, but I think speaks to the thing that we’ve been talking about. So, maybe can you tell the full saga what happened? You arrived in France.
Pavel Durov
(00:57:24)
I arrived in France last year in August just for a short two-day trip and then I see a dozen of armed policemen greeting me and asked me to follow them. They read me a list of something like 15 serious crimes that I’m accused of, which was mind-boggling. At first, I thought there must be some mistake. Then I realized they’re being serious and they’re accusing me of all possible crimes that the users of Telegram have allegedly committed or some users and they think I should be responsible for this, which again, like you said, it’s something that never happened in the history of this planet. No country, not even an authoritarian one did that to any tech leader, at least at this scale.

(00:58:37)
There are good reasons for that because you are sacrificing a big part of your economic growth by sending these messages to the business and tech community. So, they put me in a police car and I found myself in police custody. Small room, no windows, just a narrow bed made of concrete. I spent almost four days there. In the process, I had to answer some questions of the policemen. They were interested in how Telegram operates. Most of it is public anyway, and I was struck by very limited understanding or should I say even lack of understanding on behalf of the people who initiated this investigation against me by how technology works, how encryption works, how social media work.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:57)
I mean, there’s something darkly poetic about a tech founder of a platform where a billion people are communicating with each other and you’re on concrete, no pillow for days, no windows. I’m a huge fan of Franz Kafka and he’s written about the absurdity of these kinds of situations, hence the Kafkaesque stories. There’s a story literally about the situation that he wrote, perhaps predicted, called The Trial, where a person is arrested for no reason that anybody can explain and is stuck in the judicial system for a long time, that nobody fascinatingly in that story, neither the person arrested nor any individual member of the system itself fully understand what is happening.

(01:00:45)
Nobody can truly answer the questions and eventually the person, spoiler alert, is mentally broken by the whole system, which is what bureaucracy can do in its most absurd form. It breaks the spirit, the human spirit laden in all of us. That’s the negative side of bureaucracy.
Pavel Durov
(01:01:05)
I agree with you on the absurdity of this thing because if this was a good faith attempt to fix an issue, there were so many ways to reach out to Telegram, to reach out to me personally, voice their concerns, and solve any alleged problem in a way that is conventional and diplomatic the way every other country on this planet solves these problems, including with Telegram. We did it dozens of times.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:43)
Yeah, you have a nice page showing this is like details that most people don’t really think about, but Telegram is at the forefront of moderating CSAM and terrorist groups. There’s a nice page, telegram.org/moderation that shows just the incredible amount of groups and channels that are engaged in terrorist activity and CSAM activity that are actively blocked, found and blocked by Telegram. A lot of this work, like you said, because of the automation is done with machine learning, just the scale is insane.

(01:02:22)
This is stuff that most noobs like me who are just chatting it up on Telegram don’t think about, but there’s just an immense number of people essentially doing things that violate the law on there and you have to find them immediately and catch it. I guess all platforms have to deal with it. Telegram was doing a great job of dealing with that content. What you’re saying is the French government had no idea. Do they even know what machine learning is?
Pavel Durov
(01:02:53)
It’s a concept that is challenging to explain to them, but I think they will learn much more about it by the end of this investigation. That’s my hope. In any case, you’re right. If you look at Telegram, we’ve been fighting harmful content that is publicly distributed on our platform since 10 years ago, actually since the time we launched public channels on Telegram. Since something like eight years ago, we had daily transparency reports on how many channels related to child abuse or terrorist propaganda we’ve taken down daily.

(01:03:41)
Every day we’ve taken maybe we’d take down hundreds of them, and if you include all kinds of content that we remove, all the accounts, groups, channels, posts, that would amount to millions of pieces of content every week, hundreds of thousands every day. Then somebody would read the newspaper, get enraged because they would read something about child porn. This is a subject that is very emotionally charged and start doing something not based on data and logical thinking and laws, but based on emotions driven from inaccurate input.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:36)
Yeah, I think we should make pretty clear that there’s no world, no reason that the French government should have arrested you, but here we are. That’s the situation you’re in. So, to be clear, you have to show up in front of a judge. All of this is beautifully absurd. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t extremely serious. You have to show up in front of a judge every certain amount of time. What is that experience like?
Pavel Durov
(01:05:01)
In France, they have this role of investigative judge. I don’t think you have it in many other places in the world. It means I’m not on trial, I’m being investigated. In France, it’s not just the police or prosecutor asking me questions. It’s a judge, which in my experience is more like still a prosecutor, but it’s called a judge. That makes it harder to appeal. So, if you are limited in say, countries where you can travel, then to appeal that restriction will take you a lot of time. The investigation itself should have never been started. It’s an absurd and harmful way of solving an issue such as complicated as regulating social media. It is just the wrong tool. So, we objected and appealed the investigation itself. We did last year, I believe.

(01:06:14)
We’re still not even given a hearing date for the appeal because the process is painfully slow, not just for me but for everybody, which made me realize the system may be broken in many levels. You have other entrepreneurs affected by the French justice system telling me horror stories about their experiences where businesses got paralyzed by very unnecessary actions of investigative judges that ended up being unjustified and biased. In the end, you can perhaps solve it when you reach a higher court and you’ll get justice, but you’ll lose a lot of time and energy in the process. So, this is the only thing that is, I hope, different and will be different in this case compared to the story you told from Kafka.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:31)
I mean, but it does as Kafka describes break a lot of people with time. So, we should say that you’re for a long time not allowed to travel out of France. Now you can travel to Dubai. We’re now in Dubai, got to meet many of the people that work at Telegram. Telegram is headquartered in Dubai, but you’re not allowed to travel anywhere else. When do you think you’re coming to Texas to hang out with me over there?
Pavel Durov
(01:08:01)
That’s a hard question to answer because it doesn’t depend on just my actions. I can just say this, I’m patient. I will not let this limitation on my freedom dictate my actions. I will, if anything, double down on defending freedoms because I experienced firsthand what the absence of freedom feels like at least during these four days in police custody when you are just stuck, unable to communicate with people that are important to you, when you don’t even know what’s going on in the world in relation to you personally. So, I have no crystal ball that would tell me the future. I can’t say that I am pessimistic. I think we’ve been able to gradually remove most of the restrictions initially imposed on my freedom last August.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:23)
If the French government or the French intelligence agency want to have a back door or want to access private user messages, what would you say to them? Is there anything they can do to get access to the private user messages?
Pavel Durov
(01:09:42)
Nothing. My response would be very clear, but it won’t be very polite. So, I’m not sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:52)
It’s good to say here.
Pavel Durov
(01:09:53)
It’s good to say because you are wearing a tie.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:57)
Yeah, this is a serious adult gentleman-like program. Yeah, but that is a concern.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:00)
… a gentleman-like program, yeah. But that is a concern that people have is when you have so much pressure from governments that, over time, they’ll wear you down and you’ll give in. And then, of course, other places use that as propaganda to try to attack you, you get attacked by basically every nation. So, it’s a difficult medium in which to operate. It’s difficult to be you fighting for freedom, fighting to preserve people’s privacy. But is there something you could say to reassure people that you’re not going to sacrifice any of the principles that you’ve just expressed if the French government just keeps wearing you down?
Pavel Durov
(01:10:42)
I think the French government is losing this battle, this battle is wrong. The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defiant I become. And I think I have proven that in the last several months when there were attempts to use my situation being stuck here in France by approaching me and asking me to do things in other countries, blocking certain channels, changing the way Telegram works. And not only I refused, I told the world about it and I’m going to keep telling the world about every instance, any government, in this case in particular, the French government, tries to force me to do anything. And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure because, if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates rights of other people as well, you become broken inside, you become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.

(01:12:10)
So, I wouldn’t do that. There are probably other people in the world that would consider that, I don’t care. Telegram disappears to something people don’t understand, including in this intelligence services or governments, I don’t care, I’ll be fine. If they put me into prison for 20 years which, let’s be clear, it’s not something that I think is realistic but let’s just think about it as a hypothetical situation. I would rather starve myself to death and die there, reboot the whole game than do something stupid.

Romanian elections

Lex Fridman
(01:12:59)
Let me ask you about an example of the thing you’re talking about. Tell the saga of Telegram in the Romanian election. So, amidst all this, you are still fighting to preserve the freedom of speech. What happened and what were some of the decisions you had to make?
Pavel Durov
(01:13:16)
So, when I got stuck in France unable to leave the country for a few months, I was offered to meet the head of state foreign intelligence services through a person I know quite well, he’s actually a well-known tech entrepreneur in France and he’s well-connected and he said, “This guy wants to meet you.” I said, “Okay, fine, let’s do that but I’m not promising anything.” I took the meeting and, in this meeting, I was asked to restrict what I see as restriction of freedom of speech in Romania. I don’t know if you followed the whole saga with the Romanian elections, they had a presidential elections last year, the results got canceled. Now, Romania, at that point when I had this meeting, was preparing for a new presidential elections, the conservative candidate was not somebody who the French government was supportive of so they asked me whether I would be shutting down or ready to shut down channels on Telegram. Let’s support the conservative candidate or protest against the pro-European candidates so they called the guy they liked.

(01:14:49)
I said, “Look, if there is no violation of the rules of Telegram which are quite clear, you can’t call to violence. But if it’s a peaceful demonstration, if it’s a peaceful debate, we can’t do this, it would be political censorship. We protected freedom of speech in many countries in the world, put it in Asia and Eastern Europe and Middle East, we’re not going to start engaging in censorship in Europe no matter who is asking us.” I was very clear to the guy who was the head of French intelligence, I said, “If you think that, because I’m stuck here, you can tell me what to do, you are very wrong. I would rather do the opposite every time,” and in a way that’s what I did. I had a small debate with him about the morality of this whole thing and then, at a certain point, just disclose the content of this entire conversation because I never signed an NDA. I don’t ever sign NDAs with any people like that, I want to be able to tell the world what’s going on.

(01:16:12)
And that’s quite shocking to me that you would have people in the French government trying to get advantage of this situation. Of course, if they had nothing to do with the start of this investigation itself and use it to reach their political or geopolitical goals, I consider it an attempt to humiliate myself personally and millions of Telegram users collectively. And it’s quite strange that the same agency asked us to do certain things in Moldova as well. So, even before that, I think it was October last year or September, I was arrested in Paris in late August and then again approached through an intermediary and asked, “Would you mind taking down some channels in Moldova because there is an election going on and we’re afraid there’re going to be some interference with these elections. Could you please connect with representatives of the government of Moldova and take care of it?” We said, “We’re happy to take a look at it and see if there is content there that is in violation of our rules.”

(01:17:50)
And they sent us a list of channels and bots, some of them were … So, it was a very short list and some of these channels and bots were in violation indeed of our rules and we took them down, only a few of them, the rest were okay. Then they said thank you and sent us another list of dozens of channels, many, many channels. We looked at these channels, we realized that there is no solid foundation to justify banning them and we refused to do that. But interestingly enough, the French intelligence services that were asking us to do this in Moldova, let me know through the contact that, after Telegram banned the few channels that were in violation of our rules in Moldova, they talked to my judge, the investigative judge in this investigation that has been started against me, and told the judge could things about me which I have found very confusing and, in a way, shocking because these two matters have nothing in common.

(01:19:27)
Why would anyone talk to an investigative judge that is trying to find out whether Telegram did a good enough job in removing illegal content in France, what does Moldova have to do with it? I got very suspicious at that moment. Remember, it happened after we blocked a few channels that violated our rules but before we refused to block a long list of other channels that were completely fine which is people expressing political views which I may not agree with but it’s their right to express them. Not extreme views, not views that call to violence. That was extremely alarming, that was a moment when I told myself that there may be more going on here that I initially thought. Initially I thought, yeah, some people are confused about how technology works and, after this case in Moldova, I got much more suspicious. So, by the time the head of intelligence services met me to ask about Romania to help them silencing conservative voices in Romania, I was already wary of what can be going on next.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:18)
Yeah. So, clearly, this was a systematic attempt to pressure you to censor political voices that the French government doesn’t agree with. And we should say that you have fought for freedom of speech for left-wing groups and right-wing groups, it really doesn’t matter. So, it’s not you don’t have a political affiliation, political ideology that you fight for, you’re creating a platform that, as long as they don’t call for violence, allows people from all walks of life, from all ideologies to speak their mind, that’s the whole point. And it happens to be conservative voices in the Romania election that the French government wanted to censor because, currently, the French government leans left. But if you flip everything around and the government would be right wing, you’d be fighting against censorship of left-wing voices and you have in the past many times.
Pavel Durov
(01:22:13)
Exactly. Ironically, we received a request from the French police to take down a channel of far left protesters on Telegram in France. We refused to do that. We looked at the channel, peaceful protesters. It doesn’t matter for us whether we are defending the freedom of speech of people leaning right or leaning left. During COVID, we were protecting activists that were organizing the Black Lives Matter events and the other side, the protesters against lockdowns. We protect everybody as long as they are not crossing the lines and not starting to call to violence or incite damage to public property. It’s a fundamental right to assemble. It’s interesting that people who haven’t had this experience of living in countries that don’t have freedoms don’t always realize how dangerous it is to gradually compromise your values, your principles, your freedoms, your rights because they don’t understand what’s at stake.

Power and corruption

Lex Fridman
(01:23:56)
Yeah, these things become a slippery slope. So, you’ve, for many, many years, including currently, have spoken very highly of France, you love French history, French culture. I think this situation, this historic wrong that’s been done is, put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There’s no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this. There is no justification for this arrest, there’s a misapplication of the law, all kinds of pressures, all kinds of behavior that seems politically motivated, all that kind of stuff, all the excessive regulation and the bureaucracy, a nightmare for entrepreneurs that dream to create something impactful and positive for the world.

(01:24:50)
So, what do you think needs to be fixed about the French government, the French system and then, zooming out, because you see similar kinds of things in Europe, that could enable entrepreneurs, that could reverse the trend that we seem to be seeing in Europe that is becoming less and less friendly to entrepreneurs? What can be fixed? What should be fixed?
Pavel Durov
(01:25:20)
I think the European society must decide where they want their ever-increasing public sector to stop increasing, what they think should be the right size of government. Because today, if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country’s GDP, it’s maybe as much more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union. So, you have this disbalance where you have many more people representing the state as opposed to people trying to bring the country’s economy forward by creating great products and great companies.

(01:26:26)
The start-up field and my field, social media field has been affected by it immensely. There was one great start-up in this realm in France in the last 10 years, it was this location-based social network, it was eventually sold to Snapchat. But before it was sold, the founder asked me whether he should sell, I told him, “Never sell. You have a great thing going. You have lots of users, you have organic traction in many countries and the first of this kind of success story in France.” But then he sold anyway in a couple of weeks.

(01:27:12)
And later I met him, he’s trying to do a new thing now, I met him and I asked him, I was trying to understand what went wrong and one of the things he told me about is that, while he was trying to run his company, competing with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, having all this pressure from investors, trying to hire the best people and persuade them to go to Paris, and he did a great job by the way, but while he was trying to do that, he got also attacked by some silly investigation, again, involving the data protection issues which lasted forever and was gradually sucking blood of his team and his company, constant interrogations, disclosure requests.

(01:28:14)
And this is a young company, it significantly increases the level of stress and, at some point, I think the pressure was too much, he decided to, again, just sell it. Eventually it turned out that there was no issue, the investigation ended as far as I understand with no charges but, such investigations, they have a price, they have a cost.

(01:28:45)
And unless the society realizes the cost of projects, of companies, of start-ups that are never created or sold to the United States at the very early stage or other countries resulting in decreased economic growth, things won’t change. I think we just talked to a guy a few days ago who left France and started a business here in Dubai and one of the reasons he had to leave France is that the government started an investigation on his company and they frozen his bank accounts and this investigation that involved taxes lasted for many, many years, I believe he said eight years.

(01:29:36)
And at the end of this eight years, the government reached to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong, he’s good, it’s okay. In the meantime, his corporate bank accounts were frozen, his business died. The only reason why he was able to retain sanity is because he moved to Dubai and started a new company which is incredibly successful and now he’s enriching this city which we’re in right now with his great ideas and creativity.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:17)
And by the way, having interacted with him, there’s a fire in his eyes, the human spirit that fuels entrepreneurship. Whatever that is, he doesn’t have to do it, he’s made a lot of money. He probably doesn’t have to do anything but he still wants to create and that fires what fuels great nations. Build, build, build, build new stuff, expand, all of that and regulation suffocates that.
Pavel Durov
(01:30:40)
You have to cherish this people.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:41)
Yeah.
Pavel Durov
(01:30:42)
But I guess the French public or some part of the French public was misled and I don’t know when, perhaps since the time of the French Revolution, to believe that entrepreneurs are somehow their enemies. They’re the evil rich people that are the cause of all problems as if only you could make the rich share their ill-gotten wealth with the rest of the population then every problem will be magically solved. In reality though, a lot of these people that are starting such companies with fire in their eyes are sacrificing their lives, their livelihood.

(01:31:27)
They’re working 20 hours a day, they’re experiencing immense stress in order to fulfill the vision and bring value and good to the society around them. They create jobs, they create great services, they create great goods, they make your country grow, they make your people proud, you have to cherish them. But what does the system do to them? It squeezes them out because perhaps there was somebody in the tax authority that decided to advance their career and perhaps was too ambitious and not too smart so, as a result, a company was destroyed.

(01:32:17)
And now the same entrepreneur, by the way, who we talked to is invited to come back to France. He’s been offered really good terms, he said they’re going to open this new venue on Champs-Élysées, we’re going to give you the best location, we’re going to fund part of it, tax breaks and he said, “Never. Just forget about this, it’s impossible. I’m not coming back to France.” He’s traumatized by the experience and he’s French, he was born there, he has a French passport. So, unless things like this change, France and the rest of Europe will keep struggling with economic growth, with budget deficits, with unemployment and all the other relevant social and economic metrics.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:06)
Yeah, it’s heartbreaking. Many of these nations, I appreciate the historic and the culture of value and I hope Europe and France flourish but this is not the components that are required for flourishing. Quick pause, I need a bathroom break.

Intense education


(01:33:24)
All right, we had some tea, we’re back. Let’s go back a bunch of years to the beginning. You mentioned you went to school with super intensive education so I thought it’d be really interesting to look at some of the powerful aspects of that education from the languages to the math. Can you actually describe some of the rigorous aspects of it and what you gained from it?
Pavel Durov
(01:33:48)
At the age of 11, I got the opportunity to enter an experimental school in St. Petersburg where I lived and you had to pass a rigorous test to get accepted. The idea behind the school was that, if you try to squeeze as much information as possible into a brain of a teenager making a focus on maths and foreign languages, then there will be some changes in the brain of the student that will allow the student to understand most other disciplines. But we had a class, as a result, that didn’t have any single focus, it was very widespread across a lot of disciplines. You would have four foreign languages at least including Latin, English, French, German, in addition, you can get ancient Greek. You would have classes like biochemistry or psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology. The difference of this class as opposed to other classes in the same school which was part of the St. Petersburg State University called academic gymnasium was that, unlike other classes which were specialized in some single subject like physics or maths or history, this one tried to get the best from all of these specialized classes and bring into one curriculum. Since it was an experimental class, it wasn’t possible to become a straight A student, to be excellent in all the subject, it’s always considered crazy to even try.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:48)
So, it’s assumed nobody’s able to handle it, you’re just pushing the limits of the human mind. Four languages in parallel, math, evolutionary psychology, just overwhelming the mind and see what happens.
Pavel Durov
(01:35:59)
Yes, see what happens. This was an experiment and it was in the middle of the ’90s, remember, when Russia, particularly its educational system, wasn’t regulated as much as it is today. It was in the middle between the two stages of the Russian history, the Soviet’s history and the modern Russian history of the 21st century. In any case, I learned a lot from that experience. First of all, why I got into this school is because I kept being kicked out from other schools.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:38)
Challenging authority?
Pavel Durov
(01:36:39)
I was good at all subjects but not behavior. We had this behavior grade in the Soviet Union in early ’90s, perhaps they even have it today, I’m not sure. I was very bad at behavior, always challenging the teachers, always pointing out their mistakes.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:59)
By the way, that’s not such a bad thing, right? If you were looking back, there’s some value to that for young people to, maybe respectfully, but challenge the authority, the wisdom of old, right?
Pavel Durov
(01:37:14)
I think I was very lucky to be able to do that and to be able to get away with it in the end because, normally, if you keep challenging authorities, you just get kicked out of all schools and then you end up nowhere. So, I eventually got into a school where challenging teachers was not fully okay but it was something that you could do and then you would start a debate with the teacher and normally they would allow you to express your point of view and then some objective truth may come out of it as a result.

(01:37:58)
But at that point, I was pretty bored with my life, every teenager gets to a point when they have this sort of existential crisis. What’s the point of life? What am I even doing here? At some point, I decided, since I have to go to school anyway, I might as well try to do something impossible and become the best student and get an A or what we called five in the Russian system on every single subject and that kept me busy for a while.

(01:38:40)
It was incredibly difficult because you didn’t have enough time. Even if you just studied all the time, not doing anything else, you didn’t have any time left to prepare all the homework, tasks and get ready for all the tests. So, I ended up using the breaks between classes but I get to the result I wanted to get to. I got the excellent mark in every subject and that kept me happy for a while.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:19)
What did you understand about an effective education system from studying foreign language at the same time doing such a diversity? If you were to design an education system from scratch for young people, especially in the 21st century, what would that look like? You posted about the value of mathematics as a foundation for everything.
Pavel Durov
(01:39:39)
Yeah. I still think math is essential. It’s something that shapes your brain, it teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big problems into smaller parts, put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently, trying again if it doesn’t work. This is exactly the same skill you’ll need in programming and project management and start it when you start your own company. And it’s one of the few subjects to school which encourages you to develop your own thinking as opposed to rely on what other people have to say and just repeating their opinions. That is extremely valuable. And of course, once you’re good at math, you can apply it in physics, in engineering, in coding. And it’s not surprising that most of the most successful tech founders and CEOs are very good at matters in coding because, ultimately, it’s the same mental skill that you rely on.

(01:41:05)
But back then in the school, I realized something else as well, it’s that competition is really important, competition is key. This is what motivates a lot of teenagers when there is school and, if you remove competition out of the education system, you end up forcing kids to start competing elsewhere, for example, in video games. It’s a trend you see now in many countries, including in the West, when well-meaning authorities or parents say we don’t want our kids to be too stressed, we don’t want them to feel anxiety so let’s just get rid of all the public grading system, all these rankings of who won, who lost, we don’t want any of that.

(01:42:06)
And part of it is justified but, as a result, some kids lose interest. Yes, you eliminate the losers but you end up eliminating the winners as well. And then, if you are overprotective of the kids in that age, they grow up, graduate schools, the universities and they’re still not prepared for real life because real life is constant competition for jobs, for promotions, for customers and it’s more brutal.

(01:42:47)
What you have as a result is high suicide rates, high unemployment, all the things and negative trends you see now in many countries which thought eliminating competition from their education system was a good idea. They still persist, they still think competition is a bad thing, they try to eliminate competition from their economy as well to an extent saying we are going to make sure the losers don’t lose and the winners don’t get too much but, as a result, they make their entire systems less competitive, their entire economies.

(01:43:34)
Some of them in Europe are now struggling to keep up with China, with South Korea, with Singapore, with Japan and other places where the education system was based on ruthless competition. So, this is a hard choice any civilization has to make. We support competition understanding that, eventually, it leads to progress in science and technology and abundance for society at large or we remove competition thinking that somehow we can shield the future generations from the stress that competition inevitably causes.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:22)
Yeah, it’s grounded in a good instinct of compassion, you don’t want people who suck at a thing to feel pain but it seems like struggle is a part of life, either you do it earlier or you do it later. And it’s true, that’s such a good point that competition does seem to be a really powerful driver of skill development, like you mentioned, pursuing mastery. There’s something in human nature that, especially for young people, if you can compete at a thing, you’re going to be really driven to get good at that thing. If you can direct that in the education system as China does, as many nations like you mentioned do, then you’re going to develop a lot of brilliant people.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:00)
… do, then you’re going to develop a lot of brilliant people, resilient people, people that are ready to create epic shit in the world.
Pavel Durov
(01:45:07)
I think there is a lot of evidence proving that we are biologically wired to compete and establish our understanding of what our qualities are and talents are in relation to other people around us, and this is one of the ways society self-regulates.

Nikolai Durov

Lex Fridman
(01:45:30)
Speaking of competition, your brother, Nikolai, he’s a mathematician, programmer, expert in cryptography. He has won the IMO International Mathematics Olympiad, he got gold medal three times, ICPC programming, two times, has two PhDs in mathematics, and you have worked together for many years creating incredible technologies that we’ve been talking about. So what have you learned about just life from your brother?
Pavel Durov
(01:46:02)
Well, first of all, I must say I learned pretty much everything from my brother, everything I know, because when we were used to be kids, we slept in the same bedroom, like beds a few feet away from each other, and I kept bugging him with questions. I would ask him about dinosaurs and galaxies and black holes and Neanderthals, everything I could think of, and he was my Wikipedia back in the time when we didn’t have internet access. He’s a unique prodigy kid, probably one of a billion.

(01:46:45)
He started reading at the age of three, I think, and he pretty fast got so advanced in maths, that by the age of six, he could already read really sophisticated books on astronomy. Sometimes when he did it in public places, like buses or metro, my mom was criticized by people who were witnessing it. They would tell her, “Why are you mocking your own kid with this serious book? It’s obvious that the kid can’t understand everything there. It’s too complicated even we don’t understand anything there. There’s some formulas,” and he was already sucking in this knowledge. He just has this thirst for information.

(01:47:39)
So he was the source of all kind of great facts, useful things, inspiring things. He taught me pretty much everything I know. At the same time, he’s incredibly modest and kind, and this is something I think a lot of people that think they’re smart but not generally intelligent lack. More often than not, people who are truly intelligent, they’re also kind and compassionate.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:18)
And he is that?
Pavel Durov
(01:48:20)
Definitely.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:21)
You actually have been staying out of the public eye for the most part. You’ve done very few interviews, you’re pretty low-key, but your brother is in another level. He’s been staying out of the public eye. What’s behind that?
Pavel Durov
(01:48:34)
Part of it is his natural modesty. He doesn’t need to do it. He doesn’t feel this urge to show off, brag about stuff. I tried to avoid it as well, but at a certain point I realized that me being too private, too secretive becomes a liability because it creates this void, this emptiness that people and organizations that don’t like Telegram very much are willing to fill with inaccurate information and they’re willing to spread the narratives about Telegram, which can result in strange situations, some of which we discussed earlier. For example, this French investigation.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:32)
Yeah, I’ve gotten to know you more and more and there’s a deep integrity to you that I think is good to show to the world. There’s a lot of attack vectors on user privacy and I think the most important, the last wall of protection is the actual people that are running the company, so it’s important to some degree for you to be out there to showing your true self.

Programming and video games


(01:49:55)
So we should say that also you didn’t mention, but you were a programmer from an early age. You started coding at 10. First things you built are a video game at 11, and then eventually 10 years later, 21, you programmed the initial versions of VK single-handedly. Can you talk to me about your programming journey that led to the creation of VK? What was the VK stack? Is it PHP mostly? How did you figure out how to program websites, all of that?
Pavel Durov
(01:50:27)
Yeah, I wasn’t as interested in probably websites at first. I didn’t even have access to the internet when I was 10 years old, but I liked video games. I didn’t have enough of them and the scarcity forced me to start building them, more computer games, just to play myself.

(01:50:49)
It’s actually an interesting thing that we sometimes don’t realize it, but scarcity leads to creativity, and one of the reasons you have so many people who love to code coming from the Soviet Union or other places which didn’t have much access to modern technology, and more importantly modern entertainment, is that perhaps we were not so much distracted by all this abundance of different entertainment options, which is not to say it’s bad to have those options. It’s just a fact that we sometimes don’t appreciate.

(01:51:34)
So I started to build computer games. My brother would sometimes guide me. For example, I would create a turn-based strategy. Of course, two-dimensional. Back then three-dimensional was too much for me. But it wasn’t as slick in terms of the scrolling FPS, frames per second, parameter, and I asked my brother how to optimize it. He would guide me, and this kind of learning and training really shaped my coding skills when I was younger.

(01:52:21)
Then I started to create video games for my classmates when we played, for example, tic-tac-toe on an infinite field in my class during the breaks. And not tic-tac-toe the three in a row, this was about five in a row and in an infinite field. This is a much more interesting game and it gets quite complicated if you keep playing it. My classmates used to love it and some of my classmates were really smart, champions of math olympiads, sons and daughters of professors at the university, and I decided, “No, I want to win every single time. I don’t want to lose even a single time. So how do I win? I need to practice more, but how do I practice more? I need an opponent stronger than myself.”

(01:53:08)
So I coded this game so that I would play against the computer and the computer would calculate, I think, four moves in advance to choose the optimal strategy. That wasn’t enough. Four moves in advance, I would still win over it. If I tried to calculate five or six, it was too slow, so asked my brother to help me out here. So he made this algorithm. Eventually, I trained myself to win every single time, even with the computer back then, we didn’t have modern CPUs, and I could still retain some self-confidence.

(01:53:54)
I would go back to school during breaks, play with my classmates, and soon people started to lose interest. None of my classmates wanted to play this game anymore. I killed the game because there’s…

VK origins & engineering


(01:54:09)
So after that, when I got into the St. Petersburg State University, it was quite boring just to study because it was too easy. So I thought, “What can I do there?” I created a website for the students of my faculty first. I organized the creation of digital answers to all exams and digitalized version of all lectures, which was something very unique back then. Remember, it was 25 years ago. I would put together a website where I would publish all this materials, and pretty soon it became super popular. I opened a discussion forum there. In a few years, I expanded to the university with all of its other departments, and then to other universities. We ended up having tens of thousands of users just as a student’s portal. We had all kinds of social features there, friends lists, photo albums, profiles, blogs. All of it.

(01:55:29)
It was quite successful, and after I graduated the university, one of my ex-classmates from the school reached out to me after reading about my successes in a newspaper, the main business newspaper of St. Petersburg, and he asked me, “Are you trying to build a Russian Facebook?” I said, “I’m not sure. What’s Facebook?” So we met. Since he graduated an American university two years before that, he showed me Facebook. I thought, “Well, I can’t already have all of this technology, but it’s valuable to know which elements I should get rid of in order to scale this thing and have millions of users.”

(01:56:25)
This is also something people don’t appreciate that sometimes in order to move forward and have more success, you have to get rid of things, including technology. Getting rid of features is super important.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:40)
Simplify, both for scaling and for making it amenable to just growing the user base where people get it immediately.
Pavel Durov
(01:56:50)
Yes. Otherwise, it’s just too complicated for the new user. The existing users will be happy, they’ll be praising you, they will be asking you to add more stuff to make it even more complicated, so it’s easy to lose track and get disoriented if you are only relying on the feedback of existing users.

(01:57:18)
So as a result, I started the website called VKontakte or VK, it means “in touch” in Russian, initially to solve my own personal problem. I graduated the university that same year and I wanted to be in touch or remain in touch with my ex-classmates from the university and the other fellow students. And of course, as a 20-year-old, I wanted to meet other people, including good-looking girls.

(01:57:46)
So I started to build it from scratch. For that one, I thought, “I’m not going to use any third-party libraries, modules because I want to make it as efficient as possible.” I was obsessing over every line of code, but then how do you start something that large? I didn’t have any prior experience creating a project of that scale, which would involve everything. Before, I would reuse some existing solutions. Here, I wanted to build from scratch.

(01:58:26)
So I called my brother. He was a post-doc student in Germany at the time in the Max Planck university, and I asked him, “What should I start from?” And he told me, “Just build a module to authorize users, just to log in, not even to sign out, just to log in because you can pre-populate the database with credentials and emails and passwords. It doesn’t really matter. But once you see that you can type in your password and email and you are in and it tells you, ‘Hello,’ using your name, then you will have a clear understanding where to go from there.”
Lex Fridman
(01:59:22)
Yeah. I mean, that’s true.
Pavel Durov
(01:59:24)
That’s one of the best advice I’ve ever got in my life. It worked perfectly, by the way. I started to build it and before I knew it, I would have there on the website photo albums, private messages, this guest book. We used to call it “thee wall” back on VK and I guess in the early days of Facebook. We’d end up building something even more sophisticated than Facebook at the time with more features.

(01:59:54)
I had a girlfriend at the time. I asked her, “We need to somehow come up with a database of all Russian schools and universities and the departments and subdivisions.” She did a great job trying to source all this information online or sometimes writing emails to universities saying, “Which departments do you have exactly at this point? We need to know,” or reaching out to the Department of Education, but in Russia and then in Ukraine, and then eventually in Belarus and in Kazakhstan and other countries where VK ended up to be the largest and most popular social network.

(02:00:38)
So we did a few things that were quite unique at the time, and for the first almost a year, I was the single employee of the company. I was the backend engineer, the front-end engineer, the designer. I was the customer support officer. I was the marketing guy as well, coming up with all the wordings and the announcements, coming up with competitions to promote VK, which worked quite well. That was an incredible experience that gave me knowledge of every aspect of a social networking platform.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:30)
Also understanding of how much a single person can do.
Pavel Durov
(02:01:32)
Exactly. It’s one of the reasons why I’d like to think I’m an efficient project manager and product manager inside Telegram because I will not take anything but ambitious deadlines from my team members. If somebody gives me, “Oh, I need three weeks to do that,” I always reply, “Well, I built the first version of VK in just two weeks. Why would you need three weeks? It seems like something you could make real in just three days. Three weeks? What are you going to do the rest of the three weeks apart from this three days?”

(02:02:18)
And the team knows me, and that’s why we are able today, Telegram, to move at a very good pace of innovation. Every month we’re pushing several meaningful features, I think out-competing everybody else in this industry in terms of what you can do within a short timeframe. So yes, that experience was invaluable.

(02:02:52)
As for the stack, I started from PHP and MySQL, Debian Linux, but very soon I realized, “I need to optimize this.” I started using Memcached. Apache servers were not enough anymore. We had to set up NGINX. And my brother was still living in Germany, so he couldn’t help me much for the first year of building VK. Sometimes I would manage to get through to him through a call. I would use an old-school phone to call him with wires. I said, “What do I do? How do I install this thing called NGINX? I’m not a Linux guy.” If he felt particularly kind that day and not too busy, he would show me the way to do it or set it up himself, but for the most part, I had to rely on just myself.

(02:03:53)
Having him there though helped when we started to grow fast and started to scale it, because at first, you realize, “One server is not enough. I need to buy another one. Then another one and another one.” The database should be in a different server. Then you have to split the database into tables. Then you have to come up with a way to chart the tables using some criteria that would make sense that wouldn’t break your user experience.

(02:04:28)
When we got to over a million users and beyond a dozen of servers surviving without the input from my brother in terms of taking care of the scaling aspect, it became impossible. I remember asking him to come back, “You need to help me with this thing. It’s starting to be really big.” What was worse is that since we became popular, somebody started to do DDoS attacks on us, as it always happens. And then we had people that wanted to buy a share of VK, and interestingly, every time we had a negotiation day, the DDoS attacks intensified, so we had to come up with a way to fight it. I remembered having many sleepless nights trying to figure it out.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:30)
So that was your introduction to all kinds of bad actors, DDoS, business. Then later you’d find out there’s such a thing called politics, and then later, geopolitics. But this is the initial stages, that it’s not just about creating cool stuff, it’s having to deal with, as you now have to deal with with Telegram, is seas of bad actors trying to test the limits of the system, trying to break the system.
Pavel Durov
(02:06:02)
Unfortunately. If we didn’t have bad actors and pressure, it would be the best job ever. You just get to create.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:12)
Yeah, yeah. And so the help from your brother, like you mentioned NGINX and charting the tables, some of this scaling issue is algorithmic nature. It’s almost like theoretical computer science. So it’s not just about buying more computers, it’s figuring out how to algorithmically make everything work extremely fast, so some of it’s mathematics. Some of it is pure engineering, but some of it is mathematics.
Pavel Durov
(02:06:44)
Yeah. So at that stage, I could do the basic stuff. I could understand how I implement scalability into the code base, how I chart my tables in the database, where I include Memcached instead of direct requests to the database. That was quite easy because it was still PHP back in the day.

(02:07:14)
When my brother got back from Germany somewhere around 2008, I asked him, “Can we make it even more efficient? Can we make it super fast and at the same time so that we would require even fewer servers to maintain the load?” And he said, “Yes, but PHP is not enough. I’ll have to rewrite big part of your data engines in C and C++.” I said, “Okay, let’s do that.”

(02:07:47)
He invited a friend of his to help him, another absolute champion in world’s programming contest, twice in a row, and they put together the first customized data engine, which was far more efficient than just relying on MySQL and Memcached because it was, first of all, more specialized, more low-level.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:19)
So they rewrote it in C, C++?
Pavel Durov
(02:08:21)
A large chunk of it. For example, the search, the ad engine, because VK had targeted ads, they built that. It was very efficient what they did. Eventually, the private messaging part, the public messages part. At some point, we realized there are very few websites online that load faster than VK.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:48)
Nice.
Pavel Durov
(02:08:49)
I remember in 2009, I went to Silicon Valley and I met Mark Zuckerberg the first time and some of the other core team members of early Facebook. Remember, Facebook was just four or five years old. And everybody kept asking me, “How come even here in Silicon Valley, VK loads faster than Facebook? Everything seems to appear instantly on your website. What’s the secret sauce?” That was one of the things that made them very curious
Lex Fridman
(02:09:25)
And that was always important to you, to have very low latency to make sure the thing loads because that’s one of the things Telegram is really known for. Even on crappy connections and all that kind of stuff, it just works extremely fast. Everything is fast.
Pavel Durov
(02:09:37)
As one of the core technological ideas, we prioritize speed. We think that people can notice the difference, even if it’s just 50 million millisecond difference. The difference is subconscious. It also allows us not just to be faster and more responsive, but also more efficient when it comes to the infrastructure, the expenses. Because if your code executes faster, it means you need fewer computational resources to run it.

(02:10:16)
So there is no way you can lose in making things faster, and that’s why we have always been very careful when hiring people. I would only hire a person if I’m ultimately certain is the best option because if you hire somebody who is maybe a little bit distracted, unexperienced, you may end up with inefficiencies in your code base that results in tens of millions of dollars of losses. And think about the responsibility, like if we jump to today from the VK days, Telegram is used by over a billion people. They open it dozens of times every day. Imagine the app opens with a slight delay, say, half-a-second delay. Multiply by dozens of times by a billion. It’s centuries, millennia lost for humanity without any reason other than just being sloppy.

Hiring a great team

Lex Fridman
(02:11:24)
That is so important to understand and so wise that it’s actually, if you’re just a little bit careless as a developer, you can introduce inefficiencies that are going to be very difficult to track down because you don’t know that it can be faster. The code doesn’t scream at you saying, “This could be much faster.” So you have to actually, as a craftsman, be very careful when you’re writing a code and always thinking, “Can this be done much more efficiently?” And it can be tiny things because they all propagate throughout the code, and so there’s a real cost in having a careless developer anywhere in the company because they can introduce that inefficiency and all the other developers won’t know. They’ll just assume it kind of has to be that way.

(02:12:11)
So there’s a real responsibility for every single individual developer that’s building any component of an app like Telegram to just always ask, “Okay, can this be done more efficiently? Can this be done more simply?” And that’s one of the most beautiful aspects, the art forms of programming, right?
Pavel Durov
(02:12:32)
Oh, yes, because when you manage to discover a way to simplify things, make them more efficient, you feel incredibly happy and proud and accomplished.

(02:12:47)
And to your point, I can recall a few instances in my career where firing an engineer actually resulted to an increase in productivity. Say you have two Android engineers building their app and then they just can’t make it. They’re not keeping up with the pace of the feature release schedule. And you think, “I probably have to hire a third one,” but then you notice that one of them is really weird, falling behind the schedule, complaining some of the time, doesn’t assume responsibility. And you ask, “So what if I just fire this person?” And you fire this person. In a few weeks, you realize you actually don’t need any new, never needed the third engineer. The problem was this guy who created more issues and more problems than he solved.

(02:13:49)
That is so counterintuitive because in developing tech projects, we tend to think that you just throw more people into something and then things get solved miraculously by themselves just because more people means more attention from them now.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:12)
That’s, again, extremely powerful. Steve Jobs talked about A players and B players, and there’s something that happens when you have B players, which is like the folks you’re talking about. Introduced into a team, they can somehow slow everybody down. They demotivate everybody. And it’s very counterintuitive that you basically, part of the work of creating a great team is removing the B players. It’s not just hiring more, generally speaking. It’s finding the “A players” and removing the people that are slowing things down.
Pavel Durov
(02:14:48)
Oh, yes, because the other thing that people don’t realize is how demotivating working with a B player is. Everybody can tell if the other person, the other engineer they’re working with is really competent. And it’s very visible if the person is not comfortable. They’re asking the wrong questions, they keep lagging behind. And at a certain point, if you’re an A player, you get this dissatisfaction, this feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential, accomplish what you’re really meant to accomplish because of this person working next to you or pretending to work next to you.

(02:15:37)
And by the way, in some cases, it’s not because the person is lazy. In some cases it’s just the mental, the intellectual ability is not there. It’s not about experience. Most often it’s about natural ability and persistence. In 90% of cases, it’s just the inability to focus on one task for an extended period of time. Not everybody has this ability. So for people who do have this ability, it’s an insult to work alongside someone who is distracted and cannot go deep in the projects that they’re responsible for.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:27)
On this small tangent, what’s your hiring process? So you’ve shown and you’ve talked about how you use competitions often, coding competitions to hire to find great engineers. What’s your thinking behind that?
Pavel Durov
(02:16:40)
Well, it’s in line with my overall philosophy. I think competition leads to progress. If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition? A coding contest where everybody who wants to join your company as an engineer or just wants to get some prize money or validation can demonstrate their skills, and then we just select the best. Or if we are not certain because there’s not enough data to hire somebody, we just repeat the contest with another task, get more data, get more winners, then repeat again.

(02:17:31)
And at some point, you realize, “Oh, actually this guy has competed in 10 of our contests since he was 16 years old or 14 years old. Now he’s 20 or 21. He won in eight of these competitions. He seems to be really good in JavaScript on Android, Java, and also C++. Why not hire this person?” There’s some consistency there.

(02:18:04)
And a lot of these people, they have never worked in a big company before, which is priceless because in a big company, people tend to shift responsibility. They have this shared responsibility wherein nobody fully understands who can take credit for a project, who can take blame for a project. Inside Telegram, it’s pretty clear, and these competitions are the closest experience to what people will have when working at Telegram.

(02:18:46)
So for example, we want to implement certain very tricky animation and redesign to the profile page of the Telegram’s Android version. And the Android app, it’s an open-source app. Anybody can take its code and play with it. So as a result, we would not just select the best person and hire this person, we would also select the best solution to the problem because we would not suggest the contestants to solve trivial problems. It’s something that’s valuable. It saves a lot of time for us in terms of development.

(02:19:24)
And because I always had this large social media platforms, which I could use to promote these competitions, somehow both VK and Telegram were very popular among engineers and designers, other tech people, I had no issue to promote this contest and find the right people ever. And what can be better than, for an employee of your company, somebody who has been a user of it? This person has no prior experience of using Telegram.
Pavel Durov
(02:20:00)
This person has no prior experience of using Telegram. Their understanding would be very limited. Why would I even try to hire somebody from LinkedIn who worked at Google and other companies, is used to receiving salary for nothing, is used to shift responsibility and being stuck in endless meetings and have very limited understanding of what Telegram stands for? It’s just crazy if you think about it.

Telegram engineering & design

Lex Fridman
(02:20:40)
Because of that, you’re extremely selective and slow in hiring. People really have to earn their spot and then as a result, I got a chance to sit in one of the team meetings where people discuss the different features that are being developed, the different ideas, some of which are at the very cutting edge and so you get to see behind the scenes how it’s possible to have such a fast rate of idea generation. You generate the idea, you implement the prototype and then eventually it becomes an actual feature in the product. That’s why you have this kind of half hilarious, half incredible fact that for many, as compared to WhatsApp and Signal, you’ve led the way on many other features. Many of the features we take for granted now, many of which we know and love, like the auto-delete timer. That was seven years ahead of any other messenger. Message editing, replies. These are all obvious things I’ve even forgotten for some of them that they were never part. I think auto-delete timer is a really brilliant idea.
Pavel Durov
(02:21:54)
We implemented in 2013 in the Secret Chats. Funny thing about it is then when other apps started to copy it, WhatsApp seven years after and then Signal and some other of these apps, they initially even copied the exact timestamps. For example, if we had one, three and five seconds, they would also have one, three and five seconds. They tried not to change it because they were not sure what was the magic sauce behind the feature. Ironically, it happens with many of these things. For example, when we design how you reply to a message and you have a small snippet showing that you’re replying to this message and now you’re typing your response, then there is a small snippet into the message itself that if you tap on it highlights the original message you’re replying to. Seems pretty obvious, but there are certain design decisions that we were implementing at the time and we got this vertical line on the left and all these other small things that are completely arbitrary, you can do it in a different way, but somehow the entire industry ended up copying exactly that solution. Now whenever you go to WhatsApp, Instagram direct, Facebook Messenger, Signal, it doesn’t matter, you would see exactly the same or pretty much similar experience because nobody really wants to take the risk and innovate. If something works, why not just copy it?
Lex Fridman
(02:23:32)
We should say that it’s done extremely well. The vertical line and the highlighting, I mean all of these are tiny little strokes of genius. By highlighting the text in a certain way that from a design perspective makes it very clear that this part was written before and thing under it is your reply. The distinction between the different formatting, the text. Listen, I know how much typography is an art form. There’s a lot of interacting, graphic artistic elements inside Telegram that all have to play together extremely well. Like you pointed out to me, this thing that just blew my mind, which is the background gradient of Telegram, shifts. It changes and it adjusts really nicely to the bubbles, the chat bubbles and then there’s graphic elements on top of the gradient that all interplay together. All of that has to work really nicely without sacrificing clarity. Everything’s just intuitive. That’s very difficult to create. That is art. On top of that, super fast.
Pavel Durov
(02:24:40)
That’s the hardest part. To make it look so that designers love it is one thing. The real challenge is make it look the way the designers love it and make it work on the weakest device as possible. Oldest, cheapest, smartphones you can imagine. If you take the moving gradient on the background of every Telegram chat, this is something most people don’t notice, but they can feel it.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:13)
They notice it subconsciously or something like that. There is a pleasant feeling. There’s a feeling, there’s a pleasant feeling when you’re reading a chat and that’s where the design contributes to that. I think a gradient really does. I really love that about Telegram, the gradient. Not the technical thing you described, but the feeling of it and then the technical aspect of creating that feeling is incredible. I could probably come up with all kinds of algorithms of rendering that gradient that’s going to be super inefficient and so doing that efficiently is like…
Pavel Durov
(02:25:46)
Or efficient, but not too beautiful because even doing something so trivial as a gradient can result in noticeable lines in the gradient that a person can instantly say, oh no, it’s not the right thing. You can have to introduce certain randomness there and then you have the gradient, but it’s not enough. It’s too plain. You want to have certain pattern as an overlay, but it should be simple enough not to distract you from the content, but it has to be entertaining enough to create a good feeling about the whole app. Another question, what kind of objects you want to include in this pattern and how this pattern would work? Will it be based on pixels or would it be vector-based and would it be vector-based so they will be infinitely scalable and high quality? I think for the default pattern and the default background, which is based on four colors, it’s not a gradient based on two colors, it’s four colors and they’re constantly shifting. I probably look through several thousand variations of that because this is such an important decision to make. It’s the default background. Of course you can change it actually. You can set up your own four colors for that. You can change it.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:09)
No way. Really?
Pavel Durov
(02:27:10)
Yes, you can do it and you want to rely on certain deeply hard-coded biological properties of the human mind. Which color do you want to use? Is it going to be blue? Is it going to be yellow? Is it going to be green? Each color has a different meaning in our brain and what kind of objects you want to put there? Something from our childhood? Something from nature or something that can create a different kind of mood? This is just one detail of the app. There are many details. When you send a message, you are done typing a message and you just then tap send and then the message gradually appears in the chat. How does it happen? You want the input field to slowly morph into the actual message.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:03)
To the message. Yeah.
Pavel Durov
(02:28:04)
You want this to be done regardless of the contents of the message because sometimes the width would be different. Sometimes it’ll be containing media or link preview or other stuff that will change the message bubble. You go through countless different scenarios and make sure every one of them works great, even if this message contains 4,000 characters. Then you look at all the platforms, iOS, Android and all the old devices, all kinds of outdated operating systems and the hardware and you cross the two because you can have this really bad old phone, but using the newest operating system version, so what do you do? What kind of bugs you get there? Then of course, since Telegram works on tablets as well and our iOS version works on an iPad, which I love a lot, you have to understand that everything can be really big. It can consume a lot of space on your screen and then it’ll trigger using more computational resources to render it. There are a lot of nuances to it, but as long as you obsess over every small detail, at least every detail that really counts, you can get to a user experience… If you’re really used to Telegram, if you’ve been a regular user for at least a few weeks, going back to any other messaging app feels like a serious downgrade.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:53)
Yeah, I mean there’s so many really magical moments. For example, the way a message evaporates when you delete it, that is a really pleasant experience.
Pavel Durov
(02:30:05)
Oh yeah. Boy was it hard to make, particularly on Android. This is this Thanos snap effect, right? The message is broken into tens of thousands particles, which go away like dust in the wind. It looks great, but it was so hard to make.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:28)
Probably one of my favorite GUI graphical things. It’s just art. It’s pure art. It’s incredible. It’s good to hear that it has been really fought over and thought through. It’s extremely well done.
Pavel Durov
(02:30:45)
No, you can’t pull it off if you’re not going deep in this. Then you don’t want to distract people from their communication with all this additional animation. You want them to be invisible in a way.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:06)
They create the feeling, but they don’t create distraction.
Pavel Durov
(02:31:09)
Yes. In order to do that, you have to overcome even more challenges. For example, you mentioned this deletion effect, message evaporates. If you do the animation, if you show the animation first and then the message that is preceding the deleted message that is going after the just deleted message move closer to each other, then it doesn’t feel right. It feels too long, too imposing. What you want to do is you want the message disappear while the messages around it go closer to each other to fill the resulting gap. Then you imagine what it involves. Redrawing the entire screen. On top of this very complicated animation, you have to think about things like which kind of messages were there before it after. It just adds to complexity.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:14)
Once again on all kinds of devices, all kinds of operating systems, all kinds of tablets, phones, desktop, all of that.
Pavel Durov
(02:32:21)
Once you accomplish it, it gives you this immense sense of pride because nobody is doing this. Nobody really cares. In a way maybe they’re right not to care. Maybe nobody notices this, but there is something about it that feels wrong when such things are neglected because I understand that every day, tens of millions of people around the world are deleting messages. What kind of experience they get? Is this an experience that maybe even subconsciously inspires them and makes their hearts sing even a little bit? Fills them with joy? Lightens up their mood, even a little bit by 0.001%? Is it something that is just basic and I think if we can bring some value in people’s lives, even through this subtle details, we have to definitely invest our time in it.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:32)
Some joy. Not just sort of value like productivity, but joy. I think Steve Jobs, Jony Ive talked about this, they would put so much love and effort in the design of everything, including things that weren’t visible in the initial pc, personal computers because they believe that you somehow through osmosis, the users will be able to feel the love that the designers put into the thing and you’re absolutely right. It’s not about deleting messages. I feel a little inkling of joy when I see that evaporation animation. It’s just nice. I’m happier because of it. I feel that effort and I think a billion users feel that.
Pavel Durov
(02:34:21)
People like when other people care.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:23)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s exactly what it is. Of course there’s the more sexy things like all the emojis and the stickers, the gifts, many of those are just, they’re a little like art pieces.
Pavel Durov
(02:34:39)
That’s again an intersection of art and technology because you look at the stickers, which Telegram launched way before most of this other apps-
Lex Fridman
(02:34:48)
Three years and eight months ahead.
Pavel Durov
(02:34:50)
… ahead of WhatsApp, yes. The stickers that WhatsApp ended up launching three years and eight months after were not the first version was not really good because they just did regular GIFs or WebM videos, which were not based on vector graphics. What we did is vector animations. Each of these stickers is only several kilobytes, sometimes maybe maximum 20, 30 kilobytes in size, but it says 180 frames. We were able to run them at 60 frames per second on all devices. It’s also very challenging. It was a challenging thing to do. We had so much headache trying to make it work. Nobody even tried to do anything like this before us because it’s crazily difficult. As a result, you have these fluid animations. You have this really nice user experience. Somebody sends you a sticker, you don’t have to wait for it to load because it’s so lightweight and it starts moving instantly.

(02:35:58)
Then of course, it’s not just engineering. You have to find designers that are able to create the stickers using vector graphics, which means they’re based on curves described by formulas, not just created as photographs with pixels. Where do you find these people? Again, we did competitions, but was not easy to assemble a team of artists/engineers I would say, that are able to do something like this. This is a unique form of art and this allowed us to do a revolution in stickers and then another revolution in animated emoji that you can add into messages, custom animated emoji. I don’t think anybody did that. I think Telegram is still the only one allowing users to do that because you can include 100 of animated emoji in a message and they will be animated and it’ll be moving and your device won’t crash. It’s probably unnecessary and crazy, but we think somewhere in this intersection of art and engineering, true quality is created.

(02:37:14)
Then of course, more recently we expanded into what we call Telegram Gifts, which are essentially blockchain-based collectibles that you can demonstrate on your Telegram profile so that they get social relevance, but you can also use them to congratulate your friends and close ones with their birthdays and other holidays and that was received extremely well.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:41)
Yeah, they can hold value, they can increase in value, you could trade them in that aspect, but to me still, vector graphics and it’s not just simple graphics, it’s incredibly intricate graphics. The vector makes it very efficient, but it also allows you to create, maybe incentivizes the artist, enables them, incentivizes them, to create super detailed intricate elements. Then the final result, you would think it wouldn’t matter, but the final result has a lot of stuff going on and it allows you to scale on arbitrary devices. Now it’s like this little… Usually GIFs from back in the day and still in meme form, are low resolution and so usually people don’t put details and intricate art into it, but here with vector graphics it’s like a million things going on. It allows you to play with different animations. Like you showed me this thing where you send and you hold for a while on the send button and so you can share with the person you send a message to this animation that you’ve encoded. There’s a bunch of stuff going on when they read the message.
Pavel Durov
(02:38:59)
Yes, we have a lot of features like that when we use this art to allow people to express themselves and most people don’t even know about these features.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:10)
I didn’t know about it. That was cool. That was cool.
Pavel Durov
(02:39:12)
The other application of the same technology is reactions on Telegram because we made it a goal to make sure that people feel joy when they just send you a like. Something so trivial as just adding a like to a message should be an action that you want to perform again and again and again.

Encryption

Lex Fridman
(02:39:43)
Another feature, on the more serious side, is end-to-end encryption. You led the industry in that. It was launched one year and three months ahead. Can you speak to why you decided to add end-to-end encryption and how you developed the encryption algorithm in the beginning? What was your thinking behind that?
Pavel Durov
(02:40:03)
At 2013 when we were launching Telegram, we were aware of the serious issue with privacy that Edward Snowden made very clear. We thought, yes, we’re designing this product in a way that is already extremely secure, but we want to make sure that not even we can access user messages. We understood very clearly that a bunch of people who were born in Russia don’t necessarily inspire trust. That’s why we made Telegram open source, so all our apps have been available on GitHub since 2013 and then we added end-to-end encryption in our Secret Chats, which WhatsApp copied a few years after. One year and three months ahead they just started to test it. They rolled this out I think 2016, which is three years after us and the only reason I think the rest of the industry had to do it is because we set the standard.

(02:41:23)
It was incredibly important back in the day and at the same time we realized certain limitations of end-to-end encryption. Within that design, that architecture, you can’t support very large chat communities with consistent persistent chat histories. You can’t support huge one-to-many channels. You’d have issues with maintaining bots that have lots of incoming messages. Multiple device support becomes tricky. People will end up losing some of the documents they share. We also saw a lot of issues and we ended up having this sort of hybrid experience where depending on your use case and your requirements, you can choose the level of encryption that we want to have.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:27)
That’s why you chose to go opt-in for end-to-end encryption. The trade off there that you are describing is between for people who really care about specific messages, extreme privacy on those messages and usability, like being able to sync across multiple devices, having groups that are 200,000 people. All of those features, quality of life features, there’s a trade-off between those and end-to-end encryption. You lean towards letting users enable end-to-end encryption for cases when they want to be super secure.
Pavel Durov
(02:43:04)
Yes. Secret Chats are not just end-to-end encrypted. There are certain limitations that are both a feature and a bug. For example, you can’t screenshot them. You can’t forward any document, any message from them, which is not necessarily something you need when you are trying to get some work done and you are just communicating with your team on a project. It became very clear to us that there are different needs here and if you try to combine both in one type of chat, you will end up losing a lot of utility. We at Telegram, we don’t use any collaboration tool for teamwork. We use Telegram to build Telegram. We felt instantly when we were trying to switch to say Secret Chats, to share large documents and tried to get work done, it was just not adapted for it. At the same time, if you were really paranoid, you think, I don’t want to be screenshotted, I don’t want to have any leaks, I don’t even trust Telegram, I only trust code. Secret Chats are the best option. I believe is the most secure means of communication today.

Open source

Lex Fridman
(02:44:36)
We should say that there’s a lot of other aspects to this that are important. For example, Telegram is the only app that has open source reproducible builds for both Android and iOS. Why is this important?
Pavel Durov
(02:44:49)
You need reproducible builds in order to verify that the app really does what it claims, really encrypts data in a way that it is described on its website. For that you need to make your apps open source for any researchers to have a look at it. Telegram has been open source since 2013. Apps like WhatsApp have never been open source, so you don’t really know what they’re doing and how exactly they encrypt your messages. What’s important here though is to understand whether the version of the app that you download from the app store corresponds exactly to the source code that you can view on GitHub. For that you need reproducible builds.

(02:45:48)
As you said, Telegram is the only popular messaging app that does that. We allow people to make sure both on Android and the iOS that the source code of Telegram on GitHub and the app you are actually using is the same app. I think it’s incredibly important, not just to gain people’s trust, but just to stay transparent and open about it. When I make this claim that Telegram’s Secret Chats are the most secure way of communicating, I really mean it because I haven’t seen any fact contradicting this claim, at least among the popular messaging app. You say WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage. None of them have reproducible builds on both iOS and Android. None of them had at least at the same level put so much effort into making sure that the algorithms that you use in order to encrypt data are not algorithms that have been handed to you by some agency in order to create a honey pot, at least from what I know about our competitors. I don’t think they went through the same process.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:23)
We should say that the entirety of the software stack in Telegram is done from scratch internally to Telegram. We’re talking about not just the encryption, but everything running on the servers. The servers are built out, the hardware and the software are all done internally, which is one of the ways you reduce the attack surface on the entire stack that handles the messages.
Pavel Durov
(02:47:45)
It does make it more secure because if Snowden’s revelations taught us anything is that very often open source tools, modules, libraries, that they used by everybody, ended up having certain flaws and security issues that make software vulnerable. It’s also a way to make sure you are doing things the most efficient way possible, but it’s extremely difficult to do that. You really have to have exceptional talent in your team to achieve this level of thoroughness, to go to a low level of coding that allows you to recreate from scratch database engines, web servers, entire programming languages because the programming language we use on the back end to develop the API for the client apps is also entirely built by our team.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:01)
Removing, minimizing the reliance on open source libraries is extremely difficult as most companies, they rely on open source libraries.
Pavel Durov
(02:49:09)
Well, I wouldn’t say we are completely independent from that. We use Linux on the back end. There’s no way of avoiding it for us at the moment, but for the most part we are much more self-reliant than most other apps.

Edward Snowden

Lex Fridman
(02:49:26)
You mentioned Edward Snowden. A long time ago you wanted to work together with him, perhaps to share expertise, to understand the full realm of what it takes to achieve cybersecurity. What do you make of his case? What lessons do you learn from what he has uncovered and maybe even broadly, what impact has his work had on the world, do you think?
Pavel Durov
(02:49:53)
Well, the main lesson is not everything is what it seems. You would discover and this is something that I found quite shocking at the time, that a lot of people who you thought were security and cryptography experts ended up being agents of the NSA in one way or the other, promoting flawed encryption standards. You wouldn’t end up discovering that your government that was supposed to be limited in how it can surveil its people, actually doesn’t consider itself that limited. That was very valuable for the world to understand.

(02:50:50)
I guess it also can be a lesson demonstrated that we humans don’t get the balance right. 9/11 created a situation when the government had to respond and it responded, but it overreacted. It ended up eroding certain basic rights and freedoms including the right to privacy because the government always wants to increase its powers and the government always tries to do it at the expense of citizens. You have the situation when the cure is worse than the disease. I think it was incredibly brave to do what Edward did. I didn’t get to work with him. Whoever see him in person, we keep in touch, we sometimes communicate, but we’re not close. I still, I think what he did is laudable. I hope someday we meet.

Intelligence agencies

Lex Fridman
(02:51:59)
You yourself have faced the full force of various governments, intelligence agencies. Is there any intelligence agency you’re afraid of? Any government you’re afraid of?
Pavel Durov
(02:52:15)
I think they should be equally afraid of or equally not afraid of, in a way. It’s not that intelligence services can kill you and the other can’t kill you.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:26)
They all can kill you?
Pavel Durov
(02:52:27)
I guess they all can kill me one way or the other, but it’s a matter of whether I’m afraid of death.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:34)
This goes back to the beginning of our conversation, I think, multiple times. You’re in general fearless in the face of the pressure.
Pavel Durov
(02:52:42)
That would be a very bold statement, but I proved to be quite stress resilient and it’s not that you don’t have fear. You can have fear, but you overcome this fear. I don’t think there is anything at this point that can happen to change the way I am.

Iran and Russia government pressure

Lex Fridman
(02:53:11)
You went through a lot from 2011 to 2014, government pressure that you refused to give into, that led you to create Telegram and let go of VK. Then in 2018, Russia and Iran decided to ban Telegram. That was another example of pressure. Can you take me through that saga in 2018?
Pavel Durov
(02:53:35)
In 2018 Telegram started to become popular. I think we had something like 200 million users and it increasingly became popular in places like Iran and Russia and other countries where sometimes people have something to hide from the government. In Iran, people use Telegram to protest against the government. They had these huge channels that they would use to organize the protests and eventually the government couldn’t keep up. They decided to ban Telegram. People would still keep using it though using VPNs. It didn’t help. The government invested a lot in coming up with their own messaging app. They had several teams competing for the title of the nationally reigning messaging app. All these apps failed. People still preferred Telegram. Interestingly, Iran banned Telegram, but WhatsApp wasn’t banned.
Pavel Durov
(02:55:01)
WhatsApp wasn’t banned. Or at least they unbanned WhatsApp soon after. At the same time starting in mid-2017 or late-2017, Russia demanded that Telegram hands them the encryption keys. They thought these things exist, something that would allow them to read messages of every person on Telegram or at least every person on Telegram in Russia. And we told them, it’s impossible. If you have to ban us, ban us. And this is what they ended up doing in spring 2018. And that was quite fun because they were trying to block our IP addresses, but we were prepared for that and we came up with this technology that allowed us to rotate IP addresses, replacing them with new ones every time the sensor blocks our existing addresses. And then it was completely automated. We had millions of IP addresses. We would be burning through them. We set up this movement called Digital Resistance when system administrators and engineers all around the world, both inside and outside Russia could set up their own proxy servers and their own IP addresses for Telegram to rely on in order to bypass censorship.

Apple


(02:56:41)
We ended up spending I think, millions of dollars on that. And as a result, the sensor got crazy there. They would ban IP addresses and large subnets of IP addresses and huge subnets, which resulted in a weird situation where parts of the country’s infrastructure started to go down. People were trying to pay for groceries in the supermarkets and nothing would work because the Russian sensor blocked too many IP addresses and some of the subnets were used to host other unrelated services. Even some Russian social networks and media got affected. Banks. So they had to start being more selective in how they combat our anti-censorship tools.

(02:57:41)
The biggest resistance we got at the time was from Apple. Apple didn’t allow us to update Telegram in the app store saying for at least four weeks that we have to come to an agreement with Russia first who said it’s not possible. They said, “We will allow you to push your update for Telegram worldwide except for Russia.” We didn’t want to do that. Almost lost hope. At some point I said, “Maybe this is the only way. Maybe we should leave the Russian market. Stop allowing users from Russia to download the app from the app store.” Which would mean it’s over. We helped organize certain protests in defense of Telegram and privacy and freedom of speech in 2018 in Moscow. There was hilarious people flying paper airplanes.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:47)
I saw that.
Pavel Durov
(02:58:49)
And at some point I decided I have to make a statement. I have to say that Apple sided with the censor. That we are trying to do the right thing here, but without Apple we can’t do much because people can’t download your app anymore. I published it in my channel and then New York Times picked it up with the picture of the protesters flying paper airplanes. Apple was criticized in that story and I thought, well, Apple should probably come back to the right side of history here. And I waited for one day and two days. In the meantime, since we’ve been unable to update Telegram for more than a month, it started to fall apart because the new version of iOS came out and it made the old versions of Telegram obsolete. Some features that used to work stop working and users all over the world start to suffer. People that had nothing to do with Russia from other parts of the world experienced issues with Telegram. So it was really serious and I said to my team, you know what if by 6:00 P.M. today … I think it was a Friday. Nothing changes and Apple doesn’t allow us to push the version of Telegram through, let’s just forget about the Russian market. Let’s keep going because the rest of the world is more important. It’s sad, but what can we do?
Lex Fridman
(03:00:44)
Which by the way, removes all the people that want to protest all the people that want to talk in Russia and removes their ability to have a voice in the most popular messaging app in that part of the world.
Pavel Durov
(03:00:55)
Yes. Magically 15 minutes to the time I was planning to remove Telegram from the Russian app store in order to proceed globally, Apple reached out to us and said, “It’s okay. Your update is approved.” And we managed to keep playing this hide and seek game with the sensor bypassing censorship through digital resistance. In Iran, it was a little bit different because we realized it would’ve been too expensive to try to come up with all these IP addresses, and in addition, it was not clear whether we wouldn’t be in violation of the sanctions regime. So we did something else. We created an economic incentive for people who would set up proxy servers for Telegram. Any person, say an Iranian engineer could come up with a proxy server, distribute its address among users in Iran, and whoever connected through the proxy of this person would be able to see a pinned chat, an ad placed there by the system administrator, the owner of the proxy. And this is how you can monetize your proxy. So it created this market which resulted in Iranians fixing their own problem. And as a result, we kept millions or maybe 10s of millions of Iranian users. Up until this day I think Telegram is still banned in Iran today, but we probably have something like 50 million people relying on Telegram from that country.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:08)
So that people find a way around.
Pavel Durov
(03:03:10)
People find a way around.

Poisoning

Lex Fridman
(03:03:11)
That’s ingenious. That’s really great to hear. I have to ask you about this. After having spent many days with you, I learned of something that you’ve never talked about at the time, have not talked about to this day, that there was an assassination attempt on you using what appears to be poisoning in 2018. I think to me, it showed this seriousness of this fight to uphold the freedom of speech for everyone, for all people of earth that you’re doing. I have to say it would mean a lot to me if you tell me this story.
Pavel Durov
(03:03:55)
Well, this is something I never talked about publicly because I didn’t want people to freak out particularly at the time, it was spring 2018. We were trying to raise funds for TON, a blockchain project working with all kinds of VCs and investors. In the meantime, we had a couple of countries trying to ban Telegram. So it wasn’t exactly the best moment for me to start sharing anything related to my personal health. But that was something that is hard to forget. I never fall ill. I believe I have perfect health. I very rarely have headaches or bad cough. I don’t take pills because I don’t have to take pills. And that was the only instant in my life when I think I was dying.

(03:05:05)
I came back home, opened the door of my townhouse, the place I rented. I had this weird neighbor and he left something for me there around the door. And one hour after when I was already in my bed … So I was living alone. I felt very bad. I felt pain all over my body. I tried to get up and go to the bathroom, but while I was going there, I felt that functions of my body started to switch off. First the eyesight and hearing, then I had difficulty breathing. Everything accompanied by very acute pain. Heart, stomach, all blood vessels. It’s a difficult thing to explain, but one thing I was certain about is, yeah, this is it.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:25)
You thought you were going to die.
Pavel Durov
(03:06:26)
Yeah. This is it. Because I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see anything. Was very painful. I think it’s over. I thought, well, I had a good life. I managed to accomplish a few things. And then I collapsed on the floor, but I don’t remember it because the pain covered everything. I found myself on the floor the next day. Was already bright and I couldn’t stand up. I was super weak. I looked at my arms and my body, blood vessels were broken all over my body. Something like this never happened to me. I couldn’t walk for two weeks after. I stayed at my place and I decided not to tell most of my team about it because again, I didn’t want them to worry. But it was tough. That was tough.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:35)
Did that make you afraid of the road you are walking, meaning all the governments, all the intelligence agencies, all the people like we mentioned? It’s like you’re playing a video game. You started with VK where you’re just trying to build a thing that scales and all of a sudden you find out there’s DDoS attacking the security, the integrity of the infrastructure, and then you realize there’s politics and then you realize there’s geopolitics and all of these forces are interested in controlling channels of communication, and you’re just a curious guy who created a platform for everybody on the earth to talk, and all of a sudden you realize there’s a lot of people attacking you. How did that change your view? Did that make you more scared of the world?
Pavel Durov
(03:08:42)
Interestingly, not at all. If anything, I felt even more free after that. It wasn’t the first time I thought I was going to die. I had an experience when I assumed something bad is going to happen to me a few years before that also in relation to my work. But after you survive something like this, you feel like you’re living on bonus time. So in a way, you died a long time ago, and every new day you get is a gift.
Lex Fridman
(03:09:30)
Is a bonus.
Pavel Durov
(03:09:31)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(03:09:32)
And the first time you’re referring to would that have to do with the complexity that was happening with the pressure from the government on VK? The increasing pressure and you had to figure out what to do, and you understood that you’re losing control of VK that moment.
Pavel Durov
(03:09:52)
The first of these instances was in December 2011. December 2011 you had this huge protest on the streets of Moscow. They didn’t trust in the integrity of the election results to the state Duma in Russia. I remember 2011, I still lived in Russia running VK. There was no Telegram. So the government demanded that we take down the opposition groups of Navalny from VK that had hundreds of thousands of members and that were used to organize this protest. And I very publicly refused to do that. I just decided it’s not the right thing to do. People have the right to assemble. And I mocked the Prosecutor who handed me that demand. They put out a scan of it. And next to it a photo of a dog in a hoodie with its tongue out. And I said … This is my official response to the prosecutor’s request to ban the opposition groups. That was very funny at the moment. But then I had armed policemen trying to get into my apartment, and I thought about many things at that moment. I asked myself, did I make the right choice? And I came to the conclusion that I made the right choice and I asked myself, what would be the next thing that would logically follow from this? And I realized they’re probably going to put me in prison, so what am I going to do about it? I asked myself.

(03:12:04)
And I told myself, I’m going to starve myself to death. It’s something that probably many men have. They’re ready to die for other people or certain principles they strongly believe in. I’m not alone here. I guess Edward Snowden was ready to die as well, or some other people like Assange. Also, at that moment, I realized there’s no way to communicate securely. I need to tell my brother what’s going on. They’re probably going after him. How do I tell him without betraying him? Because in 2011, remember WhatsApp was already there. I think they launched in 2009, but it had zero encryption. All messages were plain text in transit, meaning that even your system administrator, let alone your carrier had access to your messages it was only after Telegram started this push for encryption that this other apps suddenly remembered that privacy wasn’t their DNA as WhatsApp founders famously stated, but it must have been a dormant gene in 2011.
Lex Fridman
(03:13:28)
Yeah. Yeah.
Pavel Durov
(03:13:33)
In 2011, there was no way to send a message in secure way. And I also told myself, if I’m going to survive this, I’m definitely launching a secure messaging app. Somehow it ended up not being too bad. I was summoned to the Prosecutor, answered some silly questions, fewer questions that I had to answer more recently in the French investigation case. But it was the beginning of the end. It was clear that there’s no way I’m going to be allowed to run VK the way I wanted it to run. That was the moment I packed my backpack and just started to wait. I moved to hotel and realized any day I can leave the country, I kept running VK. I started to design Telegram and assembling the team. But I knew my days in Russia were numbered.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:01)
First I really have to say for myself from I think millions, maybe hundreds of millions, maybe the entirety of Earth, thank you for putting your life on the line in those cases, I think freedom of speech is fundamental to the flourishing of humanity. And it depends on people willing to put everything on the line for their principles. So thank you. Quick pause. I need a bathroom break. All right, we’re back. And once again, we had a super long day and the fact that you would spend many hours with me, thank you for powering through. We got this. It’s already late at night.
Pavel Durov
(03:15:45)
Thanks for doing this.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:47)
Okay. So there is increasing indication I think from things I’ve seen online that Russia is considering banning Telegram. First of all, do you think this might happen and what effect do you think this might have on humanity and in general what do you think about this?
Pavel Durov
(03:16:07)
It can definitely happen. As you said, there are certain indications. There have been certain attempts to partially ban it. Telegram is no longer accessible in parts of Russia such as Dagestan and will be incredibly sad if Russia restores its attempts to ban Telegram because currently it’s been used by its population for all kinds of purposes, not just personal communication or economic business activities, but also it’s the only platform which allows the Russian people to access independent sources of information. If you think about media outlets such as BBC or any other non-Russian of source of information, they’re only accessible in Russia through Telegram in the form of Telegram channels. Their websites banned. Some other social media sites banned. And as you said, there are indications that Russia is planning to migrate users from existing messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram to their own homegrown tool, which would of course be fully transparent to the government and wouldn’t allow voices independent from the government to express themselves.

(03:17:53)
It’s certainly an alarming trend. We see these attempts in countries that are not famous for protecting freedom of speech, but also increasingly in countries that have been known to protect freedoms. And this creates this vicious circle because in a way, European countries trying to fight freedom of speech under pretexts that sound legitimate, such as combating misinformation or election interference, they create precedents and they legitimize restrictions to freedom of speech, which then in turn be used by authoritarian regimes and they would say in places like China or Iran that they’re not doing anything different. It’s the norm now to restrict voices that don’t go in line with the narrative.

(03:19:11)
That’s sad because one of the things that makes our life interesting is this abundance of different viewpoints of different people that we get to experience. You limit the freedom of people, you inevitably decelerate economic growth, level of happiness, the way people can contribute to the society, the way people can express themselves. I personally think it would be a huge mistake to ban a tool like Telegram in any country, particularly a large country such as Russia, because the Russian people are incredibly talented and resilient people. They’re among the first to start utilizing some of these recent innovations that Telegram implements. They’re the early adopters. I’d say them and also the Americans, perhaps other people from Eastern Europe like Ukrainians and Southeast Asians, they’re among the first people to start using any new addition that we launch. They’re incredibly hungry for innovation.
Lex Fridman
(03:20:32)
So all that said, as part of the propaganda and in general, there’s attacks on you all over the place. There’s misinformation. I’ve read a bunch of things that are, I think in a systematic way, lying about you, lying about telegram from all angles. Why do you get attacked so much by everybody?
Pavel Durov
(03:20:56)
For protecting freedom of speech. It’s not a way to make a lot of friends. Because you would inevitably find yourself in a situation where you would be protecting the freedom of the opposition to the current government in any country to express themselves. And then the initial reaction and a very basic instinctive reaction of any government would be to say our position shouldn’t be trusted and allowed to express themselves because they’re actually are agents of some foreign rival, a geopolitical force that wants to destroy our country. This is something that every authoritarian regime in history used. You take Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, Maoist China, they always use the same trick that say, “We need to limit your freedom of speech because these people who are masquerading as opposition are actually the agents of this other country that wants to take over.” That’s why their citizens forget about their freedoms. And now increasingly you see similar attempts in free countries.

(03:22:33)
The initial instinct from say, President Macron’s team, when they’re confronted with some footage. For example, the footage of his wife slapping him would be to say it’s all fake Russian imagery. Something that is inaccurate. Something that is misinformation or interference. And then when they are confronted with more information, they have to refine the narrative. So when you find yourself in a situation that you’re running this platform like Telegram, and then you protect the freedom to express of ideas that don’t go in line with the mainstream narrative, you often find yourself in this crossfire when the forces in power will say that you must be working with some foreign government that they don’t like. Inevitably they would say that, oh, if you’re protecting this voices, it’s not right. They love you when you are protecting the freedom of speech in a country that is far from them or better yet in a country that is their geopolitical rival. They praise you for that. But then they have this bipolar attitude when you do the same in their own country and they say, “No, no, no, no, no. We loved you for protecting freedom of speech, but not here, not in my backyard. We don’t need it here. We’re all right. We have free press.”

(03:24:28)
And then you will find yourself in this weird spot. The Ukrainians say you work for the Russians. The Russians say you work for the Ukrainians. And all this schizophrenia is something that we had to deal with for some time because it’s a very easy way to attack you. At some point you don’t understand where it is coming from. Is it our competitors? We must give credit to our competitors if it’s their invention to launch these kind of rumors because at a certain point they must have realized they can’t compete technologically on the product side, so they must do something like this. Or it’s just governments launching these rumors, trying to discredit the platform, trying to scare their citizens away from it because they understand that their power and grip of their own country is in danger as long as they allow a pro-freedom platform to operate.
Lex Fridman
(03:25:39)
And through all of this, we should say over and over, that you are simply preserving the freedom of speech for all people of earth no matter what they believe, as long as they don’t call for violence, and as long as they’re not doing some of the criminal activity that we discussed, including terrorist organizing. But other than that, it doesn’t matter what they believe. Left-wing or right-wing, you’re just preserving their freedom of speech. Do you think people of Ukraine, people of Russia and people of Iran, people of all over the world understand that despite the propaganda against you?
Pavel Durov
(03:26:14)
I think people are smart. Every time I meet somebody from one of these countries you mentioned in real life or people recognize me in the street, say here in Dubai, they come over, they seem incredibly grateful and understanding. The propaganda in each of these countries would tell them a number of things, but they learned to discount it. That’s why they’re so happy that Telegram exists is because the way they can understand the world around them is to receive conflicting, mutually exclusive viewpoints from sources that hate each other and try to understand what really is true. Because there’s no such thing as an unbiased source of information. When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, I instantly realized Telegram is going to be used to spread propaganda by both sides. And I didn’t want Telegram to be used as a tool for war and publicly. I suggested maybe we should just suspend the activity of all politics-related channels in both countries for the time of the war. Maybe we shouldn’t have channels in these two countries.

(03:27:55)
And then interestingly, people from both countries revolted against this. They told me … Both people in Ukraine and in Russia that I don’t get to babysit them and decide for them what sources of information that they have to be granted access to. They are grown-ups that can make these decisions for themselves. They understand that there is a lot of propaganda. They learn to see through this propaganda. They learn to be able to tell truth from lie. And in this time of war, it was particularly available for them to receive as much information as possible because their relatives, their friends who are getting affected and are still getting affected, they want to understand what’s going on. At that point, when I realized people are smart, people get it, people can see through it. If you ask most people in any of these countries, do you agree that access to Telegram should be restricted for whatever reason, they would say no.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:19)
They hunger to have a voice.
Pavel Durov
(03:29:21)
They need a voice, and they need a place to share their opinion securely.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:28)
I have to ask in the question of leadership in the Le Point interview, the journalist said that you’re often compared to Elon Musk, and you highlighted some interesting nuances around that, that you’re quite different. That Elon runs several companies at once, while you only run one. And Elon can lean more on the emotional side while you deliberate and think deeply before acting. Can you expand on this? Also there’s an interesting point that you made that everybody’s weakness is also a strength.
Lex Fridman
(03:30:00)
Same point that he made that everybody’s weakness is also a strength. Everybody’s strength is also a weakness. There’s a dual nature to all our characteristics. So on the topic of Elon, what have you learned from his style of leadership? What do you respect about him?
Pavel Durov
(03:30:20)
First of all, I don’t think there is such thing as a negative personal trait. In most cases, our bad traits and our good traits are the same trait, or at least have the same source. Of course, there are some extreme examples, but I’d say 99% of people, if you analyze their character, their bravery can be seen and recklessness in other situations. Depending on circumstances, you would see exactly the same personality trait and it would be either a good thing or a bad thing. Because humanity is perfect as a whole, and each of us is different for a reason. We have evolved to be different, to complement each other’s abilities, so that together we’re invincible.

(03:31:20)
And even if you take a person as complicated as Elon, I believe that certain traits that Elon demonstrates that people criticize about him are also the sources of his strength. For example, his emotionality is derived from the fact that he cares about issues deeply, and he’s willing to start as many wars and as many fights as it takes to change the world in the direction that he thinks is right. He also seems to be able to extract motivation from all these wars and personal conflicts, which is again, not something to be underestimated. At a certain point in the life of a successful entrepreneur, the question of motivation starts to be the primary question. If we’re talking about the richest person in the world and the most famous entrepreneur in the world, you have to wonder how does he motivate himself?

(03:32:40)
And if starting a war on X, debating certain issues or becoming personal with other CEOs, criticizing them, if these activities help Elon to innovate and start new projects, he should be doing more of it. There’s nothing wrong in being non-agreeable. Actually, it’s one of the main traits of a successful entrepreneur, not agreeing with things. And every time somebody like Elon, but there’s no somebody like Elon, it’s just Elon, I think, at least from the entrepreneurs I know and I personally interacted with, he’s unique in the sense that he keeps launching new things, running them in parallel, and he doesn’t seem to be stretched too thin. Well, some people think he is, but he manages to still demonstrate success in all or most of his endeavors. So again, you can criticize Elon for being emotional, but would he be the same person without this? I doubt that.
Lex Fridman
(03:34:11)
And the incredible teams he’s motivated too. There’s an element of that which you’ve spoken about, the team at Telegram. Assembling a team of A players, as we’ve talked about, is a skill in itself. And that’s also a big part of the leaders that we’ve discussed, it’s like judged in part by the team you assemble.
Pavel Durov
(03:34:39)
Yes. And one of the necessary character features to enable that is to be ready to be unpleasant. You have to be ready to insult some people. If their work is inferior, you have to be ready to fire them without remorse. So in order to be an efficient and great entrepreneur and enrich the world of innovations, you have to do unpleasant things. Most people will shy away from it. And in a certain sense, entrepreneurs sacrifice their peace of mind in order to contribute to the world around them. And Elon is a great example of that.

Money

Lex Fridman
(03:35:31)
I have to ask you about the big picture Telegram. We’ve already talked about the fact that you own 100% of it, and there’s a lot of on the business side of it, the business structure of Telegram is fascinating. You’ve invested hundred, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars of your money. As far as I know, you take a salary of what, $1.
Pavel Durov
(03:35:57)
One dirham is one third of that.
Lex Fridman
(03:36:01)
One-third of a dollar. And in 2024 was the first time Telegram was profitable. So one of the interesting questions here that we could talk for many hours about, but I’d love to get a high view picture. So you’ve left what I understand, what I think is a huge amount of money on the table by sticking to your principles. For example, not doing advertisement that’s based on user private data, which basically every social media company does. So the only advertisement that Telegram does is based on channels and groups, based on the topic, not the private data of the individuals. And the other thing is, which is also gangster and incredible, is you don’t do a news feed, which is the most addictive and engagement inducing aspect of social media, which feeds the very kind of addictive downside of the internet.

(03:37:02)
The distraction, the engagement, drama farming aspect that we’ve talked about in the very beginning that you tried to resist, that you think is damaging the human mind at scale. So anyway, that’s just speaking to the fact that you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. So how the hell were you able to be profitable? What are the ways that Telegram makes money?
Pavel Durov
(03:37:23)
Yeah. We had to innovate a lot in order to reach a point where we are profitable without having to resort to dubious business activities involving exploiting personal data of users, something that most of our competitors do. Because money has never been the primary goal, at least not for me. When I sold the remaining share of my first company and I had to do it below market price because I didn’t leave Russia completely without any pressures, I reinvested the vast majority of everything in Telegram. Telegram is an operation that is losing money for me personally. I didn’t extract more from Telegram than I invested in it. I never sold a single share, but I also didn’t want to sell Telegram. So how do you reach a point when you’re profitable without sacrificing your values?

(03:38:40)
One of the ideas we explored was a subscription model, but only for certain additional features. We wanted to keep all the existing features free and just add more business-related tools or tools for advanced users that they would have to pay for, say 4 or $5 a month. It was quite unprecedented at the time. It wasn’t considered a viable option for messaging apps to do that. We launched the premium subscriptions for Telegram in 2022, and now we have over 15 million paid subscribers. This is some very significant recurring revenue. So we would receive more than half a billion dollars from premium subscriptions alone this year, and it’s growing fast. For that, we had to innovate a lot. We included over 50 different features into the premium package. And then how do you make an app that is already more powerful than any other messaging app on the market, even more useful so that people would be ready to pay for this extra? That wasn’t easy. That took a lot of effort.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:19)
And you’re constantly adding features.
Pavel Durov
(03:40:21)
We’re constantly adding features.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:22)
It’s actually fun to watch just the rate of adding, and some of them are subtle, like the updates to improvements, expansions of polls, for example.
Pavel Durov
(03:40:32)
Yeah. So you keep improving the existing features and adding new ones. And every time when you add a new feature, you don’t want to clutter the app. So in a way, they’re not in your way, they’re invisible. That’s not an easy thing to do. And most of the features maybe are not even known to the majority of our users, but when you need them, they’re there. So premium is one source of our revenue. We also have ads, but they’re context-based, not targeted. Of course, we leave probably 80% of value on the table because we’re not ready to engage in all this practices, exploiting personal data.
Lex Fridman
(03:41:15)
Just to be clear, targeted ads is what most social media companies, most tech companies that do any kinds of advertisement do. And that’s the kind of advertisement that uses personal data from users. Just to clarify. And when you said 80%, that’s a lot of money.
Pavel Durov
(03:41:34)
Of course, because we would never use, for example, your personal messaging data or your context data or your metadata or your activity data to target ads. It’s sad that it became synonymous with the internet industry, this kind of exploitation. But we are happy with the fact that we managed to make Telegram profitable despite that. We are also experimenting a lot with blockchain-based technologies. We’re the first app to allow people to directly own their username or their digital identities using smart contracts and NFTs removing Telegram from the picture. So for example, Telegram cannot confiscate your username from you. It’s impossible. We do a lot of things related to the ecosystem of Telegram. We have a thriving mini app platform, millions of mini app developers launching their own bots and applications.
Lex Fridman
(03:42:48)
So a lot of people are making millions of dollars on the Telegram platform.
Pavel Durov
(03:42:53)
Yes. We enabled them to receive payments from the users through in-app purchase mechanism provided by Apple and Google, which I think was the first attempt of this kind, to allow that both on iOS and Android on a big platform so that third-party developers of mini apps, which are basically websites so deeply integrated into Telegram that you can’t tell whether they’re standalone or they’re part of the overall experience. And by providing this payment option, we’re able to extract a commission from these transactions. But it’s a very low commission. Presently it’s 5%. So we’re not greedy here. We want people to succeed in building these tools for our users. We understand that mini apps bring us users. The more users we have, the more successful and relevant Telegram becomes. We need third-party developers. I think at this point, Telegram gives developers by far the most powerful tools to create.

TON

Lex Fridman
(03:44:21)
Plus there’s a bot API. And I mean you have to tell me about the TON blockchain and the crypto ecosystem available through Telegram. So what is TON aka The Open Network blockchain?
Pavel Durov
(03:44:34)
TON is a blockchain technology that we initially developed in 2018 and 2019, and we started to develop it because we needed a blockchain platform to be integrated deeply into Telegram because we believe in blockchain. We think it’s one of the technologies that enable freedom. But at the time, if you look at Bitcoin, if you look at Ethereum, they were not scalable enough to cope with the load that our hundreds of millions of users would create. They would just become congested. And I asked my brother, “Can we create a blockchain platform that would be inherently scalable so that no matter how many users or transactions there are, it would split into smaller pieces?” which we call ShardChains and would still process all transactions. And he thought for a few days and said, “Yes, it’s possible, but it’s not easy.” And we started building it.

(03:45:37)
We ended up succeeding in developing that technology, but we couldn’t release it because the SEC, the Securities and Exchanges Commission in the United States was unhappy with the way the fundraise for TON was conducted. So we had to abandon the project and the open source community took over. Luckily because we constantly conducted those contests for third-party developers, there was a thriving community around TON, which now stood for The Open Network as opposed to its prior name, Telegram Open Network. And so this project got eventually launched without our direct involvement. And it’s thriving now because everything we do, like I said, this blockchain based tokenized user names, Telegram accounts are all based on TON and its smart contracts.

(03:46:55)
It’s the only way for third-party developers and creators to withdraw the funds that they earn through our revenue sharing programs. For example, with channel owners, we do a 50-50 split of ad revenues. It’s also the only way to transact on Telegram. For example, if you want to buy ads on Telegram, you should use TON. All the new things we launch, for example, let’s say gifts that we mentioned earlier, which you can define as a reinvented socially relevant NFT integrated into a billion user ecosystem, but at the same time available on chain, transferable, which you can own directly also based on TON. Incredibly fast growing space. We only launched them half a year ago, and now as a result of this Telegram gifts, TON has become I think the largest or the second largest blockchain in terms of daily NFT trading volumes.
Lex Fridman
(03:48:19)
So yeah, like you mentioned, it is a layer one technology as opposed to being built on top of Ethereum or Bitcoin and it’s able to achieve scale and the speed of transactions that’s needed for something like Telegram. And like you also mentioned the gifts. You recently launched some Snoop Dogg gifts. Is there going to be some other celebrities in the pipeline?
Pavel Durov
(03:48:46)
Yeah, I’m a big fan of Snoop, and that’s why when they reach out, suggests to do something together, say, “Let’s launch the Snoop related gifts.” And it was really fun. We managed to sell 12 million worth of gifts within 30 minutes.
Lex Fridman
(03:49:03)
30 minutes. Well, there you go. I even got a few. But yeah.
Pavel Durov
(03:49:09)
After this we have many requests from many really high profile influencers that in a way are lining up.
Lex Fridman
(03:49:19)
So from my perspective as a fan, it’s just interesting to see what kind of art you create for any kind of celebrities, athletes, musicians, because the Snoop gifts are all just, going back to our previous conversation, just beautiful pieces of art that encapsulate certain memes, certain aspects of Snoop that everybody knows, these cultural icons that he represents. It’s cool. And the incredible detail of the art of the individual gifts is just incredible.
Pavel Durov
(03:49:53)
And each of these gifts is scalable because it’s vector based. It references certain points in Snoop’s creative biography, and each of them has countless different versions. We had to create over 50 distinctive versions of each. And then each individual piece is unique because it also has unique background, unique icon and the background. It’s something that we reinvented because we didn’t like the old school NFTs. First of all, they were not relevant socially because okay, you have an NFT, where do you demonstrate it? At Telegram, a telegram gift is there next to your name. It’s part of your digital identity on Telegram. And then you can create collections of gifts and show it off on your profile page.

(03:50:50)
But also, the other thing that we wanted to reinvent is the aesthetic part of it. Most NFTs are just ugly and they’re not based on any sophisticated technology. So what we did with Snoop’s gifts I think represents an example of beautiful, aesthetically pleasing and at the same time very accurate in terms of references to this specific artist’s biography mixture between art and technology, which I think is quite rare. I’m quite proud of it. I think it’s a new trend, a new phenomenon. It’s only half a year old, so let’s see where it goes. We’re going to select our next influencer or artist to be part of it.
Lex Fridman
(03:51:51)
Hey listen, I’m really proud. I got a Snoop gift next to my name, and I figured out that you can add even more by pinning them. It’s like a cool little art icon.
Pavel Durov
(03:52:02)
We didn’t expect it, by the way. We just had a lot of fun launching these things. And then we realized that one of the first collections we sold each piece at something like $5. And then the minimum price of any items in this collections currently is something like $10,000. And it keeps going up. So I was quite surprised with the reception. I realized when you are trying to monetize social media platform in a way that is consistent with your values, you are forced to find ways that benefit your users, not exploit them. People love these gifts. People love the fact that they can congratulate a person close to them with something valuable and at the same time something beautiful. Also, some people make a business out of it, which is funny. They resell these gifts. We recently met a guy who earned several million dollars just from buying and selling gifts.
Lex Fridman
(03:53:17)
It’s a real market.
Pavel Durov
(03:53:18)
It’s a real market. It’s just something that he did in a few months. And last year when we launched many new features for the mini apps on Telegram and the payments options for them and the other monetization options, the same guy earned $12 million from mini apps. And I know several people saying, “Totally, I earned $10 million.” “I earned $3 million in just a matter of months single-handedly.” Sometimes they would have a team of two, three people. So whenever I hear stories from people who were able to build businesses on top of Telegram, this makes me incredibly proud.

Bitcoin

Lex Fridman
(03:54:05)
And mini apps include games, they include tools, services of any kind. It’s an app within the ecosystem of Telegram. Let me ask you about crypto in general. So you’ve been an early supporter of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin. You’ve bought in into Bitcoin early on. You kept buying. Maybe you could speak to the reasoning why you kept buying Bitcoin. Do you think Bitcoin will go to a million dollars? Do you think it’ll keep increasing, Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies?
Pavel Durov
(03:54:40)
I was a big believer in Bitcoins since more or less the start of it. I got to buy my first few thousands of Bitcoin in 2013, and I didn’t care much. I think I bought at the local maximum, it’s something like $700 per Bitcoin and I just threw a couple of millions there. A lot of people after Bitcoin later next year, went down somewhere close to 300, 200. Started to express their sympathy to me. So, “Poor Pavel. You made this horrible mistake investing in this new thing, but don’t feel bad about it. We still have some respect for you.” And my response to them were, “I don’t care. I’m not going to sell it. I believe in this thing. I think this is the way money should work. Nobody can confiscate your Bitcoin from you. Nobody can censor you for political reasons.”

(03:55:52)
This is the ultimate means of exchange. And again, I’m now talking about Bitcoin, but it relates to cryptocurrencies in general. So I have been able to fund my lifestyle, so to say, from my Bitcoin investment. Some people think if I’m able to rent nice locations or fly private, it’s because I somehow extract money from Telegram. Like I said, Telegram is a money losing operation for me personally. Bitcoin is something that allowed me to stay afloat. And I believe it will come to a point when Bitcoin is worth $1 million. Just look at the trends. The governments keep printing money like no tomorrow. Nobody’s printing Bitcoin. There is a predictable inflation and then it stops at a certain point. Bitcoin is here to stay. All the fiat currencies, remains to be seen.

Two chairs dilemma

Lex Fridman
(03:57:13)
Let me ask you a deeply philosophical serious question. In your first Telco interview, you had two interesting chairs in the background. I think they reference a now legendary meme. The choice is Пики точёные или хуи дрочёные (Russian: “Sharpened pikes or jerked-off cocks.”) What is the philosophical wisdom in the dilemma that these two chairs present? Have you had to face the dilemma yourself personally?
Pavel Durov
(03:57:37)
Not this exact dilemma. I think this is a riddle that people have to face in Russian prisons. And metaphorically, it’s describing all the situations where you’re presented a choice between two suboptimal options. When you’re running a big business or when you’re running a large country, it is similar. You sometimes face this dilemma, what are you going to do, this very horrible thing or this also very horrible thing? So I think the right answer to this riddle is not to do any of these things. Reframe the question, design a solution that turns a disadvantage into an advantage and then use it to cope with the other side of the problem. So do you know the answer to that riddle?
Lex Fridman
(03:58:44)
No. Somebody on the internet said, “Не ходи туда, где задают такие вопросы”, which is basically try to avoid the situations where such dilemmas present themselves or there is no right answer.
Pavel Durov
(03:59:02)
This is one of the ways to answer this question. If you got to a tricky situation that probably earlier you made a certain mistake-
Lex Fridman
(03:59:11)
You fucked up already.
Pavel Durov
(03:59:12)
Should have been avoided. But the other quite creative answer to this question is that you take the sharp objects from one of the chairs, or the spikes and then they use them to cut off the objects from the other chair. And you know what objects I’m talking about?
Lex Fridman
(03:59:38)
That’s a very engineering solution. I’m glad somebody came up with that.
Pavel Durov
(03:59:43)
I believe this is the right answer. We’re often being manipulated by politicians, by corporate leaders to make a choice from two suboptimal options. And then when we are forced to make this choice and we make this choice, it’s almost as if it’s something that we have to assume responsibility for. I don’t think we should be buying into that.
Lex Fridman
(04:00:12)
Okay. And this theme of absurdity and ridiculousness, there’s an object here that appeared in… Not many people seem to have noticed this. People should go watch your excellent conversation in the Oslo Freedom Forum. Behind you, I’m no archeologist, but I believe this is a, how should I put it, a walrus penis bone, and it was behind you. You told me that you brought it with you to France and back to Dubai. I assume it brings you luck of some sort. Why did you bring it with you everywhere?

(04:01:00)
Is it kind of like in America they have a wishbone? Is it just a large wishbone? Because the wishbone brings you luck. And I should also point out that just like with Telegram, with the art, there’s tiny little walruses. And thanks to you, I had to also find out that a lot of mammals have a bone inside their penis. And the evolutionary advantage, I guess, of having a bone is quite obvious. It actually raises the question of why humans don’t have a actual bone inside their penis. A lot of questions there.
Pavel Durov
(04:01:31)
That’s a very interesting subject. The reason I have this is because the tribe that is almost gone and extinct in Siberia and Mongolia called Evenki, passed me this gift from them. Normally they would craft something like this only for their most respected leaders. It is supposed to be a token of their appreciation for bravery, courage, leadership. Ironically, it also translates in a very specific way into the Russian language. In Russian, walrus’s penis means something a bit funny, which is often used to describe nothing. So for example, if you’re being requested by say certain government or a certain business partner to provide something that you’re not willing to provide, you can just politely have this penis bone in the background while you’re doing the video call and hope then they would.
Lex Fridman
(04:02:52)
Through osmosis figure out the deep message. It is an indirect rebellion. By the way, in the former Soviet Union, there was, and a lot of places throughout history, some of the rebellion had to take this kind of symbolic, metaphoric form through poetry, through children’s stories. It’s the beauty of the human language and art that we’re able to do that, say F-U, to whatever forces that try to overpower us. We say F-U through poetry, through art, and sometimes through a rather large walrus penis bone carried by what appears to be either a happy sumo wrestler or a cat of some sort.
Pavel Durov
(04:03:39)
They asked a lot of questions about this walrus’s penis bone in the airport, both here in the UAE and in France, they are always very interested in this thing.

Children

Lex Fridman
(04:03:53)
There seems to be some confusion over how many kids you have. It’s often said to be over 100. Can you explain how many kids you have?
Pavel Durov
(04:04:06)
The truthful answer to this question is I don’t really know how many biological kids I have exactly. Because at a certain point in my life, about 15 years ago, I decided that it was a good idea to be a sperm donor. Initially, a friend of mine asked me to help because they were trying to have a baby with his wife, and they experienced certain health issues that prevented them to do the natural way. And he asked me, he told me, “We don’t want to just rely on some random anonymous genetic material. We want somebody we know and respect to be the biological father of our kid.” And I said, “You got to be kidding me. Sounds ridiculous. What are we even talking about?”
Pavel Durov
(04:05:00)
… I mean, sounds ridiculous. What are they even talking about? But then I realized it’s actually a serious issue, and they were not the only couple struggling with that. So eventually, I got persuaded into doing more of it. I can’t say I am incredibly proud of that, but I think it was the right thing to do, particularly at the time when I thought, “Okay, I probably don’t have much time on this planet left. Things are getting trickier and trickier. So if I can help some couples have babies, let’s do it.”

(04:05:37)
And then more recently, when I was working on my will, I realized that I shouldn’t make a distinction between the kids conceived naturally and the kids who are just my biological kids that I never seen. As long as they can establish their shared DNA with me someday, maybe in 30 years from now, they have to be entitled for a share of my estate after I’m gone. And that made a lot of noise in the news for some reason. People get very excited by this kind of news. I get a lot of messages from people claiming they’re my kids. I get a lot of requests from people asking me to adopt them. The memes were priceless. But understanding that it’s not a thing that most people do, I don’t see anything wrong with it. If anything, I think more people should be donating sperm.
Lex Fridman
(04:06:52)
So we should say, the 100-plus kids is from that. You also have naturally conceived kids. It was a pretty bold decision from a financial perspective to treat them all equally. And also quite interesting was that you said that they don’t receive any money for the first few decades of their life. Can you describe that thinking?
Pavel Durov
(04:07:24)
Yeah, I think overabundance paralyzes motivation and willpower. It’s extremely harmful, particularly for young boys, to grow up in an environment where they can be proud, not of their own achievements, but of their father’s achievements or their father’s wealth. This removes the incentive to work on developing their own skills, removes the incentive to study, to work. So I thought if they’re going to have this money, it should be something that they would only get when they’re already adult. It’s still risky, but one of the reasons I decided it makes more sense to divide this huge wealth that I’m likely to leave behind among a hundred or more than a hundred people is that it won’t be too much for every single descendant. But at the same time, some people did the calculation, it’s still many, many millions of dollars for each child, so I’m not sure it helps too much.
Lex Fridman
(04:09:12)
On the topic of abundance, offline we had a lot of fascinating philosophical discussions. One of which was about the mouse paradise experiment, also known as Universe 25. It’s an experiment from the 1960s and early ’70s conducted by ethologist John B. Calhoun. We can talk about this one for hours also, I’m sure. But it was an experiment with a few hundreds of individual mice compartments, and they provided them with unlimited food, water nesting, no predators, stable temperatures, and frequent cleaning. Basically the definition of abundance as far as mice go.

(04:09:56)
The interesting aspect of this experiment is that at first the population doubled, it grew very quickly. But then it leveled off, and certain really negative social things started happening, like mothers neglected to kill their young, violent attacks, and hypersexual activity became widespread. Some “beautiful” ones, largely inactive, well-groomed mice withdrew, refusing to mate or interact. So all of these kind of societal qualities that we see as negative from the functioning of a society started to emerge because of the abundance. And finally, the collapse. The reproduction rates crashed, social dysfunction spread to the next generation, and eventually just went extinct. It didn’t just plummet to a low level, it plummeted steadily to zero despite the fact that those ongoing resource abundance. As this description states, the last mouse died surrounded by untouched food and water. I mean, there’s deep wisdom to that about abundance. You’ve mentioned this in different contexts throughout this conversation, is it seems like scarcity. It seems like constraints. It seems like non-abundance is essential for human flourishing, which is a counterintuitive notion. It’s true for mice, and I think it’s probably true for humans too.
Pavel Durov
(04:11:27)
We have evolved to overcome scarcity. Almost by definition, there has never been such thing as infinite amount of food or entertainment in our lives before now. We seem as a species to lose our ability to identify purpose in the world where you have everything and everything loses its meaning. Restrictions are important. I think though that they should be coming from within. It should be self-restriction rather than a restriction in order to create purpose and meaning in life. In a way, I was lucky in a very counterintuitive way because I grew up poor. I didn’t have money when I was a teenager. I had the same jacket for years, which was bought on a secondhand marketplace. My father wouldn’t receive his salary as a university professor for months because the Russian state was almost bankrupt back then. My mom had to juggle two jobs to take care of us. It was not easy, but it also created purpose. It created meaning. It created priorities. It allowed us to focus on things that mattered, allowed us to develop our character and intellectual abilities.

(04:13:17)
Now, if we had everything, why do anything? These mice suffered societal collapse that was irreversible, and this is not an accident. This kind of experiment has been repeated countless times. At a certain point, social dysfunction and the erosion of social roles becomes contagious, and the society gradually degrades into a chaotic collection of individuals unable to take care of the next generation or even to produce the next generation, and it goes extinct.
Lex Fridman
(04:14:14)
It’s fascinating because we’re creating technologies and this is what AI is proposing to our future generations as a problem to solve, which is, AI may very well create abundance. So we will be like these mice potentially. Whether it’s AI or other kinds of technologies, they increasingly give more and more to all of us. And it is a thing that is good: decrease the amount of suffering in the world, increase the quality of life. But as we reach towards that abundance, the fabric that connects us, rooted in our biology that’s developed by evolution, it might create a real challenge for us.
Pavel Durov
(04:14:54)
We should find the right balance between chaos and order, between self-restriction and freedom for creativity.

Father

Lex Fridman
(04:15:03)
Your father recently celebrated his 80th birthday. You had a conversation with him. He gave you some life advice. I think you mentioned to me one of the things he said was not to just speak of your principles, but to live them, to lead by example. I think this is something you already do well. Maybe can you speak to what you’ve learned about life from your father, maybe some of the lessons he told you in the conversation you’ve had with him on his birthday.
Pavel Durov
(04:15:40)
I’m incredibly lucky to have my father. He’s a person who wrote countless books on Ancient Rome and Ancient Roman literature, dozens of scientific papers, and I always remember him working. He would be busy typing his books and articles in an old-school typewriter back in the late ’80s, early ’90s. He was relentless. The example he said to myself and my brother was priceless. Some people make this mistake of thinking that you can instill the right principles in the future generation or into your kids by saying things to them, but kids are smart. They discount words, they look at the actions. So observing our father was a big lesson by itself. It wasn’t necessary for him to say anything to us. And then at the same time, he was incredibly patient, emotionally resilient.

(04:17:06)
My mom, great woman, incredibly smart, highly educated, but she would sometimes try to test the patience of my father. It’s a trait rooted in our biology. There’s an evolutionary explanation for that. Women sometimes tend to do that, and he demonstrated incredible patience all the time. He told me recently, “You shouldn’t give the wrong example to the people around you and in particular to your kids, because you can do the right thing nine times out of 10, but you make a mistake once, and they will instantly copy it. If you’re telling your kids not to use a smartphone, but you’re using a smartphone all the time yourself, and coming up with all kinds of sophisticated, brilliant explanations why they shouldn’t be using a smartphone, it won’t land. It’s bound to fail. So you lead by example.”

(04:18:19)
There are other numerous lessons: staying positive, looking at the bright side, never despair, be honest. He told me last time I spoke to him that AI can have consciousness, can be creative, but it cannot have conscience in a way. It cannot be moral. It cannot have deeply rooted principles. It cannot have integrity in the meaning that we understand it as human beings.
Lex Fridman
(04:18:57)
I love the fact that you’re talking to your 80-year- old father, and you’re talking about AGI and the difference between human, the human spirit, human nature, and what AGI, AI is able to achieve. And conscience is the thing that humans have, the ability to know the right from wrong.
Pavel Durov
(04:19:23)
This is the lesson that he gave me. One of my goals in life is never to disappoint him.

Quantum immortality

Lex Fridman
(04:19:33)
Another thing we’ve talked about, which I think is a fascinating topic, is the power of the mind, power of thought. Do you believe you can affect your life and reality by thinking about it, by manifesting it into being? What do you think?
Pavel Durov
(04:19:55)
There are many explanations why it works. One thing most people agree on is that setting goals and staying positive and confident does allow you to achieve the things you want to achieve. It’s very hard to believe though that you can just manifest things into being without applying effort in the direction that seems to be logical. Maybe some people exist that can just sit on the bank of a river and materialize things by the power of their thought. But I’m not sure I’m one of these people. I always found it more easy to believe that if you couple this optimism and faith with logical action, then it is bound to be successful.
Lex Fridman
(04:21:04)
Prolonged effort, hard work, coupled with positive focus, thinking about the thing.
Pavel Durov
(04:21:13)
Oh yes, over many, many, many days. It’s possible to imagine our world as a high dimensional universe where humans have the ability to navigate through it with the power of belief, which is coupled with positive emotion and logical thinking. But we are getting into an esoteric realm. We don’t have any proof of that. But we also know that we probably at this point haven’t discovered even 1% about this universe.
Lex Fridman
(04:22:00)
I agree with you fully, and I like what you said in the way you were thinking about it. You’ve told me before that maybe there’s a way that with effort and with the focused mind, you can shape, you can morph the landscape of probabilities around you. It’s a nice way to visualize it, that somehow our effort and our focus changes the things that are likely and less likely. And by focusing on it, we make the thing more and more likely, at least as an estimate, as the kind of field that we, through our thoughts and through our actions, change that field. And then there’s eight billion of us doing so, and together there’s this collective intelligence that creates the world we see around us like the mice. Like you said, us as a humanity together are perfect. I like that you said that.
Pavel Durov
(04:23:05)
I admire your belief in the fact that we get to experience this together because it’s not obvious. Maybe each of us experiences his own or her own universe, and maybe every second of the universe splits into a billion of different universes, and everything that can happen happens. And there is a universe where, say, I died in 2013. Maybe every time I die, I actually get to shift to a parallel universe when I don’t die. And then it keeps going, and at certain points we achieve this quantum immortality when we’re 1,000 years old, but a lot of people from other versions of reality think we’re long gone.
Lex Fridman
(04:24:04)
Yeah. This is something you explained to me, the idea of quantum immortality, which is a thought experiment, which I find deeply fascinating, people should look into it, which is very crisp, clean consequence of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that we as conscious beings can’t experience our death. As we branch into these many worlds, only the living consciousnesses get to experience it. So in some sense, yeah, there’s many universes. If we were to seriously take the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there’s many universes where you died many times, especially you, and I’m glad we’re in the universe where we get to share the table with this impressive bone, a little humor, and a lot of serious topics covered today. Once again, I can’t say enough. Again, thank you from me. Again, thank you from hundreds of millions of people that follow your work, for you fighting for the freedom of all of us to speak and creating a platform where we can do so. Thank you so much for talking today, brother. It’s been an honor getting to know you and to be able to call you a friend.
Pavel Durov
(04:25:22)
Thank you for saying that. I’m also incredibly grateful to you and to the fact that I happened to be in this version of reality when I haven’t died, at least yet, and hopefully we’ll get to spend more fun moments in the years to come together.
Lex Fridman
(04:25:44)
Thank you, brother.

(04:25:45)
Thank you for listening to this conversation with Pavel Durov. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, let me try to articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you’d like to submit questions or topics like this for me to talk about in the future, go to lexfridman.com/ama.

Kafka


(04:26:05)
I’d like to use this opportunity to talk about Franz Kafka, one of my favorite writers. The reason he has been on my mind is that his work The Trial and the case of Pavel Durov in France has, let’s say, eerie parallels, both metaphorically and literally. Of course, The Trial is a work of fiction, but I think it is often useful to go to the surreal world of literature, even over-the-top dystopian variety like 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Trial, The Castle Metamorphosis, even The Plague by Albert Camus, all to understand our real world and the destructive paths we have the potential to go down together, which also hopefully helps us understand how to avoid doing so.

(04:26:55)
So let me zoom out and speak about Franz Kafka. Who was he? He was an insurance clerk who wrote at night. He died young and almost completely unknown, and he asked for his manuscripts to be burned. Luckily for us, his friend, Max Brod refused to do so, giving us the work of what I consider to be one of 20th century’s greatest writers. In his work, Kafka wrote about the cold machine-like reduction of humans to case files through the labyrinth of institutional power. He wrote about an individual’s feeling of guilt even when a crime has not been committed, or more generally, he wrote about the feeling of anxiety that is part of the human condition in our modern, chaotic world.

(04:27:42)
His writing style was to use short, declarative sentences to describe the surreal and the absurd, and in so doing, effectively, I think, convey the feeling of an experience versus simply describing the experience. For example, famously, his work, The Metamorphosis, opens with the following lines, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying in his hard armor-plated back, and when he lifted his head a little, he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments, on top of which, the bed-quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.”

(04:28:38)
Kafka, I think, effectively uses this image of being transformed into a giant bug stuck on his back to convey a feeling of helplessness and uselessness to his family, to his job, to society. The feeling of being a burden to everyone, dehumanized, alienated, and abandoned. The feeling of being only temporarily valued as long as he served some function for his job or for his family, and quickly discarded otherwise. I will probably talk about this work in more depth at another time, because it is so haunting, and I think it is such a profound description of the burden of existence in modern society for many people.

(04:29:24)
But here, let me talk about another of his work, The Trial. In this novel, the main character, Josef K, is a successful bank officer, and he’s arrested on his birthday for an unspecified crime by a kind of amorphous court whose authority is everywhere and nowhere. He navigates a labyrinth-like legal system where everyone knows about his case, but no one can really explain it. The so-called trial never actually occurs in any conventional sense. Instead, Josef K’s entire life becomes the proceedings leading up to the trial. In a sense, the trial is the state of being accused itself, a permanent condition rather than a singular event. Kafka’s geniusness work was to show that modern institutions don’t need to hold trials; they just need to hold you in the permanent looming possibility of one.

(04:30:21)
Public attention to this case, both positive and negative, gives Josef K a feeling of constantly being judged by people around him. This wears at his mind, and his psychological well-being begins to deteriorate. In a sense, the trial doesn’t need to convict him. The internal psychological turmoil and the external social scrutiny performs a conviction and the eventual execution. When exactly one year after his arrest, Josef K is visited by two men, walked him courteously through the city to an abandoned quarry, and stabbed him in the heart without Josef K resisting. To me, the trial shows that tyranny’s final victory isn’t when it kills you, or when you hold still for the knife, not because you’re forced, but because you’ve been exhausted into submission. Once again, it is a haunting story of the soullessness of bureaucracy in its suffocation of the human spirit. I highly recommend this short book, and I’ll probably talk about it even more in the future. I don’t think it’s especially useful for me to speak to any parallels between The Trial and Pavel Durov’s case, because after all, The Trial is a work of fiction. But on a positive note, let me report that as far as I saw, Pavel has maintained optimism and a general positive outlook throughout this whole process. What I always fear in such cases is that a bureaucratic system can wear people down, exhaust them into surrendering. I saw none of that with Pavel. I don’t think he knows how to give up or give in, no matter how much pressure he’s under. Again, this is truly inspiring to me.

(04:32:09)
Also, now that we’re talking about it, let me mention some other of Kafka’s work that was moving to me. The Castle has similar description as The Trial does of the absurd inaccessibility of those in authority, of the nightmarish bureaucracy. The character in The Castle is also named K. Both bureaucracies operate through exhaustion, endless deferrals, procedures, waiting rooms. Again, highly relevant to modern times.

(04:32:37)
I can also highly recommend Kafka’s In The Penal Colony and Hunger Artist. Both are too interesting and weird to explain in depth here. But let me say, the Hunger Artist is a story that I think is relevant to our modern-day attention economy, where so many people want to be famous. It tells the story of a, let’s say, professional faster who performs starvation in a cage as entertainment, and he slowly loses his audience to newer spectacles, so much so that eventually when he starves himself to death, nobody cares.

(04:33:14)
Kafka’s work is heavy. It serves as a warning for the nightmare that civilization can become, and yet I think it is also a source of optimism, because when we can recognize elements of our own world in Kafka’s stories, when we can see elements of our institutions in The Trial or in The Castle, when we can see ourselves in Gregor Samsa, we’re not just diagnosing the disease, we’re proving that we’re still human and wise enough to see it and name it. Kafka gave us the goal: to resist against such systems that tried to dehumanize us and to ensure that individual freedom and the human spirit keep flourishing. I think it will. I have faith in us humans. I love you all.

Transcript for Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481

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Episode highlight

Norman Ohler
(00:00:00)
Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan, which was the plan to go through the Ardennes Mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it’s not the drugs, actually that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountain. If you, if you think monocausal, you would say that’s the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I. You, it, it becomes a stalemate and they fight for months, and no one really moves, and it’s bloody, and it’s nothing’s happening. It’s bad. But that was the only plan that they had. That’s why the high command said, “No, we’re not gonna do it.
Norman Ohler
(00:00:39)
It’s stupid. But these three tank generals said, “Look, if we go with the whole army through the Ardennes Mountains,” and Hitler was like, “Eh, this is not possible. This is like a mountain range. How can the whole German army fit through this eye of a needle,” basically. And they said, “No, we can do it because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do. Tanks are not slow machines in the back that wait for the action to happen, and then support this somehow. We’re going to use tanks in the front as race cars, basically. We’re going to overpower the enemy. We’re going to be in France before they know it.
Norman Ohler
(00:01:16)
We are already behind them, but it would only work if you would reach Sedan, the border city of France, within three days and three nights, and that was only possible if you don’t stop.” Suddenly, Ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe for how people could stay awake for three days and three nights. Before that, he was kind of an outsider, like the freak with the drug idea. Suddenly, he became like…
Norman Ohler
(00:01:38)
…”Okay, tell us, how does it work?” And he gave lectures in front of the officers and he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army is prescribed a drug, in this case, methamphetamine. How much should be taken, at what intervals. This became a very big thing. And then Temmler had to deliver 35 million dosages to the front lines. And then on May 10th, they took their methamphetamine and they started the surprise attack through the Ardennes Mountains.

Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:02:09)
The following is a conversation with Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, a book that investigates what role psychoactive drugs, particularly stimulants such as methamphetamine, played in the military history of World War II. It is a book that two legendary historians, Ian Kershaw and Antony Beevor, give very high praise to. Ian Kershaw describes it as, “Very well-researched, serious piece of scholarship.” And Antony Beevor describes it as, “Remarkable work of research.” And it is, indeed, a remarkable work of research. Norman went deep into the archives using primary sources to uncover a perspective on Hitler and the Third Reich that has before this been mostly ignored by historians. He also wrote Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:04)
And he’s now working on a new book with the possible title of Stoned Sapiens, a great title, looking at the history of human civilization through the lens of drugs. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here’s Norman Ohler.

Drugs in post-WWI Germany

Lex Fridman
(00:03:31)
Tell me the origin story of meth, methamphetamine, and Pervitin, its brand-name drug version, in the context of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Let’s start there.
Norman Ohler
(00:03:43)
I think you’re right to ask about the context because without the context, it’s not really understandable. So what was the situation? In the ’20s, the Nazi movement basically started, and it started in Bavarian beer halls. So alcohol was the drug of choice of the early Nazi movement. The only guy that didn’t drink was Hitler. He was a teetotaler, I guess you say. So that was happening in Munich. So alcohol and national socialism are very closely connected. At the same time, in the ’20s, in Berlin, there was a completely different thing going on. People were taking all kinds of drugs. This had to do, actually, with the defeat of Germany in the First World War. I mean, the context is a big context.
Norman Ohler
(00:04:32)
The Versailles Treaty had the effect that the German economy was not really able to recover after the end of World War I. The Versailles Treaty was written basically by the Western victorious powers. Germany had no say in the negotiations. And I’m certainly not a German nationalist, not even a German patriot, but even I would say that the Versailles Treaty treated Germany somewhat unfairly. I mean, it laid all the blame on Germany. And, I mean, a war is a very complex thing, and the First World War, to examine how it actually started, is a very complex story, and there are many factors to it. But the Versailles Treaty just said it was Germany’s fault, and then Germany had to make all these payments to the allies. It couldn’t create a new economy. It couldn’t have a new army.
Norman Ohler
(00:05:31)
So the economy really went down. Everything in Berlin was cheap, and the people were also using substances that were very cheap in huge quantities. So while in Bavaria, they were drinking alcohol, and alcohol in the brain stimulates behavior, group behavior, us against them. You can actually examine this. A neuroscientist would know exactly how this works. While in Berlin, the drugs that were used were morphine, there was cocaine, there was mescaline, there was ether. So people were experimenting. Everyone developed a different mindset. It was all… You know, you didn’t behave in a way that some kind of authority would like you to behave in, because the authority had just lost the First World War, and there was no real authority in Berlin.
Norman Ohler
(00:06:23)
People were doing whatever they wanted to do, and they were intoxicating themselves in the way they wanted to. So the population, in a way, if you just look at Munich and Berlin, was growing apart. Like, there were the alcohol people in Munich, the Nazis, and then there were these weird, diverse, LGBTQ, whatever kind of scene in Berlin, like actresses sniffing ether in the morning and then making crazy moves.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:51)
Could you speak to the nature of the motivation for the drug use in Berlin at the time? Was it rebellion? Was it a way to deal with the difficult economic depression? Was it just the natural thing that young people do to explore themselves, to understand the world, to develop their culture? What do we understand about drug use there?
Norman Ohler
(00:07:14)
All of these factors come together. But it was the first time in modern history, in Germany at least, that there was no emperor. Before that, Kaiser Wilhelm, everything was very strict, you know? You had to… You couldn’t go crazy, you know, as a young person. You couldn’t be a young person. But now in the Weimar Republic in the ’20s, you could. No one stopped you, so people went crazy. That’s what made Berlin into the city that it still somehow is. And maybe later we’ll talk about contemporary Berlin. It kind of… It still has that vibe, you know? That’s why people still come to Berlin. Drugs are cheap, you can move however you want, there’s no authority.
Norman Ohler
(00:07:54)
So that created a rift between the Nazis in Munich, and they always hated Berlin and what was going on in Berlin. So, for example, Goebbels, the later propaganda minister, he called the situation in Berlin the “hated asphalt reality of Berlin.” He hated that. And when the Nazis then were able to take power in 1933, one of the first things they did was to really prosecute people who were taking drugs, because they wanted to, you know, bring everyone back into the fold. And I think that’s… You asked what was the reason for people taking so many drugs. They were accessible, they were cheap, but I think the most important thing is that they let you find yourself, maybe, or lose yourself, you know? Also possible, you know?
Lex Fridman
(00:08:42)
Can we also focus attention there, because you have a connection to this place, Berlin, and this part of the world. Can you just briefly speak to that so we can contextualize even deeper the personal aspect of this? Because you understand the music of the people, the land, its history. There’s something you can only really understand if you’ve been there and you’ve taken it in. And we’ll return to this topic in multiple contexts, but in this particular way, as one human being who writes about this place, what’s your own story?
Norman Ohler
(00:09:19)
I grew up in West Germany, and this was during the Cold War. And Berlin, the walled-in city, was always like a big fascination because there was a wall, there was actually a wall in the city preventing people from moving into another part. And I was from the west, fortunate enough to be from the free west, so I could travel to Berlin, and I could leave. I could look at it, and I always loved Berlin. I thought it was a very vibey place. And then when the wall came down, I was still in school, but I immediately got into the car of my parents and drove there. I wanted to see how it came down. And then Berlin really, in the ’90s, became a place that was very attractive to me, and I moved there then in the ’90s.
Norman Ohler
(00:10:04)
I was first living in New York. I wrote my first novel in New York, and I loved New York before Giuliani became mayor. It was… He ruined the city. Before that, it was not gentrified. Or let’s say he introduced gentrification, and gentrification is a big topic. I still lived in the ungentrified New York City for like 300 bucks a month rent, and everyone I knew was an artist.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:27)
You loved the diversity of it?
Norman Ohler
(00:10:28)
Yeah, I loved it. I wrote my first novel there. I took LSD for the first time in Downtown Manhattan on a Saturday night.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:35)
So you’re kind of like a German Kerouac-type character, but moved a few decades forward.
Norman Ohler
(00:10:40)
I wouldn’t compare myself to another writer, but I think Kerouac is pretty cool. But he’s an amphetamine writer. On The Road was apparently written in two weeks on amphetamines. And it’s good. You know, amphetamines are not bad per se. We can also talk about these so-called bad drugs, you know, because basically they’re neutral. But let’s not lose the thread.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:00)
Yes, yes. New York, Berlin…
Norman Ohler
(00:11:01)
Even though New York was… Oh, yeah. And then I was in New York. I was in a health food store, one of the first. There weren’t health food stores back then a lot, but there was one on First Avenue. And suddenly there was an announcement, which was unusual in the health food store. I think it was called Prana, Prana Foods. And the announcement was that Kurt Cobain had just shot himself. It was like… And I had been, actually, and still am, a Nirvana fan. I’ve seen one of the last concerts of Nirvana in New York City, and it was amazing. But he killed himself, and the next day, I received a music cassette from a friend of mine from Berlin with electronic music, and I realized that there had been a paradigm shift, obviously. Rock music with the hero on stage was dead.
Norman Ohler
(00:11:47)
Now it was, you know, dance, electronic music, which a lot of people today think it’s a kind of simplistic music form, but it’s actually a very highly intelligent music form. At least it was in the ’90s. People were really experimenting with that music. That was the new music. That was actually the reason I moved to Berlin. I really… I decided I’d leave New York City and move to Berlin. And then in Berlin, to answer your question, I fell in love with something that probably reminded me of the ’20s, even though I wasn’t there in the ’20s. But that really… The city was very open. The wall had just… Was still, you know… I mean, it’s a few years later, but still, the wall, it felt like it just came down. There was… Germany was… Berlin was not yet the capital of Germany.
Norman Ohler
(00:12:35)
That was still in Bonn. So Berlin was a very cheap, and cultural, and crazy city, probably a bit like in the ’20s, actually. And that’s how I fell in love with it, and that’s how I became interested in this electronic scene. I mean, I visited many dance venues then, so-called clubs.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:56)
It’s one of the hubs in the world of electronic music.
Norman Ohler
(00:12:59)
They claim that techno was kind of invented in Berlin, but it also comes from Detroit. So Detroit and Berlin are like the techno hubs, I would say.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:09)
Electronic music is a soundtrack for some of the most interesting experiences this earth has ever created, right? It just gets people together in some interesting ways. So it’s not just the music itself, it’s the experiences that the music enables.
Norman Ohler
(00:13:23)
Well, in Germany, we had a situation that the wall actually kept people apart. People didn’t know each other. But because the wall came down, people suddenly met in abandoned buildings in the center of Berlin, which had been owned by the socialist state of East Germany. The most famous club, Tresor… Tresor means, like, vault. It was the big vault with the big doors, so that’s where Tresor was, the club.

Nazi rise to power

Lex Fridman
(00:13:50)
It’s so funny that the echo 100 years later, Berlin had all these young partygoers using drugs, and then Munich with the beer, and that’s where Hitler came out. So is that what we’re supposed to imagine in the early days of the Nazi party when Hitler’s giving the speeches to just a handful of folks, they’re all drunk?
Norman Ohler
(00:14:12)
Well, it is a fact that the movement came out of the Bürgerbräukeller. It’s a certain restaurant pub in Munich, and that was not only a beer hall, that was also a political venue. And it was a right-wing venue. It was for right-wing populists. People like communists wouldn’t use it, even though communists are in many ways quite similar to the right wing, especially back then. But it was used by right-wingers, and Hitler didn’t mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right-wing populism, I would claim now here, and Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk, or maybe even very drunk, because if you’re drunk you also get aggressive against others. He could play with that, you know?
Lex Fridman
(00:14:59)
So drunk, aggressive towards others, but drunk in a group.
Norman Ohler
(00:15:03)
It constitutes the group also. If everyone is on the same alcohol level. You know, you can just go to Oktoberfest in Munich, which is not a political thing, but everyone… You can kind of sense how it originated. And actually, the first time the Nazis tried to grab power was the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. I mean, that’s a historical event. It took place in 1923, and it was after a drunk night where they suddenly decided, “Now we’re going to do it.” So they came out of the Bürgerbräukeller, and they were all drunk except Hitler, and they just tried to overtake the Munich government, and they miserably failed because it was just a stupid drunk idea. They were like, “Yeah, let’s just do it.” And the Bavaria police, quite sober that day, they just shot them to the ground.
Norman Ohler
(00:15:49)
Hitler was almost killed. He just jumped behind his bodyguard. Göring, during the Beer Hall Putsch, was wounded in his stomach with a, I think a gunshot. That’s why he became a morphine addict. So this Beer Hall Putsch in ’23 had severe effects. Also, they were sentenced to prison, and Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:11)
All these little events come together. It’s so interesting that for them it was just life, but now we look back at these critical moments in history that turned the tides of human civilization, right? So Hitler could have died there, and these characters, Göring, that became larger than life… …That influenced the lives and the deaths and the suffering of millions, all… First of all, it could have been stopped then, and whatever that means when you look back at history. But all those are just human beings developing their ideas, growing, developing groups, developing ideologies, and using drugs or drinking.
Norman Ohler
(00:16:53)
I mean, that’s why I thought it’s interesting, for example, to examine Hitler’s drug use. When I announced that to a historian while I was doing research, he helped me a lot with methamphetamine and the army, a proper medicine historian from the University of Ulm. And then I said, “Now I’m interested in Hitler.” He said, “No, don’t. This is not interesting. This is not serious…” He said, “This is not serious history.” But it’s… You know, even Hitler was a person, you know? And if you understand, for example, the substance abuse of a person, of course you understand more about that person. And historians never had that idea before. Kershaw, for example, who is really a great… He’s very knowledgeable about national socialism.
Norman Ohler
(00:17:36)
Like many British historians, they always know more about German history than the German historians, but Kershaw really does. I think he’s really good. But in his biography of Hitler, he just writes one sentence like, “And then he had a crazy doctor called Morell who gave him dubious medications and drugs,” and he stops there, and then he goes on to describe whatever.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:01)
Yeah, we should say that Ian Kershaw is widely considered to be probably one of the greatest biographers of Hitler.
Norman Ohler
(00:18:07)
I think he wrote the best biography of Hitler.

Hitler’s drug use

Lex Fridman
(00:18:10)
Which is so important. Your work is really important because it opens a whole new perspective on the lives of the individuals and the machinery of the Nazi military that historians haven’t looked at. It’s so interesting that you can unlock those perspectives. And that’s the underlying, really, the foundation of our conversation today and of your work, is there are layers to this thing. You can look at the tactics of war and the strategic level of war, the operational level of war. You could look at the human suffering of war, the love stories. You could look at the hate, the psychology of propaganda, or you could look at the individual things, substances consumed by the individuals that make up the Nazi Party leadership and the soldiers.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:00)
And all those are critically important to understand the war, right? And this piece of drug use and supplement use have been ignored by historians.
Norman Ohler
(00:19:11)
That was very surprising to me, you know. I didn’t know this myself. I never planned to write this book. It kind of happened to me. And I decided to team up with the leading German historian on National Socialism, Hans Mommsen, who has passed away by now. He was quite old, but quite ready to be my mentor for this book, Blitzed. And he was maybe even shocked when I came back from the military archive of Germany with a lot of copies, all relating to the systematic drug use of the German army, including an experiment done by the Navy, who had always pretended to be the clean, in German we say Waffengattung, weapon. Like you have the Army, you have the Air Force, you have the Navy. And in Germany they had the SS.
Norman Ohler
(00:20:15)
And the Navy always pretended to be like, “We weren’t really Nazis. We were like, you know, the German Navy. We had our ethics code.” But I found in the archive that the Navy did human experiments in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, trying to find a new wonder drug, because they had new, what they called ‘wonder weapons’ or what Hitler called ‘wonder weapons’. He always talked about these wonder weapons. Wonder weapons were basically mini submarines, one or two people going in, staying underwater for up to a week and torpedoing, you know, allied ships. So the Navy was trying to develop a drug that would keep you awake and combat-ready for seven days and seven nights without sleep and without, you know, burning out. Very difficult to find.
Norman Ohler
(00:21:02)
So they hired a penalty unit in the concentration camp. They hired… The SS had a so-called ‘shoe walking unit’. It was a penalty unit within the concentration camp testing shoe soles for the German shoe industry, walking for like days. And then they would measure how the soles, you know, kept up in the stress, and they had different layers in the concentration camp, like all the surfaces the German soldiers would touch when they conquered Europe. So this is a very elaborate thing, you know. And if you go to the concentration camp today, it’s a museum. You can still see that running track of the shoe runners unit.
Norman Ohler
(00:21:43)
So the Navy hired the shoe runners unit from the SS, paid them money, and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and chewing gum and all kinds of things. So this is a big thing, you know. And there are documents to it. And Mommsen, who knew everything about National Socialism, the old, you know, authority. And I’m like the young, like I didn’t study history. I just, you know, I just try to make sense, you know. But I present him all these documents. He’s reading like from this Pill Patrol and he said, “Wow.” Like he said, “We historians, we never do drugs. We don’t understand drugs. This, we missed this.” You know. So he was very clear that we missed this.
Norman Ohler
(00:22:30)
And he said this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler’s degeneration as a leader. He made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war, and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you can link that to drugs. You can explain a lot of Hitler through the drugs, but you can also look at this point that historians so far had not been able to figure out, basically. What happened to Hitler? Why did he get crazy? And I mean, he was crazy, but why did he get so bad as a leader? Because he was very effective for a long time and then there’s this moment where it turns.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:17)
Yeah, the degeneration of decision-making, psychology, behavior, all of that. You cannot understand that fully without understanding his drug use. And we should also say that some of the historians you mentioned, Ian Kershaw and Anthony Beevor, these legends of history, they all gave you compliments. So Kershaw said that “Your work is very good, extremely interesting, and a serious piece of well-researched history.” Anthony Beevor said that it’s a remarkable work of research. So props to them. You have received a bunch of criticism from historians, but you’ve also received, obviously, a lot of props. I mean, Kershaw, the legendary historian of Hitler, complimenting how deep your work is. That must feel good.

Response to historian criticism

Lex Fridman
(00:24:09)
Maybe this is a good moment to also, since we’re talking about historians, to address some of the criticism. So Richard Evans has been also a great historian, has been one of the bigger critics. He said that your work is crass and dangerously inaccurate account, and is morally and politically dangerous. I think that’s grounded in the idea that if you say that, “Well, all the Nazi forces and Hitler were on drugs, so therefore their evil can be… They’re not really evil. Accountability can be removed because they were using drugs.”
Norman Ohler
(00:24:48)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:49)
And also another criticism of his, which I also understand and probably can steel man, is if you look too much through the singular lens of drugs, you can overemphasize it. You can overemphasize how important it was as an explainer of the effectiveness of Blitzkrieg, for example. Because there is some… I mean, I should say there is something really compelling about a singular theory that explains everything, and you can fall in love with it too much as an explainer. So can you steel man his criticism or a criticism you received, and also argue against it?
Norman Ohler
(00:25:32)
I think he’s absolutely right that you shouldn’t argue in a monocausal way. And this is actually what Mommsen also said to me because, of course, I was enthusiastic about all my drug findings. And he said, “Don’t argue in a monocausal way, especially the war.”
Lex Fridman
(00:25:50)
There are a lot of variables, a lot of factors, a lot of things going on.
Norman Ohler
(00:25:53)
So that sentence of his, “Don’t argue in a monocausal way,” that always stayed with me. And I think that I didn’t deviate from that path, actually. But it was still interesting that Evans thought that I put too much emphasis on the drugs. It’s… I think it’s a totally fine opinion. I would disagree. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have written the book. What I can state here is that I invented nothing. In all of my three non-fiction books, nothing is invented. If you are a good writer, and I trained as a novelist, for me, it was also very unusual to write a non-fiction book. I wanted to write a novel about Nazis and drugs. My publisher said, “No, this is…” And he looked at the facts, you know?
Norman Ohler
(00:26:43)
He said, “Someone has to write the facts.” So I said, “But the non-fiction books are boring.” He said, “Not necessarily. Maybe you can find a way to write it with your novelistic style, but based 100% on the facts.” And that is like… In German we say Șpagat. How do you say that? A split, like when you do with your legs. It’s hard, you know?
Lex Fridman
(00:27:08)
Yeah.
Norman Ohler
(00:27:09)
Because with a very fluent, sophisticated language, you can easily overpower the reader. If I describe how the German guys, 19-year-old guys, took the meth and went into the tank, and the meth started kicking in, five guys on meth after one hour of ride into France, you can write that in a powerful way that if you are the reader, you would think, “Yeah. I mean, the Blitzkrieg without meth is unthinkable.”
Lex Fridman
(00:27:38)
There is a bit of a… Man, I wish I found that kind of feeling for historians, right? Like, “How did I miss this piece?” So some historians, like great historians like Kershaw, obviously, they kind of give you a slow clap, applaud. And some historians are a little bit skeptical, like, “This is a little too good.” So totally understandable. And…
Norman Ohler
(00:28:02)
Also, they have different techniques to write texts like this. I used a totally different technique. And I have an apparatus, so it really feels like it could be an academic work. But still, it’s written in a way that it kind of overpowers. It kind of colonializes the story in a weird way. I never thought about it like that. But while I was writing it, I was just trying to write it as well as I could. I didn’t think about these questions we’re talking about now.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:35)
Yes.
Norman Ohler
(00:28:36)
I just… I got carried away, obviously, but I never left the area of facts.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:43)
Yes. So we should talk about your process. That’s also super fascinating. You went to the archives. You went to the sources. What does that take? What does it feel? What does it smell like? What does it look like? What does it entail? How much text is there? What language is it in? What’s the process there?
Norman Ohler
(00:29:01)
I never thought of going to the archives. And my girlfriend at the time, she said, “You have to go to the archives.” And she’s an academic. So she… And I was like, “Yeah, okay. I’ll go. I’m fine. I’ll check it out.” And then when I met a historian, he claims that without methamphetamine, there would be no Blitzkrieg victory of Germany. Like he’s monocausal. But he was also extremely helpful to me, and he’s an academic. He gave me the signatures, it’s called in German, where you find stuff in the archives. Signature is like… Then it says like H2/538, something like this. And these were the files of Professor Ranke. And Professor Ranke was the head of the Institute for Army Physiology. His job was to improve the performance of the soldier.
Norman Ohler
(00:30:00)
And all of his stuff was filed in a certain place in the military archives, which in Germany is in Freiburg, in the south, in a small town, not in Berlin. Because Germany is a bit of a decentralized country. We don’t want to put everything into Berlin again like the Nazis did. We try to avoid our mistakes. So the military archive is in Freiburg, and I went there. And because I had this signature, immediately I got original documents that were all relating to my research. Like, I could read the original. I had the original.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:34)
What does it look like? Is it sheets of paper?
Norman Ohler
(00:30:36)
Yeah, it’s like…
Lex Fridman
(00:30:37)
Like, so it’s not scanned, it’s…
Norman Ohler
(00:30:39)
Well, it’s different things, like the guy who put the meth into the army, Professor Ranke. He was writing a war diary. That’s what the name was, War Diaries. So every day he would write it by hand. So this war diary was given to me.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:56)
So you’re reading that?
Norman Ohler
(00:30:57)
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:57)
So it’s like dated, you have a date…
Norman Ohler
(00:30:59)
Yeah
Lex Fridman
(00:30:59)
… the diary?
Norman Ohler
(00:31:00)
It was a bit funny with him because he took a lot of meth himself, because he thought it was great. He just thought it increases your performance. By now we know a little bit more that methamphetamine is not so healthy because you get used to it and you burn out, and you get depressed, and then you have to take more. Big problem. And he became depressed and burnt out, and he didn’t realize it’s because of the meth that he’s like describing to the whole German army, like he was, he made a convincing case. And I can explain that in detail how that actually happened. But just to have his war diary was great, and then also he would type letters writing to the company of Temmler, how fast they could produce stuff, in which time.
Norman Ohler
(00:31:46)
So we have, you have all these original documents. You have like 500 documents and it goes like, he writes like reports what happened in this battle on methamphetamine. There’s a lot of stuff you can find in the archives if you find them. But the tricky thing is that you can only look, you can kind of look at a so-called find book. In the find book you cannot type in “drugs.” It wouldn’t find anything because at the time when they were taking all the notes from this doctor, his war diary, everything, they didn’t put the label “drugs” there. They put the label his name, his position, World War II, French campaign, stuff like that. So, because at the time they didn’t know that I would at one point come and look for drugs in that, you know?
Norman Ohler
(00:32:36)
But he was the drug guy, but also they didn’t realize he was the drug guy. No one realized that he was the drug guy. So it’s not easy to find stuff in the archives. So the archives you go, it’s a very Kafkaesque experience. You go into this building, and you have to understand the rules, and you will never fully understand what’s going on. Also, the archivists, they don’t really know what’s going on because there’s so many documents. No one’s read them all, you know? No one knows, like there’s history kind of lying there, somehow organized, somehow stored.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:05)
I mean, it does sound like a very Kafkaesque…
Norman Ohler
(00:33:07)
It’s-
Lex Fridman
(00:33:08)
… thing.
Norman Ohler
(00:33:09)
But it’s great if you find something, but you can also sit there for a week and not find anything.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:14)
So what was the process for you? You’re just reading, open-minded, seeing, trying to see, is there some truth here to be discovered?
Norman Ohler
(00:33:26)
Well, I have a friend. He’s a DJ, and we talked about Berlin. We’ll probably talk about it more, and he takes a lot of drugs. And he knows his drugs, let’s put it that way. He knows his drugs. And one day he said to me when I was trying to figure out what I would write about next, he said, “The Nazis took a lot of drugs. You should write about that.” And I said, “The Nazis didn’t take drugs,” because, you know, when you grow up in Germany you get educated about the Nazis quite intensely, especially in West Germany. They teach you everything, but they don’t teach you drugs. Now they do, maybe, you know. But it was not known, so, and the Nazis always had this aura of being law and order. No drugs, of course. No chaos. Everything…
Norman Ohler
(00:34:15)
My grandfather, he was a Nazi, always said, “Well, at least there was discipline in the country. There was law and order.” So this doesn’t match with drugs, you know?
Lex Fridman
(00:34:24)
You know, I should also say I think that’s the experience for a lot of people. Before reading your book, I had the same kind of feeling that the Nazi ideology was all about law and order and purity, and surely they would not be doing drugs. So this really blew my mind. I think I wasn’t quite ready, similar to Richard Evans. This is a big, like, okay, a narrative transforming into a deeper, more complicated understanding what Nazi forces and the Hitler inner circle actually looked like.
Norman Ohler
(00:35:00)
That’s why I didn’t believe Alex.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:03)
Always take the DJ, the drug expert, with a grain of salt.
Norman Ohler
(00:35:07)
I didn’t believe him, but I said, “It’s a great topic. Maybe I could invent it.” He said, “No, we don’t invent this. This is real.” And I said, “How do you know?” And he said, “I have a friend,” and I know this guy by now. I met him. He’s an antique dealer in Berlin, and he had bought an old medicine chest in an old Berlin apartment. This was in 2010, and he found Pervitin tablets inside, which were the methamphetamine product that was marketed in Germany in the late ’30s. And this guy, the antique dealer, took some tablets, and they were quite old, you know, 70 years old, but they still had an effect on him. And I later asked him and he said, “Well, we took them for about a month. It was the greatest month we ever had. Like, we had so much fun.” “We were so productive.”
Norman Ohler
(00:35:54)
‘Cause that methamphetamine back then was also like a quality product. It was not crystal meth made in a trailer lab, you know?
Lex Fridman
(00:36:03)
So this is many decades later.
Norman Ohler
(00:36:05)
They were still potent.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:06)
They were still potent.
Norman Ohler
(00:36:07)
Alex especially convinced me because Alex has a high tolerance, and he said, “Okay, they still had some.” So I said to him, “Can I have some also?” And I took one, and he’s like, “And this was, we were standing in my writing tower, which is at the river in Berlin,” and he was like, “I took one, and I could feel something. Then I took another one…” and then it’s, you know, I could feel more. And then I took a third one. Typical Alex, he would take three, you know.
Norman Ohler
(00:36:33)
Instead of just taking one, he took three methamphetamine tablets from the ’40s, and he said, “And then I felt like…” and he looked at the river, and there was a big cargo ship going by, and he said, “I felt like this ship.” Suddenly there was this, “Shoop,” he said in German, like a motion that was like energy that was grabbing me, and I felt so powerful. And he told me this, and I was like, “Wow, this is like…” And I Googled “methamphetamine Nazi Germany.” This was in 2010. And there was this one professor at the university in Ulm who said, “The Blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine.” So I called up this guy, and he said, “Sure, I’ll meet you.” And then he gave me the signature for the archive.
Norman Ohler
(00:37:14)
Then I went to the archive, and then I really started to do my own research. And then I went to different archives, and I tried to find everything on Nazis and drugs. And that came… Everything is in the book. So that crazy meeting with Alex in my writing tower, that kind of got me on this research journey.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:34)
It makes me wonder what other mysteries like that are in the archives. Do you think there’s stuff like that in there that we deeply don’t understand? I mean about, for example, there’s a bunch of mysteries that we think we understand, maybe about the concentration camps, maybe about the Eastern Front, the interplay between Stalin and Hitler. Maybe, maybe about Britain, that could be discovered in the letters, in the data that were completely missing.
Norman Ohler
(00:38:07)
I think so. And I think that also there are archives that are not open. Let’s say the Vatican archive. Some secret archives that some very powerful structures have, structures that we might not even know now off the top of our head, which still have a huge influence. So I think that human history is quite different from what most historians write. I think that’s just one version. I think there are several versions, and I think that it goes much deeper and is much more interesting. And so, I guess, this history is a very active thing, which I also didn’t know. You know, I was writing a historical nonfiction book, and I suddenly realized that this is like a shark pool because history defines the future or is very connected.
Norman Ohler
(00:39:03)
Our history teacher always said, “If we don’t know where we come from, we cannot know where we go.” And that is, I think, true. That is what I’m now really interested in for my next book. I’m trying to really understand human history. And obviously, I’m not the first. There are a few, you know, alternative historians that go like… Because you have to go back in time quite a bit, and then it’s not easy to write about it, but it’s very interesting to think about. And I would love to find the truth on Atlantis, which I don’t believe in actually, and we can also talk about that. But maybe there’s an archive where we can actually see that they had this king ruling.
Norman Ohler
(00:39:41)
I don’t think this could be found, but I think we can still also find a lot of documents, but I think especially in closed archives. So we won’t find them.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:51)
You said a lot of really interesting things. It’s so important to have people like you that do the daring work of going to the archives, the sources, the evidence, and trying to find a thing that completely transforms history as we thought we understood it. That’s revisionist history at its best. Revisionist history has a sort of negative connotation sometimes because you go to conspiratorial land without much evidence, and you’re just being a rebel for a rebel’s sake. But when you ground it in data and dare to challenge the historical narrative, that’s really powerful. So now, I should also mention that we’ve been just laying out the context.
Norman Ohler
(00:40:37)
Yeah. We’re still in the context phase.

Pervitin

Lex Fridman
(00:40:39)
Context phase. And for the next 10 hours, and maybe for the rest of our lives, we will be continuing just setting the context. But let us dare return to the original question of Pervitin. How did that come about? Take me to 1930s Nazi Germany. The Munich and the Berlin tension that we all laid out beautifully. How did Pervitin come into the picture?
Norman Ohler
(00:41:03)
Well, the Nazis managed to grab power on January 30th, 1933, and they immediately became an anti-drug regime. That is important to them because the only intoxication they allowed from now on in Germany is the Nazi intoxication, it’s the ideological intoxication. So they quickly installed concentration camps, which were at the time run by the SA, not the SS, which takes over later and turns the concentration camps into an industry. The first SA concentration camps were in cellars in Berlin or in the countryside. And some of the first people that landed in these cellars and were disciplined were drug users. Also, anti-Semitic policies which were very important from day one for the Nazis. Anti-Semitism is the defining pillar of national socialism.
Norman Ohler
(00:42:05)
The core of it, really. They quickly connected anti-drug policies with anti-Semitic policies. They claimed the German Jews were taking more drugs than the non-Jewish Germans. And National Socialism’s goal was to purify the German body. So they saw the whole Volk, the country, the people, as one body, and that has to be purified so all Jews are poison. But not only Jews, everyone who thinks differently. Communists are also poison. Jews are the worst poison, but, you know, a lot of, you know… Yeah, and then you create this clean body. And obviously drugs have no position in that. If you’re addicted to drugs, that’s weak, you know, you’re a morphinist.
Norman Ohler
(00:42:56)
You use cocaine, that’s all degenerate, that’s Jewish, that’s… Jewish doctors are all morphinists, you know? So Nazi Germany and Hitler were the shining examples of a person who doesn’t take drugs. He didn’t have a private life, he didn’t even have a body. He just led the Volksbody, you know? So Hitler was not putting any poisons into him. He stopped smoking cigarettes in the ’20s already. He never touched alcohol.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:32)
Vegetarian.
Norman Ohler
(00:43:33)
…vegetarian, no caffeine even. So he was… That’s what he was in the beginning. The story, of course, changes at a certain point in time, but he started as this.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:47)
As far as you understand, that’s true? The beginning?
Norman Ohler
(00:43:50)
Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure that this is true. Also, vegetarianism was a right-wing thing in Germany. It was an elitist thing. If you were a vegetarian, you had a higher frequency, which kind of gave you superiority over, let’s say, these workers who need to eat the sausage so you can, you know, do the work. Like Wagner, the composer, he was vegetarian. Hitler was impressed by Wagner. So vegetarianism, all… I think that’s all true. I think Hitler was like that. And it’s hard to be like that actually, and I think that gave him an attraction inside the movement to all the drunkards, like Goering using morphine all the time because of his pain. He got used to morphine, so they were…
Norman Ohler
(00:44:37)
The movement wasn’t like this, but he was like this. So he symbolized that whole approach of cleanliness, like purity. So then how does methamphetamine come into the picture? It’s totally absurd. That’s why I thought it was fun researching this, because it doesn’t make sense, you know? And, you know, they use this simple trick by defining what is an illegal drug and what is not. Because drugs don’t have it written on them, “This is an illegal, dangerous drug.” You know, drugs are basically neutral. These are molecules, you know? So the methamphetamine molecule was found in a Berlin-based company called the Temmler Company.
Norman Ohler
(00:45:23)
And the head of Temmler, he was very upset with the Olympics in 1936 because an Afro-American athlete, Jesse Owens, was running faster than German superheroes with the best genes, you know? How could this be? So they thought that he was on something, because he won, I think, five gold medals. It was ridiculous. You know, these were supposed to be Germany’s games, and then the Afro-American runs better than the Aryan ubermensch. So the only explanation is he took a drug. He took probably Benzedrine, which was an illegal amphetamine, and also there were no doping checks at the Olympics. And if you’re taking amphetamine, of course you can run a bit faster maybe, when it kicks in.
Norman Ohler
(00:46:16)
That this has to do with the immense release of dopamine in the brain. But it was never proven that Owens used any type of drugs, but the head of the Temmler Company, he said, “We have to prevent this. We have to invent a better amphetamine. We have to make a German amphetamine that is stronger than the American Benzedrine.” So his main chemist, Fritz Hauschild, he did research and he found that in 1917, in Tokyo, a Japanese chemist had made methamphetamine, and he remade that methamphetamine and they tested it among themselves, the chemists in the Berlin pharmaceutical lab, and they loved it. Like, they made pure methamphetamine, and, you know, they had a really good time, and they were more active, they were talkative.
Norman Ohler
(00:47:07)
Because that’s what happens with methamphetamine. So the company really thought this is a great product, and they turned it into a product, they went to the patent bureaucracy and got the patent for methamphetamine, and then it quite quickly came onto the market. It was labeled as Pervitin, which is kind of a great name, because it has the perverse already in it. And this Pervitin was available in any pharmacy, so you didn’t need a prescription. A child could go and buy 10 packs of pure methamphetamine. So methamphetamine was also very cheap, so it became quite popular because people, you know, talked about it.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:44)
Did they understand the, the side effects and negative effects of me- methamphetamine? Did they care?
Norman Ohler
(00:47:49)
They didn’t really know what it was. I mean, I also read, I went to the archive of that company also, of course. So they were like, “What is it good for?” Like, “I just feel great when I take it and I have more energy,” and they didn’t know if that could be a product. It was 1937, ’38 when they were discovering it.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:08)
But also, did they… How did they think about the fact that this is a drug?
Norman Ohler
(00:48:14)
Well, they called it a performance enhancer.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:17)
Got it.
Norman Ohler
(00:48:18)
Is drinking a coffee in the morning a drug? I mean, it is a drug, but we don’t think of it as a drug, you know? It’s legal. And this was kind of how meth was treated in Germany. It was normal to use it. Like, you had a very important business meeting, of course you would take a Pervitin. There’s a movie by Billy Wilder called “One, Two, Three,” a very good movie, and he shows… the American executive, the movie was set right after the end of the Second World War. So we see, I think it’s a Coca-Cola executive, American, and he says to his secretary, “How should I have the morning coffee? I think half of a Pervitin.” So Pervitin was also normal, it wasn’t stigmatized. It wasn’t the American “just say no” propaganda, where your teeth fall out and…
Norman Ohler
(00:49:11)
I mean, it was a German quality product, people liked it. Of course, they did tests at universities, like… But most of them were quite positive. Like, yeah, it reduces your fear. Today, we might, you know, look for different things, but this was also a performance-driven, totalitarian society moving towards war. So if someone takes Pervitin and says in the clinical tests at university, “I’m not afraid of anything anymore.” So that’s positive. That’s actually what got the guy who worked for the German army interested, because he read university reports, like I also saw all of these reports. They were also in the military archive. So he’s like, “Okay, you’re not afraid anymore if you take methamphetamine. You don’t need to sleep anymore.
Norman Ohler
(00:49:56)
You don’t need to eat so much, because your appetite is lowered.” Like, this is perfect for a soldier. So negative effects only became public in 1940, when the first Pervitin opponent, who was actually a relative of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later arms minister, this Speer psychologist, he was the first one who said, “Wait a minute. First of all, methamphetamine is against the Nazi ideology, because now we’re all taking a drug to be high performers. We have to be high performers without a drug.” And he also said, “You know the obvious, this is going to make you addicted,” et cetera. “This will, you know, create a tolerance.” So only then the first negative reports came out.
Norman Ohler
(00:50:44)
Before that, what Temmler did and then what the universities did, they all thought methamphetamine was really good.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:51)
So what was the process of convincing the German military, the Wehrmacht army, to use it at scale?
Norman Ohler
(00:50:59)
Well, Professor Ranke was employed by the army, so it was his job to find things that would improve the performance of the German soldier. I always imagined him like a James Bond character, like Q who develops gadgets and stuff, because he also developed gadgets. So he was quite a… You know, he was an academic, but he was also a soldier, you know? He was employed, but he was basically running this institute, examining it, and he was so convinced that Pervitin is the answer to his question, how to beat the main opponent of the German soldier. And that was not the British soldier, not the French soldier, not the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer.
Norman Ohler
(00:51:48)
So when he read these reports from universities, he did his own tests in the military academy with young medical officers. They came together at 8:00 PM in the evening, and then they received either methamphetamine, a caffeine pill or a placebo, or Benzedrine. Like they had different experiments, and he always concluded at the end, like, they started at 8:00 PM and like at 10:00 AM in the morning, one time he notes the Pervitin people still want to go out and party, while the caffeine guys are sleeping on the bench and the… You know, it was clear that Pervitin is the strongest. It gives you the most energy, lets you work for the longest time.
Norman Ohler
(00:52:30)
So he was convinced, but his superior, like the surgeon general of the German army, he was like an old-school dude, and he didn’t even react to these, like… Ranke would write letters, “We have to use this synthetic drug in the next campaign,” which was against Poland, which he knew about. And because Pervitin was quite known in the civil society, people were using it already, so he said, he even said, “A lot of soldiers will just take it with them, and we should control that. We should make it an official drug.” But the surgeon general didn’t understand. He didn’t reply. So Germany attacked Poland without a clear regulatory system on methamphetamine, and indeed, a lot of soldiers used it.
Norman Ohler
(00:53:15)
And what Ranke then did was he requested from all of the medical officers in the field in Poland… The war was over after a few weeks, so… But the German army was occupying Poland. He said, “Send me all back reports, and tell me what… Did your people take Pervitin and what were the effects?” And he collected all these reports, which are also studied in the military archive, and he came to the conclusion, “This is a really good fighting drug.” And it probably is, because people are still using it today. Methamphetamine is still being used, and Ranke discovered this. He had everything in front of him. And Poland was beaten, and then Hitler wanted to attack the West.
Norman Ohler
(00:53:54)
And the West was a different story than Poland, because the West was the world empire of Great Britain combined with La Grande Armée, the strongest army in the world, the French army. These two combined, you know, how can you win that? Poland, they could overpower. They had, you know, better army than Poland. But is the German Wehrmacht really better than both of these armies combined? His officers didn’t think so. High command said, “No, we’re not going to attack the West; we’re going to lose.” And Hitler was fanatic about it, he really wanted to attack it. They were planning a coup against him in November 1939 just to prevent him ordering the attack on the West, because it would have been a catastrophe for Germany. Because they really cared, you know?
Norman Ohler
(00:54:41)
If you’re a high command, you don’t want to start a war that you’re going to lose, you know? Very bad.

Blitzkrieg and meth

Lex Fridman
(00:54:46)
Can you just briefly give a sense of, do you think this is genius or insanity on Hitler’s part to think that he can take on probably what’s perceived to be the most powerful military in the world, which is the French military, or at least in Europe?
Norman Ohler
(00:55:06)
I think his hatred for the French was very, very deep. He really, he really wanted to go to war with them. It was an ideological, irrational decision. That’s why he was not… He didn’t hate the empire. He kind of looked down, he admired it and looked down on it.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:23)
You mean the British Empire?
Norman Ohler
(00:55:24)
Yeah. But the French he really hated, and France had been the Erzfeind, the genetic enemy of the German people, at least right-wingers would say so. There had been two wars. The first one Germany had won, then World War I, Germany had lost. So Hitler wanted to kind of revenge and also stop the Versailles Treaty, so he really needed to attack the West, at least in his mindset. But it was an irrational decision, and that’s why high command said, “No, we’re not going to do it,” basically. And Hitler’s position at the time was not that he could do anything he wanted. I mean, high command is still a high command of the German Wehrmacht. That’s a very old, you know, it’s a tradition. It’s… They do whatever they want, you know?
Norman Ohler
(00:56:13)
But also, they have to obey Hitler’s orders. So it’s a power struggle, basically. But to invade France was a totally stupid idea, but it changed in the morning. On the morning of February 17th, 1940, Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan, which was the plan to go through the Ardennes Mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it’s not the drugs. Actually, that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountains, if you think monocausal, you would say that’s the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I. You…
Norman Ohler
(00:56:56)
It becomes a stalemate, and they fight for months, and no one really moves, and it’s bloody, and nothing’s happening. It’s bad. But that was the only plan that they had. That’s why the high command said, “No, we’re not going to do it. It’s stupid.” But these three tank generals, they somehow were able to sneak into Hitler’s office, and they said, “Look, if we go with the whole army through the Ardennes Mountains,” and Hitler said, “Eh, this is not possible. This is like a mountain range.
Norman Ohler
(00:57:22)
How can the whole German army fit through this eye of a needle, basically?” And they said, “No, we can do it because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do.” Tanks are not slow machines in the back that kind of wait for the action to happen and then, you know, support this somehow. “We’re going to use tanks in the front as race cars, basically. We’re going to overpower the enemy. We’re going to be in France before the French, who are stationed with the British in northern Belgium and also on the Maginot Line, but not really in the Ardennes Mountains. That was hardly fortified because no one could imagine that Germany would go through there. And before they know it, we are already behind them, basically.”
Norman Ohler
(00:58:09)
We are already in France, and they’re still hanging out in northern Belgium because it takes quite a while, you know, to travel. This was a different time also. So he was convinced, and he then ordered the attack. The attack would happen, and that is then… But it would only work if you would reach Sedan, the border city of France, within three days and three nights. So the whole army, or at least, you know, the avant-garde of the machinery had to be a big part of the army, had to be in Sedan after three days and three nights. And that was only possible if you don’t stop, and that was the problem. The sleep was really then…
Norman Ohler
(00:58:51)
Suddenly became a huge problem, and Hitler said, “When I was fighting in World War I, of course I could stay awake for a week. I’m a German.” You know, even though he’s not even German, he’s Austrian. But that was a problem, but suddenly Ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe how people could stay awake for three days and three nights. So Ranke suddenly became… Before that, he was kind of an outsider, like the freak with the drug idea. Suddenly, he became like, “Okay, tell us, how does it work?” And he gave lectures in front of the officers, and he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army is prescribed a drug, in this case methamphetamine. How much should be taken? At what intervals? What are the side effects? So this was a…
Norman Ohler
(00:59:41)
This became a very big thing. And then Temmler had to deliver 35 million dosages to the front lines, which were… No, not the front yet. I mean, they were stationed in the west of Germany, and then on May 10th, they took their methamphetamine, and they started the surprise attack through the Ardennes Mountains.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:01)
So the 35 million dosages for the French campaign, I mean, we could probably talk for many hours about this particular campaign because it is, I think it’s fair to say, the most successful military campaign from the German side.
Norman Ohler
(01:00:19)
Ended with a big mistake, Dunkirk. It was brilliant up until that point. That is the turning point. That was the first big mistake Hitler did, and it also had to do with drugs.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:29)
We’ll talk about it, but let’s just linger on this three days. So we should also mention that’s where Blitzkrieg really shined. So it wasn’t just the tanks, it was the infantry, it was the aircraft moving very fast behind the French lines. What can you speak to just the execution of that campaign and the role of drugs in it? And it is, we should say, a really bold strategic decision to use meth. I mean, it’s a big risk. There are a lot of risks taken here, which could be seen as military genius or military insanity, or a mixture of both.
Norman Ohler
(01:01:08)
Well, they were very lucky that it all worked out. Like, it… Also, the- the guys in the tanks could all have freaked out on the meth. Because then it would… It was never tested before, can you actually be in a combat situation, in a tank, in enemy territory on meth? Can people actually cope with that and be better fighters?
Lex Fridman
(01:01:26)
Going through the mountains…
Norman Ohler
(01:01:29)
It’s insane, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:29)
…against the biggest military in Europe.
Norman Ohler
(01:01:33)
Well, what meth does is… I read reports of a depressed atmosphere right before the attack started because they were afraid. They thought they would lose, they didn’t want that. You know, soldiers, maybe some really hardcore Nazi soldiers, but most people were just normal guys, you know? They didn’t want to start that. But once they had the methamphetamine, it kind of… you’re like in a party mood. So also when you’re in the tank, everyone likes it, you know? It’s rather an uplifting thing, they were really getting into it and they really, you know, they started fighting then. It’s also intoxication, it’s a rush.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:14)
What does meth feel like?
Norman Ohler
(01:02:19)
Well, meth creates the so-called fight or flight mode. So either you run… it releases all the neurotransmitters in the brain which are released in situations of high danger, for example. So in a highly dangerous situation, you become very alert, so you can cope with the situation. If you’re under life threat and you don’t even react to it, you’re probably going to be dead, you know? But the body does that, and methamphetamine does that. So you take a pill of methamphetamine or you snort a line of methamphetamine and you’re like… and you’re like this, you’re like… And then it’s the fight or flight mode. Either you run away like it’s too much, you know?
Norman Ohler
(01:03:01)
But on meth, you usually don’t run away. You kind of think it’s really cool what’s happening. You like to move, you like to be with your pals, you like to, you know, being in a tank is great on meth.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:10)
So there is a party aspect to it?
Norman Ohler
(01:03:12)
I think it was very joyful for the German soldiers because it was springtime. They had immediate successes. And it wasn’t heavy fighting; it was just being in the tank. I mean, there was, of course, fighting, and there were also war crimes. I read a report when Rommel, high on meth, at night, doesn’t stop, of course, because they all, you know… they didn’t stop at night, but every army usually stops at night. So the French army was stopping, they were in a village camping out, and the German, Rommel, was going with the tank through that village with his division, just running over people. And he was standing in the open lid of the tank and he was going through that thing, you know, like a berserk type of warrior.
Norman Ohler
(01:04:01)
And that was when… that to me is a war crime. That is when the Wehrmacht lost its innocence in that push of Rommel through the French countryside, because you don’t do that, you know? Your enemy is sleeping. Because the French also had a drug regulation. They received three quarters of a liter of red wine per man per day. So, of course, at night they’re going to be sleepy on red wine, and the Germans were on meth and they were just running over them. There are descriptions of the chains of the tank becoming bloody. I don’t think he did it and he was like, “Oh my God, what did I just do? I’m sorry.” You know, “What am I doing here?” He was in the movie, you know?
Lex Fridman
(01:04:41)
This is the dark thing about human nature, that in war, if you dehumanize, if you allow your brain to dehumanize the enemy, the opponent, the humans on the other side, you can actually… I think hate can take over, and in that hate you can find pleasure when you murder the other. And people have written about this, they’ve talked about this. It’s probably a thing that a person like me can’t possibly comprehend unless they experienced it. And you have to be in the mania, in the hysteria, in the insanity intensity of war.
Norman Ohler
(01:05:21)
I mean, what Evans, for example, said is that, “I excuse the Germans of the war crimes because they were just in an intoxication.” I understand that argument, but… And if you look at individual soldiers, it’s quite tricky. Like, it’s a 19-year-old guy, he’s been drafted. And in Nazi Germany, if you don’t go, you land in the concentration camp. So you can choose, you know, concentration camp or you just join the ranks and then you get Pervitin and then you invade France. There was a trial in Germany because someone said all soldiers are murderers. And I think then the German Bundeswehr sued him. “No, soldiers are not murderers.” And he actually won in court. So it’s legal in Germany to call every soldier a murderer. But it’s a tricky question.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:12)
Yeah, I remember seeing this documentary on ordinary people. I think there’s also social pressure. Again, insane it is to say, I think the documentary, “Ordinary People,” was looking at the Germans that were a part of the shooting squads. And, you know, they didn’t understand what they were signing up for, and they were told that they’re free to leave once they understand what they’re doing, and many of them didn’t. And they didn’t have hate for Jews or for the people they’re murdering. You are, again, a 19, 20-year-old young kid; it’s so hard to comprehend the moral insanity that’s happening all around you and you just kind of want to fit in.
Norman Ohler
(01:06:54)
I mean, that’s why I wrote the book, “The Bohemians,” because there were a few people in Berlin that didn’t react this way, but they reacted in a different way. They said, “We cannot be part of this.” Um…
Lex Fridman
(01:07:07)
But it’s hard to be the person…
Norman Ohler
(01:07:07)
It’s very hard, yeah. And most people are part of it because it’s much more safe, or at least it seems more safe. I mean, it has its own perils, you know, because you might become a genocidal murderer, you know. That might happen. And are you responsible? I would say you are responsible, but that’s just my personal gut feeling. I always thought my grandfather was responsible for the genocide because he was working for the German railway system, and he once saw a train car full of Jews in a cattle wagon, and he only said to me, “Yeah, this was against German railway regulations.” And I said, “So what did you do?” And he said, “Well, there were SS at the station when I was working, and I was too scared. I didn’t do anything.” So I thought that he was…
Norman Ohler
(01:07:58)
he made himself guilty, I thought. And my father, for example, reacted very strongly because of that. He never called him by his first name, the father of his wife, because he still had that, you know, he was a Nazi because he was working for the railway. So I wouldn’t excuse… I wouldn’t excuse people actually, and I certainly would not excuse high-ranking politicians that make policies because the genocidal policies that the Nazis developed and the war policies that they developed had nothing to do with drugs. And I never write that, you know, because there are no documents. If I would find documents that say, “Yeah, when we…” you know, but the Nazi ideology has nothing to do with drugs. Maybe with alcohol, you know, but it’s…
Norman Ohler
(01:08:49)
And I spoke with my father, who had been a high judge in Germany. What does the law actually say? And the law says if you plan a crime and then maybe when you commit it, you are under the influence, it does not diminish your responsibility. Your responsibilities are only diminished… Let’s say you’re a totally normal person, never done any harm to anybody, and suddenly you take a drug that… or you’re totally drunk, and you don’t know what you’re doing and you kill someone. Then a judge could say maybe you have a lesser responsibility. But this is not the case with the crimes of National Socialism, and I never even hint at that in my book. So I think that criticism by Evans was short-sighted. I wouldn’t… I think he’s not right about that.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:39)
Yeah, I, I think I agree with you totally. I didn’t get that sense.
Norman Ohler
(01:09:43)
He thought the book was very successful because a lot of right-wing people bought it, but that’s not… it’s simply not true.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:50)
I think your book did a masterful job of never making itself amenable to that kind of narrative.
Norman Ohler
(01:09:59)
To the contrary, I got an angry letter by a German army employee, quite a high officer and a military historian, and he said that I… he also thought I overemphasized the drug use of methamphetamine in the Western campaign because he said the German army was just so good, and you kind of diminish their capability by saying they were only so good because they took methamphetamine. I thought that was kind of funny because the Wehrmacht doesn’t exist anymore, and the new German… the current German army is called the Bundeswehr, and historically, they’re not supposed to be connected. Like, there was a clear cut, but he still felt that I was kind of hurting the pride of the Wehrmacht.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:46)
I, I generally sort of agree with him. In general, it seems like great historians often… I’m just a human, so I’m not a historian, but they undermine the importance of the heroes that make up an army. The Soviet Army, the British Army, the French Army, the German Army. These are humans, and some of the great military campaigns involve people really stepping up. Now, the effectiveness of the military tactics with Blitzkrieg, the effectiveness of meth, the strategic decisions around where to invade, the timing, the speed, all those are important, but there are humans there. There are real heroes. And sometimes historians kind of diminish that. I don’t know what to make sense of it.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:39)
I might be just an idiot, but I’ve had a great conversation with James Holland. I’ve gotten to know him well. He kind of analyzed the mistakes made by Hitler and by Stalin in Operation Barbarossa. But through generations, because I grew up in the Soviet Union, you hear these stories of these heroes, you know. My grandfather was a machine gunner and miraculously survived. And just knowing those stories, Stalingrad would not have happened without the heroes on the Soviet side.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:13)
It’s easy to say there are a lot of blunders, a lot of bad tactics, all this kind of stuff, but to me, from the human side, I just know through my bloodline, the people that have fearlessly given their life to defend their homeland, and that sometimes can be a little bit easily dismissed. So, I don’t know what to make sense of it. Maybe I’m romanticizing, or maybe I’m speaking to the suffering that the people have felt, and they just propagate themselves through my life story, and then maybe the gratitude I have for the people who stopped the Nazi forces.
Norman Ohler
(01:12:50)
I think it’s amazing what the Russian soldiers actually did because they beat the Wehrmacht. It was really the Red Army on the ground that did the job, you know. And did they love communism and the system? I don’t think so. I think they were… I mean, of course, some people, but basically, they were defending their country. I’m also very grateful to them.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:15)
Yeah, they’re defending their families. Quick pause. Bathroom break?
Norman Ohler
(01:13:18)
Okay.

Erwin Rommel (Crystal Fox)

Lex Fridman
(01:13:20)
Alright, we’re back. So can you say a bit more about the French campaigns? It was over in six weeks. It took six weeks to complete a defeat and occupy most of France. And the initial operation, three days, was, from a military perspective, successful. What else can we say about the role of drugs, the effectiveness, what was learned from that experience by the Wehrmacht?
Norman Ohler
(01:13:53)
I mean, for me to research the Western campaign was very interesting because I didn’t really know anything about it except that Germany won very quickly. So to actually look at the details is very interesting, and the drugs give you kind of a way in.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:10)
What are some things you found in the archives that were interesting, like, about maybe letters, reports, diaries, that gave you some insight about the human story of it all?
Norman Ohler
(01:14:21)
Well, there are letters, for example, by Heinrich Böll, who won the Nobel Prize later in literature. He writes to his parents describing in detail what Pervitin did to him, how it kept his mood up, and that without Pervitin, he wouldn’t have been able to do the job. But also military documents I found very interesting. For example, I could see exactly how the methamphetamine was distributed because it was not distributed equally. It was done in a way that the tank troops who were leading the advance received the most meth, and they also needed it. I could see how many pills on which date were delivered to Rommel’s troops. And Rommel became, I call him the Crystal Fox in my book for obvious reasons. His division was using a lot of meth.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:11)
And he was using meth as well?
Norman Ohler
(01:15:14)
I just have descriptions of how he, like, totally crazy stands in the open lid of the tank and all his people… Well, they had the meth, but there’s no-
Lex Fridman
(01:15:23)
So you can infer from that.
Norman Ohler
(01:15:24)
There’s no, they- they, maybe they didn’t use it. Maybe he didn’t use it. But it looks like he used it. Like, there were also never any reports that all the meth was given back. I mean, a lot of soldiers write that they take it, but Rommel specifically, I wouldn’t write in my book Blitz that Rommel would take methamphetamine on such a day or something if there was no record for it. But Rommel, there is a record for it that Rommel’s division used the most meth of any tank division. So I write about that. And that already makes him the Crystal Fox because, you know, in his division, crystal meth is rampant.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:06)
You know, it’s like in Animal Farm when the pigs discover alcohol. Animal Farm by George Orwell. There’s no evidence that they drank. It’s just the next day that they’re all hungover.
Norman Ohler
(01:16:18)
Rommel is a very interesting character in general because later he apparently turned against Hitler. He was part of the conspiracy of Operation Valkyrie. He received, you know, the offer to shoot himself in the forest, which he did, instead of being tried and executed.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:40)
Is he just part of the- this general tension that the generals, the military had with Hitler? That’d be fair to say?
Norman Ohler
(01:16:48)
I would say so, yes. I’m not an expert on the Wehrmacht. This is a very complex, large organization. But I see most of the officers of the Wehrmacht as not necessarily Nazis in the way that they would, you know, shout, “Heil Hitler,” all the time. They were highly intelligent, highly trained, super professionals that ran a very effective war machine. And at one point, more and more of these generals realized that the orders that Hitler was giving were not really helping, you know, and they have their men dying because of it. So that creates a lot of tension. And that’s what led to the mistake that Hitler did in Dunkirk, basically.

Dunkirk

Norman Ohler
(01:17:34)
What Churchill called the sickle cut, which was the idea to storm through the Ardennes Mountains and kind of cut off the British and French troops who were still, you know, in the north of Belgium trying to figure out what was going on. Suddenly the Germans are behind them so that they, they kind of cut as a, like a sickle into enemy territory, the sickle cut. That was so successful that basically the campaign was won already. So then the Germans invaded, like occupied all the cities on the canal back to England to kind of cut off the British completely so they couldn’t even flee. But Dunkirk was open, the last port that was open. And the German army was, you know, already on the outskirts of Dunkirk.
Norman Ohler
(01:18:19)
They could have just taken it and closed that, you know, that hole for the British military to get out. But Hitler then did his famous… And this is all the dynamic of the Western campaign, you know, a lot of things happen every day. And then they’re saying like, “We’re going to have Dunkirk tomorrow and then it’s over.” And then Hitler stops the tanks. It’s his famous Halte Befehl, the order to stop. And you know, they were all on meth, you know, they didn’t want to stop. But Hitler was not on meth. Hitler was, he basically, it was a little bit similar to the Berlin-Munich thing. Hitler didn’t really understand that campaign, it was too fast for him. He…
Norman Ohler
(01:19:05)
Because they didn’t say like, “Oh, they’re all on meth, they’re not going to sleep, they’re going to behave erratically.” They didn’t discuss this. They discussed this in old-fashioned terms. And Hitler was seeing like, “They do not protect their flanks. What if the British come from the north?” This is terrible. Militarily, it was… They were already fighting World War II while Hitler was still fighting World War I, and especially the Allies, they were still fighting World War I. But the tank generals on meth or the tank generals without meth, the tank generals per se, they were fighting a new type of war. And Hitler then got a visit from Goering, the head of the air force, the Luftwaffe. And Goering was a morphinist. That is very well documented.
Norman Ohler
(01:19:49)
He was on morphine. He was high as a kite most of the time. And that comes with losing touch with reality, I would say. Or at least it changes your grip on reality, you know. Maybe you’re still a good decision maker, but it could lead to… You know, if you’re intoxicated, let’s say you’re writing and you’re intoxicated, you think it’s great, but the next day you read it and it’s shit, you know? So Goering was using morphine in the morning, then met Hitler at the Felsennest, which was Hitler’s headquarters to command the Western campaign. The Felsennest.
Norman Ohler
(01:20:25)
And Goering said to him, “If the army generals are now going to take Dunkirk, then basically the army has won this campaign, and that will give army high command, which is already against you,” because they were, you know. For them, Hitler was always, like, the der kleine Gefreite, like this small kind of regular army guy because that’s what Hitler had been in the First World War, and now suddenly, he was the big decision maker. So they never… They thought they made much better decisions than him. So Goering says, “Their power will be so overwhelming that they will, from now on, call the shots how this war will continue and what will be done next. You should let me with the Luftwaffe do the job from the air.
Norman Ohler
(01:21:12)
The National Socialist Luftwaffe is going to end the Western campaign.” So he thought that he could destroy… It doesn’t make sense, you know. Even to destroy the British military with planes, maybe you can do it. But certainly, he couldn’t do it. So the tank generals received the Halte Befehl, the stopping order. They didn’t believe it when they received it because this would have been a complete victory over Great Britain. This would have been the end of Great Britain. The whole British military was encircled, but they did get out through Dunkirk. That’s why the movie Dunkirk with Christopher Nolan is not good because he doesn’t describe what happened on the German side.
Norman Ohler
(01:21:53)
It’s just this heroic British thing, “Yeah, we just got out and we reformed, and then we beat…” You know. This was just because Hitler was afraid of the power of his army high command, and convinced by Goering’s morphine-high vision that he would stop it with the air force, which he couldn’t. I mean, he bombed, and then the British, you know, they were on ships, and a few ships were sunk, but basically, they got out. You need to do this on the ground. At least back then, you would have needed to do it on the ground. So that was a big mistake by Hitler.
Norman Ohler
(01:22:26)
That’s why von Manstein, one of the three tank generals from February 17th — it was Rommel, von Manstein, and Guderian — and von Manstein, he later said, he spoke of a lost victory. He said the Western campaign was a lost victory because we really could have achieved the victory. We could’ve dominated, you know, Britain. They could’ve, you know, invaded Britain. There was no more military.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:50)
Well, okay. On land, yes.
Norman Ohler
(01:22:52)
There was still the Royal Air Force.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:54)
And the, and the Navy.
Norman Ohler
(01:22:56)
And the Navy, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:57)
So invading Britain, I think any invasion of actual Britain is a gigantic mistake on the Nazi part, but—
Norman Ohler
(01:23:06)
But if Britain doesn’t have a standing army anymore, it’s much easier—
Lex Fridman
(01:23:10)
Well, I-
Norman Ohler
(01:23:10)
…than still having one.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:11)
…I think it’s still extremely difficult to invade, but it’s much easier to neutralize, make sure that Britain is not a player in the war. I mean, the—
Norman Ohler
(01:23:21)
For sure. Maybe Hitler wouldn’t have invaded at all anyhow.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:24)
Also, because of his sort of, not respect, but non-hatred—
Norman Ohler
(01:23:29)
Right
Lex Fridman
(01:23:30)
…of the British Empire.
Norman Ohler
(01:23:31)
‘Cause they’re also white supremacists, so… Why, why, why would we fight them? You know, it doesn’t make sense. While the French, they were already like half black, basically, in Hitler’s eyes.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:40)
If we’re to talk about counterfactual history of the possible trajectories of the war that would lead to Nazi victory, one of the big mistakes is the invasion of Britain. So you already mentioned the stake with Dunkirk, but beyond that, if they even captured mainland Europe, they could’ve just neutralized the British threat and not invaded Britain, and then go after the oil, which is much needed, maybe in the Middle East. So focus on that campaign before invading the Soviet Union. And then maybe wait for the Soviet Union to invade them through Poland, which would be likely coming, or wait until 1943, something like this, to invade east without the Western front having to have been there.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:38)
And the other really big mistake is declaring war against the United States. Having complete disrespect for the United States and declaring war on the United States.
Norman Ohler
(01:24:49)
Very stupid.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:49)
Which didn’t have to be done at all.
Norman Ohler
(01:24:51)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:52)
So it’s collecting enemies when those didn’t have to be done. So there is, to me actually, there’s a lot of paths there, as dark as it is to imagine for Nazi Germany to be successful in the invasion of the Soviet Union, even.
Norman Ohler
(01:25:13)
Well, I think that’s why the Wehrmacht officers were pissed at Hitler, because they knew that they could actually win if it was done in a certain way. But Hitler’s ideology and his stupidity, and later also, his degeneration of his cognitive abilities, did not allow the Wehrmacht to fight in a most effective way. So they had a… Hitler was a very bad leader after Dunkirk.

Hitler’s drug addiction

Lex Fridman
(01:25:38)
So can you speak to the morphine? What kind of drug is morphine?
Norman Ohler
(01:25:42)
Morphine was developed in the 19th century by a German, a young chemist called Sertürner. He wanted to know what the potent alkaloid in opium was. Because opium is a natural drug, but there’s something in the opium that’s actually decisive, and that’s morphine. So he was able to extract that from the opium. So, he basically, this young guy, invented morphine, which then became very important in wars, especially. Like the American Civil War is unthinkable without morphine. Or at least it would have been very different, because with morphine, you can treat people, you can amputate people, you can fix people up and send them back into battle. And that also corresponded with the development of the hypodermic needle, the injection needle that was around in the mid-19th century.
Norman Ohler
(01:26:43)
So the injection needle and morphine together became a very efficient way to treat soldiers. And that prolonged, for example, the Civil War in America.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:52)
So Göring was taking morphine.
Norman Ohler
(01:26:54)
Yeah. Morphine is like the classic. You don’t eat opium, you know? You take what is active in opium, and you inject it, and that’s a much… That’s a very potent… You know, that numbs all your pain. You don’t have pain anymore if you’re on morphine.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:13)
Also affects judgment.
Norman Ohler
(01:27:15)
I’ve never taken morphine. So I cannot really say. I’m… There are a few junkies that are highly creative on it. A lot of musicians in the ’60s were using heroin, which is a more potent form, or it’s a half-synthetic, it’s an opioid. Morphine is an opiate and heroin’s an opioid. I guess you could be quite sharp on it also. That’s why Hitler liked Eukodal, which is OxyContin, oxycodone. And he injected that. I actually…
Lex Fridman
(01:27:52)
Which is another opiate, heroin-like.
Norman Ohler
(01:27:55)
It was a product by the Merck company from Darmstadt, Germany. They made Eukodal, which when Germany lost the war, the patent was basically taken by America and then ended up in oxycodone. So if you inject Eukodal, that was a very popular drug in the ’20s, because apparently it gives you the most beautiful high on Earth. You’re super high. You feel extremely well, and you can think very clearly. And you feel like this is how life should feel. High on Eukodal, this is like Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann, he used Eukodal. Quite a few doctors actually used it also, and probably quite a few Jewish doctors also used it, because this was like a doctor’s drug. Doctors knew how to, you know, set the injection. And it was, you know, a great experience.
Norman Ohler
(01:28:42)
And Hitler, he really loved to be on Eukodal. He would use Eukodal every second day. In the beginning, 10 milligrams intravenously, then he raised to 20 milligrams. And I spoke to someone who’s actually done exactly that drug application, because I wanted to know how Hitler felt, and I didn’t feel like doing it myself for some reason. I don’t like needles, so I didn’t want to put a needle in my vein to have the Hitler drug experience. I should have done it. A historian, a proper historian never does that, okay? So, I… But I thought I should take quite a few drugs that I write about to understand it better. But this drug I didn’t take. I never shot oxycodone intravenously into my veins.
Norman Ohler
(01:29:24)
But I met someone who did, and he said it’s like the king’s high. You know, if you do that properly, obviously you get addicted to it, you know?
Lex Fridman
(01:29:34)
I’d be scared to try.
Norman Ohler
(01:29:36)
Very intense experience.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:37)
I think it’s a very badass thing to do for a historian, by the way. But I think it’s a big risk. I think there is a risk that comes along with it, right?
Norman Ohler
(01:29:47)
Well, but not for Hitler, because he got the Eukodal from the pharmacy. He knew exactly, like his doctor knew exactly what was inside. It was made by a pharmaceutical company.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:57)
No, I mean, the risk of addiction.
Norman Ohler
(01:29:59)
Yeah, that is a big risk. That is a big risk. But there’s also the risk of getting impure stuff and… …Like heroin on the street and dying from an overdose or… But the addiction thing is very… I think it happens quite quickly with Eukodal, because it’s such a great feeling. So why wouldn’t you do it over and over again? And then the opioid receptors in the brain want you to take it. And if you don’t take it, you get withdrawal symptoms and you feel like shit. And you have to… So that’s the problem with opioids, with morphine. That’s what happens. And that’s what happened to Hitler.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:31)
I generally say yes to most things, but those drugs, like cocaine doesn’t scare me. Heroin scares me. The opioids scare me. Oxycodone scares me.
Norman Ohler
(01:30:45)
Because they really make you physically dependent. I don’t even know if cocaine makes you physically dependent. It makes you psychologically addicted. But they actually… You have to get it, otherwise you feel bad. That’s a physical, terrible addiction.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:01)
And also for life to feel less when you’re not on it.
Norman Ohler
(01:31:04)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:05)
That scares me.
Norman Ohler
(01:31:06)
That’s the problem also with methamphetamine. People who use a lot of methamphetamine, on days they don’t use it, they don’t feel great at all, especially not compared to the methamphetamine days. So that became a problem in Germany when people were really using more and more of the Pervitin.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:22)
All right, you’ve got to take me through the full drug cocktail that Hitler was on, patient A of Morell’s. Let’s start at the beginning. We’re big on setting context here. So tell the story of Dr. Theodor Morell. How did he meet Hitler?
Norman Ohler
(01:31:39)
Well, Morell was… He had his practice on Kurfürstendamm, which is like the main boulevard of Berlin, in the west of Berlin. Kind of a fancy street. And he was a celebrity doctor, which was a new type of doctor in a way, a Dr. Feelgood. He was one of the first Dr. Feelgoods. So you didn’t go to him when you had a disease. You went to him when you were… let’s say you were an opera star in the Berlin Opera, and you had a big premiere, so you would go to Morell in the afternoon, and he would give you a nice shot, and then you would, you know, be really good on stage. He was not a quack. I mean, he just knew his drugs, and he believed in, why shouldn’t you treat someone even if that person doesn’t have a disease?
Norman Ohler
(01:32:30)
If you can make that person feel better, it’s good, especially if that person pays. He said, “Everyone who pays my…” And he wasn’t cheap. “Who comes to me and wants a testosterone hormone injection or a vitamin injection or an opioid injection, you get it from him.” He didn’t have any scruples.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:50)
I mean, but we should also say, he was pretty innovative and extremely knowledgeable. So you mentioned hormones, but also you know, like probiotics. You talk about…
Norman Ohler
(01:33:00)
Yeah. Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:00)
He knew his shit.
Norman Ohler
(01:33:02)
He was a bit of a nerd. He was-
Lex Fridman
(01:33:04)
Like, a legit doctor, just didn’t have boundaries about what he used.
Norman Ohler
(01:33:09)
He had a very unappealing physical appearance, and I think that was a problem for him, and he was known to have very bad eating habits. Like, sauce was running, and… So people were easily disgusted by him. He was like an outsider. He was really like a freak. But when people looked at him after he had given them an injection and they said, “Thank you,” and “I feel so great now,” that’s what kind of made his day, you know? So one day, a man entered his doctor’s office on Kurfürstendamm named Hubertus Hoffmann. And Hubertus Hoffmann was a photographer, and he had gonorrhea, and Morell, because he knew about alternative ways to treat, he actually cured him.
Norman Ohler
(01:33:58)
And Hubertus Hoffmann said to Morell, “I have a good friend, and I think you should meet him, and I’m going to have a dinner in Munich, and I think it would be really worth your time to come.” And Morell came, and the good friend was Hitler, because Hubertus Hoffmann was Hitler’s photographer. And they were… In German, we have a formal “you,” which is “Sie.” Like, if I don’t know you so well, I say “Sie.” And if you’re my close friend, I say “du,” you. And Hitler only had about four people he would say “du” to. He always liked the “Sie,” like the distance. It was always about distance, respect, and borders and boundaries.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:37)
What are the two again? “Sie” and what?
Norman Ohler
(01:34:39)
Du.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:40)
Sie and du?
Norman Ohler
(01:34:41)
Yes. “Sie” is the formal one, and “du” is the informal one.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:44)
Yeah. No, in Russian, there’s the same thing: “vy” and “ty.” And so that’s a big thing.
Norman Ohler
(01:34:50)
Also, in French, you also have that. You have that in Spanish. Only in English you don’t have it.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:55)
And it is part of the cultural discourse of, like, when you upgrade from the “vy”… …To the “ty,” from the “Sie” to the “du”… …Or from the “du” to the “Sie.”
Norman Ohler
(01:35:06)
From the “Sie” to the “du.”
Lex Fridman
(01:35:07)
Sie to the du.
Norman Ohler
(01:35:07)
That would be the upgrade because you become more intimate.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:10)
Yeah, like, you ask, “Can I go…” …from Sie to du?”
Norman Ohler
(01:35:13)
Yeah. Like, the older person must suggest it, I think.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:16)
Yeah. Okay. Beautiful language.
Norman Ohler
(01:35:19)
So Hoffmann was a “du freund,” a “du freund,” we say, of Hitler. So he was quite close to Hitler, and that’s why he could also make that close connection. So he had a dinner with just him, Hitler, Eva Braun, Hitler’s girlfriend, and Morell came. Like, they sent a plane to Berlin to pick him up. So it’s like VIP treatment. It was… …The whole thing.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:40)
And this is 1936?
Norman Ohler
(01:35:42)
’36. Yeah, they had spaghetti with tomato sauce on the side, I read. There’s like a description of this event. The tomato sauce was on the side. And there was muscat. What is muscat? It’s a spice. Nutmeg.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:58)
Nutmeg.
Norman Ohler
(01:35:58)
Yeah, it was with nutmeg, which is an unusual recipe, I guess, but that’s what they had. And spaghetti wasn’t a fancy thing, you know? It came from Italy, from Mussolini, who invented fascism in Italy, and who was Hitler’s role model for a long time until Hitler surpassed him, obviously. So the spaghetti that came from Italy, it was a big thing. And Morell had the big problem that spaghetti’s hard to eat, right? It was a catastrophe. But he got out of it because Hitler complained about stomach problems, because Hitler was a terrible vegetarian. He was a so-called cake vegetarian. He would only eat sweets, like cake. No meat, of course, but he wouldn’t eat healthy stuff, you know?
Norman Ohler
(01:36:41)
So he was bloated the whole time because he only ate cake and white bread, and it’s not good. So he voiced that, and there was also Brandt there, an official doctor from the SS, who was his doctor. And Hitler said, “My doctors can’t cure me.” And Morell was like, “This is my chance. Thank you, God.” And he told Hitler about the probiotics, which Hitler had never heard of, and also Brandt, the doctor, he hadn’t heard of, because that was a new thing.
Norman Ohler
(01:37:15)
And Hitler was asking, “What is that?” And Morell said, “These are live bacteria from German soldiers from the First World War that were fighting in Serbia.” There was one guy who didn’t get the stomach flu when all the others drank the water in Serbia and all got sick, but this one guy, so his bacteria… And this is a true story. His gut bacteria were cultivated into a medicine called Mutaflor. And Morell told Hitler about this and he said, “This is amazing. I have to try this.” You know? And it helped. He got the Mutaflor, he did the Mutaflor therapy, and it cured him. He suddenly had no bloating anymore, and the farting of Hitler was really bad.
Norman Ohler
(01:37:58)
So bad that it would diminish his ability to work, you know? So suddenly he could work. He said he felt better. He didn’t have the pain. He felt great, so he really thought that Morell was a wonder doctor. And he asked Morell pretty quickly afterwards, “Do you want to be my personal physician?” And Morell’s wife was very much against it because she said, “If you become the personal physician of Hitler, you won’t have any time for me anymore.” And he said, “Come on, man. This is like the chance you only get once in your life.”
Lex Fridman
(01:38:35)
Yeah, I mean, at this point, Hitler’s a really big deal.
Norman Ohler
(01:38:37)
He’s the most powerful man in Europe. And there had not been war crimes because the war hadn’t started yet. Obviously, there were concentration camps and a lot of crimes had been committed, but it was also kind of hushed up, you know? It’s not such a huge thing as we now know it became. So, Morell never really had any conscientious problems. He just thought it was great, you know? “I’m gonna be the doctor. I’m gonna be part of history.” So he becomes the personal physician, and being this vitamin guy, like vitamins were really his thing. He believed in the power of vitamins. And today, I think we know that he was right. Vitamins are good, but back then, no one knew.
Norman Ohler
(01:39:24)
And Hitler was like, “Okay.” He told Hitler, and then Hitler said, “Okay, I want to try these vitamins and…” And what they did from the beginning was injections because Hitler didn’t want to take a pill, because the pill takes too long and it goes through the track that he has problems with, like the digestion. He didn’t want to take a pill. He believed in the injection, and Morell was the masterful injector. So Morell, because the needles were thicker than they are today, but Morell could give you an injection without you feeling any pain. So Hitler was quite impressed, so he got a vitamin C injection, but Hitler loved the daily injection, so he got hooked on the daily injection. Once he got the injection, the day was good.
Norman Ohler
(01:40:09)
And he never got sick, actually. He could stand for a long time with his arm raised. He went to the gym, basically. He had a gym where he was doing exercises so he could have his arm up for hours when a military parade would walk by. So he was quite fit and he was never sick, and Morell was giving him the daily injection, and they lived happily ever after basically until the Soviet Union attacked.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:34)
Wait, wait, wait. He literally lifted so he could do the Heil Hitler salute?
Norman Ohler
(01:40:39)
Yeah, I found a document for that.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:42)
That’s funny. Oh God, that’s dark.
Norman Ohler
(01:40:45)
He had an expander, we say. I don’t know, do you use that word in English? Expander?
Lex Fridman
(01:40:49)
Oh, like a band.
Norman Ohler
(01:40:51)
Yeah, it’s like this. You do like…
Lex Fridman
(01:40:52)
Yeah, yeah, I have one of those.
Norman Ohler
(01:40:54)
Yeah, that’s what, that’s what- That’s what he did. In front of the-
Lex Fridman
(01:40:57)
And I do those kinds of exercises.
Norman Ohler
(01:40:58)
…in front of the window.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:00)
Well, at least he’s not doing it in front of a mirror. Okay, wow, that’s dark. That’s… I mean, those little details, yet another reminder that he’s just a human being.
Norman Ohler
(01:41:11)
I mean, it’s hard to keep your arm up for like hours. You can’t let it down. If you keep it up, that’s what it’s all about, you know?
Lex Fridman
(01:41:18)
I mean, he was very much about the façade, right? He’s very important to present himself in a certain kind of way when he’s giving the speeches.
Norman Ohler
(01:41:26)
Yeah, it was, everything was orchestrated. The Nazis were masters in propaganda. They really knew how to create the perfect image.

Methamphetamine

Lex Fridman
(01:41:35)
Okay, so let’s go into the cocktail. It started with the vitamins in ’36.
Norman Ohler
(01:41:41)
Right. I think it was pretty harmless in the beginning. But the addiction to the injection was the main thing that I think happened—that Hitler needed his doctor. But from ’36 to ’41, only vitamins and glucose were being injected, so I don’t think it really harms you. It might benefit you. He never got sick; he was fit.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:06)
This, I mean, this is the thing that…
Norman Ohler
(01:42:08)
That was phase one of his drug use were the vitamins, until ’41.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:12)
So, you think the tweaking at the Olympics, you’ve talked about before, but still, so you’re saying this person— … we’re watching a video of here, is not on drugs.
Norman Ohler
(01:42:23)
I don’t know. I don’t think so.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:26)
So the- the video could be faked.
Norman Ohler
(01:42:27)
There are no records.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:28)
It could be sped up.
Norman Ohler
(01:42:29)
I think it’s fake, because I think someone read my book that Hitler was on, thought that Hitler was always on meth and created this. But I might be wrong.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:36)
Yeah, and the narrative takes hold. I think the thing you mentioned is he could be on sugar, so it could be a lot of elements.
Norman Ohler
(01:42:43)
He was also a weird guy. Maybe he was really just rocking- … because he was so happy what he saw, you know? Maybe he really got into it. Maybe it was a sexual thing for him what he saw. I don’t know. There’s no document showing that he took a drug on that day, let’s put it that way.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:57)
I think I’ve been fidgety, especially staying up all night. You can just be caught in a certain moment when you’re being very fidgety.
Norman Ohler
(01:43:08)
I think he probably rocked a few times, and then the video was cut in a way—
Lex Fridman
(01:43:12)
Sped up?
Norman Ohler
(01:43:12)
…that he rocks more or something. Also, methamphetamine wasn’t yet available in 1936. So—
Lex Fridman
(01:43:18)
That’s important to say.
Norman Ohler
(01:43:19)
…for sure he was not. So, what is said here on Hitler tweaking on meth at the 1936 Olympics is definitely false.

Invasion of Soviet Union

Lex Fridman
(01:43:28)
Okay, there you go. So when did it start getting more serious? The injections and the kind of drugs he was taking?
Norman Ohler
(01:43:37)
This was a day in August of 1941. Germany had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd. So this is about six weeks into the campaign, which was called Operation Barbarossa. And Germany was doing pretty well, and it came to a crucial moment where high command said, “Now we’re going to take Moscow.” And Hitler said, “No, we’re going to split up the troops and take Leningrad,” which is now Saint Petersburg in the north, and in the south, we’re going to go for the oil fields, basically. That was his plan. He said, “Let’s not do Moscow.” And high command was like, “This is the biggest mistake. We must take Moscow. If we take Moscow, we’re going to win.” And Hitler became ill for the first time on the day this decision was made. I mean, this is a dynamic thing that’s going on, you know?
Norman Ohler
(01:44:38)
They’re moving, and now they have to decide, will we split up or will we continue towards Moscow? And he had the Russian flu, in German, the Ruhr, which is a flu-type disease with a very high fever. It comes… Like, they were in the field, so they were in the east, you know, camping out. Maybe he drank water that wasn’t good, or he had some, you know, they tested everything meticulously, but he got sick. High fever, he felt like shit, and he said to Morell… And, you know, you can see it in Morell’s notes. Morell describes this very vividly in his notes, which are at the Federal Archives, which no historian ever looked at except me, the non-historian, which is kind of funny.
Norman Ohler
(01:45:21)
So he describes how Hitler then asks of him, basically says, “Vitamins are not enough anymore.” Like he’s very weak. He must go to the military briefing, but if you… The flu is quite a severe disease, I think. If you have a heavy flu, you really feel like you’re going to die, you can’t go to a military briefing. But Morell kind of fought with himself, and then he decided to inject an opioid into Hitler’s veins intravenously, like the strongest application possible, and this was Dolantin, which is a German opioid that was legal. And I was once an exchange student in Flint, Michigan, 1988, and I was number one of the tennis team ’cause I was quite a good tennis player.
Norman Ohler
(01:46:11)
We were playing our main enemy. I think it was Flint Powers Catholic High School in Flint, Michigan, and I think it was Power Central, and they had a number one, Marc Resstiner.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:24)
Still remember, wow.
Norman Ohler
(01:46:26)
He was feared, and no one could beat him. And on the day of the match, I had the Russian flu, basically. I was the hope, I was the number one, the wonder kid from Germany. And they took me to a doctor, and the doctor gave me an injection. And I don’t know until this day because I was just a kid, I got the injection, I was 17, and I felt great. Like, the flu was gone like this. It was probably an opioid, something, you know, something that just shuts off all the pain and gives you energy. And I beat this guy— …in a way, I totally, I thought of a new technique by playing very high balls. Like, in the direct, fierceful competition, I would have lost, so I played something that in Germany, we call “Lüddeln,” which is something you don’t really do. You just play high balls—
Lex Fridman
(01:47:24)
Lobbying, yeah, yeah.
Norman Ohler
(01:47:25)
…which is not pretty to look at, but it’s very effective. And he just lost, he just lost his nerve, and I beat him like 6-0, 6-0, something like that. Sensational. So Hitler receives this Dolantin injection, and he gets up, he goes into the meeting room, he dominates the meeting room, he feels great. He decides, you know, in front of everybody, no one is able to… no one overpowers him in that meeting. He was very good in the room. And the troops are split up. Like Leningrad is now a target. This weakens the general thrust towards Moscow. This is probably why they didn’t take Moscow. They probably could have taken it, or maybe not, you know, but the decision was made in August to…
Lex Fridman
(01:48:11)
I think it’s one of the biggest blunders of the Eastern Front.
Norman Ohler
(01:48:14)
To not take Moscow.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:15)
To not take Moscow. I think they had a straight shot given the…
Norman Ohler
(01:48:18)
Right
Lex Fridman
(01:48:18)
…disorganization.
Norman Ohler
(01:48:20)
They had the one-time thing, the one-time moment where they could have done it. And the German war machine could only win in so-called speed wars, like lightning war. Only if they would do it very fast and surprise, because they were always weaker, basically. They just had this moment, this dynamic moment, and this was fueled by the methamphetamine. Also, in the Soviet Union, hundreds of millions of dosages were given, so the Germans were really going. And at one point, this ends, you know? You can’t take meth for the rest of your life. You’re just going to end up being a nervous wreck. But you can do it for like two months. You could do it, but then it stops.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:55)
I think if you’re really honest about where you have the asymmetry of power, which is in the speed of the Blitzkrieg, so that’s similar to Genghis Khan, who had a very small military, but their advantage was, I mean, I think at the peak it would be probably 100,000, and but every soldier of Genghis Khan’s had five horses. So the…
Norman Ohler
(01:49:22)
Right
Lex Fridman
(01:49:22)
…the whole point was they can move really fast. They, and they, not just fast, but they can move on all terrain, so they can go around. You know, if wars were fought on normal roads, you’re supposed to travel a certain kind of way. If you go fast and around, not on paths that are usually taken, attack from all kinds of sides, that’s why you can conquer as much as Genghis Khan was able to conquer. And the same thing with the Nazi forces, this is their biggest advantage. And not using that is essentially the end of its effectiveness.
Norman Ohler
(01:49:59)
I think that’s also why the tank troops were such a good weapon, because they can go off-road while military vehicles, cars, cannot do it. Like a tank can even go through a forest and just, you know, kill small trees and just run over it. So that was those are kind of the five horses that was the idea that they had at this working breakfast. That’s what they presented to Hitler. “We’re going to use the tank force in a very different way, and that’s going to enable us to win the lightning war of campaigns.”
Lex Fridman
(01:50:29)
Was it one of the first times he tried an opiate like that? An intense one?
Norman Ohler
(01:50:34)
That was the first time.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:36)
And then that was it for him? He loved it?
Norman Ohler
(01:50:38)
Well, not immediately. You can see when you study his medications, that that is the turning point in a way, that now he deviates from the vitamins. He becomes more interested in what’s out there. And from ’41 to ’43, he tries out a lot of medications that he didn’t try out before. Before that, it was quite conventional, mostly vitamins and glucose. But now he becomes experimental, and he discusses this with Morell. And Morell is also very experimental. They really nerded themselves into, like, “What can we use?” Like, bull’s testicle extracts. So, Morell, in order to present those things to his patient A, he created a pharmaceutical company that he ran.
Norman Ohler
(01:51:32)
He was, so he was the personal physician of Hitler, and he was also the CEO of Hammer Pharmaceuticals, which had its production site in occupied Czechoslovakia. And for example, at one point when Germany had invaded Ukraine, Morell asked for a monopoly for all the organs of all the slaughtered animals from all the slaughterhouses in Ukraine. So, this was a huge logistical operation. All the slaughtered animals, all the organs were removed for the personal physician of the Fuhrer, sent in military trains back to the factory in occupied Czechoslovakia.
Norman Ohler
(01:52:16)
And the military became really upset with that, because they said, “We need our trains to transport back our wounded soldiers.” Now there are cars full with offal and pigs’ hearts and pigs’ livers, and it was totally bizarre. But Morell then became, he was this good-natured Dr. Feelgood in the beginning, and then when Ukraine was occupied, he became just a business freak who made a lot of money with his dubious hormonal concoctions, where he would threaten the army. “If you don’t let the train with my raw materials go to my factory, I will tell Hitler, and you will have a problem.” He was acting like that. He became quite an asshole, actually.
Norman Ohler
(01:53:04)
And a war criminal, because he also, at his factory where he would make the famous pig liver extract that was then tested by Hitler, and Hitler said, “That’s a good medication. I feel more, I have more energy. So, this can also be sold to the German military.” That’s how it worked. Because the regulations at the time were, and that it was very difficult to bring out a new medication onto the market. Because medications, to bring them onto the market, you need certain test phases and all of that stuff. So, that’s hard to do in a war, especially in World War II. So, Hitler said to Morell, “I’m going to be your guinea pig.
Norman Ohler
(01:53:44)
You just make it in your factory, I test it, and if I think it’s good, then I’m just going to write a…” Today, you would say, like, a decree. “You know, because I’m the president, you know, I can, and I can order it, that it’s going to be legal all over Germany.”
Lex Fridman
(01:53:58)
So, Hitler was a real drug guy. He liked drugs.
Norman Ohler
(01:54:02)
Well, he liked to experiment, I would say, with drugs and with Morell. They never… He was against drugs, you know? He was…
Lex Fridman
(01:54:11)
But that’s a crazy thing for a guy who didn’t do anything, right?
Norman Ohler
(01:54:14)
It’s a big contradiction, or it’s a big irony, or it’s very weird.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:21)
But isn’t it even a bit of a mystery? At that stage, I’m sure he was paranoid about being killed and all that kind of stuff. So, he must have really trusted Morell, right?
Norman Ohler
(01:54:31)
Yeah, he trusted Morell because Morell was not part of any organization. He was the loner coming from the VIP doctors, his own VIP doctor’s office, and now he was basically Hitler’s toy. Hitler could get access to all kinds of medications through him and Morell would never say it to anybody, you know? He would just write it down. But this was kept quite secret. No one knew what was going on between the two men.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:54)
See, it’s just so interesting, because, like, why would he? There might be… Can you maybe even speak to that? Why did Hitler trust another human being this much? You could probably make the case nobody was closer to Hitler than Morell.
Norman Ohler
(01:55:10)
That is certainly the story I’m telling.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:13)
Isn’t that crazy? What is it about Morell? This guy who’s… I guess he’s fat and weird, and nobody really likes him.
Norman Ohler
(01:55:26)
He was not a threat to Hitler. Hitler hated all the super smart medicine people. He never undressed before them. He never let himself be seen naked, because he didn’t want anyone to know anything, you know, about him that he couldn’t control. So, Morell was harmless. Morell basically did what Hitler wanted. They wouldn’t say, “We’re going to take— Today we’re going to take drugs together. It’s going to be fun.” You know, Hitler was always about optimizing his performance, because he knew, “Only I’m doing this. I have to…” And he always thought he was going to die young, so he always thought, “I don’t have unlimited time.
Norman Ohler
(01:56:06)
The clock was always ticking, so I have to always be the high performer.” So Hitler, when he first experienced the beauty of the opioid high that was given to him in August 1941 intravenously, when he experienced that, his eyes opened. And he didn’t think this was a drug. I mean, this is a medicine. This is a medicine that helps me function. This is a medicine that my doctor gives me in a very controlled manner, and that lets me be extremely sharp for, like, eight hours. I can convince all the generals. I can do my job. I’m happy. Because Hitler was also depressed, you know? I mean, he really appreciated what the drug gave him, but he never thought, “Now I’m becoming a drug addict,” or…
Lex Fridman
(01:56:57)
So, oxycodone in general begins to work within 30 to 60 minutes, and lasts for about four to six hours. This is a long-lasting thing.
Norman Ohler
(01:57:06)
Yeah, but this is, you swallow. If you get an intravenous injection, it works after one second.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:11)
Wow.
Norman Ohler
(01:57:11)
Get the injection, you’re high, but that—
Lex Fridman
(01:57:13)
But it lasts for many hours.
Norman Ohler
(01:57:15)
Yeah. That’s why people who take heroin love it, because you feel like shit, you take the injection, you feel great. I mean, it’s in your system for quite a while. You can go into the meeting quite comfortably.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:28)
Into the meeting. Yeah, okay.
Norman Ohler
(01:57:30)
I mean, there’s the briefing. It starts at 1:00. Morell comes, and you can see this in the notes. Like, “I have to be at the Fuhrer in his bedroom at 12:00.” And then, you know, you chat a bit, and then Hitler rolls up his uniform sleeve, and then he gets the injection maybe at 12:30. Then the high comes on, and then it’s very stable. You feel great. This is a pure product from the Merck company. This is not some heroin from the street. And Morell knows exactly what dosage you want right now, so you feel at the top of your game. You don’t feel… You’re not intoxicated. I mean, you are, but it makes you clear, you know?
Lex Fridman
(01:58:11)
So the mind is clear?
Norman Ohler
(01:58:12)
The mind’s totally clear. Your body feels fantastic. You know exactly your points. You know exactly how the others… Because the others are just mortals, you know, because they’re sober. They just sit there, and they just… They haven’t slept very well, or they have problems with them, you know? And you’re way above them.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:30)
What do we know about its general psychological effects? Does it boost your confidence? Does it boost aggressiveness? What effect did it have on his vision of the world?
Norman Ohler
(01:58:40)
It makes you feel extremely confident. You have a lot of energy, but it’s not too much. Let’s say you take cocaine or methamphetamine, you’re like— That’s why Hitler was never a meth guy. That’s also why I think this video is fake. He didn’t take meth. I studied Morell’s, the things he gave him. He gave a lot of things, and only twice was meth. So that’s not a lot for Hitler, like twice.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:07)
I read that the multivitamin had some amphetamine and maybe meth, a little bit, or no?
Norman Ohler
(01:59:13)
It’s-
Lex Fridman
(01:59:13)
Multi-
Norman Ohler
(01:59:14)
I mean, I’ve s-
Lex Fridman
(01:59:15)
Vitamultin.
Norman Ohler
(01:59:15)
Vitamultine.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:16)
Multine.
Norman Ohler
(01:59:17)
Vitamultine is interesting because it was a little bar of a sweet that was lying next to his food, so he would just, you know, eat, and then at the end, he would take this. It was nice-tasting. It had some sugar in it. And I read through all of the, you know, ingredients. There were different types, and there was never methamphetamine in it.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:37)
Oh, there isn’t? Okay.
Norman Ohler
(01:59:39)
No. There was an SS, Dr. Schenck, and he claims that Morell made special Vitamultine in his lab with meth in it, but I think he just made that up. There was never any proof of that.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:54)
I mean, that’s a really important line to draw. The army, the Nazi army, at scale, not everybody, but some fraction, especially during the French campaign, used meth. And then there’s Hitler, who used a lot of drugs, but meth was not one of them, really.
Norman Ohler
(02:00:14)
No, meth, for him, was just for the foot soldiers, you know?
Norman Ohler
(02:00:18)
He didn’t even talk about meth. This is nothing that concerned him, you know? This is something that makes you function. Maybe… He signed… I mean, the stimulant decree went over his desk, but I don’t know if he really read it or understood it. I mean, he probably knew Pervitin because everyone knew it. And maybe, you know, they discussed it, but they would probably also not… I mean, there was a point when there’s a conflict about methamphetamine in the army. This is when the Secretary of Health of the German government, the Nazi government Conti, he starts writing to the army, and he says, “You must stop this. This is against Nazi ideology.” But the army basically doesn’t listen to him and keeps on using meth all the way to the end.
Norman Ohler
(02:01:03)
So maybe that guy, Conti, maybe he discussed this with Hitler, but… Also, Hitler never… You know, if Hitler would have said, “We stop the methamphetamine,” it probably would have stopped. But Conti saying that wasn’t enough. I don’t think Hitler was really into meth. It was not his thing. He was more into the opioids, into these weird hormonal things. Like, those things were, especially the opioids, were interesting to him, because you can function on opioids for a long time if you have a proper product and a doctor that gives you the injections. Göring was high on, was addicted to morphine from 1923 until when the Americans captured him in ’45. That’s 22 years he was functioning on morphine. And when they captured him, he had…
Norman Ohler
(02:01:53)
I write about it in Blitz, like the amount of morphine capsules he had on him. So the Americans did was first take away all the morphine from him, and then he went through withdrawal in American, you know, incarceration. And he lost a lot of pounds, and he became more of a haggard Göring, which was then in Nuremberg, you know, this haggard kind of guy defending what he did. So Hitler was really an opioid guy, while the army was really meth-ed up. That’s how you could sum it up briefly.

Cocaine

Lex Fridman
(02:02:26)
He did try cocaine. Why didn’t he get into cocaine?
Norman Ohler
(02:02:30)
He started cocaine after the bomb attack by Stauffenberg on July 20th, 1944. When this bomb went off, which actually killed a few people in the room, this was during a military briefing. Stauffenberg put a bag with explosives under the table, and the table actually saved Hitler’s life because it was a good German quality oak table. So the table was so stable that the bomb explosion kind of just, it kind of blew up the table, but Hitler behind the table was protected by this table.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:00)
Yeah, this is the closest assassination attempt, probably.
Norman Ohler
(02:03:04)
Yeah. I mean, it’s very weird that it didn’t succeed because he had the bomb. He put it next to Hitler. He took out some of the explosives before he went into the room. This is one of the big mysteries. Why did Stauffenberg take out some of the explosives? There’s no explanation for it. But Hitler survived, but he was quite injured, which Nazi propaganda always denied. They always said the Führer was miraculously unharmed. But he was quite harmed. There were over a hundred splinters from the wood everywhere. His eardrums were blown, which was, you know, it’s quite an injury, I guess. You know, he was bleeding internally and he was shell-shocked basically. And then a new doctor comes in. His name is Keesing. Because Morell was not a…
Norman Ohler
(02:03:51)
In Germany, we have, well, I guess worldwide, it’s the ear, nose, and throat specialist, right? So an ear, nose, and throat specialist from the German army called Dr. Keesing, he was ordered to come into headquarters after the bomb attack to treat Hitler’s blown eardrums. And Keesing gave Hitler cocaine, because cocaine at the time was being, was… You know, it was used. It was not Schedule 1, you know. It had the effect that it would numb the pain. And you could, you could like use it, you would like put it on a certain place where you had the pain and then it would numb that area.
Norman Ohler
(02:04:35)
But Hitler was like, he had never taken cocaine before, but he got very interested in it. And Keesing writes a meticulous report about his experiences with Hitler. Alone, that report is really fun to read. It’s about a 15-page report that he did for American military after the war. When he was being interrogated by American military, he described what happened with Hitler and him. And he realized that Hitler really liked the cocaine, and then he started saying, “Now give it in the nose now,” and then it was a liquid that he could apply with a dab like into the nose.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:12)
Oh, shit.
Norman Ohler
(02:05:12)
Like, it wasn’t cocaine powder, but he could like…
Lex Fridman
(02:05:14)
It was liquified. Yeah, interesting.
Norman Ohler
(02:05:16)
Liquified cocaine. And Hitler loved it, and he’s just saying things like, “Finally, I can think clear again.” And he had this cocaine rush, which is a rush of superiority. It’s a dangerous drug because you think you know more than the other. It’s not a very humble drug, you know. It just increases the ego. And that actually… he liked that because that was… you know, after the bomb attack, he thought everyone was a traitor. He didn’t feel safe anymore in his own bunker, you know. And he was like, “Nazis…” The right wing is always paranoid. Like, “Who’s the enemy?” Like, “They’re behind us.” Like, “They’re stabbing us in the back.” So Hitler was this type of person.
Norman Ohler
(02:05:58)
So the cocaine kind of stabilized him, and Keesing realized that this guy is like a drug guy. He didn’t know. He came in. He saw the Führer for the first time. He was in awe. And like a drug wreck was approaching him. And as soon as he had some cocaine in his system, ’cause this was summer of ’44, he had already taken a lot of opioids and a lot of drugs. So he, and a lot of these dubious hormonal concoctions, which led to autoimmune diseases in Hitler, maybe even had Parkinson’s. He was… Morell basically turned him into a physical wreck. That Keesing also writes about this like he’s trembling before he goes into the room for the first time where the Führer is.
Norman Ohler
(02:06:35)
And then there’s like an old guy in a blue kind of pajama, kind of coming up to him and kind of shaking his hand. “That’s the Führer,” you know. And Keesing is totally shocked because it’s like, you know, the destiny of the German nation, the whole Europe, everything is like… …Hangs on this guy, you know. And then whenever he takes cocaine, he’s a little bit better, like… But the cocaine had the problem that Keesing was more of a, at least later in his discussions with the US military, he described himself as a conscientious guy. And he’s like, “I became like… I had the kind of problems giving Hitler more cocaine.” And…
Lex Fridman
(02:07:18)
Yeah, and I’m sure Hitler could have sensed that.
Norman Ohler
(02:07:20)
And then Morell started disliking Keesing because Hitler spent more time now with Keesing than with him. And there was this, what I call, the doctor’s war ensued, ’cause Keesing then tried to get rid of Morell, because Keesing could suddenly see that Hitler was receiving a lot of drugs. And he was taking cocaine with Keesing. Keesing left the room, then Morell would come in and give him Eukodal opioid intravenously, which is the speedball effect. Cocaine and an opioid, you know, at the same time. That’s like, that creates a really crazy high. But that’s a high that’s not stable anymore, you know. That’s a high that you… That’s like at the end of your drug career, you take the speedball.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:08)
So speedball is a combination of a stimulant…
Norman Ohler
(02:08:10)
Right
Lex Fridman
(02:08:10)
…and a depressant. Cocaine and heroin.
Norman Ohler
(02:08:13)
Opioids are depressants.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:15)
Yeah. So combining cocaine and heroin, huh? Wow. Oh.
Norman Ohler
(02:08:20)
I’ve never had a speedball, but I think it’s like the most hardcore drug experience you can have, you know. And Hitler had this in the summer of 1944 for quite some time. And then the doctors really fought for influence over Hitler. And Keesing teamed up with Himmler, head of the SS, and basically said to Himmler, “This Morell guy…” And Himmler was really suspicious of Morell, obviously, because Morell’s spending so much time with Hitler. There’s no control, like Himmler was a control freak. What is he actually giving to the Führer? The Führer doesn’t look good anymore.
Norman Ohler
(02:08:53)
So Keesing was trying to get Morell out. Maybe because he wanted Hitler to have better health, maybe he wanted to have the job himself. He certainly tried to get rid of Morell, and it came to like, a high noon situation, like the duel between the two doctors. It’s, by the way, why I think it’s completely insane that Hollywood hasn’t bought the rights yet, alone this doctor’s war.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:19)
You mean for the entire Blitz story, or?
Norman Ohler
(02:09:21)
Yeah, of course.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:22)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s really… I mean, some of the greatest movies… I mean, like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Norman Ohler
(02:09:28)
You can do a drug movie on the Nazis.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:31)
You know, one of my favorite movies, probably Downfall, which is Hitler in the bunker, which does, I guess… Does Downfall have a drug…
Norman Ohler
(02:09:38)
No.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:38)
… component to that?
Norman Ohler
(02:09:39)
They missed, they missed the drug angle. Because my book hadn’t been out yet, they didn’t know about it. That’s why they can’t…
Lex Fridman
(02:09:45)
That’d be a different story.
Norman Ohler
(02:09:46)
They can’t really explain why Hitler became a physical wreck. There’s no explanation for it except the drugs.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:53)
Well-
Norman Ohler
(02:09:53)
The opioid addiction.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:54)
You could explain it. It is a part of it that you’re… it’s just an extremely stressful position he’s in.
Norman Ohler
(02:10:01)
Yeah, but you don’t become a physical wreck if you’re…
Lex Fridman
(02:10:03)
And he’s losing the war. The physical wreck aspect, yeah.
Norman Ohler
(02:10:06)
And there were two bedrooms in the bunker in Berlin. Two bedrooms. One, of course, for Hitler, the other one for Morell. No one else was sleeping in the bunker. I mean, you can see the importance of, especially in those last months, of Morell in the bunker. And they didn’t get that when they made the movie, The Downfall. But it’s still an interesting movie, but I can’t take it seriously because they didn’t see this as a…
Lex Fridman
(02:10:33)
As a drug component.
Norman Ohler
(02:10:34)
It’s missing.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:34)
Again, I don’t think it has to be the main thing, but it has to be a part of it. A serious movie on Blitzed would be really nice. It’s not easy to do.
Norman Ohler
(02:10:45)
No.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:46)
There’s something about drugs, if you do a movie that involves drugs, that makes it… You can go too far into like Tarantino territory…
Norman Ohler
(02:10:56)
Right
Lex Fridman
(02:10:57)
… where it’s more like… which is also incredible and awesome, but it’s a different thing.
Norman Ohler
(02:11:02)
Well, he invents history, and he’s very open about it.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:05)
Yeah.
Norman Ohler
(02:11:05)
Like, this is not what actually happened. I think a Blitzed movie would have to stick to the facts. And I’ve spoken with some directors, very good German directors, and it’s just very hard to do. But…
Lex Fridman
(02:11:17)
But if you do it well, that’s a legendary movie.
Norman Ohler
(02:11:19)
I think it would be. Yeah. Yeah.

Hitler’s last days

Lex Fridman
(02:11:20)
That would be incredible. Can you just speak high level from, from… What is it? You said ’41 to ’45. What were some behavioral changes or changes in decision-making that we can trace in Hitler that could be attributed to drugs? How did they change him?
Norman Ohler
(02:11:43)
Well, an interesting event is July 1943 in a villa in Northern Italy where Hitler meets Mussolini. Mussolini is basically fed up with the war and he wants Italy to leave the Axis of Evil. Hitler is really pissed when he hears that. He knows that’s what the meeting is all about. Mussolini, I mean, the Italians invented that modern type of fascism, and Italy was the role model for Nazi Germany, but by now, Nazi Germany, of course, has been much more powerful. Italy is the most important ally, and now Mussolini is quitting in the middle of the war. What is going on here? So Hitler becomes… Morell writes about this quite a lot. He’s in a terrible mood. He really doesn’t want to go.
Norman Ohler
(02:12:36)
He might lose his temper or whatever. He’s not happy. That’s actually the day when he receives Eukodal for the first time. He says to Morell, “I’m under such stress, I’m not going to go.” He threatens, he calls off the whole thing. The plane’s already waiting in Obersalzberg. Everything is ready, and he says, “I’m not meeting this guy.” Then Morell gives him Eukodal, and you can see the time when he gets the Eukodal. That’s when he has this effect for the first time, this like, “I can do anything. This is great.
Norman Ohler
(02:13:11)
I’m going to explain to Mussolini that he’s not going to leave the war effort.” On the way to the plane, he says to Morell that this Eukodal is really helping him, and he wants another shot, and he receives another shot. So he has quite a lot of Eukodal in him when he speaks to Mussolini. The people who write the protocol of the meeting and also other people around, it’s not just two people in the room. It’s like, I don’t know, 15 or 20 people in the room. A lot of people talk about that meeting in their memoirs.
Norman Ohler
(02:13:45)
Mussolini is not able to say one word basically, because Hitler is so high and so charged. He’s just telling the whole time how great this is, what they’re doing right now. Of course, it’s not even possible that you’re going to leave. We are in this together from the… He explains everything, the whole thing for like two hours, and Mussolini is just like… Then a messenger comes in and says, “Rome has just been bombed.” He’s like, he knows, but he can’t say anything, and he stays. So that meeting was very much influenced by his Eukodal. That’s probably because it was so successful in Hitler’s eyes…
Norman Ohler
(02:14:28)
is why Eukodal became a very attractive drug for him. This was the first time in July 1943. He didn’t take Eukodal the whole time. It only started in July ’43. He started with regular opioid use. You can see that he takes it more and more regularly now. Not every day, but sometimes. Like in September 1944, he takes Eukodal every second day, which is like a junkie rhythm. You take it, and the next day you don’t take it. Then you take it again.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:58)
Why is that junkie rhythm?
Norman Ohler
(02:14:59)
You don’t take it all the time because you need to relax. You take it maybe Saturday night, and the high lasts until Sunday morning. Then Sunday, when the high slowly wears off, you sleep, and then you wake up and you’re hungry. Maybe you eat. Then the next day, Monday, you’re going to do it again. So that’s this rhythm.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:24)
And it was more potent than what is it, Dolantine?
Norman Ohler
(02:15:27)
Dolantine.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:28)
Do- Dolan-
Norman Ohler
(02:15:28)
Eukodal is said to have the best effect, the best in the sense that it’s not about strength. You just increase the dosage and you have a stronger effect, but you can’t increase it too much because then you’re going to die. That’s also the problem with opioids. If you take too much, you’re going to die because you’re just going to have a heart attack. So but…
Lex Fridman
(02:15:46)
There are nuanced differences that…
Norman Ohler
(02:15:48)
Yeah, th-
Lex Fridman
(02:15:48)
…it’s hard to convert into words, I guess. Yeah.
Norman Ohler
(02:15:50)
Different molecules have different effects. So Eukodal apparently had the best effect. That’s why they had the oxycodone epidemic in America, because people take this pill. Thank God they’re not injecting it like Hitler did. They’d take a pill, so it’s not as dangerous as injecting. But apparently the effect of this Eukodal, of this particular type of opioid, is so pleasant that it’s more attractive, maybe, than Dolantine.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:19)
Is it possible to try to reverse engineer the effect of Hitler’s drug use on the outcome of World War II? So if he didn’t use any drugs, would the Nazis have been more successful or less successful? What do you think?
Norman Ohler
(02:16:38)
I think it would be speculative to answer, but I can try. The war is so complex. There are many different ways this war could have played out and ended, but I think it would always have ended with a German defeat.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:55)
I don’t think it would have ended with a German defeat.
Norman Ohler
(02:16:58)
Well, if you don’t attack the Soviet Union, then of course you can win. But as soon as you attack the Soviet Union…
Lex Fridman
(02:17:02)
As we talked about, I think the probability of success is low. But, you know, I would put it like, I don’t know, 10%. Again… …Extremely speculative. But if you do a blitzkrieg type of attack, very rapid, don’t split the forces in Operation Barbarossa, go straight for Moscow. Don’t invade Britain. Don’t declare war on the United States, and really focus on gaining oil from the Middle East. So maybe making the Africa campaign the central point in the very beginning, so that you have the resources that are essential for the industrial capacity of Germany that’s required to, you know, keep manufacturing and keep fueling the planes, the tanks, the mechanized aspect of the army. So there are a lot of paths to this.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:58)
I mean, but I think it’s probably fair to say that a reasonable, thoughtful, calculated, disciplined leader would not have done any of the things Hitler did, even in the beginning. I mean, it requires insanity, it requires hatred, it requires ideological self-capture where you tell yourself narratives that rapidly deviate from like ground truth, from first principles of things. And you just, you’re an insane person. You’re an insane dictator that’s drunk on power. And it’s impossible for you to make great military decisions at that point.
Norman Ohler
(02:18:39)
Yeah, you would need like an impossible Hitler that is as crazy as he was but still wouldn’t make any-
Lex Fridman
(02:18:44)
Mistakes
Norman Ohler
(02:18:44)
irrational mistakes. So that doesn’t exist. Hitler can only be imagined or understood in a way, as the drugs. Hitler without drugs is unthinkable for me. It doesn’t, it makes, he was the drug guy. You cannot separate this. So Hitler was a self-destructive personality, and National Socialism is a self-destructive movement. That’s why I said I think the Germans would have lost in any case, except if there was this perfect Hitler, which is theoretically impossible.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:22)
Theoretically possible in the 20th century. I mean, you could think of a Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great type characters that would really internalize the sense of, in the case of Hitler, that the German people are, like, without the hatred, without the ideology, but with the murderous with the ability to dehumanize the rest of the world and see the German people as, uh—
Norman Ohler
(02:19:48)
Superior
Lex Fridman
(02:19:49)
… the superior and so it’s fair to do the Lebensraum and all of that kind of stuff. It’s hard to—it’s just the reason you want to think about that kind of stuff is Hitler got, to me at least, close to capturing a very large part of the world. And it’s terrifying and sort of unbelievable that somebody could get close to that.
Norman Ohler
(02:20:17)
I mean, what you described as this feeling of superiority and conquering countries, that was basically what the Wehrmacht, the high command, that’s what they were going for.
Norman Ohler
(02:20:26)
And they wanted to eliminate Hitler in the Operation Valkyrie— not because they thought, “He’s an evil guy, he’s killing the Jews,” or, you know, they wanted to eliminate him because he was not this effective decision-maker anymore that they needed to win the war, or to end it in a different way. And I spoke with Anthony Beevor once about the attempt of British intelligence to assassinate Hitler, and he had seen some evidence that at the point in time, they dropped those plans because they knew that drugged Hitler or malfunctioning Hitler, which he was after, you know, the summer of 1943, is better for Britain than, you know, killing Hitler and then having to deal with, like, some kind of, you know, maybe the army would have taken over the country, and that that would
Norman Ohler
(02:21:23)
have been more uncomfortable for Great Britain than having this- having the continuation of the degenerating maniac.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:31)
What do we know about the very end, Hitler in the bunker? The moments, the days, the weeks, the months leading up to the suicide, all those kinds of things?
Norman Ohler
(02:21:45)
It’s quite well-documented because people at the time were keeping diaries and writing about it, writing about their experiences. Also, Morell wrote quite a bit what happened in the bunker. One thing that changed was that Eukodal was not available anymore, so the drug that Hitler actually had become physically addicted to was suddenly not available anymore. This had to do with the bombardment of the Merck company, the factory in December 1944. British bombers destroyed the production facilities. And Morell, there’s a report of Morell, the overweight person, riding on a motorcycle through bombed-out Berlin from pharmacy to pharmacy, basically going into the pharmacies, trying to score Eukodal, and he couldn’t find it anymore.
Norman Ohler
(02:22:43)
It was nowhere to be found, and that’s when Hitler goes into withdrawal. What I find surprising is that he didn’t use another opioid because morphine was available all the way till the end, but he never kind of made that switch then. He doesn’t… Also, he didn’t realize for a long time that he becomes physically dependent on a drug, that he becomes a drug addict, but this realization happens in the last weeks in the bunker ’cause Goebbels, he understood it, and Goebbels wanted that bedroom, the second bedroom.
Norman Ohler
(02:23:15)
So he said to Hitler, “Do you understand what’s going on, that Morell turns you into a drug addict?” And Hitler, at one point, realized what Goebbels was saying is true because he felt the withdrawal, he was shaking, and he felt like shit, and Morell is, like, giving him weird stuff in the end. Like, one time he gives him harmine, which is an MAO inhibitor, which is part of ayahuasca, actually, because he still had that in his doctor’s bag. It hadn’t been used yet, so he gives him that, which also creates some kind of a weird high, but, you know, Hitler at one point realizes really what’s going on.
Norman Ohler
(02:23:59)
This is late April, so very late in the game, and there are a few reports of what actually happens. Like some say that Morell has to kneel in front of him and that Hitler puts a gun on his head and says, “You’ve been making me addicted to opioids. Get the hell out of the bunker.” For sure he fires him that day, and then Morell’s described as being in tears, like, leaving the bunker, he gets one of the last planes out of Berlin. He has a research lab in the south of Bavaria close to the Berghof, and he makes one of the last or the last plane out of Berlin.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:34)
He survives?
Norman Ohler
(02:24:35)
Yeah. And he goes to this research lab, and this is like May 2nd, 1945. He has like a little apartment in this research lab. His wife is still in Berlin. He’s like all alone, and he starts doing his taxes, and that kind of shows you that he was probably insane at that point, you know?
Lex Fridman
(02:24:52)
Just totally out of touch.
Norman Ohler
(02:24:53)
Why would you do your taxes? Maybe he was bored, you know, maybe he didn’t do his taxes for so long because he always had to treat Hitler, and then he thinks, “Now what am I going to do? I’m just going to do my taxes now.” Very German thing to do.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:05)
He’s just a strange character. I mean, you tell this whole story, it’s—
Norman Ohler
(02:25:09)
I would put that in the movie for sure, him doing his taxes and…
Lex Fridman
(02:25:12)
That’s how the movie ends.
Norman Ohler
(02:25:14)
Well, then the Americans move into Bavaria, liberate Bavaria from National Socialism, which was a great job they did there, and so I’m also thankful not only to the Red Army but also to the American forces. Really, very thankful that they… Because National Socialism was hard to beat. It was a beast, you know? It was hard to beat. So they capture Morell and they interrogate him, and he actually lives for another two years in American custody in Germany in a military prison, and after these two years, his health’s really bad.
Norman Ohler
(02:25:48)
He has heart problems, and the Americans dump him in front of the Munich train station in a much too small uniform jacket, probably an American uniform, and he’s lying on the pavement in front of the train station, and a half-Jewish nurse that walks around there finds him, and she says, “I’m Theo Morell.” It’s really like in a movie. “I’m Theo Morell, I was the personal physician of the Fuhrer.” She’s like, this is 1947, Germany’s in ruins. And she brings him to a hospital. His wife comes from Berlin for the last time, they meet in a hospital at Tegernsee, a beautiful lake in Bavaria, and then he dies. So that was the end of Morell. So we know pretty much what happens in the end.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:33)
Did somebody try to talk to Hitler about this? Like, what about Eva Braun? Has anybody close to him tried to talk about this?
Norman Ohler
(02:26:40)
Well, Goebbels did.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:41)
Well, that at the very end. But you would imagine maybe the generals or friends or inner circle. I mean, the reason I mentioned Eva is because, you know, people close to him.
Norman Ohler
(02:26:54)
There is a certain tension between Eva Braun and Morell. And I could very well imagine that she talked with Hitler about it, but there’s no record, so I don’t know exactly. But they had a very intimate relationship. So Eva Braun was not just the dumb blonde that plays no role. They actually spoke every day. And when Hitler was in the military headquarters, he would phone her every night at 10:00 PM. They would have a long phone conversation. So they had a very deep relationship, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t really like Morell because, you know, for the obvious reasons. He was closer to Hitler than herself. And, you know, if you count one plus one, it’s two, you know. So…
Lex Fridman
(02:27:34)
But she could have maybe not liked him because she might have cared for Hitler. And you can see the effects of drugs on humans that you care for.
Norman Ohler
(02:27:42)
She also had a good relationship with him at times because he was often at the Berghof. The Berghof was like, what is it called? Mar-a-Lago.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:52)
Oh, the Mar-a-Lago? Yeah.
Norman Ohler
(02:27:54)
Yeah, that’s kind of what it was. And it was actually, it became an official headquarter for Hitler, so he would actually make decisions from there. It was not just a vacation place. And Morell was often there, and Eva Braun was always there. That was her place. She was running that place. She was like the woman of that place. And Hitler was often, of course, in the field in the headquarters, but he came as much as he could to the Berghof because it’s quite beautiful. I went up there. It’s quite interesting. And she also had a good relationship with Morell, and there’s a paper that I found where they were very intimate and very close. There’s a paper of Morell where she comes to him in the morning and she has scratch marks.
Norman Ohler
(02:28:42)
So apparently, they had violent sex. So Morell is also kind of a witness to that. That I found in Washington, D.C. in the National Archive.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:51)
Wait, Hitler and Eva had violent sex? What do we know about Hitler’s sex life? It’s not known, right?
Norman Ohler
(02:28:57)
I found it interesting that Morell describes these scratch marks. I mean, it’s interesting. So they had some kind of kinky sex maybe. Maybe they also had normal sex and sometimes it was kinky, or… Maybe Hitler was aggressive in bed, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s just what happened between Eva and him.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:16)
Yeah, I don’t think that affected… …Military operations of the Wehrmacht.
Norman Ohler
(02:29:19)
The drug use did. His sex… If he would have had sex with a lot of people, maybe with his generals, then maybe, you know, it would be worth writing about it, because maybe he dominated these generals in bed or something. But he was just having sex with Eva, and I don’t think that’s historically relevant. It might be interesting for the movie, but also, I don’t want to see Hitler having sex.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:41)
I don’t think anyone wants to see Hitler having sex.
Norman Ohler
(02:29:45)
But Eva Braun is an interesting character because she had more of a say than historians for a long time attributed to her. Then a biography was written on her by a female German historian, and that’s a very good biography. It really shows that she had, you know, quite a lot to say in this relationship. She was not the dumb blonde that just… She was quite, you know, opinionated and active. So, it’s… And she was filming him a lot. Like, she was always filming in the Berghof. You can go online and look at the Eva Braun clips, and you will see Hitler in color at the Berghof, how he’s, like, meeting children, petting their head. And this is her contributing to the myth of this private, the good private man.
Norman Ohler
(02:30:30)
So Eva Braun is an interesting character for sure. But I found one note that she, in the beginning when Morell started with his drugs, said to Morell that she wants the same drugs, the same medications, not drugs, the same medications as Hitler so she would be on the same wavelength with him. She wanted to be… She didn’t want to lose this world. But, I mean, Hitler became such a drug polytoxicomanic user that, of course, Eva couldn’t keep up with that. They weren’t a drug couple. I didn’t see any evidence for that, that they would, like, take all the crazy drugs together and then have crazy sex or something like that. That’s not how it was. So I think she was sympathetic to Morell in the beginning and then changed her opinion.
Norman Ohler
(02:31:15)
And I’m pretty sure she talked with Hitler about it, but there are no records about their private conversations.

German resistance against Nazis

Lex Fridman
(02:31:21)
Let’s talk about another perspective on this whole story that you document in your book, “The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis.” So this is the story of the people who resisted from within Germany.
Norman Ohler
(02:31:37)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:37)
Can you tell their story? In particular, let’s talk through the story of the two key figures in the movement who… …Happened to also be in love.
Norman Ohler
(02:31:49)
Well, the main guy is Harro Schulze-Boysen. He caught my attention when I was doing research in an archive in Munich, researching drugs in the Luftwaffe, Goering’s Luftwaffe. Goering being the more finist… I mean, the Luftwaffe was a very promiscuous drug place. A lot of people in the Luftwaffe were high.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:15)
Oh, so more for entertainment versus the practical aspect of… So it’s less about the meth optimizing human performance and more about just exploring?
Norman Ohler
(02:32:26)
Like the number three of the Luftwaffe, Ernst Udet, he committed suicide in the fall of 1941. And he had had seven Pervitin tablets for breakfast.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:39)
Okay.
Norman Ohler
(02:32:40)
So he was really high on meth. He really enjoyed it. But he loved to take meth and then drink. Alcohol was a big thing in the Luftwaffe. You can drink a lot more when you’re on methamphetamine. And I found this letter, and that was really a coincidence while I was looking through the drug stuff. I was searching for, you know, drugs, and I found this letter by Harro Schulze-Boysen, who had nothing to do with drugs, but still I found this letter. I don’t know why. I can’t remember how exactly it happened that I was suddenly reading this letter, and it was the last letter that he wrote in his life.
Norman Ohler
(02:33:14)
He wrote it to his father, and he said that “Everything I have done, I’m totally fine with it, and I know it’s very hard for you, and I really am mostly sad for you and mother and my brother that you have to go through this. And I’m very sorry, but I’m fine with it, and I have a clean conscience. I did what I could to stop this madness.” And I’m like, “What? Who is this guy?” And I Googled him, and there were not so many hits on him, but I read a little bit, and he actually had formed, together with his wife, Libertas, which means freedom…
Lex Fridman
(02:33:51)
Good name.
Norman Ohler
(02:33:53)
He had formed the largest resistance network against the Nazis that ever existed. Over 100 people in Berlin that were all connected, and they were, they were from all flights of life. Like there were, some were artists, others were workers, some were leftists, others were patriots. Harro always believed that people could come to an agreement, like it’s possible to actually talk about things, and he was a, he was a true democrat, maybe you could say, or a true, I don’t know, libertarian. Or, you know, he was a… He had to learn a hard lesson that, with Nazis, you cannot argue, because they are always right. It doesn’t work. At least it didn’t work during the Third Reich. Like, he could…
Norman Ohler
(02:34:54)
He had, he had published a newspaper during the Weimar Republic called “Gegner,” which means opponent. And in the “Gegner,” opponents could all write, like who would be on the street’s opponents, they could all write in “The Opponent.” And so it was a… You read all kinds of texts and opinions, and he thought when Hitler took over power in ’33 that he could continue to publish “The Opponent,” because “The Opponent,” he thought even, you know, in a Nazi-led Germany, you know, this keeps the discourse. You have to have a discourse. We have to discuss. We have to disagree, you know. And then in April 1933, two months after Hitler took power, they had a meeting with the editorial staff.
Norman Ohler
(02:35:38)
They discussed the new issue, and then there was a knock on the door, and it was the SS, and they beat up everybody, and they destroyed the typewriters and the printing press that they had in the office in Berlin. And they took Harro and his best friend, who was half Jewish, to one of these early concentration camps, and they tortured both of them, and the Jew was killed. He didn’t make it. Henry Erlanger and Harro, at that moment he realized who he’s against, you know, that he has to… He decided to become… to, to fight the system. And the way he fought the system was later during the ’60s we also had a ’60s kind of cultural and political changes in Germany. And then our ’60s they, they called it march through the institutions.
Norman Ohler
(02:36:30)
That is a way to infiltrate the system, like to become part of the system, and then, you know, change the system from within. So you don’t leave the country, you stay, you go into the institutions. You march through the institutions. So Harro decided to go into the Luftwaffe, and he was working in the Air Force, Luftwaffe Ministry, a huge building still intact today in Berlin Wilhelmstrasse. Quite an interesting building that was like the power center of the Luftwaffe or like one of the most important structures in the whole Nazi regime. And he was working there, and he worked his way up, and he received quite a lot of information. For example, when Germany, for the first time, became militarily active again.
Norman Ohler
(02:37:19)
This was in 1936, when the Germans supported the fascists in Spain in the Spanish Civil War. This was a clandestine operation. The Luftwaffe did this. And they, like German soldiers went to Spain like in plain clothes, like posing as vacationers. But then they, you know, were actually soldiers and supporting Franco’s… You know, were part of Franco’s victory later on. And Harro had this information, and he passed… He tried to pass this on to the BBC. He failed passing it on. Well, he met a BBC journalist during the Olympic Games in Berlin, and told him about this, and the BBC guy was too afraid to make this public, and he kind of buried that information.
Norman Ohler
(02:38:04)
So Harro is just a very interesting character, and he was in love with Libertas and Libertas with him. Harro came from like a bourgeois family, very educated. His great-grand uncle was von Tirpitz, who built up the marine, the Navy for the Kaiser. So he came from this influential German family, but they were all patriots. They were not Nazis. They were democrats, patriots and militarists, I guess you could say, or like even, you know, very straight-laced also in a way. And Libertas, she came from a castle north of Berlin. She was this like Bohemian, like aristocratic Bohemian type. She’s very good-looking, always playing music. And they fell in love. They met on the Wannsee on boats. They were both on a…
Norman Ohler
(02:38:53)
Harro was rowing, and she was on a sailboat of a guy that Harro also knew. So he was rowing, and he saw his friend on the sailboat, and he looked at Libertas, she looked at him, and they were in love in 1934. And the other guy, the friend of Harro, he left his sailboat, because he realized, “I’m like the fifth wheel on the car, not really needed,” right? Like, how do you say that in sailboat terms? I don’t know, the third sail is not needed.
Norman Ohler
(02:39:21)
You know, but what happened at night, Harro didn’t sleep with Libertas. For her, that was very unusual because everyone wanted to sleep with her, but Harro, he wanted to keep his clothes on, and it was a very warm night, and I researched this quite thoroughly. I know exactly the temperature, and so also The Bohemians, when you read The Bohemians, you really experience the life of these people, what they experienced, but everything is nothing is invented, which is very tricky to do. So what happens that night, Libertas wants to take off his clothes and he doesn’t want to take them off, because why? From the torture in April 1933, he has quite a lot of scars. They even burned swastikas into his thighs. Not burned, sorry, they… With knives.
Norman Ohler
(02:40:11)
The SS. So he doesn’t want to show that to her. He just, and he hadn’t had a girlfriend for a while. He can’t open up emotionally because he’s fighting the Nazis. It’s very secret. No one knows about this, that he’s long-term planning his life to fight the system that he hates so much because they killed his best friend in front of his eyes. But at one point, Libertas does take off his clothes and she sees this, and she’s naive. She’s even a member of the Nazi party, but she’s not a very active party member. She just, you know, she works for MGM actually in Berlin, a Hollywood film studio office in Berlin. Germany was one of the biggest movie markets, and she was the press girl. She did the campaigns for the big Hollywood movies in Germany.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:57)
So just a regular German girl?
Norman Ohler
(02:40:59)
Well, she wasn’t regular. She was from a very high family. Actually, her grandfather had been in a relationship with the German emperor, which is a side story that I found out when I researched The Bohemians. The German emperor apparently was bisexual and was going to that castle, and they had homosexual meetings there with Libertas’ grandfather. So she came from a very… …Unusual family.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:28)
Yeah. But what I mean in a usual German girl, what I mean by that is it’s not obvious that a person like that would hold a crucial role in the resistance against the Nazis.
Norman Ohler
(02:41:42)
No, not at all. That was always a problem because for her, it was weird that someone was against the system. But Harro told me… Harro was totally convinced that fascism is wrong and that he has to fight it, and more and more Libertas was convinced, and then more friends came into the group. And the way Harro organized this resistance group was through parties. They were a power couple of Berlin, and they had a great loft apartment.
Norman Ohler
(02:42:12)
They moved together to a loft apartment on also a side street from Ku’damm, a huge room, and there they had parties every second Thursday night and they would invite friends, and then once they trusted someone personally, they would spill the beans and say, “This is actually not just a party.” But they would test it. At the party, they would say something critical of the regime and you immediately, you know, either the person jumps on it, responds, or, you know, goes somewhere else, gets a drink at the bar, not into it.
Norman Ohler
(02:42:48)
So that was the way of recruiting people, and that was such an efficient way that the Gestapo was not able to understand this group for a long time, not even recognize that there is a group, because Gestapo was very good at infiltrating, for example, communist resistance groups, because you just had to go in as a Gestapo guy and be a communist. Just say the right words and they would, at one point, you know, take you. But with Harro and Libertas, it wasn’t so easy. They would sniff you out, you know?
Lex Fridman
(02:43:20)
These parties were what, like, intellectuals, artists and that kind of stuff?
Norman Ohler
(02:43:26)
Yeah. They had music. They would dance. They would sleep with each other. They also…
Lex Fridman
(02:43:31)
Oh, sex stuff too.
Norman Ohler
(02:43:33)
Well, they had, and this is again a parallel to the ’60s, they had the idea that if you’re against fascism, if you’re for freedom of everything…
Lex Fridman
(02:43:45)
Yeah, free love, the whole thing.
Norman Ohler
(02:43:46)
…Yeah, they had free love, but it wasn’t a dogma. There was also a female doctor there, she was quite square, I guess you would say, and she was against this. She said, “This is too complicated. We are a resistance group. What if there’s jealousy and what if this could compromise operations?” And it did sometimes. So that’s why The Bohemians are a very interesting subject because sometimes it just doesn’t work. In a way, it works that love really bonds them together.
Norman Ohler
(02:44:15)
But also, especially Libertas and Harro, they have a terrible marriage sometimes. They really fight because Libertas is not so much intellectually convinced. She’s more a resistance fighter from the heart, she feels that the Nazis are not good. But Harro is more like the analytical guy. So they have a lot of friction also, and it’s a fascinating story, and they came quite far. I mean, they made… There was a point in time when Harro had militarily relevant information through his position at the Luftwaffe ministry, and he passed that on to allies, to Western allies and to the Soviet Union. So he went a step further than just being a resistance group. He became, you could say, a traitor.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:03)
He would give information to the Soviets.
Norman Ohler
(02:45:05)
Yeah, he would, because he said-
Lex Fridman
(02:45:07)
As part of the resistance.
Norman Ohler
(02:45:08)
Yeah, they can beat Germany. But that was also discussed in the groups. Very interesting to see some say, “We can’t do this because the Soviet Union is also a totalitarian regime.” But then Harro says, “Yeah, but they are going to beat Hitler.” So The Bohemians is a very interesting topic.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:26)
What lessons do you learn from these folks, maybe about why so few resisted Hitler while in Germany?
Norman Ohler
(02:45:38)
I mean, it was extremely dangerous.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:40)
Is it purely the danger? Is it also people believed it’s hard to be an independent thinker and take yourself outside the propaganda? Because they’re also swimming in propaganda.
Norman Ohler
(02:45:55)
I mean, the chances of succeeding are quite small because the system was extremely strong. And if you made a joke about Hitler and the wrong person heard it in a restaurant and would rat on you, you would land in a concentration camp. So, people were very, very careful. Also, at parties, when Libertas was singing and they were drinking and dancing, and then suddenly the political discussion started, you know you have to have guts to then actually not leave the party but to stay, because they were risking their lives basically. As soon as they would be found out, they would be dead. And people don’t want to die when they’re in their mid-20s. They were all pretty young.
Norman Ohler
(02:46:37)
And Libertas, she would often say, “We can’t win. Why are we risking our lives for what?” So, one time they did a Gelbe Sättel Aktion, Gelbe Sättel. They produced… because one guy had access to a printing press, and they produced leaflets, small papers that had glue on one side, and the paper said, um… What the Nazis did, they set up a huge exhibition hall which was called the Soviet Paradise, and this exhibition was always in the center of Berlin. I’d never heard about this before. I found this when I researched The Bohemians, and it was the most popular exhibition during the whole of the war. Two million people, two million Germans saw this.
Norman Ohler
(02:47:29)
They went into this exhibition, and they saw how horrible the Soviet Union is, h- how horrible communism is to people. So, it was a propaganda show.
Norman Ohler
(02:47:39)
And the group decided to make these leaflets which didn’t say “The Soviet Paradise,” but it said “The Nazi Paradise”: torture, SS torture, hunger, war, how long will it last? And they glued over a thousand of these stickers everywhere in Berlin in May 1942 at night. They organized it in a way that always two people, a man and a woman, would go out. They had the stickers with them, and then they would pretend to kiss and would lean on a wall. And then while they were kissing, one would put the sticker on. Then they would move on in the dark. So, in the morning of that May 1942, tens of thousands of Berliners saw that the city saw these things. Does it make a difference? It made one on that day, you know?
Norman Ohler
(02:48:35)
It was a very dangerous thing to do, and no one was, no one got caught. And in the morning, a lot of people saw that there is actually resistance, that there are people who do something against it. So, I think they did something.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:48)
Yeah, I was reading about protests in recent human history, and most of them, many of them, don’t have an effect until they do. It’s like this threshold effect. It’s very hard to know. It’s very hard to know because it’s a match that lights a fire. And sometimes the spark takes a little bit of time to propagate through the whispers. What happens is the people whispering, it’s the whisper network of people talking, and sometimes it just takes that one sticker to begin the whispers, and then a few months later, the regime is overthrown. It’s funny. It’s hard to trace back what was effective and what was not.
Norman Ohler
(02:49:35)
I mean, Harro was convinced that the system would lose, so he thought that maybe we can make a contribution that makes it go faster. Maybe we will be that spark. When I think that there’s this possibility, I must try it. That was his conviction. So, he would put his life on the line for that possibility.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:59)
How did they get caught?
Norman Ohler
(02:50:01)
They were approached by the Soviet Union, who wanted to recruit them as spies.
Norman Ohler
(02:50:06)
And they didn’t want to do that. Harro refused the Soviet intelligence. These are documents that were found in the early ’90s. One of the sons of one of the members of that group, a good friend of Harro’s, one of his sons went to Moscow to look at the files, and he found a kind of furious Soviet KGB description of this weird guy, Harro, that doesn’t want to be a proper Soviet spy and just says, “Yes, I’m going to give you information so you can hurt Hitler, but I’m not going to play your game. I’m not going to be one of you.” So still, they did collaborate with the Soviet Union. They accepted a radio transmitter from the Soviet Union, with which they were supposed to send military information via radio to Moscow.
Norman Ohler
(02:51:03)
And they struggled with the technology. The Russians gave them an apparatus only with Russian instructions, and it’s very difficult. They made mistakes. But what actually gets them caught is the Russians at one point answered and sent a message to them through the ether. And that message is coded, but the Nazis intercepted that message and were able to decode it. And in the message, it gives the clear names of Harro and his address, which is a total intelligence blunder. Or maybe they just wanted to give them up, and had their revenge because Stalin did crazy stuff like that, you know?
Norman Ohler
(02:51:51)
So they suddenly knew, the Gestapo knew Harro Schulze-Boysen, the high-ranking officer in the Luftwaffe ministry, was giving military information to the Soviet Union, and apparently, he was meeting with all kinds of friends. So the Gestapo started observing the group for months. And the group at one point realized that they had been basically found out, but then it was already too late. Then they captured quite a few of them, and quite a few got a military trial and received the death penalty, and were also being executed. And Harro and Libertas were among them. And also, that last chapter of their lives is very well-documented, and it actually ends with that letter, you know, that I found in the beginning. That’s the last thing that Harro does, is write that letter.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:44)
To his father.
Norman Ohler
(02:52:45)
That’s very interesting what happens with Libertas because she gets in custody. The Gestapo asks one of their secretaries, Gertrude Breiter, to go in and pose as a friend to Libertas. And Libertas actually falls for it and starts telling that secretary, who pretends to be her friend and kind of helps her with certain things, tells her secrets, and that kind of breaks the neck of the group. It’s a very tragic ending. So while my books always contain as much humor as possible, that is not a funny story, but it’s a very dramatic story. Even though they had a lot of humor, obviously. I mean, they had parties to recruit people.

Totalitarianism

Lex Fridman
(02:53:31)
What lessons can we learn from that about how to resist totalitarian regimes? Is there some deeper wisdom?
Norman Ohler
(02:53:44)
I just think it’s admirable to be brave and not do things that you cannot really justify in front of your own conscience. I don’t know if I would have been so brave. I don’t even know, obviously, how my conscience would have been, but I’m probably more the fleeing type. Like, a lot of writers would just leave Germany. Like Thomas Mann just left Germany and lived in Pacific Palisades.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:12)
And then, and then maybe write, criticize, but leave first.
Norman Ohler
(02:54:16)
And he criticized it from the outside, and he was quite influential. He worked for the BBC. They did shows against the Nazis. So you could maybe do more when you leave. It’s just you have… Like today, let’s say we see something. We live in a system that suddenly changes, and we’re not happy with it anymore. Do we just go along and, you know, continue to stare at our smartphone, or do we do something against it? What do we do? I mean, every situation has very different conditions. It’s… I think it’s probably even harder now to be in the resistance than it was back then.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:58)
But I think it does, at the end of the day, boil down to facing yourself, looking yourself in the mirror-
Norman Ohler
(02:55:03)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:03)
that you’re facing your conscience and then doing the courageous thing. And I think that in itself, like… it’s the tree falling in the forest, even if there’s nobody there to hear it. Just the fact that that exists, somehow through the karma channels of the world… …Can materialize into progress, into a revolution against oppression. Something about that human spirit still shining through can start a revolution.
Norman Ohler
(02:55:40)
I mean, it is that spirit that actually made us human. It is that neuroplasticity in our brain that we do not just repeat the conditioned sets that we ought to repeat. But that we actually dim down the command center in the brain and let other parts of the brain react, which is the psychedelic experience, basically. That, I think, contributes to the evolution of our species. And our species is certainly threatened by extinction. So I think if we somehow care for the human race then resistance becomes a very immediate and important topic, you know. Because you can resist, obviously. Your brain is yours. You can resist in many ways, you know, by thinking, just by thinking. That’s actually why I became a writer when I was a teenager. I was very political.
Norman Ohler
(02:56:56)
I wanted to change the system. I thought, “This is not good, what’s happening.” This was in the Cold War. Very… I don’t know if conservative is even the right word, but you know, Ronald Reagan was president. So I thought my writing could change the brain waves of the readers, basically, and therefore have a neuroplastic effect on the reader. And just because that is what literature is. Literature, and I started off as a novelist, and that’s really literature. It’s about what do you see right now? How do you describe it? So you do it in ways that when you read it, when you read a good book, you feel good because suddenly you see different things, your brain changes. You become more free, I think, if you read good literature.
Norman Ohler
(02:57:45)
That was always my form of- of resistance. Communist resistance cells would probably say this is nothing, you know, but I think it is resistance. And that’s a little bit… I- I think it resembles a little bit what this group did. Just living differently, not living, you know… That’s why I said in the beginning, Nazis were bad dancers, because… I think they were good dancers at the parties, you know, and they were like… I think dancing can be a form of resistance.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:19)
Yeah, but I also like the scale when you resist and through that resistance you have impact at scale, and I do think writing is that. So if you can en- encapsate your, sort of the spirit of that resistance into writing, that’s- that’s beautiful. And some of the greatest literature does exactly that.

Stoned Sapiens

Norman Ohler
(02:58:39)
Right. That is the aim of my next book.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:43)
So is it still called Stone Sapiens?
Norman Ohler
(02:58:45)
Yeah, it’s called Stoned Sapiens.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:46)
Great title, great title. So what is this lens that you’re looking at all of human history through?
Norman Ohler
(02:58:54)
I discussed this with the already mentioned Antony Beevor, who is like the master in historical non-fiction books, and said, “Is it also possible to write a world history?” Like, about everything, basically. And he said, “Yes, it is possible.” It’s not easy, because you have to understand a lot, you know? And obviously, it will always be a selection. It’s clear, you know. That’s why I also think that historical science is basically a fictional science. I mean, I have a foreword, the Blitz foreword basically tells that story. Take it with a grain of salt. Not only Blitz, but every historical book, because we weren’t there, you know? That’s what Johnny Depp said when the guy said, “So you had like a megapint of red wine.” He just said, “Were you there?”
Norman Ohler
(02:59:42)
You know, and the guy wasn’t there. So, history, historical sciences, is a fiction. But, you know, it’s a certain type of fiction, and it’s based on facts. So I’m not inventing anything in Stoned Sapiens, and I’m highly interested in the very early human history, and there are not a lot of sources. So the beginning of the book is more speculative than, for example, the Vietnam War chapter. In the Vietnam War chapter, I’m in Hanoi speaking to Viet Cong generals, asking them did they supply heroin to the GIs, which diminished their fighting capability. You can research that, and that’s also a chapter. By the way, the Vietnam War is not called the Vietnam War in Vietnam. It’s called the American War.
Norman Ohler
(03:00:36)
And also, I was sitting with these Viet Cong generals in Hanoi just a few weeks ago for researching for Stoned Sapiens, and I said, “So did the Viet Cong bring heroin?” Because there’s never been evidence that it happened this way, and they just looked at me and they said, “There’s no Viet Cong.” Like, “What are you talking about? You are the Viet Cong.” They said, “No, this is an American propaganda term. We were the North Vietnamese Army. We never called ourselves the Viet Cong.” So the book is full of surprises, obviously. But the very early beginning of Stoned Sapiens goes back to about 1.5 million years ago when Homo erectus, who has also become kind of famous by now, Homo erectus, is like the first human that really gets shit done, you know. They-
Lex Fridman
(03:01:24)
Yeah, they get moving.
Norman Ohler
(03:01:26)
Yeah, they move. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:01:27)
And why were they moving?
Norman Ohler
(03:01:28)
Why were they moving? I mean, then you can examine exactly where they originated, which was, I mean, it’s also disputed by now that it’s the Great Rift Valley, that only the most fossils have been found there, but that doesn’t mean that they originated there. Maybe they originated in the Central African rainforest where fossils disintegrate, and only there in the Rift Valley do we still find it. So but we know for sure that in the Great Rift Valley there was a plant called khat, which is like a plant speed. So they were using that. It’s still being used now in these countries, in Ethiopia, Yemen, around the Horn of Africa. Khat is very normal to use. You chew the leaves and it gives you… It’s like an amphetamine. It’s a plant amphetamine, basically.
Norman Ohler
(03:02:16)
So Homo erectus, there’s no proof that they actually used it, but they were living in that area and the plant was there, so you can write about that. So it’s interesting because they were able to do certain things, like they shed their fur. They were the first ones to suddenly be naked. And that has the effect that sweat glands are produced. Homo erectus could sweat it out basically when they were very hot. What animals couldn’t do because they had the fur. So an antelope can run faster than a Homo erectus, but after 10 minutes, the antelope has to stop, like what dogs do, their tongue goes out. And humans didn’t have to do that because they were sweating, so they developed the jogging mode, basically.
Norman Ohler
(03:03:07)
So they were jogging. They were not sprinting to get the animal, they were jogging, and when the animal couldn’t do it, had to rest, then the humans would come and hunt it down. So Homo erectus was very… was evolutionary very good. And then later, one of the species coming out of Homo erectus is Homo sapiens.
Norman Ohler
(03:03:27)
At one point, there were only about 1,500 people left. There were not a lot of Homo sapiens. There was a point in time when there were quite a few of them, and the problem became inbreeding, and there was a real danger of extinction. They were vulnerable, you know? They were not on top of the food chain yet, so they had to develop consciousness. Consciousness is what basically saved us from extinction. Without human consciousness, we wouldn’t be here, you know? That is what made us, in the end, superior to other animals. So, how did this happen? You can kind of trace how they moved. You can trace that they went through the Central African rainforest, and there’s one plant there which elephants like, and that’s iboga.
Norman Ohler
(03:04:13)
And iboga now is like the hot thing of the psychedelic renaissance. Iboga, iboga, iboga. But it’s also the oldest drug in the book, basically. They saw that elephants were eating iboga, the root and the leaves, and suddenly were like, walking backward and were behaving in an unusual way, and then people were also using this. And this was going on for about 100,000 years in the rainforest. So, you can write a story about that, you know. Was it maybe iboga? Of course, you can’t prove it. You know, maybe the frontal cortex grew by itself, you know?
Lex Fridman
(03:04:49)
That’s a really compelling story. That’s one of the great mysteries of… How did the light turn on?
Norman Ohler
(03:04:56)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(03:04:56)
The magic of human cognition and consciousness, and the-
Norman Ohler
(03:04:59)
Like Sapiens by Harari, which is a great book, he also misses that. When it comes to those moments, he writes, “We don’t understand how the first cognitive revolution and the second cognitive revolution actually happened.” So, I find it interesting to kind of look, could it have been drugs? Like, I include everything he leaves out, I look at thoroughly in Stoned Sapiens.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:24)
I mean, he does a good explanation of interesting consequences. You know, our ability to imagine ideas and share them and, you know, collaborate on them, and the imagination, all that kind of stuff. But the why, the transitions of why did it happen, he doesn’t provide, right? I mean, there are some theories, but if iboga is one of them, that’s a compelling one. That’s a really compelling one.
Norman Ohler
(03:05:51)
Yeah. I mean, I’m still researching this book and writing it. I also want to go there, because they still take iboga in Gabon, for example. I also interviewed one of the leading iboga experts at Columbia University for Stoned Sapiens, and he described how iboga works in the brain because that’s… and he’s never taken iboga himself.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:17)
Oh, interesting.
Norman Ohler
(03:06:18)
He just relies on the data. He doesn’t want to be personally influenced. But he said he will take it at a certain point in time. But right now, he’s still just working on data, just with patients, you know? And what he found, and also examining in the brain through brain scanners, what actually happens in the classic psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, they dock at certain points. They interact with certain receptors. It’s quite well understood how they work. And he said iboga is completely different. It’s like… And he also showed this with his hands, because he’s just so mesmerized by his own findings. It kind of—it’s kind of everywhere at the same time in the brain, like… He says it’s like a spa for the neurons, basically. It is…
Norman Ohler
(03:07:02)
His findings show—and these are academic findings at Columbia—that iboga, it’s like, as if, he said to me, as if iboga would know our brain from a long time. Like, it knows exactly if you’re addicted to something, or if you’re depressed. The depression literally is a depression in the neuronal network. Depression is a thought loop, for example, or, you know, a system of thought loops that you’re on, that, “I’m not worthy, I’m not whatever, I can’t do it.” You always go back. It really kind of depresses your brain in a way. And iboga sees this immediately, and kind of takes the depression out and makes your brain go basically well again. So, this is what his findings are. So, it seems…
Norman Ohler
(03:07:53)
He says he’s totally convinced this is like a… He doesn’t call it a plant. He calls it like a neurotechnology of the 22nd century. So, iboga really seems to be in a different kind of category. That’s why I really feel that Stoned Sapiens must be written, because there’s so much that historians just shied away from. And it all started when I was on the island of Crete, the biggest island of Greece. Crete, that’s another, like, Harari moment. On Crete was the first what is called high culture of Europe, the Minoan culture. You might have heard of the Minoan culture.
Norman Ohler
(03:08:37)
And no one can explain, so far, why there, on Crete, suddenly in Europe, they started making amazing structures and amazing art, and how did it happen there that this, like, totally backwards place, Crete, became… I mean, backwards as any other place, you know? Why did it happen there that such intricate objects were being made and that the culture was developing so intensely? And I was kind of thinking about that. That’s how the book started. I was with my kids on vacation in Crete. And if you go to, like, Knossos or Phaistos, the big archaeological sites, or to the museum in Heraklion, you don’t find an answer. Why did it happen there?
Norman Ohler
(03:09:28)
And then I found an old book in an old bookshop, and it described an excavation site at the sea, and that it was maybe a maritime place, or like a harbor basically. And then while I was swimming there, I found on the seafloor, the remnants of a wall that was a harbor wall that was out, that was breaking the waves, and then I climbed over the fence because the archaeological site is still fenced off, like it’s not explained officially what it is, and the walls in there are the biggest walls of the whole Bronze Era, and it was actually quite a big harbor. And then the next step is what did they trade? And they traded olive oil because Crete was the first place to produce olive oil.
Norman Ohler
(03:10:24)
And then I also found, and this is historically documented, opium was made in Crete and the poppy flower was growing there. And this was the harbor. Basically, they became incredibly wealthy through olive oil and opium trade through that harbor. So you could say that the whole of the European high culture, which goes from Minoan, goes to Athens, so it all started basically with, you know, they were drug dealers in a way. Or they… I mean, it was the most potent medicine, because it was the only medicine that numbs the pain for sure. You know, opium works, and the Minoans developed that. So, I mean, it’s kind of, it’s a bit similar to the Blitz experience. You know what, the more I did research, the more I found—
Lex Fridman
(03:11:17)
That there’s this whole component to human history- …that could be a- a really critical component. I mean, I am really interested about the origin… There’s certain leaps, like the- the origins of human civilization, and then the origins of homo sapiens. Those are really big leaps.
Norman Ohler
(03:11:32)
I mean, there’s some evidence, you know, like, they came through the area where Iboga was, but there’s no academic proof. So I guess an academically trained historian couldn’t really write about that. But I can write about it. I can write about possibilities.
Lex Fridman
(03:11:51)
Yeah, sometimes… I mean, that’s what… The- the farther into history you go, the more it’s about writing the possibilities.
Norman Ohler
(03:12:01)
I mean, it’s also interesting why did the Neanderthals die out? And what we can compare is the cave art. And the cave art of the Neanderthals is much simpler than ours. Like, if you really get into the cave art, I don’t know if you’ve done that-
Lex Fridman
(03:12:15)
Have not, no.
Norman Ohler
(03:12:16)
It’s quite fascinating. Picasso looked at some of the cave paintings in Southern France, and he said, “We didn’t learn anything new.” And if you study them, they’re really good, but only the humans are good. The Neanderthals, they were worse artists than us. And you can also see there’s a very famous one that comes from Algeria with a shaman and around his body like mushrooms grow out of his body, so he was like a mushroom shaman. So mushrooms seem to have been, like, part, at least in that area, and, I mean, that’s the stoned ape theory-
Norman Ohler
(03:12:53)
…that Terence McKenna did. And I think, a lot of evidence kind of points to it that we were able to develop our consciousness in a better way than the Neanderthals, who did not have a drug culture. They were basically too sober for the future. We assimilated them. They had no chance against our impetus of boldly going where no one has gone before. They were much more happy with what they had. They were not progressing all the time. Like, we have the transcendental kind of moment, which is, you know, the psychedelic experience. I guess you could think of it without it, but to imagine sapiens makes more sense to imagine sapiens as Stoned Sapiens, as a species that was able to incorporate psychoactive components into its development. It makes a lot of sense.

Religion

Lex Fridman
(03:13:52)
What about one of the great, if you can think of it that way, technologies that humans have developed is religion. Religion evolved different kinds. Do you think there’s a connection between psychedelics and religion, the development of religion throughout different parts of the world?
Norman Ohler
(03:14:07)
Well, I think Moses is quite interesting. Moses was a traumatized man that had fled Egypt, where he had killed a man who had been beating up a Hebrew. So Moses kind of took revenge and killed him. So he was running from the law and he was, together with, in the Bible it says, I think 66 people. They were in the desert, in the Sinai, and they had been fasting for days and no alcohol. So it was kind of a psychedelic retreat, basically. I mean, this is being examined by Israeli scholars and I think it’s very interesting work. They examine in detail what the Bible says, and the Bible mentions in that passage where Moses sees the burning bush and then gets the Ten Commandments.
Norman Ohler
(03:15:03)
In that Bible passage, several times the acacia is mentioned. And the Egyptian acacia grows right in that Sinai area and contains DMT. So there’s this Israeli research that Moses was actually having a trip, basically, that he was seeing, he was hallucinating the burning bush. You know, if you take LSD and you look at a bush in the heat, you know, it will move, you know? It might resemble a burning experience. And he went up the mountain, which takes three hours, while the others were staying down. And with the DMT type of experience, it’s not that everyone in the group has the same experience, you know, to Ayahuasca.
Norman Ohler
(03:15:54)
Sometimes, like one guy has an incredible experience, while another person might not feel that much at all, and Moses felt a lot. And you do feel a lot when you, you know, when you have something to work through, and he certainly had something to work through, the trauma of killing a man. So it’s also no surprise that he receives one of the commandments, “You should not kill,” you know? So for him, it’s extremely, extremely important what he receives on the mountain, that God is like, “There’s someone speaking to me,” and he understands that God is not, that there’s not many gods, just one God. He has a revelation, you know?
Norman Ohler
(03:16:38)
And I think when I, when I read, you know, these examinations by these scholars, I think it makes a lot of sense to imagine that the Jewish religion comes from Moses’ trip. And also, if you look at the Jewish religion, they are quite open to drugs. I don’t know if that, you know, that could be an unconscious reaction to that, to that kind of trippy beginning. Like, they have Purim where it’s like, you’re supposed to get intoxicated to get closer to God. They’re not as straight-laced as the Christians. Like, they just, you know, they just allow alcohol; it’s like the blood of Christ. So also, Stoned Sapiens is a book about religion.
Norman Ohler
(03:17:16)
Also, Islam and intoxication is also a very interesting topic, because you have the Sufis who intoxicate themselves to get into ecstasy, to be closer to God, and then you have, like, the conservative Islamic scholar, Ibn Taimiyya, who defended Damascus against the Mongols by combining anti-drug rhetoric, like, “They’re bringing drugs to us and they are not good Muslims.” So drugs in religion, sometimes drugs kind of help religion to, like, are used in religious contexts, but then you can also see that religions work as prohibitionist movements against drugs, like the Christian church.
Norman Ohler
(03:18:01)
Also the Purity Law, for example, it’s very famous in Germany. It’s called the Reinheitsgebot. Beer can only contain three things: water, hops and barley or something like that. That’s the Purity Law. And that was done by the church in the 16th century. And in Germany, for a long time, this was seen as like, this is like a quality control, like beer has to be pure, it only has these ingredients. But it’s actually a move by the church to weed out all the other ingredients that had been put in beer before, like nightshade plants. So beer… Also, witches were brewing crazy beer you drink and you have visions and you dance around the fire. It’s like…
Norman Ohler
(03:18:44)
And the church didn’t like this, so the church said, “This is the beer now,” and especially the hops was the new ingredient for the beer. And so the Purity Law is the first prohibitionist law in the Middle Ages in Europe. Another fascinating…
Lex Fridman
(03:19:02)
Yeah. I- I think as society becomes, develops more and more, it d- seems to resist, certainly psychedelics, s- seems to resist drugs. I don’t know what that’s about.
Norman Ohler
(03:19:16)
One of the very fascinating turning points that I have been able to kind of pinpoint, or at least I think this is what happened, is when did the first kings come up? They weren’t kings for a very long time. The first king that I can identify was in the so-called Sumerian high culture, was in Uruk, was Gilgamesh, and they wrote the Gilgamesh Epic about, you know, the great king. But that was four or 5,000 years ago, something like that. But what happened in the thousands of years before, there’s no source that there were rulers. It seems like humans were quite good in organizing themselves without kings before these first kings came. And I mean, thousands of years from the end of the Ice Age until the Sumerian high culture, there were no kings.
Norman Ohler
(03:20:14)
So people were quite able to organize their communities. There was, for example, Çatal Hüyük in Eastern Turkey- that was working for like 2,000 years without any hierarchies. I think that is, that is quite interesting, and then why do suddenly the hierarchies start and what makes the hierarchy stronger? And again, I’m still researching this, but in Sumeria, we can see that it’s the beer that destroys the hierarchy-free society, because they are able… I mean, beer is quite old. The first beer was made in Gobekli Tepe, the famous first kind of structure of mankind. I also write about that, because it’s very interesting.
Norman Ohler
(03:20:56)
Small detour, what is Gobekli Tepe? No one knows. How did they make it? No one knows. But why did they make it? I think they made it because they were creating a meeting place, and why was that so important? There were not so many humans at the time, there were like one to four million, those are the estimates, on the whole planet. And they were usually living in small communities of like a hundred people up to 500, not more. But so the problem then is, again, inbreeding. Inbreeding means it’s a degeneration, so it’s a problem. We are genetically not so diverse, actually, as humans, so it… But Gobekli Tepe people were meeting from different areas, having sex with people they usually wouldn’t see… … Creating healthy children.
Norman Ohler
(03:21:47)
And Gobekli Tepe was working for 1,600 years, and I think it was an evolutionary kind of machine. Like, without that idea, we’re going to create a fucking place… …Or a party place.
Norman Ohler
(03:22:00)
It was a party, basically. They were eating very well. They found a lot of bones, but no one lived there. They just came together for parties. And after 800 years, they started making beer there, and then the situation slightly changed. They found these places where they made beer; you can still find the chemicals, and it’s sure that they made beer there. And then once they make beer, they create different stone circles, and it changes. We can see clearly how it changes in the Sumerian high culture when beer becomes a business. Beer is being done by the priests, by the ruling class, or a ruling class emerges.
Norman Ohler
(03:22:46)
Monasteries often brew beer, and that was also the case in the Sumerian high culture. They make beer. They labeled the beer, and the temple that would make the beer, the beer would be attributed to that temple. It would be sold, so that temple rises in status, makes money. That’s how hierarchies started up. So the hierarchy, which is the big problem right now, that we have these hierarchies, that we have these kings everywhere that steal our money, or at least make it very difficult for us as humans to organize on an egalitarian planetary scale, which is our only chance for survival.
Norman Ohler
(03:23:26)
If we, at one point, overcome the hierarchies, overcome the nation-states, and create a planetary, probably AI-assisted, open-source AI-assisted planetary society, and everyone has the same political rights, there are no more borders, there’s a planetary minimum income so no one is starving, everyone has at least what everyone needs, which is totally possible. It’s just a problem of organizing and of breaking the resistance of those who don’t like that, and there’s a lot of resistance, obviously. I mean, I’m talking about what’s happening on the planet in 50 years, not what’s going to happen tomorrow, but that is where we are slowly moving towards. And you can see that this actually comes from a time when we were able to organize ourselves without kings.
Norman Ohler
(03:24:12)
We don’t need kings. Kings always say, “If you don’t have me, then someone else, some other guy will come,” but you know, that’s why I’m not… If a nation-state makes war against another nation-state, I’m not taking a position and saying, “This country is better.” Basically, both nation-states are doing war, and who has to suffer is us, you know? It’s Stoned Sapiens, it’s the human species.

LSD, CIA, and MKUltra

Lex Fridman
(03:24:39)
Speaking of which, I have to ask you… I’ve done psilocybin a bunch, and I’ve done ayahuasca, but I’ve never done LSD, acid, and you have quite a bit. So, maybe the big general question is what’s LSD like? In the space of psychedelics, which funny enough, we haven’t really spoken a lot about psychedelics—
Norman Ohler
(03:25:04)
Right
Lex Fridman
(03:25:04)
…except in the context of Stoned Sapiens. What’s LSD like?
Norman Ohler
(03:25:09)
Well, this is probably the third book that we want to talk about, is—
Lex Fridman
(03:25:15)
Tripped
Norman Ohler
(03:25:16)
Tripped, because Tripped is an examination of the history of LSD. And that sounds maybe less interesting than it actually is. It’s… I mean, I find it fascinating. I had tried LSD. It was given to me by my girlfriend at the time, Anya, in Lower Manhattan on a Saturday night, 1993. So, I was like 23.
Norman Ohler
(03:25:48)
And she said, “Let’s take LSD.” And I’d never really taken any drug. I’d maybe smoked a bit of weed, but I didn’t know what a strong drug is. And she gave me this paper, and I took it, and we walked around in the East Village, pre-gentrified East Village. It’s pretty cool, actually. And it didn’t work. For like one hour, I felt nothing, and then I went into the toilet. I had a falafel or something. I went into the toilet, and there was a mirror. I was peeing, and then there was this mirror, but the walls had lines. They were painted in lines. Suddenly, these lines started to vibrate, and then the trip started, and it was such an overpowerful experience that I thought I would go insane. It was the worst trip I’ve ever had. It was, because—
Lex Fridman
(03:26:43)
You got scared?
Norman Ohler
(03:26:43)
It was so strong. I was totally scared. I didn’t know what it was. I suddenly… I walked. I said to my girlfriend, “It’s working.” And she said, “Yes, it’s working, I feel it also.” And I went into No-Tell Motel, which was my favorite bar, just to be in a familiar environment. It’s not a good idea on your first very strong LSD trip to be out— …in Lower Manhattan on a Saturday night, but I also didn’t know this. You know? So, I was in the bar, and I saw my friend, Dora Espinoza from Peru. She was quite a small woman. I don’t know the American system, maybe 1 meter 50, so she was quite short. Short is the right word. But on LSD, she was like this.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:25)
Like tiny.
Norman Ohler
(03:27:25)
So I saw her down there, like, and I said, “Dora! Do I look normal? Because you look very small.” And Dora’s like, “No, you look fine.” I’m like, “Okay, I gotta get out of here.” And then we walked up to 2nd Avenue, and we saw a bunch of Puerto Rican kids killing one of their… It was a gang. It was more of a druggy kind of… I mean, Manhattan back then was kind of dangerous in the East Village. And they killed one of them on the hood of the car. In front of our eyes, we saw it, and I said, “Do you see this? Thank you, my God.” And then they resurrected him, they gave him mouth-to-mouth, and the guy was fine again. And we walked past, and we were not sure anymore what we were seeing. And this was-
Norman Ohler
(03:28:14)
This was a very strong hallucination. And then we saw a full-blown racial riot on 2nd Avenue. People were smashing in taxi windows, pulling the drivers out. It was like GTA.
Lex Fridman
(03:28:31)
Grand Theft Auto? Yeah.
Norman Ohler
(03:28:32)
Right, it was like that. And…
Lex Fridman
(03:28:34)
So most of this is basically hallucinating.
Norman Ohler
(03:28:36)
I think so, yeah. And I have taken…
Lex Fridman
(03:28:37)
But it felt real.
Norman Ohler
(03:28:38)
It felt totally real. And so I was happy when this trip was over, because I thought I had gone insane, basically. I thought there was a switch in my brain that had been, like, yeah, something chemical. I thought I now have a chemical imbalance in my brain. I’m going to be crazy for the rest of my life. I thought that. But after about 10 hours, it suddenly got, you know, the effects wore off, and I became normal again. And I thought that was quite fascinating. So in hindsight, I thought it was a great experience, even though it was quite scary. But it also had moments of incredible perceptions. Like, I could see that the atoms are not rigid. Obviously everything’s moving in our universe. Everything. There’s nothing fixed, you know? So I could see that.
Norman Ohler
(03:29:27)
I could see that everything was basically alive, and that my previous perceptions of how the world is, is just my conditioned perception, and that the world was very different, and, you know, just how you look at it, it looks different, and…
Lex Fridman
(03:29:44)
So it was freeing in a way?
Norman Ohler
(03:29:45)
Yeah, totally freeing. Also, it was much stronger than all the LSD I’ve taken since. And I’ve taken high dosages, so I’m not even sure if that was LSD. There are also other compounds…
Norman Ohler
(03:29:56)
that are quite rare, like DOM or whatever. Maybe it was something else. But then I also spoke to LSD experts by now, also for the book Tripped. And it can happen that your first trip is much stronger than all the other trips, because your brain kind of reacts very strongly to it. Because what happens in the brain is basically that the default mode network receives less energy, and other parts of the brain think more, communicate better. So if this happens for the first time, your brain maybe is totally surprised by this firework that’s going on, and then creates hallucinations, so it can somehow make sense of it. There are a lot of things firing, and then so you see things that maybe are not there. But that’s not usual on an LSD trip.
Norman Ohler
(03:30:41)
I’ve never had such hallucinations afterwards again, you know?
Lex Fridman
(03:30:47)
What’s the usual experience on LSD?
Norman Ohler
(03:30:50)
It really depends on the dosage. If you microdose, it’s just like drinking an espresso that lasts maybe for two or three hours in a very pleasant way, so you’re just slightly buzzed.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:01)
Is it visual artifacts, like…
Norman Ohler
(03:31:03)
No
Lex Fridman
(03:31:04)
color?
Norman Ohler
(03:31:05)
Then you would take more. Maybe if you take 50 micrograms, the colors become more intense. But if you take a microdose of 10 micrograms, nothing happens. The trip starts with about 100 micrograms. And then you could see maybe it would be… I took a swimming trip in Thailand in January, and I took about 200 micrograms, which is quite a lot. Just because it was so beautiful on this island, and it was kind of, “Will it be more beautiful if I’m on LSD now?” And of course, every LSD trip also tells you about your life, like some things you didn’t understand. Suddenly you see, “Oh, it’s like this.” It’s very good for, you know, reflecting on your life, but it’s also a lot of fun. So I swam for like…
Norman Ohler
(03:31:50)
three hours through the ocean, which is something you usually don’t do, you know? I like swimming, but after like 10 or 20 minutes, I go out. But I was swimming and swimming and…
Lex Fridman
(03:32:02)
Yeah, for me, on psilocybin and ayahuasca, there’s an intensification of the beauty of the world around you.
Norman Ohler
(03:32:11)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:11)
Whether that’s nature, or whether that’s people, or whether that’s your own memories of your past, or maybe your imagination manifesting itself in different kinds of visuals. You know, on ayahuasca, I saw dragons of different kinds, and they were just really beautiful. And maybe I’ve never taken a heroic dose of psilocybin, but it was always, everything was just always so beautiful, and I was just grateful to be alive and grateful to be in this world and get to appreciate it in this most intense way. There’s something about, like you said, you could see the individual atoms.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:49)
There are certain ways to deconstruct or maybe to visualize or reinterpret, revisualize the world that makes you appreciate, “Holy shit, this is really, this is really awesome. This is really special.” And that can only be done through the process of showing you a different version of it a little bit.
Norman Ohler
(03:33:15)
I mean, when the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz developed LSD in 1943, they were having to solve the big question: what is it good for?
Norman Ohler
(03:33:28)
Albert Hofmann, the chemist, he found it basically involuntarily, and he reported to the CEO, “I had very strong reactions in the brain.” So they set up an intoxication room. I found the documents about this intoxication room in the Novartis archive when I researched Tripped because Novartis bought Sandoz in the 90s. So all the LSD stuff is in the Novartis archive. And this intoxication room, I always think, is kind of interesting to imagine. This was 1943; there’s a World War going on everywhere in Europe, except in Switzerland, which is a neutral country. But Basel, where the LSD was found, is like a stone’s throw from the German border, so you actually hear the war going on.
Norman Ohler
(03:34:17)
And so they created a nice room within the company, and then all the employees voluntarily could go and take LSD. So they were the first people to take LSD, and they had no idea that there was, at one point, you know, MKUltra. They were just trying out something that one of their guys had developed. And I read through all these reports, and they all had a great experience. They were sitting in a nice chair, and they looked outside the window, and they were reporting stuff like, “I just had to laugh the whole time. I felt so good. I realized about my life.” It kind of created in them the feeling like a heightened sense of sensitivity and a feeling that this is how life should feel.
Norman Ohler
(03:35:05)
So, the CEO, Arthur Stoll, he was really trying to figure out what he could market it for, because he thought maybe this is a game changer in mental health. Because this was before antidepressants, before antipsychotics, and it was in the middle of World War II, which had created already millions of traumatized people. How do you treat these people? So they thought LSD could be really a big, big, big thing. And I mean, I just told you when I first took LSD, and I somehow was interested in LSD, but I never thought I would write a book about it. I just used it once in a while when I wanted to understand something about my life or just enjoy a day in the ocean.
Norman Ohler
(03:35:50)
But I read a study that microdoses of LSD, at one point, help against Alzheimer’s, and my mother has Alzheimer’s. So I discussed this with my father who takes care of my mother, and this was an academic study. I discussed this also with a leading Alzheimer’s expert that I interviewed for Tripped, and he’s like, “Wow, this is amazing.” Because LSD interacts with the very same receptors, the 5-HT2A receptors in the brain, that LSD interacts with those receptors and Alzheimer destroys those receptors. So LSD basically does the opposite that Alzheimer does. And I discussed this with my father and he said, “So why can’t I buy LSD in the pharmacy if it’s so good?” You know? He was a judge before. He actually put people in prison for drugs.
Norman Ohler
(03:36:42)
So he said, “You better bring me the story.” So I did a kind of a research loop. This is the book Tripped. Then I came back to him in the end with the true story of why LSD has been made illegal, and that is quite fascinating because the Swiss CEO, Stoll, he had learned biochemistry. This is very nerdy, but I think it’s quite interesting. He had learned biochemistry from the Jewish German god of biochemistry, Willstätter. Richard Willstätter was a Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, and his work was he would extract the potent alkaloids from so-called poisonous plants and make, you know, poison. Paracelsus taught us it’s the dosage that makes the poison, you know?
Norman Ohler
(03:37:31)
If you take too much of a potent alkaloid, maybe it’s a poison, but if you extract a potent alkaloid, maybe you could turn it into a medicine. So Stoll learned this from Willstätter, and there was another guy that was learning from Willstätter, Richard Kuhn. So it was Kuhn and Stoll. Those were the two students of Willstätter, and Stoll left and became the CEO of Sandoz and developed the pharmaceutical branch of Sandoz. And Kuhn became Hitler’s leading biochemist and was responsible in finding a truth drug and also developing nerve gas. So the two guys, Kuhn and Stoll, stayed friends also when the Nazis took power. I researched the papers of Stoll in the archive, and in the ’20s, he would communicate all the ergot research.
Norman Ohler
(03:38:21)
LSD is an ergot product. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye. He would communicate all this with Kuhn, and Kuhn would come to the Sandoz lab, and they did experiments together. And then in ’43, Kuhn was, you know, a hardcore Nazi scientist, and especially looking for the truth drug at the time. I was looking through the archive, I wanted to find the connection that, you know, Stoll also sent LSD to Kuhn, because when I was researching for Blitzed in Dachau, I had found that the SS had done, in the concentration camp of Dachau, experiments with mescaline and another hallucinogenic substance which was not named. And mescaline has the problem…
Norman Ohler
(03:39:06)
The truth drug idea is I give you something without you noticing it, like something that doesn’t smell or doesn’t taste like anything, and then after like half an hour, I know that something’s working in your brain and you become insecure because suddenly something’s working in your brain, and I can play with that situation, and therefore extract all the secrets from you because it’s a power. I’m suddenly above you because I know something about you that you don’t know. That was the idea. The problem with mescaline was it has a bitter taste and it’s kind of hard to make it. And LSD is very easy to make. Not very easy, but it’s quite easy. And LSD is odorless and tasteless. So I was trying to…
Norman Ohler
(03:39:47)
I somehow had the notion that LSD has a Nazi past, you know, which is something that no one ever thinks about. LSD is like the hippie drug, right? It’s a drug of the peace people. But I wanted to see all the papers of the CEO, of Stoll. And the archivist, he already knew, like he was the Swiss archivist. And this is not a public archive. In a public archive you basically, like the National Archives of the United States, you see what’s there, you have the right to see it, freedom of information. But a company archive, like the Novartis archive, the archivist can just say, “No,” you know, “I can’t find this right…” You know, you’re basically at his mercy. So I bribed him with LSD because he didn’t want to show me the Stoll papers.
Norman Ohler
(03:40:31)
And I said to him, just to distract him, I said, “Did you ever, have you ever seen LSD?” And he’s like, “No. Why? How would I see it?” And I said, “Well, I have some here.” And I had some, I just had gotten it from a friend.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:45)
What does LSD look like? Tabs or…
Norman Ohler
(03:40:47)
Yeah, a tab. I had a paper. And the funny thing about, yeah, these are different, you know, different designs.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:54)
Oh, so and you can put it on your tongue? Is that how people usually take it?
Norman Ohler
(03:40:57)
Right. Just, yeah. Then you take it like that. And the one I had was given to me by a Swiss friend and it had… Like here you see certain prints on it. Uh…
Lex Fridman
(03:41:05)
Oh, yeah.
Norman Ohler
(03:41:06)
And it had the print of the old logo of Sandoz from the 40s. So the guys who make this illegal LSD in Basel, in some kind of lab, they know where it comes from. So they made like a joke to make like the old logo of Sandoz. I showed this to the archivist and he said, “This has the old logo of our company.” I said, “Well, it was made by your company.” He said, “I know this, but it’s not… This is very interesting actually.” And I said, “I’m going to gift you one of these trips now.” And he said, “Wow, you really, you would do this?” And I said, “You can archive it.” And he’s like, “Ha-ha-ha.” And then he actually took one, and then the ice broke.
Lex Fridman
(03:41:42)
That’s great.
Norman Ohler
(03:41:42)
And then he said, “Okay, I’m going to show you now the correspondence of Stoll, our CEO. It’s no problem.” And he just went to the next room and he looked for like 10 minutes, and then he brought me these boxes. And then I saw actually the correspondence between Stoll and Kuhn, between the Swiss CEO and the German Nazi scientist, what they were talking about. And then I found a smoking gun: October 1943. Kuhn acknowledges that he receives half a gram of ergotamine, which is the precursor drug to LSD. And so it’s highly likely that the Nazis used LSD together with mescaline in Dachau. And when the Americans liberated the Dachau camp, they had a special unit called Alsos with them.
Norman Ohler
(03:42:28)
And Alsos’ job was to find German scientists and kind of interview them, get their knowledge for the nuclear program mostly, but also for biochemical weapons. And one of the first persons they interrogated was Richard Kuhn, and Richard Kuhn immediately collaborated because he didn’t want to go to the Nuremberg trial. He wanted to continue his career actually. He was an opportunist, so I guess his Nazi convictions were not so strong after all, because he also liked the Americans. So he told the Americans immediately about LSD. And the next day, a very high general flew from the States to Frankfurt, went to Heidelberg, spoke to Kuhn again.
Norman Ohler
(03:43:06)
He then took off his uniform and went in civil clothing to Basel, because Switzerland is neutral, and received the first LSD from Stoll’s son. So the American general had LSD. This was in ’45 in the summer. And then the American military started to examine LSD. Could LSD be the truth drug? Because if the Nazis think so, maybe it’s true, you know, because the Nazis were cutting-edge scientists, as evil as they were.
Lex Fridman
(03:43:35)
In Dachau, this was presumably used for the different experimentation that was done.
Norman Ohler
(03:43:40)
Well, I read one report from a guy who was an inmate, and he received it in coffee, and he had a full-blown psychedelic trip. And he had this SS guy who was asking him questions, and the guy had such a great trip. I would always imagine you’d have a terrible trip in a concentration camp, but he was seeing fractals and colors, and he could see that there was something bigger than these Nazis, and there was something bigger than the concentration camp. He only said it was so horrible when the trip ended and he became sober again and was just an inmate again in the concentration camp.
Lex Fridman
(03:44:16)
I mean, one of the things you get from books like Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is that in a concentration camp, the slightest good things are so rich of…
Norman Ohler
(03:44:28)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(03:44:29)
…feeling. You just get… So, I would actually expect to have incredible trips there because you’re just grateful for anything positive, anything positive.
Norman Ohler
(03:44:40)
Yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t think about that.
Lex Fridman
(03:44:42)
It becomes intensified.
Norman Ohler
(03:44:43)
Makes sense.
Lex Fridman
(03:44:43)
But from the perspective of the Nazis, they’re trying to develop the truth drug.
Norman Ohler
(03:44:47)
They miserably failed because LSD… Is not the truth drug. LSD maybe leads you closer to your own truth, because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more, and the neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and stimulated, you might understand something about your life. You might not, you know. I mean, LSD doesn’t necessarily turn you into a more knowledgeable person. You could also focus that on your Orthodox belief system. But many people realize different things, have different ideas. So it doesn’t work as this conditioning drug. But also, the CIA then took over the LSD experiments that the U.S. military took over from the SS. So now it’s in CIA hands.
Norman Ohler
(03:45:37)
In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was founded because America didn’t have a Central Intelligence Agency before. They had military agencies like OSS. Now they have the CIA, and Dulles, the first director, says, “Brain warfare is going on now between the Soviet Union and us. This is Cold War. We have to…” You know, maybe they are using something against us. We have to be really on our, you know, we have to be prepared for the brain warfare, ’cause communism is a propagandistic system. So they were always either really afraid or just pretending to be afraid the Soviet Union would develop the truth drug quicker than them. So the LSD truth drug program, which was labeled MKULTRA, the infamous MKULTRA, is a mind control program. I mean, it is, and LSD played a big part in it.
Lex Fridman
(03:46:32)
It’s a deeply illegal one.
Norman Ohler
(03:46:35)
It certainly… I mean, it was never approved by Congress or anything like that.
Lex Fridman
(03:46:39)
Yeah. It’s probably deeply unethical, maybe one of the more un-American, unethical things done in recent times.
Norman Ohler
(03:46:48)
It’s certainly unethical. It continues the Nazi human experiments.
Lex Fridman
(03:46:52)
Right.
Norman Ohler
(03:46:52)
That’s what the CIA did.
Lex Fridman
(03:46:53)
It’s continuing one of the worst aspects of what the Nazis were doing. Defeated the Nazis and carried the flag forward. It’s just dark.
Norman Ohler
(03:47:04)
And this is basically the reason why LSD at one point became illegal, because it did not get the chance. Stoll still wanted to put it on the market, but Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKULTRA, he really didn’t want LSD to be on the market. He didn’t want it because he thought it’s not good or dangerous for anybody, he just wanted to control LSD. He wanted LSD to be his so he could use it for MKULTRA, for experiments. But he couldn’t really stop. There was also legit LSD research always going on until it was prohibited in 1966. There was legit LSD research done in universities which came to all kinds of conclusions.
Norman Ohler
(03:47:46)
But the decisive thing was a visit by Gottlieb in the office of Stoll in Basel where he basically says to Stoll, he comes with a suitcase with 240,000 US dollars to buy the world’s supply of LSD, because he has the information from the American ambassador. He said, “I think we think by now Sandoz has produced 400 kilograms of LSD,” so that was the price for this 400. And Stoll said, “No, actually we have produced only 400 grams. But I’ll sell everything to you, of course.” I mean, because the pressure that he received from the CIA was, because the CIA and the FDA, they’re quite friendly organizations. So the CIA has a certain influence on the FDA, at least back then, you know?
Norman Ohler
(03:48:40)
So the pressure was if you want to put your medicines on the market, which is, of course, the biggest market in the world, and Sandoz, I’m sure you want to thrive as a pharmaceutical company, then LSD is not going to be one of these products. And Stoll basically betrayed LSD. So he said okay, and LSD was only distributed as a research drug. It was never sold by the company. So researchers could actually write to Sandoz, “I’m doing this and this test, and I’m a neuroscientist, I need LSD,” and then they would receive it. But mostly what happened to the LSD was it went into the CIA’s hands, and then it was used in MKULTRA. But then it spilled out obviously, because one of the guinea pigs was Ken Kesey.
Norman Ohler
(03:49:27)
He received 75 US dollars for taking LSD for the CIA, and he was working in Menlo Park in a psychiatric ward. And on LSD, he basically had the idea to write One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He understood that these people maybe are not crazy. It’s just a different way of seeing. That’s like an LSD revelation. These are not bad, crazy people. They just see the world differently, because that neuroplasticity kind of leads you away from one way of thinking. You realize that there are different ways. So it does, I would say, the tendency of LSD is more to increase…
Lex Fridman
(03:50:06)
Empathy? That kind of thing?
Norman Ohler
(03:50:07)
…empathy, diversity, all these kinds of things.

Writing on drugs

Lex Fridman
(03:50:10)
So, because you mentioned the effect of LSD on you as a writer, that it at least changed the way you write.
Norman Ohler
(03:50:19)
Well, I mean, the book Tripped is a book where I come back with that story to my father, and then my father decides to give LSD to my mother. And we did do the LSD, the three of us, on Christmas. And we did mushrooms on Mother’s Day. And whenever my mother takes LSD, and Alzheimer’s is a horrible disease, obviously. For example, on Mother’s Day, there was the newspaper lying on the balcony. We were sitting in the sun, and she was on mushrooms. It’s just a microdose, you know? It’s not that you have a trip, but you have that stimulation of your brain. That’s what you have. Even her brain, attacked by Alzheimer’s, reacted stronger than my father’s.
Norman Ohler
(03:51:00)
He always says, “I never feel anything from a microdose.” And you’re not supposed to feel anything, but my mother suddenly picked up the newspaper, which she hadn’t looked at for a year. So on mushroom microdoses, she picks up the newspaper and starts reading the headline to us, which was about the Ukraine war. She’d never heard about the Ukraine war. So when she, she had problems pronouncing the word Ukraine, because that was a new word for her, because she hadn’t been part of the news cycle in about a year. And this was because of the mushroom microdose. So this book, how did it change my writing? On an emotional level, taking LSD and then writing about LSD changed something in my family. It improved the health of my mother that made me very happy, of course, very satisfied, you know?
Lex Fridman
(03:51:55)
Yeah, there’s a deep personal connection, but I even mean on Ken Kesey’s side, like…
Norman Ohler
(03:51:59)
I know what you mean.
Lex Fridman
(03:52:03)
I mean, what does it do? Like, writing, I don’t know. Again, me as a fan of writing, it feels like writing is suffering. When I see these great writers in history talk about writing, it seems like it’s really hard, it’s a kind of torture. You know, Hemingway, and you have the Kerouac stories that it just kind of flows out of you. But a lot of times it’s really disciplined, day after day, you’re really digging and digging. And so it’s interesting what that looks like under the different supplements, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:52:39)
Stephen King famously, I mean, there’s a lot of people, you know, they go to the drugs, to the alcohol. You have Hunter S. Thompson who, when given the option, just says yes to all of it. And the mind is a weird thing. And a lot of writers talk about, like, they’re not really developing the ideas, they’re plugging into some… They’re channeling- … a voice from somewhere else. And- … with psychedelics, that’s certainly, it feels like you’re modifying the channel or you’re expanding the channel- …or you’re directing the channel to a different direction. That’s why I asked.
Norman Ohler
(03:53:18)
I think for me, writing has two important parts, and one of them is the actual writing part, and that’s the painful part that you talk about. It’s basically discipline, focus. It becomes harder and harder to focus because of the telephone.
Lex Fridman
(03:53:42)
Yeah, distractions.
Norman Ohler
(03:53:43)
There’s a place in Switzerland, The Nietzsche House. I go there as much as I can to write. It’s in Sils Maria, it’s quite high up. Nietzsche went there every summer from 1882 to 1888, with the exception of 1887. He didn’t go that summer, I don’t know why. He stayed there for three months and wrote most of his work. In that room. And that room is still there, and his desk is still there. You can rent rooms in that Nietzsche House, and I rent. It’s great. I do this as often as I can, and only there am I able to switch off the phone. I don’t even switch it on. I’m like a soldier. I’m in the Nietzsche House. Also, the Nietzsche House is magical, so it gives you… I would never take drugs in the Nietzsche House, because it would disturb that clarity that is in that house.
Norman Ohler
(03:54:33)
Nietzsche wrote Zarathustra and…
Lex Fridman
(03:54:37)
You can sense his presence a little bit?
Norman Ohler
(03:54:39)
Yeah, I speak to him quite a bit. His door is always open.
Lex Fridman
(03:54:43)
Is he an asshole? Is he a nice guy?
Norman Ohler
(03:54:44)
No, he’s a nice guy.
Lex Fridman
(03:54:45)
Nice guy.
Norman Ohler
(03:54:46)
His room, it cannot be rented. It’s always open. It’s like a museum-type room. I never thought of him as an asshole. I mean, he’s a total weirdo, obviously.
Lex Fridman
(03:54:58)
He had issues, like, struggled getting laid.
Norman Ohler
(03:55:01)
Yeah, I think he had a lot of problems.
Lex Fridman
(03:55:04)
That’s one of them. But he had a lot of good qualities too.
Norman Ohler
(03:55:07)
But he’s also part of Stoned Sapiens, because he did experiment with drugs there, and he writes about it. It’s very hard to find, but in the Nietzsche House, I found a book on Nietzsche’s medical history, and he takes quite a bit of hashish; he smokes. Is it to help?
Lex Fridman
(03:55:24)
Does it help with the stomach issues or whatever? Or is it?
Norman Ohler
(03:55:25)
No, he’s interested in what happens in the brain, and this…
Lex Fridman
(03:55:28)
Oh, interesting.
Norman Ohler
(03:55:28)
this comes back to your question: How did the drugs change my writing? Well, first of all, it’s this discipline. I can do it up in the Nietzsche House. I can also do it sometimes in Berlin. It’s just sitting there, trying to focus and writing. But what you need, of course, is the inspirational part. LSD helped me with just the first trip to realize that it’s not all black and white. The world’s quite colorful, and there’s like the abyss, and there’s also the horror. I was a happy-go-lucky kid, you know. I never thought that the world is so deep as I understand it now. So the LSD makes the world deeper. So I think for me to understand the world better, to understand myself better, it improved my writing, but I would not write on LSD.
Norman Ohler
(03:56:19)
Because on LSD, you want to walk in the forest or you want to go up the mountain. That’s what I like. I would never sit in front of the ugly computer with a stupid screen and write, you know. Maybe I would lie in the mountains with a notebook and kind of write poetic lines. And that could be done on LSD. Because when I was researching Stoned Sapiens, I did one LSD trip from the Nietzsche House. I went quite high up in the mountains on LSD, and I just thought about the book and kind of looked at the different chapters, just did work together, like, kind of like macro without taking too many notes, just kind of letting it play out in my mind. And then, when I walked down, I passed a cave.
Norman Ohler
(03:57:11)
And I realized a lot about people’s relationship to caves and the cave paintings, how, you know, actually the cave walls, you see all the arteries of the rocks. And I mean, on LSD, you see all of that and you see how alive that is and how beautiful it actually was by humans to then use that canvas and work your cave paintings in there. I mean, I never had the appreciation of that before.
Lex Fridman
(03:57:43)
Yeah, you’re right, you are able to detect the aliveness of the details on psychedelics, if I can put it this way.
Norman Ohler
(03:57:51)
For me, it’s a very creative drug. But for other people, it might not be, you know? So I cannot advertise it, because also if you have a psychological problem, maybe it’s overwhelming.
Lex Fridman
(03:58:03)
Yeah, that’s actually a good thing to say at this moment. From my perspective, and maybe you can comment on it. In general, when people ask me, because I’ve done psilocybin a few times and I did Ayahuasca and I’ve talked about it, when people ask me if I recommend those things, I, as a general statement, I say no. You know, to the general population. And then as a second step, if I’m talking to specific people on a case-by-case basis, I can just discuss my experience and let that be an inspiration. Because I’m very hesitant to recommend a thing that could be so powerful. Because I don’t know- Like I had a tremendously positive experience and I was sure I would be meeting some demons. I thought I would have some demons in the basement or something, but I didn’t meet them. Not yet.
Lex Fridman
(03:58:49)
But people might have some demons. That they meet and then it might destroy them or it might change them in a way they don’t like. And actually, it’s a good question for me whether it’s good to do psychedelics when you’re in a good place in life or in a bad place in life. Because I know that, you know, even scientifically there have been studies where psilocybin helps with extreme sort of, with depression and PTSD and all these kinds of things. But I’d be very nervous about that too, because the mind is such a powerful thing and it’s such a complicated thing that with these really powerful tools, it’s unclear where it’s going to take you.
Lex Fridman
(03:59:32)
But I have heard a lot of stories of people have taken incredible journeys, sometimes difficult journeys, with psychedelics and have come out much happier and much freer and have healed some of the things they have been going through. But when people ask me to recommend or not, I’m just too afraid to say yes. I think the right thing is always just in general no. Be very careful.
Norman Ohler
(03:59:59)
Yeah, I think it would be irresponsible to recommend it to people you don’t see.
Lex Fridman
(04:00:04)
Right.
Norman Ohler
(04:00:04)
You know? Maybe if you know a friend and the friend asks you, maybe then you could… Maybe I would say to a friend, “Yeah, I think you would be fine taking it.” But even that is a big responsibility, you know, because LSD in German, the book Trip, is called The Strongest Substance, and it is actually the strongest substance because it works in microgram dosages. Even the strongest snake poison, cobra toxin, if you use that in microgram dosages, you don’t feel anything. But if you take 250 micrograms of LSD, it can totally overpower you. And if you have an unstable psyche, it could turn you mad, you know?
Lex Fridman
(04:00:51)
Do you understand how it compares to psilocybin and ayahuasca and DMT? How does LSD compare to those? Is it similar territory, just more intense?
Norman Ohler
(04:01:02)
Well, LSD and psilocybin are like cousins.
Lex Fridman
(04:01:04)
Distant cousins, or?
Norman Ohler
(04:01:05)
No, quite close cousins. And I spoke to a neuroscientist from a university clinic in Zurich, who’s been researching psilocybin and LSD since the early ’90s. And he puts people in brain scanners, for example, so he sees exactly what happens in the brain on LSD or on psilocybin. And he said to me when I asked him that very same question, he said, “LSD is the more sophisticated molecule.” He meant by that is that LSD docks onto more receptors than psilocybin. Psilocybin interacts with like five different types of receptors in the brain, and LSD like with nine. So that makes LSD a more complex molecule. That’s why it already works in very small quantities, because it’s like the key is perfect for our brain. Our brain really reacts strongly to LSD.
Norman Ohler
(04:02:06)
For psilocybin, you have to take milligrams, not micrograms, but milligrams. So mushrooms are also described as the softer psychedelic experience because it only lasts for like five hours, where LSD lasts like eight hours. And LSD can be more… LSD is also a mushroom, but it’s an ergot, which is a mushroom, but it’s turned into a diethylamide. You extract the potent acid from ergot, which is lysergic acid, and you turn that into a diethylamide. So it’s a processed drug in a way. It’s a potent processed drug that works well for mass movements. That’s why it was so popular in the ’60s, because people could just make it, while mushrooms, they have to grow.
Norman Ohler
(04:02:58)
The hippie movement could never have sustained itself on mushrooms because so many mushrooms don’t even grow. But a good LSD chemist can make LSD for the whole world, basically.

Berlin night clubs

Lex Fridman
(04:03:12)
Can we go back to something we talked about in the beginning about Berlin? It’d be fascinating to learn more about this culture. Are you still connected? I’m sure you’ve been to some wild parties. I’ve been told that Berlin has some wild parties.
Norman Ohler
(04:03:30)
Well, it had them in the ’90s. I mean, it had the best clubs that I… It was just a dream. You go into this club. But I was also in my mid-20s, so I would go into this club, I’d take MDMA, and the DJ is amazing and the sound system is crazy and there’s like 500 people on MDMA just dancing for like eight hours.
Lex Fridman
(04:03:48)
And that’s when electronic music was really…
Norman Ohler
(04:03:50)
Yeah, it was really good. A friend of mine, he runs an underground club of visionaries, which is a famous club in Berlin, and he asked me in the early 2000s when this club was offered to him, “Should I do this?” I said, “Gregor, techno is over, electronic music is dead.” But obviously, it’s not dead, it’s still going on, but in the ’90s it was new. You really went into the club and you heard something you’d never heard before. And the first time, I came from New York, and New York was a very old-school, kind of urban place, rock and roll or grunge music, and I came to Berlin. It was in a club called I Am A Bucket in East Berlin, it doesn’t exist anymore, like, in a rundown, totally rundown squat.
Norman Ohler
(04:04:35)
And I went to the bar and I had a beer, and I looked and there were just a few people on the dance floor and this electronic music which I’d never heard before. And the guy in front of me, he was like… He looked like an East Berlin skinhead type of guy, but totally smiling. I’m sure he was on ecstasy, and he was disassembling an imaginary machine. And I just looked at this guy, he was like… For one hour he was just doing the most…
Norman Ohler
(04:05:02)
…complicated things. And I was like, this is a totally different way of moving, and I liked that actually. I liked to dance in clubs. And I did this for like two years very intensely with my girlfriend at the time. We went out a lot, from Friday to Monday, basically, but it means… And a lot of people still do that in Berlin, but it means that you can’t really work.
Lex Fridman
(04:05:29)
Yeah, you escaped that. It’s interesting that you were able to do that for a short time, just as an experience, and then go on… …To be extremely productive.
Norman Ohler
(04:05:39)
For me, it was also kind of research, even though I didn’t know this.
Lex Fridman
(04:05:41)
Life is research in a way, if you allow it to be.
Norman Ohler
(04:05:45)
I could not have written these books on history and drugs without having had these drug experiences because… also, like, when I wrote about methamphetamine and the Nazis, I asked… at the time weed was illegal in Germany, so I asked a friend of mine, she’s a cannabis dealer, I guess you would say. I said, “Can you also get me crystal meth?” And she was, like, shocked, like, “No,” because she was a weed dealer, but then she found a Polish guy who actually had crystal meth. I just wanted to have it. It was like the Paul Schrader thing when he wrote the screenplay to Taxi Driver, he had a gun in his drawer.
Norman Ohler
(04:06:23)
So he would play, you know, get the vibe of danger. And so I wanted to have this crystal meth, so this Polish guy sold it to me and he gave me a Xerox without me saying anything, and maybe my friend, maybe she said “He’s a writer” or something, but he gave me the methamphetamine, one gram, and the Xerox copy of the patent of Pervitin from 1938. So this was a crystal meth dealer that actually had historical…
Lex Fridman
(04:06:50)
Mm-hmm. Knowledge, yeah.
Norman Ohler
(04:06:52)
…knowledge about it. So…
Lex Fridman
(04:06:53)
Did you, did you ever try?
Norman Ohler
(04:06:55)
Yeah, well then I tried it because I really wanted… I could not really write about it in the same way without having tried it. I can’t recommend it. It feels very toxic. When you take a psychedelic, I can say this with a clear conscience, it’s not toxic. LSD is not toxic; it doesn’t poison you. You might have reactions in your brain that are too much for you, but if you snort crystal meth, it goes on your central nervous system, your heart starts pounding, your blood pressure rises. So it’s stressful on the organism; it’s toxic, you know.
Norman Ohler
(04:07:29)
But still, the effect in the brain is not so interesting as with LSD. You couldn’t go crazy, I would say, on crystal meth. You’re just very much awake, but you don’t have crazy thoughts that you can’t evaluate anymore. So it’s a very, very different drug, but taking that, of course, made me understand better how a soldier feels in the tank taking it.
Lex Fridman
(04:07:50)
Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s really, really important to do. I have to ask, your friend Alex, who… it sounds like he’s taken every single drug there is. Has he spoken about, like, what’s the most interesting drug? What’s his favorite drug? He seems like a connoisseur, right?
Norman Ohler
(04:08:11)
But he’s not a psychedelic guy, so.
Lex Fridman
(04:08:13)
Oh, well then, okay.
Norman Ohler
(04:08:15)
He’s more into the addictive drugs.
Lex Fridman
(04:08:18)
It’s very difficult, I guess. Yeah, that would be a special person that can be a really, sort of, a full-on explorer of the drug space, because if you get into psychedelics, then you don’t really want to do the hard drugs, and if you get the hard drugs, you don’t want to…
Norman Ohler
(04:08:37)
Right. They contradict each other.
Lex Fridman
(04:08:38)
They do contradict each other. Yeah.
Norman Ohler
(04:08:40)
It’s why we spend less and less time together.
Lex Fridman
(04:08:46)
Since you mentioned Kerouac, I love Kerouac. Do we know any famous writers that have used drugs as part of their writing? So Kerouac is one.
Norman Ohler
(04:08:59)
Do we know any famous writers who have not used drugs as part of their writing?
Lex Fridman
(04:09:03)
Interesting. So wait, I didn’t actually know, to be honest, this story. I love Kerouac.
Norman Ohler
(04:09:08)
That’s the good thing about being a writer, you can take drugs on the job and no one will cancel you for it. If you’re like a politician, you can’t really do it.
Lex Fridman
(04:09:16)
That’s right. You can be a rock star or you can be a writer.
Norman Ohler
(04:09:19)
You can be an artist and take drugs.
Lex Fridman
(04:09:20)
You mentioned that Kerouac did what?
Norman Ohler
(04:09:22)
Amphetamine.
Lex Fridman
(04:09:23)
Amphetamine.
Norman Ohler
(04:09:23)
Speed. Basically, speed. The legend has it that On the Road was written in two weeks on speed, basically without sleeping and using an endless paper roll…
Lex Fridman
(04:09:34)
Yeah, the whole scroll. Yeah.
Norman Ohler
(04:09:35)
…in this typewriter, so he was just writing. And I can imagine that you can write a hell of a lot on amphetamines. I do it sometimes, but not a lot, you know. So I can take amphetamines and have a really good time and write, like, 20 pages, but then the next day, I wouldn’t do it anymore. But he decided, “Okay, for 14 days, I’m going to do it.” Philip K. Dick was an amphetamine writer. Also, I think if you take a lot of amphetamines, you get into kind of psychedelic spaces at a certain point in time where you start hallucinating. Like, if you write Blade Runner, maybe it helps you. So amphetamines are also… they can be creative, I guess. It’s just not, it’s not my type of drug.
Norman Ohler
(04:10:20)
And they’re certainly not as creative as… But it also depends on the person. Like, Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, he was drinking a lot, or Hemingway was drinking a lot, and they could only write when they’re drunk. When I’m drunk, I can’t write. I just can’t do it.
Lex Fridman
(04:10:37)
Write drunk, edit sober.
Norman Ohler
(04:10:40)
And that’s advisable. Like, if I would write something on amphetamines, I would certainly edit it sober, of course, because on amphetamines, your self-criticism is lowered because you feel so good, you feel so confident. You just write. But writing is about nuances, especially literary writing. Maybe a non-fiction book would be easy on amphetamines, but a novel, it’s all about you have to be very, very open. Amphetamines close you. You become like a machine, you write. But if you’re on the right track, like Kerouac with On the Road, he had the right, you know, he was on, he was going, you know? But you could also be on the wrong one and then write 200 pages, and you just have to throw it away. And probably he did a lot of that also, you know?
Lex Fridman
(04:11:26)
Yeah, yeah. And also, On the Road is a particular kind of book.
Norman Ohler
(04:11:31)
It’s an amphetamine book.
Lex Fridman
(04:11:32)
You want the spontaneity, the speed of…
Norman Ohler
(04:11:36)
It’s about speed. It’s about moving fast… …But not stopping. It is a speed book. That’s a great book.
Lex Fridman
(04:11:43)
It’s such a great book. It’s such a great book. But then I’ve recently been rereading all of Dostoevsky. So going through Notes from Underground up to The Idiot, to Crime and Punishment, to Brothers Karamazov, and that, I don’t think—
Norman Ohler
(04:11:55)
Which one’s your favorite?
Lex Fridman
(04:11:56)
Brothers Karamazov. Well, I read in both Russian and English. And for the longest time, it was The Idiot. Until… It’s a complicated philosophical issue. When I was younger, I thought Prince Myshkin, the main character in The Idiot, was not as flawed as I believe he is now. I think Dostoevsky tried to create a Jesus-like character in Prince Myshkin. And I think kind of failed, because he was too giving in a way that was actually counterproductive and destructive to the world, which he tried to fix in The Brothers Karamazov with Alyosha Karamazov. But anyway, I don’t think you could do that. I’d be very surprised to learn that Dostoevsky did any drugs.
Norman Ohler
(04:12:46)
Also, there was not so much available.
Lex Fridman
(04:12:48)
That’s true.
Norman Ohler
(04:12:49)
Alcohol, of course, nicotine, coffee. Those are really powerful drugs.
Lex Fridman
(04:12:55)
And I’m also doing a podcast with Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and many other amazing books.
Norman Ohler
(04:13:02)
He’s a great writer. Fight Club influenced me quite a bit. I think the novel is even better, maybe, than the movie. But the movie’s great.
Lex Fridman
(04:13:12)
I mean, as he said, the movie is great, and that is almost like a bigger than life thing. Sometimes the book and the movie and those things can influence culture.
Norman Ohler
(04:13:24)
That certainly influenced culture.
Lex Fridman
(04:13:26)
To where, like, “Okay, this has a life of its own.” I’d like to think some of your work might influence how we perceive history. That’s really important. That’s really powerful. To not just change, but to sort of expand our conception of history, which is important to do. Are there particular books, fiction or non-fiction? So you are both a fiction writer and a non-fiction writer. Are there books that had an influence on you?

Greatest book ever written

Norman Ohler
(04:13:53)
Yes. It’s Ulysses by James Joyce. Ulysses is good, but only when you’re like in your early 20s, living in New York, and you’re writing your first book, and you just have taken LSD.
Lex Fridman
(04:14:06)
Oh, nice.
Norman Ohler
(04:14:07)
Then I read it, and then it opened…
Lex Fridman
(04:14:09)
It made sense?
Norman Ohler
(04:14:11)
Well, it just showed, it’s just a very experimental novel, so it opens up. You don’t have to understand everything, but it shows you that there are many different ways of telling a tale, and that was quite interesting to me. But the most influential book, maybe, is The Stranger by Camus.
Norman Ohler
(04:14:31)
Because I like the language so much and I’m really mostly interested in language. I don’t really care what it’s about. I was lying on the beach in Morocco when I was 20 and reading The Stranger, and then a Moroccan came and he said, “Why are you reading a racist book?” I’m like, “What are you talking about? This is world literature.” He said, “Yeah, right. He’s, like, killing an Arab without consequence. No, actually there’s consequence, but no reason, basically. Just because he’s bored. So this is racist.” That argument made no sense to me, because I was just interested in how Camus constructed it. It was just for me a stylistic experience to read that.
Lex Fridman
(04:15:16)
I always love books, and Stranger’s a short book. I love books that are able to accomplish so much in so few pages, in so few words. The Stranger.
Norman Ohler
(04:15:28)
There’s nothing unnecessary in The Stranger, and I always try to write a book where every sentence is just… There’s nothing unnecessary in the book. But it’s very hard to do, actually. Nietzsche could do this. Peterson talked about this, that every sentence in Nietzsche is chiseled and it’s perfect.
Norman Ohler
(04:15:46)
And I think not every… I mean, that’s his tendency. He tries to write like this, and that’s very hard to achieve. That’s actually where the writing becomes poetic. So for me, Nietzsche also is like a poet. The aphorisms are poetry. So Nietzsche, stylistically, since you asked, was very important to me. So Camus, Nietzsche, James Joyce, and Kafka also. I always like Kafka. And I like Thomas Mann. I don’t know how well he translates, but in German it’s interesting, his take on how to… It’s funny. He’s a very funny guy. Even though he talks too much, but he’s good. So I always wanted to have these guys as my colleagues, basically.
Lex Fridman
(04:16:30)
Are they there somewhere in your head as you’re writing?
Norman Ohler
(04:16:33)
Less and less. But it was an incentive to be part of that club. Like, to be able to write a book and it’s out there and it’s perfect, and it’s… and you are on one level with Camus, you know? It’s very hard to do. Let’s say you become a carpenter, which is also a very challenging job, but you don’t have these kind of great… Well, you have Jesus, I guess, as your potential colleague.
Lex Fridman
(04:16:59)
Yeah, true.
Norman Ohler
(04:16:59)
But for the… I just like these writers, these two. So the ones I mentioned, and also then Thomas Pynchon. Who wrote Gravity’s Rainbow, which I think is one of the best novels of the 20th century. And I read that in Berlin in the late ’90s, and it really blew my mind. I think it’s an absolute masterpiece. The intensity of this novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, is unparalleled, and I’m still puzzled by how he did it. And it’s not known how he did it because he lives a completely obscure life. No one knows basically who he is. So he’s also a very interesting colleague.
Lex Fridman
(04:17:40)
It’s widely regarded as one of the most challenging and significant works of postmodern literature.
Norman Ohler
(04:17:46)
It’s pretty good.
Lex Fridman
(04:17:47)
Set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II, the novel centers on the design, production, and deployment of the German V-2 rocket. The narrative follows several characters. It lists the characters.
Norman Ohler
(04:17:58)
Well, Slothrop is the American agent who’s the main character. He works for Allied Intelligence, and he’s really a funny guy. He smokes a lot of weed and he’s in Berlin, in bombed out Berlin after the war, and it’s just funny to go with him through that. He’s a great character. It’s a great novel. It really is.
Lex Fridman
(04:18:17)
So it does give a window into history also.
Norman Ohler
(04:18:20)
It does, yeah. But that’s not why it’s interesting to me. But it makes it especially interesting because the way he describes these situations, the way he writes is phenomenal.
Lex Fridman
(04:18:32)
Oh, it’s a Pulitzer Prize and all.
Norman Ohler
(04:18:34)
Oh, but I’m sure he didn’t take it.
Lex Fridman
(04:18:35)
On lists.
Norman Ohler
(04:18:37)
Yeah, he declined.
Lex Fridman
(04:18:39)
Because like…
Norman Ohler
(04:18:39)
Well, no one knows who he is. I know a little bit. I know who his wife is, but I’m not going to talk about it. He really wants to protect his privacy. And I think that’s also amazing.
Lex Fridman
(04:18:48)
I think that’s a beautiful thing, but for me, from my perspective…
Norman Ohler
(04:18:52)
He wouldn’t appear in the podcast?
Lex Fridman
(04:18:53)
He would not.
Norman Ohler
(04:18:54)
It would be great if he would come on the podcast.
Lex Fridman
(04:18:55)
He would not, right. Well, I believe it’s possible, but with people like that, it has to be a long journey, and you have to… For example, I just interviewed Terence Tao, who’s one of the greatest mathematicians, one of the greatest living mathematicians, probably one of the greats in history. And there’s another I want to speak with, which is Grigori Perelman, who’s a Russian mathematician, who’s more akin to Thomas Pynchon. He declined the Millennial Prize, the one million dollars. He declined all the prizes, the Fields Medal, Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. He declined everything, and he just lives with his mom now, quit mathematics.
Norman Ohler
(04:19:34)
Like Kirilov, he also lived with his mom.
Lex Fridman
(04:19:37)
There’s something really beautiful about a human being like that. Especially because in his case it was done for principles. Like, he has a certain set of principles, and no amount of money, nothing could buy him or …
Norman Ohler
(04:19:52)
Yeah, that’s amazing actually.
Lex Fridman
(04:19:54)
I had somebody tell me this, a really interesting guy I met a few days ago, said that there’s nothing, there’s nothing more exhilarating. Perhaps only a rich person can say this, but there’s nothing more exhilarating than saying no to a lot of money. But he said it with so much confidence that I somehow believed him. But the deeper truth there is living by principles and having integrity. There is something deeply fulfilling. If that means saying no to money or if that means standing up to Hitler and then risking your life, that’s a deeply fulfilling thing. Big ridiculous question, I thought you’re a good person to ask. What’s the point of this whole thing? What’s the meaning of life and our existence here on Earth?
Norman Ohler
(04:20:54)
I somehow think that the universe has a big story to tell, or it’s telling a big story the whole time, and our consciousness is part of that bigger story. So the consciousness of the universe, the huge story, is something that is probably the meaning of life. Or the meaning of our individual life is to understand that story. And that is something, for example, that I understood quite well on LSD when I walked in the mountains about a month ago. Because the mountains, they actually, you know, they take quite high up into the atmosphere, and they are made of all kinds of minerals. So they are receiving cosmic energy that comes, you know, that hits our planet. And walking up there, it doesn’t…
Norman Ohler
(04:21:50)
I guess if you’re on LSD, you’re more open somehow because you’re not closing with your default mode network that, you know, this is the tree and this is the path and this is the mountain, and now it’s 2:00 and I have to go back, and the rain. You’re more open so you’re more, like, perceiving. That’s at least the impression I had. And I couldn’t put it in words what exactly I was perceiving, but I was perceiving more of the bigger story. And I think that is inspiration, and I think those moments bring you quite close to the meaning of life. And I wouldn’t put that meaning of life in words.
Norman Ohler
(04:22:34)
It is an experience, and I think that for me as an artist, it was an important experience to make, to get close to that. And that is what you can achieve in each of your professions, you know? Like a mathematician, he comes to that point when he, like, hears more or, like, he grasps connections. And he might not be able to put it into a formula yet, but if he’s an open person, he might be a better mathematician because he can understand a bit more of the meaning of everything.
Lex Fridman
(04:23:15)
Of this bigger story that’s being written.
Norman Ohler
(04:23:17)
Yeah. And I mean, I mentioned to you my Substack which I think is gonna be the best Substack.
Lex Fridman
(04:23:23)
What’s, do you think it’s possible it’s the greatest Substack of all time in history?
Norman Ohler
(04:23:27)
That’s what it’s gonna be.
Lex Fridman
(04:23:28)
It’s gonna be, yeah.
Norman Ohler
(04:23:29)
Stoned Sapiens Substack. But something else…
Lex Fridman
(04:23:32)
I just hope you actually do it.
Norman Ohler
(04:23:35)
Well, you should become a subscriber.
Lex Fridman
(04:23:38)
I will definitely subscribe.
Norman Ohler
(04:23:39)
I really realized that there is a greater, a bigger story, and it’s somehow interesting to try to open up. Because if we live… That’s why I like to be in nature also quite a lot. You have better access. We live boxed in. Walter Benjamin called us like the boxed human beings. Like we’re living in the cities, we’re waking up, we’re doing… It’s good to be, therefore, it’s good to be outside the system. And I hope that my art can contribute to, you know, freeing the brain waves to understanding a bit more. What that is, I don’t know, but I think the process of understanding more and connecting in different ways, that is what I’m going for because I think that is the meaning of life.
Lex Fridman
(04:24:23)
Well thank you for doing that with all of your work and for inspiring us all to do the same. Thank you so much for talking today.
Norman Ohler
(04:24:31)
It was great. Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(04:24:34)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Norman Ohler. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now let me leave you with some words from the great Terence McKenna: “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.
Lex Fridman
(04:25:21)
This is how magic is done, by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it is in fact a featherbed.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.