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Transcript for Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #429

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #429 with Paul Rosolie.
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Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:00:00)
Where are we right now, Paul?
Paul Rosolie
(00:00:02)
Lex, we are in the middle of nowhere.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:06)
It’s the Amazon jungle. There’s vegetation, there’s insects, there’s all kinds of creatures. A million heartbeats, a million eyes. So really, where are we right now?
Paul Rosolie
(00:00:15)
We are in Peru, in a very remote part of the Western Amazon basin. And because of the proximity of the Andean Cloud Forest to the lowland tropical rainforest, we are in the most bio-diverse part of planet Earth. There is more life per square acre, per square mile out here than there is anywhere else on Earth, not just now, but in the entire fossil record.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:40)
The following is a conversation with Paul Rosolie, his second time on the podcast, but this time we did the conversation deep in the Amazon jungle. I traveled there to hang out with Paul and it turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime. I’ll post a video capturing some aspects of that adventure, in a week or so. It included everything, from getting lost in dense, unexplored wilderness with no contact to the outside world, to taking very high doses of ayahuasca and much more. Paul, by the way, aside from being my good friend, is a naturalist, explorer, author, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the rainforest. For this mission, he founded Jungle Keepers. You can help him, if you go to junglekeepers.org.

(00:01:37)
This trip, for me, was life-changing. It expanded my understanding of myself and of the beautiful world I’m fortunate to exist in with all of you. So I’m glad I went and I’m glad I made it out alive. This is a Lex Fridman podcast, to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Paul Rosolie.

Amazon jungle


(00:02:07)
I can’t believe we’re actually here.
Paul Rosolie
(00:02:09)
I can’t believe you actually came.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:10)
And I can’t believe you forced me to wear a suit.
Paul Rosolie
(00:02:13)
That was the people’s choice, trust me.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:15)
All right. We’ve been through quite a lot over the last few days.
Paul Rosolie
(00:02:19)
We’ve been through a bit.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:21)
Let me ask you a ridiculous question. What are all the creatures right now, if they wanted to, could cause us harm?
Paul Rosolie
(00:02:30)
The thing is, the Amazon rainforest has been described as the greatest natural battlefield on Earth, because there’s more life here than anywhere else, which means that everything here is fighting for survival. The trees are fighting for sunlight, the animals are fighting for prey, everybody’s fighting for survival. And so everything that you see here, everything around us, will be killed, eaten, digested, recycled at some point. The jungle is really just a giant churning machine of death and life is kind of this moment of stasis, where you maintain this collection of cells in a particular DNA sequence and then it gets digested again and recycled back and renamed into everything.

(00:03:09)
And so the things in this forest, while they don’t want to hurt us, there are things that are heavily defended, because, for instance, a giant anteater needs claws to fight off a jaguar. A stingray needs a stinger on its tail, which is basically a serrated knife with venom on it, to deter anything that would hunt that stingray. Even the catfish have pectoral fins that have razor-long, steak-knife sized defense systems. Then you, of course, the jaguars, the harp eagles, the piranha, the candiru fish that can swim up a penis, lodge themselves inside, it’s the Amazon rainforest. The thing is, as you’ve learned this week, nothing here wants to get us, with the exception of, maybe, mosquitoes. Every other animal just wants to eat and exist in peace, that’s it.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:57)
But each of those animals, like you described, have a kind of radius of defense.
Paul Rosolie
(00:04:03)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:03)
So if you accidentally step into its home-
Paul Rosolie
(00:04:08)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:08)
Into that radius, it can cause harm.
Paul Rosolie
(00:04:10)
Or make them feel threatened.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:12)
Make them feel threatened. There is a defense mechanism that is activated.
Paul Rosolie
(00:04:15)
Some incredible defense mechanism, I mean, you’re talking about 17-foot black caiman crocodiles with significant size, that could rip you in half. Anacondas, the largest snake on Earth, bushmasters that can grow up to be nine to, I think even 11- feet long. And I’ve caught bushmasters that are thicker than my arms.

Bushmaster snakes

Lex Fridman
(00:04:33)
So for people who don’t know, bushmaster snakes, what are these things?
Paul Rosolie
(00:04:36)
These are vipers, I believe it’s the largest viper on Earth.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:40)
Venomous?
Paul Rosolie
(00:04:40)
Extremely venomous, with hinge teeth, tissue destroying venom. Like if you get bitten by a bushmaster, they say you don’t rush and try and save your own life, you try to savor what’s around you, look around at the world, smoke your last cigarette, call your mom, that’s it.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:57)
So that moment of stasis, that is life, is going to end abruptly, when you interact with one of those.
Paul Rosolie
(00:05:02)
Yeah, I even have, even this seemingly-
Lex Fridman
(00:05:07)
Can I just pause at how incredibly beautiful it is, that you could just reach to your right and grab a piece of the jungle.
Paul Rosolie
(00:05:14)
It’s like even this seemingly beautiful little fern. If you go this way on the fern, you’re fine, as soon as, ou, as soon as you go this way-
Lex Fridman
(00:05:20)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:05:20)
There’s invisible little spikes on there, if you want to.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:25)
Oh, I see.
Paul Rosolie
(00:05:25)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:25)
I feel it.
Paul Rosolie
(00:05:26)
See that? It’s like everything is defended. If you’re driving on the road and you have your arm out the side, or if you’re on a motorcycle going through-
Lex Fridman
(00:05:26)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:05:31)
The jungle and you get one of these, it’ll just tear all the skin right off your body. It’s kind of doing that to me now.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:37)
So what would you do? Like we were going through the dense jungle yesterday, and you slide down the hill, your foot slips, you sliding down-
Paul Rosolie
(00:05:37)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:46)
And then you find yourself staring, a couple feet away from a bushmaster snake, what are you doing? You’re, for people who somehow don’t know, are somebody who loves, admires snakes, who has met thousands of snakes, has worked with them, respects them, celebrates them. What would you do with a bushmaster snake, face-to-face?
Paul Rosolie
(00:06:07)
Face-to-face, this has happened, I have been there.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:11)
It’s nice.
Paul Rosolie
(00:06:12)
I’ve come face-to-face with a bushmaster and there’s two reactions that you might get. One is, if the bushmaster decides that it’s vacation time, if it’s sleeping, if he just had a meal, they’ll come to the edges of trails or beneath a tree and they’ll just circle up, little spiral, big spiral, big pile of snake on the trail and they’ll just sit there. And one time there was a snake sitting on the side of a trail beneath a tree, for two weeks, this snake was just sitting there resting, digesting it’s food, out in the open, in the rain, in the sun, in the night, didn’t matter. You go near it, barely even crack a tongue.

(00:06:46)
Now, the other option, is that you get a bushmaster that’s alert and hunting and out looking for something to eat and they’re ready to defend themselves. And so I once came across a bushmaster in the jungle, at night, and this bushmaster turned its head towards me, looked at me and made it very clear, “I’m going to go this way.” And so I did the natural thing that any snake enthusiast would do, and I grabbed its tail. Now, 11-feet later, by the head, the snake turned around and just said, “If you want to meet God, I can arrange the meeting. I will oblige.” And I decided to let the bushmaster go. And so it’s like that with most animals, a Jaguar will turn and look at you and just remind you of how small you are.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:24)
Like what did you see-
Paul Rosolie
(00:07:24)
“Keep going.”
Lex Fridman
(00:07:25)
In the snake’s eyes? How did you sense that this is going to be your end if you’d proceed?
Paul Rosolie
(00:07:32)
His readiness. I wanted to get him by the tail and show him to the people that were there and maybe work with the snake a little bit. As an 11-foot snake, the snake turned around and made it very clear like, “Not today, pal, it’s not going to happen.”
Lex Fridman
(00:07:44)
Is it in the eyes, in the movement, in the tension of the body?
Paul Rosolie
(00:07:47)
It was the movement and the S of the neck. It was as if you pushed me-
Lex Fridman
(00:07:51)
[inaudible 00:07:51].
Paul Rosolie
(00:07:51)
And I went, “Let’s go, make my day.”
Lex Fridman
(00:07:52)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:07:53)
Like he just looked a little bit too-
Lex Fridman
(00:07:55)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:07:55)
Too ready. He was like, “I love this.”
Lex Fridman
(00:07:57)
Okay, all right. So you know.
Paul Rosolie
(00:08:00)
You just know, whereas like the snake you met last night.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:03)
Yeah, beautiful snake.
Paul Rosolie
(00:08:04)
Such a calm little thing, he just focuses on eating baby lizards and little snails and things. And that snake has no concept of defending itself, it has no way to defend itself. So even something the size of a blue jay, could just come and just pa, pa, pa, peck that thing in the head and swallow it and it’s a helpless little snake. So it kind of depends on the animal, it depends on the mood you catch them in, each one has a different temperament.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:25)
The grace of its movement was mesmerizing, curious almost. Maybe I’m anthropomorphizing, projecting onto it, but it was-
Paul Rosolie
(00:08:32)
The tongue flicking was a sign of curiosity, it was trying to figure out what was going on. It was like, “Why am I on this treadmill of human skin?” They’re just trying to get to the next thing, trying to get hidden, trying to get away from the light.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:42)
Also, the texture of the scales was really fascinating, I mean, it’s my first-
Paul Rosolie
(00:08:45)
[inaudible 00:08:45].
Lex Fridman
(00:08:45)
It’s the first snake I’ve ever touched, it’s so interesting, it was just such an incredible system of muscles that are all interacting together to make that kind of movement work and all the texture of its skin of its scales. What do you love about snakes? From my first experience with a snake to all the thousands of experiences you had with snakes, what do you love about these creatures?
Paul Rosolie
(00:09:07)
I think, when you just spoke about it, that’s the first snake you’ve met and it was a tiny little snake in the jungle and you spoke about it with so much light in your eyes. And I think that because we’ve been programmed to be scared of snakes, there’s something wondrous that happens in our brain. Maybe it’s just this joy of discovery that there’s nothing to be scared of. And whether it’s a rattlesnake that is dangerous and that you need to give distance to, but you look at it from a distance and you go, “Whoa.” Or it’s a harmless little grass snake that you can pick up and enjoy and give to a child. They’re just these strange legless animals that just exist, they don’t even have eyelids, they’re so different than us. They have a tongue that senses the air, and they, to me, are so beautiful.

(00:09:53)
And I’ve, my whole life, been defending snakes from humans and they seem misunderstood, I think they’re incredibly beautiful. There’s every color and variety of snakes, there’s venomous snakes, there’s tree snakes, there’s huge, crushing anacondas, it’s just… Of the 2,600 species of snakes that exist on Earth, there’s just such beauty, such complexity and such simplicity. To me, I feel like I’m friend with snake and-
Lex Fridman
(00:10:23)
Okay.
Paul Rosolie
(00:10:23)
They rely on me to protect them from my people.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:27)
Friend with snake.
Paul Rosolie
(00:10:28)
Me friend snake.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:29)
Me friend snake. You said some of them are sometimes aggressive, some of them are peaceful. Is this a mood thing, a personality thing, a species thing? What is it?
Paul Rosolie
(00:10:39)
So as far as I know, there’s only really two snakes on Earth that could be aggressive, because aggression indicates offense. And so a reticulated python has been documented as eating humans, anacondas, although while it hasn’t been publicized, they have eaten humans. Every single other snake, from boa constrictor, to bushmaster, to spitting cobra, to grass snake, to garter snake, to everything else, every single other snake does not want to interact with you. They have no interest. So there’s no such thing as an aggressive snake once you get outside of an anaconda and reticulated python.

(00:11:13)
Aggression, could be trying to eat you, that’s predation, but for every other snake, a rattlesnake, if it was there, would either go escape and hide itself or it would rattle its tail and tell us, “Don’t come closer.” A cobra will hood up and begin to hiss and say, “Don’t approach me, I’m asking you nicely, not to mess with me.” And most other snakes are fast or they stay in the trees or they’re extremely camouflage, but their whole MO is just, “Don’t bother me. I don’t want to be seen, I don’t want to be messed with. In fact, all I want to do is be left alone and once in a while I just want to eat.” And by the way, when you see a snake drink, your heart will break. It’s the only thing that’s cuter than a puppy, like watching a snake touch its mouth to water and you just see that little mouth going as they suck water in. And it’s just so adorable watching this scaled animal just be like, “I need water.”
Lex Fridman
(00:12:03)
In a state of vulnerability.
Paul Rosolie
(00:12:05)
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:06)
But bro, there’s nothing cuter than a little puppy with a tongue like slurp, slurp.
Paul Rosolie
(00:12:10)
A baby ball python.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:11)
All right.
Paul Rosolie
(00:12:11)
Baby king cobra, man.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:12)
It’s a take your-
Paul Rosolie
(00:12:13)
Baby elephant.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:14)
So what, they’re like at a puddle and they just take it in?
Paul Rosolie
(00:12:17)
They can be at a puddle and they just take it in. Or one time in India, I was with a snake rescuer and we found this nine-foot king cobra, this God of a snake.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:17)
Oh, yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:12:25)
Ophiophagus hannah, is their Latin name and they’re snake eaters, they’re the king of the snakes, the largest venomous snake. And the people that called the snake rescuer, ’cause that’s a profession in India, it had gotten into their kitchen or their backyard. And so we showed up and we got the snake and the snake rescuer, he knew, he looked at the snake and he went, to me, he said, “Why do you think the snake would go in a house?” And he was quizzing me. And I actually went, “I don’t know, is it warm? Is it cold? Like sometimes cats like to go into the warm cars, in the winter.” And he was like, “It’s thirsty.” He goes, “Watch this.”

(00:13:01)
And he took a water bottle, poured it over the, now, the snake is standing up. The snake stands up three-feet tall, this is a huge king cobra with a hood, terrifying snake to be around. He leans over to the snake and the snake is standing there trusting him. And he takes a water bottle and pours it onto the snake’s nose and the snake turns up its nose and just starts drinking from the water bottle. Human giving water to snake, big scary snake, but this human understood, snake gets water, snake gets released in jungle, everybody is okay.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:30)
Okay, so sometimes the needs are simple, they just don’t have the words to communicate them to us humans.
Paul Rosolie
(00:13:36)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:37)
And is it disinterest or is it fear, almost like they don’t notice this? Or is it, we’re a source, the unknown aspect of it, the uncertainty, is a source of danger?
Paul Rosolie
(00:13:48)
Well, animals live in a constant state of danger. Like if you look at that deer that we saw last night, it’s-
Lex Fridman
(00:13:53)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:13:53)
Stalking through the jungle wondering what’s going to eat it, wondering if this is the last moment it’s going to be alive. And it’s like animals are constantly terrified of, that this is their last moment.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:02)
Oh, yeah, just for the listener. We’re walking through the jungle late at night, and so it’s darkness except our headlamps on and then all of a sudden Paul stops, he’s like, “Shh.” And he looks in the distance and he sees two eyes, I think you thought, “Is that a jaguar or is that a deer?” And it was moving its head like this.
Paul Rosolie
(00:14:22)
Uh-huh.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:23)
Like scared or maybe trying to localize itself, trying to figure out-
Paul Rosolie
(00:14:26)
Trying to see around the-
Lex Fridman
(00:14:29)
You’re doing the same to it.
Paul Rosolie
(00:14:30)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:30)
The two of you like moving your head.
Paul Rosolie
(00:14:32)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:33)
And like deep into the jungle, like I don’t know-
Paul Rosolie
(00:14:36)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:37)
It’s pretty far away, through the trees you could still see it.
Paul Rosolie
(00:14:37)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:37)
That’s fascinating.
Paul Rosolie
(00:14:40)
30-feet or so, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:41)
That’s the thing to actually mention, I mean, with the headlamp, you see the reflection in their eyes.
Paul Rosolie
(00:14:45)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:46)
It’s kind of incredible-
Paul Rosolie
(00:14:47)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:48)
To see a creature, to try to identify a creature by just the reflection from its eyes.
Paul Rosolie
(00:14:52)
Yeah. And so the cats, sometimes, you’ll get like a greenish or a bluish glow from the cats. The deer are usually white to orange, caiman, orange, nightjars, orange, snakes can usually be like orange, moths, spiders, sparkle. And so as you walk through the jungle, you can see all these different eyes. And when something large looks at you like that deer did, your first thing is, what animal is this that I am staring back at? Because through the light you see the bright light off the leaves. And I couldn’t tell at first, because that actually, those big bright eyes, it could have been an ocelot, could have been a jaguar, could have been a deer. And then when it did this movement, that’s what the cats do, they try to see around your light. I thought maybe Lex Fridman’s here, we’re going to get lucky, it’s going to be a jag right off trail.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:41)
Your definition of lucky is a complicated one.
Paul Rosolie
(00:15:43)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:43)
It’s a fascinating process when you see those two eyes trying to figure out what it is and it is trying to figure out what you are, that process. Let’s talk about caiman.
Paul Rosolie
(00:15:44)
Sure.

Black caiman

Lex Fridman
(00:15:53)
We’ve seen a lot of different kinds of sizes, we’ve seen a baby one, a bigger one. Tell me about these 16-foot plus, apex predators of the Amazon rainforest.
Paul Rosolie
(00:16:03)
The big bad black caiman, which is the largest reptilian predator in the Amazon except for the Anaconda, they kind of both share that notch of apex predator. They were actually hunted to endangered species level in the seventies, ’cause they’re leather, black scale leather. But they’re coming back, they’re coming back and they’re huge and they’re beautiful. And I was walking near a lake and I never understood how big they could get except for, I was walking near a lake last year and I was following the stream. And it’s like when you’re following a little stream and there’s just a little trickle of water, and all of a sudden this river otter had been running the other direction on the stream. River otter comes up to me and I swear to God, this animal looked at me and went, “Hey,” and I went, “Hey.” And he was like, “Didn’t expect to see me there.” And he turned around, he like did a little spin, started running down the stream, then he turned around and you could tell he was like, “Let’s go.” And I’m not anthropomorphizing here, the animal was asking me to come with him.

(00:16:59)
So I followed the river otter down the stream and we started running down the stream and the river otter looks at me one more time, is like, “Yo,” jumps into the lake. And I’m like, “What does he want me to see?” Now, in the lake, there’s river otters doing dives and freaking out and going up and down and up and down, and they’re very excited, they’re screaming, they’re screeching. All of a sudden, and I’ve never seen anything like this except for in like Game of Thrones. This croc head comes flying out of the water, all of the river otters were attacking this huge black caiman, 16-feet-
Lex Fridman
(00:17:29)
Wow.
Paul Rosolie
(00:17:29)
Head, half the size of this table. And she was thrashing her tail around creating these huge waves in the water, trying to catch an otter, and they’re so fast.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:38)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:17:38)
That they were zipping around her, biting her, and then going around. And this otter, swear to God, inter-species, looked at me and went, “Watch this. We’re fucking with this caiman.”
Lex Fridman
(00:17:46)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:17:47)
It was amazing. And for the first time, I got to stand there watching this incredible inter-species fight happening. They weren’t trying to kill the caiman, they were just trying to mess with it. And the caiman was doing his best to try and kill these otters. And they were just having a good time in that sick sort of hyper-intelligent animal, like wolf sort of way, where they were just going, “You can’t catch us.”
Lex Fridman
(00:18:07)
Yeah, like intelligence and agility versus raw power and dominance. I mean, I got to handle some smaller caiman and just the power they had. You scale that up to imagine what a 16-foot, or even a 10-foot, any kind of black caiman, the kind of power-
Paul Rosolie
(00:18:08)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:26)
They deliver. Maybe, can you talk to that, like the power they can generate with their tail, with their neck, with their jaw?
Paul Rosolie
(00:18:34)
Yeah. Alligators and caiman and crocodiles have some of the strongest bite forces on Earth, think a saltwater crocodile wins, as the strongest bite force on Earth. And you got to hold about a foot, was it a four-foot spectacled caiman? And you got to feel, I mean, you’re a black belt in jiu-jitsu. How do you compare the explosive force you felt from that animal compared to what a human can generate?
Lex Fridman
(00:19:02)
It’s difficult to describe in words, there was a lot of power. And we’re talking about the power of the neck, like the, what is it? I mean, there’s a lot, it could generate power all up and down the body, so probably the tail is a monster, but just the neck. And not to mention the power of the bite, that, and the speed too. Because the thing I saw and got to experience is, how still and calm, at least from my amateur-
Paul Rosolie
(00:19:27)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:27)
Perspective, it seems calm, still. And then from that, sort of zero to 60, could just-
Paul Rosolie
(00:19:36)
[inaudible 00:19:36].
Lex Fridman
(00:19:35)
Just go wild.
Paul Rosolie
(00:19:37)
Just thrashing.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:39)
And then there’s also a decision it makes in that split second, whether, as it thrashes, is it going to kind of bite you on the way or not?
Paul Rosolie
(00:19:49)
And that’s where, of the four species of caiman that we have here, you see differences in their personalities as a species.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:56)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:19:56)
And so you can like, just like you know, like generally, golden retrievers are viewed as a friendly dog, generally, not every single one of them, but as a rule. Spectacled caiman, puppies, you released one in the river and it did nothing, didn’t bite one of your fingers, it just swam away. We dropped one in the river, and what did it do? It chose peace. Now, I had a smooth-fronted caiman a few weeks ago, and this was probably about a three-and-a-half footer. Not big enough to kill you, but very much big enough to grab one of your fingers and just shake it off your body, just death roll it, right off. And as I was being careful, totally different caiman than the one that you got to see, this one has spikes coming off it, they’re like leftover dinosaurs. It’s like they evolved during the dinosaur times and never changed. They have spikes and bony plates and all kinds of strange growths that you don’t see on the other smoother caiman.

(00:20:47)
And I tried to release this one without getting bitten and I threw it into the stream, gently into the water, just went waa, and tried to pull my hands back. And as I pulled my hand back, this caiman, in the air, turned around and just tried to give me one parting blow and just got one tooth whack, right to the bone of my finger. And a bone injury feels different than a skin injury, so you instantly go, “ou.” And it just reminds you of, that’s a caiman with a head this big and it hurt and I know that it could have taken off my finger. Now, if you scale that up to a black caiman, it’s rib crushing, it’s zebra-head removing size, just meat destroying. It’s nature’s metal, sort of just raw power.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:32)
So what’s the biggest croc you’ve been able to handle?
Paul Rosolie
(00:21:36)
We were doing caiman surveys for years, and we would go out at night and you want to figure out what are the populations of black caiman, spectacled caiman, smooth-fronted caiman, dwarf caiman. And the only way to see which caiman you’re dealing with is to catch it. Because a lot of times you get up close with the light and you can see the eyes at night, but you can’t quite see what species it is. For instance, this past few months, we found two baby black caiman on the river, which is unprecedented here, we haven’t seen that in decades. So it’s important that we monitor our croc population. So I started catching small ones, in Mother of God, I write about the first one that me and JJ caught together, which was probably a little bigger than this table. And probably mid-twenties bravado and competition with other young males of my species, led to me trying to go as big as I could.

(00:22:26)
And I jumped on a spectacled caiman that was slightly longer than I am, and I’m five-nine. So I jumped on this, probably, six-foot croc, and quickly realized that my hands couldn’t get around its neck and my legs were wrapped around the base of its tail. And the thrash was so intense, that as it took me one side, I barely had enough time to realize what was happening, before it beat me against the ground. My headlamp came off, so now I’m blind, in the dark, laying in a river, in the Amazon rainforest, hugging a six-foot crocodile. And I went, “JJ,” as I always do. But in that moment, before I even let go, I knew I couldn’t let go of the croc, because if I let go of the croc, I thought she was going to destroy my face. So I said, okay, now I’m stuck here, if I just stay here, I can’t release her, I need help. But I was like, I’m never ever, ever, ever going to try and-
Lex Fridman
(00:23:18)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:23:18)
Solo catch a croc this big again. I knew in that moment, I was like, this is good enough.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:22)
So anything longer than you.
Paul Rosolie
(00:23:23)
Nah.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:24)
You don’t control the tail, you don’t-
Paul Rosolie
(00:23:24)
No, i-
Lex Fridman
(00:23:25)
You have barely control of anything, really.
Paul Rosolie
(00:23:27)
Yeah. And that’s a spectacled caiman.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:27)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:23:28)
A black caiman is a whole other order of magnitude there. It’s like saying like, “Oh, I was play fighting with my golden retriever versus I was play fighting with like,” what’s the biggest, scariest dog you could think of? The dog from Sandlot, a giant gorilla dog-thing, like a malamute, something huge. What are they called? Mastiffs.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:48)
Yeah. Mastiffs.
Paul Rosolie
(00:23:49)
Mastiffs.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:50)
I mean, you mentioned dinosaurs, what do you admire about black caiman? They’ve been here for a very, very long time, there’s something prehistoric about their appearance, about their way of being, about their presence in this jungle.
Paul Rosolie
(00:24:03)
With crocodiles, you’re looking at this mega survivor, they’re in a class with sharks, where it’s like they’ve been here so long. When you talk about multiple extinctions, you talk about the sixth extinction, Earth’s going through all this stuff, the crocodiles and the cockroaches have seen it all before. They’re like, “Man, we remember what that comet looked like.” And they’re not impressed.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:24)
Yeah, they carry this wisdom.
Paul Rosolie
(00:24:26)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:27)
In their power.
Paul Rosolie
(00:24:27)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:28)
In the simplicity of their power, they carry the wisdom.
Paul Rosolie
(00:24:30)
Yeah. And they’re just sitting there in the streams and they don’t care. And even if there’s a nuclear holocaust, you know that there would just be some crocs sitting there, dead-eyed, in that stagnant water, waiting for the life to regenerate so they could eat again.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:42)
It’s going to be the remaining humans versus the crocs and the cockroaches, and the cockroaches are just background noise.
Paul Rosolie
(00:24:49)
Yeah, they’ll always be there. Sons of bitches.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:53)
We were talking about individual black caiman and caiman and different species of caiman. But whenever they’re together and you see multiple eyes, which I’d gotten to experience, it’s quite a feeling. There’s just multiple eyes looking back at you. Of course, for you, that’s immediate excitement, you immediately go towards that. You want to see it, you want to explore it, maybe catch them, analyze what the species is, all that kind of stuff.
Paul Rosolie
(00:25:19)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:20)
Can you just describe that feeling, when they’re together and they’re looking at you, sort of head above water, eyes reflecting the light?
Paul Rosolie
(00:25:28)
Yeah. So the other night, Lex and I were in the river with JJ, surviving a thunderstorm. We were in the rain and we had covered our equipment with our boats and the only thing that we could do was get in the river to keep ourselves dry. And so we were in the river, at night, in the dark, no stars, just a little bit of canopy silhouetted, with all this rain coming down, it was such a din, you could hardly hear anything. And all the way down river, I just see this caiman eye in my headlamp light, and I started walking towards it because I was like, “This is even better. We can catch a caiman while we’re in this thunderstorm in the Amazon River.” And when JJ went, “Paul, it’s too far.” JJ very rarely, like he’ll make a suggestion, he’ll usually go like, “Maybe it’s far.” But in that situation, deep in the wilderness, unknown caiman size, he went, “Paul, it’s too far, don’t leave the three of us right now.”
Lex Fridman
(00:26:29)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:26:29)
We were too far out to take risks.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:31)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:26:31)
We’re too far out to be walking along the riverbed at night. Because then, right here at the research station, if you step on a stingray, you get evac’d, out where we went, nothing. So for me, seeing those eyes, I think I’ve become so comfortable with so many of these animals that I may have crossed into the territory where I feel so comfortable with many of these animals that they just don’t worry me anymore. I mean, I looked at you in a raft, while you had a sizable, probably, about 12-foot black caiman right next to your raft. I watched its head go under.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:05)
The bubbles.
Paul Rosolie
(00:27:06)
The bubbles, it was all coming up right next to your raft, as he was just moving along the bottom of the river. ‘Caused he looked at me, went under, and then my raft passed and yours came over him. So now, I’m looking back and your raft is going over this black caiman and I’m going, “I’m not worried at all.” I was not worried. I was not worried that the caiman would freak out, I was not worried that he would try to attack you. I knew, a hundred percent, that caiman just wanted us to go, so he could go back to eating fish.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:31)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:27:32)
That’s it.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:32)
Man, it’s humbling. It’s humbling, these giant creatures. And especially at night like you were talking about. And for me, it’s both scary and just beautiful when the head goes under, because underwater, it’s their domain, so anything can happen. So what is it doing that its head has gone under? It could be bored, it could be hungry, looking for some fish, it could be, maybe, wanting to come closer to you to investigate. Maybe you have some food around you, maybe it’s an old friend of yours and he just wants to say, “Hi,” I don’t know.
Paul Rosolie
(00:28:06)
I have a few on the river, old friends.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:07)
Okay.
Paul Rosolie
(00:28:09)
No, when we see their heads go under, they’re just getting out of the way. We’re shining a light at them and they’re going, “Why is there a light at night? I’m uncomfortable.” Head under. So these caiman, again, you think of it as this big aggressive animal, but I don’t know anybody that’s been eaten by a black caiman. And the smaller species, smooth-fronted caiman, dwarf caiman, spectacled caiman, they’re not going to eat anybody, again, at the worst, if you were doing something inappropriate with a caiman, like you jumped on it and were trying to do research and it bit your hand, it could take your hand off. But that’s the only time, I’ve been walking down the river and stepped on a caiman and the caiman just swims away. And so in my mind, caiman are just these, they’re peaceful dragons that sit on the side of the river.

(00:28:51)
And so to me, they are my friends and I worry about them, because two months ago we were coming up river and on one of the beaches was a beautiful, about five-foot black caiman with a big machete cut right through the head. The whole caiman was wasted, nothing was eaten, but the caiman was dead.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:11)
Who do you think that was?
Paul Rosolie
(00:29:13)
Curious humans.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:15)
Just committing violence?
Paul Rosolie
(00:29:17)
Yeah, just loggers, people who aren’t from this part of the Amazon, because a local person would either eat the animal or not mess with it. Like Pico would never kill a caiman for no reason, because it doesn’t make any sense. So these are clearly people who aren’t from the region, which usually means loggers, because they’ve come from somewhere else. They’re doing a job here and they’re just cleaning their pots in the river at night and they see eyes come near them, because the caiman probably smells fish. And then they just whack, because they want to see it and they’re just curious monkeys on a beach. And again, me friend of caiman, I protect from my type.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:51)
That said, you protect your friends and you analyze and study your friends, but sometimes friends can have a bit of a misunderstanding. And if you have a bit of a misunderstanding with a black caiman, I feel like just a bit of a misunderstanding could lead to a bone-crushing situation.
Paul Rosolie
(00:30:12)
But not for a little five-foot caiman.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:14)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:30:15)
And I think that’s incredibly speciesist of you.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:16)
About humans or about caiman?
Paul Rosolie
(00:30:21)
No, I’m saying-
Lex Fridman
(00:30:22)
Okay.
Paul Rosolie
(00:30:22)
Like all my friends do the same thing. They go, “You swim in the Amazon rainforest, you swim in that river.” And I go, “Yes, every day.” Backflips into the river, we’ve been swimming in the river how many times.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:31)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:30:32)
With the piranha and the stingray and the candiru and the caiman and the anacondas, all of it, in the river, with us. And we just do it. And what’s that for you? So what allows you to do that, knowing and having researched all the different things that can kill you, which I feel like most of them are in the river? What allows you to just get in there with us?
Lex Fridman
(00:30:53)
Well, I think it’s something about you, where you become like this portal through which it’s possible to see nature as not threatening but beautiful. And so in that, you kind of, naturally, by hanging out with you, I get to see the beauty of it. There is danger out there, well, the dangerous part of it, just like there’s a lot of danger in the city, there’s danger in life, there’s a lot of ways to get hurt emotionally, physically. There’s a lot of ways to die in the stupidest of ways. We went on an expedition through the forest, just twisting your ankle, breaking your foot, getting a bite from a thing that gets infected, there’s a lot of ways to die and get hurt, in the stupidest of ways. In a non-dramatic, caiman eating you alive, kind of way.
Paul Rosolie
(00:31:37)
Yeah, it strikes me as unfair, because humans, we’re still in our minds, so programmed to worry about that predator, that predator, that predator. What predator? We’ve killed everything. Black caimans are coming off the endangered species list, we exterminated wolves from North America. I actually heard a suburban lady one time, tell her son, “Watch out, foxes will get you.” Foxes?
Lex Fridman
(00:32:01)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:32:02)
They eat baby rabbits and mice.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:05)
Well, in the case of apex predators, I think when people say, “Dangerous animals,” they really are talking about just the power of the animal. And the black caiman have a lot of power.
Paul Rosolie
(00:32:16)
A lot of power.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:18)
And so it’s almost just a way to celebrate the power of the animal.
Paul Rosolie
(00:32:21)
Sure. And if it’s in celebration, then I’m all for it, because my God, is that power. Like the waves of fury that you saw, like when that tail, I mean, you saw the tail of the spectacled, that perfect-
Lex Fridman
(00:32:32)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:32:32)
Amazing thing, with all those interlocking scales that work-
Lex Fridman
(00:32:32)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:32:35)
So it’s like a perfect creation of engineering. And then when you have one that’s this thick and all of a sudden that thing is moving with all the acceleration of that power, whoa, the volume of water, the sound that comes out of their throat, they’re dragons.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:51)
We talked about the scales of the snake, with like the caiman, just the way it felt-
Paul Rosolie
(00:32:55)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:57)
Was incredible. Just the armor, the texture of it, was so cool.
Paul Rosolie
(00:32:57)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:02)
I don’t know, like the bottom of the caiman has a certain kind of texture and it just all feels like power, but also all feels like designed really well. It’s like exploring through touch, like a World War II tank or something like that, just-
Paul Rosolie
(00:33:17)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:17)
It’s the engineering that went into this thing.
Paul Rosolie
(00:33:19)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:20)
That the mechanism of evolution that created a thing that could survive for such a long time, it’s just incredible. This is a work of art, the defense mechanisms, the power of it, the damage it can do, how effective it is as a hunter, all of that. You could feel that just by touching it.
Paul Rosolie
(00:33:41)
Do you ever see the mashup where they put, side-by-side, the image of, I think it’s a Falcon in flight, next to a stealth bomber and they’re almost the exact same design. It’s incredible, like that-
Lex Fridman
(00:33:54)
What’s the equivalent for a croc? I don’t know-
Paul Rosolie
(00:33:57)
Like you said, maybe a tank. Like-
Lex Fridman
(00:33:58)
Maybe a tank.
Paul Rosolie
(00:33:59)
But they’re more like an armadillo, turtle.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:00)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:01)
I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:01)
Like hippos and-
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:02)
Yeah, there may not be a war machine equivalent of a crocodile, it would’ve to have like a big jaw element to it.

Rhinos

Lex Fridman
(00:34:11)
In the water, I mean, we talked also about hippos. Those are interesting creatures from all the way across the world. Just monsters.
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:18)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:19)
Hippos and rhinos. Hippos are bigger, usually, or rhinos are bigger?
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:23)
Rhinos.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:23)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:24)
Rhinos, after elephants, is the largest, white rhinos.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:28)
They can be terrifying too, again, when you step into the defense.
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:31)
Absolutely. But I have to tell you, after being around so many rhinos-
Lex Fridman
(00:34:35)
You have friend of mine?
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:36)
I have rhino friends.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:37)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:37)
Black and white rhinos.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:39)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:39)
And they’re all sweethearts, and I mean-
Lex Fridman
(00:34:40)
Awesome.
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:42)
I mean, sweethearts. And I mean, when you look at a rhino, it’s like a living dinosaur. I know it’s a mammal, but somehow it’s screams dinosaur, ’cause it seems like pleistocenic.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:51)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:34:52)
And from another age, with the giant horn. And they’re so much bigger than you think, like they’re minivan-sized animals. We’re not taller than they are at the shoulder. And they have this strange shaped head and the huge horn.
Paul Rosolie
(00:35:00)
… at their shoulder, and they have the strange-shaped head and the huge horn, and they sit there eating grass all day. So if a rhino is dangerous to a human, it’s because the rhino is going, “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt my baby.” And then they’re like, “You know what? I’ll just kill you. It’ll be easier, because you’re scaring me right now.” You’re too close to that rhino. And so there again, I just think it’s funny because humans, we’re so quick to go, “Which snakes are aggressive?” Well, there are no aggressive snakes. “Rhinos can be dangerous.” If provoked. Otherwise, they’re peaceful, fat grass unicorns. They’re really pretty calm. That we had these incredible giant animals and the largest animals on our planet, the black caiman, the rhinos, the elephants, all the big beautiful stuff is becoming less and less.

(00:35:48)
And it almost reminds me, in Game of Thrones, they’re like, “In the beginning,” they’re like, “there used to be dragons.” And it was this memory, and it’s like, we used to have mammoths, and we used to have stellar sea cows that were 16-feet-long manatees, and it’s, there were things we used to have. The Caspian tiger that only went extinct in the ’90s. Our lifetimes. And that’s mind-blowing to me. That has haunted me since I’m a child. I remember learning about extinction and I went, “Wait, you’re telling me that…” I remember being a kid and going, “By the time I grew up, you’re saying that gorillas could be gone? Elephants could be gone? And because we’re doing it? And then I remember looking at the nightlight being blurry because I was crying. I was so upset. And it was Lonesome George, that turtle, the Galapagos tortoise, where there was one left. And they said, “If we just had a female, he could live.” And I as a six, seven, eight-year-old, that destroyed me.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:46)
We’re all just trying to get laid, including that turtle.
Paul Rosolie
(00:36:48)
Including that turtle, for a few hundred years. Dude.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:53)
So for young people out there, you think you’re having trouble, think about that turtle.
Paul Rosolie
(00:36:56)
Think about that turtle. Yeah. You know there’s a turtle that Darwin and Steve Irwin both owned?
Lex Fridman
(00:37:01)
Yeah, I heard about that turtle. Man, they live a long time.
Paul Rosolie
(00:37:05)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:05)
They’ve seen things.
Paul Rosolie
(00:37:07)
They’ve seen things that, there’s a great internet joke where they’re accusing him of being incongruous with modern times. They’re like, “He did nothing to stop slavery. He didn’t fight in World War II.”
Lex Fridman
(00:37:18)
Cancel the turtle.
Paul Rosolie
(00:37:20)
Yeah, cancel the turtle.

Anacondas

Lex Fridman
(00:37:22)
Oh, shit. What a world we live in. So it’s interesting, you mentioned black caiman and anacondas are both apex predators. So it seems like the reason they can exist in similar environments is because they feed on slightly different things. How is it possible for them to coexist? I read that anacondas can eat caiman but not black caiman. How often do they come in conflict?
Paul Rosolie
(00:37:49)
So anacondas and caiman occupy the exact same niche, and they’re born at almost the exact same size. And unlike most species, they don’t have a size range that they’re confined to. They start at this big, baby caiman are this big, baby anacondas are a little longer, but they’re thinner and they don’t have legs, so it’s the same thing in terms of mass. And they’re all in the streams or at the edges of lakes or swamps. And so the baby anacondas eat the baby caiman. Baby caiman can’t really take down an anaconda. They’re going for little insects and fish. They have quite a small mouth. Again, it’s in their interest to hide from everything. A bird, a heron can eat a baby caiman, pop it back. And so they have to survive. But the anaconda and the caiman joust as they grow.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:39)
Can you actually explain how the anaconda would take down a caiman? Would it first use constriction and then eat it? Or what’s the methodology?
Paul Rosolie
(00:38:48)
So anacondas have, I don’t know, a three-point constriction system where their first thing is anchor. Something like jujitsu. So the first thing is latch onto you.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:00)
I like how I’m writing this down like, “All right, this is jujitsu masterclass here.”
Paul Rosolie
(00:39:05)
This is for when you’re wrestling an anaconda, just in case.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:09)
And you’ll be the coach in the sidelines screaming, “No, no, no-“
Paul Rosolie
(00:39:11)
“You got him, Lex!”
Lex Fridman
(00:39:11)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:39:15)
“Don’t let him take the back.”
Lex Fridman
(00:39:16)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:39:17)
All right. So one time me and JJ were following a herd of collard peccary and JJ’s teaching me tracking. So we’re following the hoof prints through the mud, and we’re doing this, and I’m talking about no backpacks, just machetes, bare feet, running through the jungle. And we come to this stream and JJ’s like, “I think we missed him. I think they went.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, they went here, look.” And not because I’m a great tracker, because I can see a few dozen footprints, hundreds of individual footprints right there. And I’m going, “No, no, they just crossed here.” And JJ was like, “You know what? We’re not going to get eyes on them today.” He was like, “It’s okay.” He’s like, “We did good. We followed them for a long time.” And I was like, “Cool.”

(00:39:51)
And then I was trying to gauge, “Can I drink this stream?” And I see a culpa. And a culpa is a salt deposit where animals come to feed because sodium is a deficiency that most herbivores have here. And all of a sudden I just hear like the sound of a wet stick snapping, just that bone crunch. And I looked down, and there’s about a 16-foot anaconda wrapped around a freshly killed peccary. Wild boar. And what this anaconda had done was as all the pigs were going across the stream, the anaconda had grabbed it by the jaw, swiped the legs, wrapped around it, bent it in half, and then crushed it to ribs.

(00:40:35)
And that’s what the anaconda do, whether it’s to mammals, to caiman, it’s all the same thing. It’s grab on, they have six rows of backwards-facing teeth, so once they hit you, they’re never going to come off. You actually have to go deeper in and then open before you can come out. All those backward-facing teeth. So they have an incredible anchor system, and then they use their weight to pull you down to hell to pull you down into that water, wrap around you, and then start breaking you. And every breath you take, you go, and you’re up against a barrier. And then when you exhale, they go a little tighter and you’re never going to get that space back. Your lungs are never going to expand again. And I know this because I’ve been in that crush, before JJ pulled me out of it. And so this pig, the anaconda had gotten it, and as the pig was thrashing and the anaconda was wrapping around it and bent it in half, and I just heard those vertebrae going.

(00:41:26)
And so for a caiman, it’s the same thing. They just grab them, they wrap around it, and then they have to crush it until there’s no response. They’ll wait an hour. They’ll wait a long time until there’s no response from the animal. They’ll overpower it. Then they’ll reposition, probably yawn a little bit, open their jaw, and then start forcing that entire… Now here’s the crazy thing, is that an anaconda has stomach acid capable of digesting an entire crocodile where nothing comes out the other side. And when you see how thick the bony plate of a crocodile skull is, that that can go in the mouth and nothing comes out the other side, that’s insane. And so it always made me wonder, on a chemistry level, how you can have such incredible acid in the stomach that doesn’t harm the anaconda itself. And someone said that the mucus-
Lex Fridman
(00:42:14)
I thought it’s able to digest… Oh, it’s some kind of mucus. Oh, the mucus, there’s… Oh, interesting. There’s levels of protection from the anaconda itself. But it seems like the anaconda is such a simple system as an organism.
Paul Rosolie
(00:42:26)
I know, but-
Lex Fridman
(00:42:26)
That simplicity, taken at scale, it can swallow a caiman and digest it slowly.
Paul Rosolie
(00:42:33)
I know, but my question was how on earth is it physically possible to have this hellish bile that can digest anything, even something as horrendous as a caiman, scales and bones and all the hardest in nature, and then not hurt the snake itself. And I had a chemist explain to me that it’s probably some sort of mucus system that lines the stomach and neutralizes the acid and keeps it floating in there, but my God, that must be powerful stuff.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:01)
What does it feel like being crushed, choked by anaconda?
Paul Rosolie
(00:43:10)
When an anaconda is wrapped around you and you find yourself in the shocking realization that these could be your last moments breathing, you are confronted with the vast disparity in power. That there is so much power in these animals, so much crushing, deliberate, reptilian, ancient power that doesn’t care. They’re just trying to get you to stop. They just want you to stop ticking, and there’s nothing you can do. And I find it very awe-inspiring when I encounter that kind of power. Even if it’s that you see a dog run… You ever try to outrun a dog, and they just zip by you and you go, “Wow.” Or you see a horse kick and you go, “Oh, my God, if that hoof hit anyone’s head, it’d knock them three states over.” And it’s like there is muscular power that is so far, like you said, that explosive, that we dream of doing it. Imagine if a Muay Thai kickboxer could harness that caiman power, that smash. And so it’s just awe-inspiring. I think it’s really, really impressive what animals can do.

(00:44:18)
And we’re all the same makeup, for the most part. All the mammals, we all have, our skeletons look so similar, we all have… If you look like a kangaroo’s biceps and chest, it looks so much like a man’s, and same thing goes for a bear. Or you ever see a naked chimp?
Lex Fridman
(00:44:34)
Have I?
Paul Rosolie
(00:44:35)
There’s chimps with alopecia.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:37)
Oh, shit. They’re shredded. Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:44:38)
And so it looks like a bodybuilder. It’s got cuts and huge, huge everything. It’s got pecs, and they got that face that’s just like, “Just let me in.”
Lex Fridman
(00:44:50)
“What now?”
Paul Rosolie
(00:44:51)
“Where’s your wallet?”
Lex Fridman
(00:44:52)
“Do something.” But yeah, but there’s the specialization of a lifetime of doing damage to the world and using those muscles, it just makes you just that much more powerful than most humans because humans I guess have more brain, so they get lazy. They start puzzle-solving versus using the biceps directly.
Paul Rosolie
(00:45:17)
Well, yes and no. And I have this question. So that whole “you are what you eat” thing. Now, we one time here had two chickens. Now, one of them was a wild chicken from the farm, had walked around its whole life finding insects, and the other chicken was factory raised. And so we cut the heads off of both of them and started getting ready to cook them. Now, the factory-raised chicken was a much higher percentage of fat, had less muscle on its body, was softer tissue, a lighter color. The farm raised chicken had darker, more sinewy muscles, less fat. It was clearly a better-made machine. And so my question is, is that what’s happening with us? If you go see a Sherpa who’s been walking his whole life and walking behind muskoxes and lifting things up mountains and breathing clean air and not being in the city, versus someone that’s just been chowing down at IHOP for 40 years and never getting off the couch, I imagine it’s the same thing, that you become what you eat.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:19)
Yeah. I mean, you and I, we’re half dead running up a mountain. Meanwhile, there’s a grandma just walking and she’s been walking that road and she’s just built different.
Paul Rosolie
(00:46:29)
With her alpaca on her shoulders.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:32)
With a baby. They’re just built different, when you apply your body in the physical way your whole life.
Paul Rosolie
(00:46:39)
Yeah. You can’t replicate that. Just like that chimp has those muscles from constantly moving through the canopy, constantly using those arms. Just like if you see an Olympic athlete or you hug Rogan.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:54)
Exactly the same.
Paul Rosolie
(00:46:55)
You just go, “Why is there so much muscle here?”
Lex Fridman
(00:46:59)
That’s exactly what I feel like when you give him a hug. This is definitely a chimp of some sort. Just the constriction of anaconda, just the feeling of that, are they doing that based on instinct, or is there some brain stuff going on? Is this just a basic procedure that they’re doing, and they just really don’t give a damn? They’re not like thinking, “Oh, Paul. This is this kind of species who tastes good,” or is it just a mechanism just start activating and you can’t stop it?
Paul Rosolie
(00:47:37)
With an anaconda, I really think it’s the second one. I do think that they’re impressive and beautiful and incredibly arcane. I think they’re a very simple system, a very ancient system. And I think that once you hit predation mode, it’s going down no matter what. This stupid mosquito, I’m going like this, and every time he just flies around my hand like I’m a big slow giant, and he just goes around my hand and then he goes back to the same spot. And I’m like, “No,” and then he comes right back to the same spot. It’s like he’s just going, “Fuck you.”
Lex Fridman
(00:48:10)
Here’s the question. If the mosquito is stupid and you can’t catch it, what does that make you?
Paul Rosolie
(00:48:14)
Fucking stupid. Dude, I flicked a wasp off me the other day, it flew back like 12 feet, and then in the air, corrected, and then flew back at my face. It made so many calculations and corrections and decided to come back and let me know about it. And I was like, “Shit.”
Lex Fridman
(00:48:29)
And that wasp probably went back to the nest, said, “Guess what happened today?”
Paul Rosolie
(00:48:32)
“This bitch-ass kid from Brooklyn tried to flick me and I showed him what’s up. I had him running.”
Lex Fridman
(00:48:36)
They had a good chuckle on that one. You actually mentioned to me, just on the topic of anacondas, that you’ve been participating in a lot of scientific work on the topic. So really, in everything you’ve been doing here, you are celebrating the animals, you’re respecting the animals, you’re protecting the animals, but you’re also excited about studying the animals in their environment. So you’re actually a co-author on a paper, on a couple of papers, but one of them is on anacondas and studying green anaconda hunting patterns. What’s that about?
Paul Rosolie
(00:49:13)
So the lead authors of that paper, Pat Champagne and Carter Payne, are friends of mine, and what we started noticing, for me began at that story I told you where we were coming across the stream and we saw the anaconda had been positioned just below a culpa. And then other people began noticing that anaconda seemed to always be beneath these culpas where mammals were going to be coming. And that contrasted with what we knew about anacondas. Because what we understood about anacondas that they’re purely ambush predators and they don’t pursue their prey. But what we began finding out here, and Pat led the process of amazing scientists, he worked with Acadia University for a long time, worked with us for a long time, and he was one of the first to put a transmitter in an anaconda right around here, and we were able to see their movements. And that’s what these papers are showing is that they actually do pursue their prey. They do move up and down using the streams as corridors through the forest. They actually do pursue their prey, they actually do seek out food.

(00:50:21)
I mean, think about it. It’s a giant anaconda. Obviously, it can’t just sit in one spot. It has to put some work into it. And so they’re using scent and they’re using communication to use the streams. So you could be walking in the forest in a very shallow stream And see a sizable anaconda looking for a meal.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:38)
So in the shallow stream, it moves not just in the water but in the sand.
Paul Rosolie
(00:50:44)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:44)
So it also likes to burrow a little bit?
Paul Rosolie
(00:50:47)
They burrow quite a bit. And so these large snakes operate subterranean more than we think.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:55)
Interesting.
Paul Rosolie
(00:50:56)
There’s times that you’ll go with a tracker, you go with the telemetry set and it’ll say, “Tu tu tu tu tu,” we’ll be over the snake. Snake’s underground. Snake has found either a recess under the sides of the stream, you saw it last night, where all the fish have their holes under the side of the stream. There was a six-foot dwarf caiman right in the stream, right where we were standing, and he had his cave. He goes under there. They know. They have their system.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:22)
We walked by it.
Paul Rosolie
(00:51:24)
We walked by it. And he stuck his head out because he thought we’d gone. And then we turned around and I just got a glimpse of him because I was in the front of the line, and he just went right back into his cave. “You guys are not going to touch me.” And so yeah, with the anacondas, it’s been really exciting. And in 2014, JJ and me and Mohsen and Pat and Lee, we ended up catching what at the time was the record for Eunectes Marinas scientifically measured. It was 18 feet six inches, 220 pounds, one of the largest female anacondas on record. And since that time, these guys have been continuing to study the species, continuing to just, again, just add a little bit by little bit to the knowledge we have of the species.

(00:52:07)
And studying green anacondas in lowland tropical rainforest, you’ve seen how hard it is to move, to operate, to navigate in this environment. And so when you think of the fact that in order to learn anything about this species, you have to spend vast amounts of time first locating them, and then finding out a way to keep tabs on them, even if you get lucky enough to see an anaconda by the edge of a stream. To be able to observe it over time, to learn its habits or to put a radio transmitter on it or to take any sort of valuable information from the experience is almost impossible. And so a lot of the stuff that I wrote about in Mother of God, us jumping on anacondas and trying to catch them, and at first it just seemed like something we were doing to just try and see them. But it ended up being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology that would have scientific implications later on, because now it’s allowing us to try and find the largest anacondas.

(00:53:07)
And people used to say, “There’s no way there’s 25-foot, 27-foot.” Well, there’s just that video of the guy swimming with the twenty-foot anaconda. And so now as we keep going, I’m going, “Well, maybe through drone identification, we could find where the largest anacondas are sitting on top of floating vegetation. And even then, how do we restrain them so that we could measure them and prove this to the world? It’s a side quest, but-
Lex Fridman
(00:53:31)
So by doing these kinds of studies, you figure out how they move about the world, what motivates them in terms of when they hunt, where they hide in the world as the size of the anaconda changes, so all of that, those are scientific studies?
Paul Rosolie
(00:53:45)
Yeah. I mean, look, there’s so much that we don’t know about this forest. We don’t know what medicines are in this forest. We don’t know. With a lot of the 1500, there’s something like 4,000 species of butterflies in the Amazon rainforest. And of the 1500 species that are here in this region, all of them have a larval stage, caterpillars. And each of the caterpillars has a specific host plant that they need to eat in order to become a successful butterfly, to enter the next life cycle. And for most of the species that fill the butterfly book, we don’t know what those interactions are. I recently got to see the white witch, which is a huge moth. It’s one of the two largest moths in the world. It’s the largest moth by wingspan.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:28)
Wow.
Paul Rosolie
(00:54:29)
Huge. It looks like a bird. Big white moth. I believe that we still don’t know what the caterpillar looks like. It’s 2024. We have iPhones and penis-shaped rocket ships. We don’t know where that moth starts its life. We still haven’t figured that out.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:47)
By the way, the rocket ships are shaped that way for efficiency purposes, not because they wanted to make it look like a penis. Speaking of which, I have ran across a lot of penis trees while exploring, and they make me-
Paul Rosolie
(00:54:47)
Have you?
Lex Fridman
(00:55:00)
I know it’s not just a figment of my imagination. I’m pretty sure they’re real. In fact, you explained it to me, and they make me very uncomfortable because there’s just a lot of penises hanging off of a tree.
Paul Rosolie
(00:55:09)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:10)
I don’t know what the purpose is. I don’t know who they’re supposed to attract, but certainly, Paul really enjoys them.
Paul Rosolie
(00:55:18)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, clearly you’ve done some research and you’ve noticed a lot of them. I haven’t even seen them.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:24)
There was a time when I almost fell, and to catch my balance, I had to grab one of the penises of the penis tree and, unforgettable. Anaconda, the biggest, baddest anaconda in the Amazon versus the biggest, baddest black caiman. Because you mentioned there, there’s a race. If there’s a fight, the UFC in a cage, who wins? Underwater.
Paul Rosolie
(00:55:45)
This is the biggest and the baddest?
Lex Fridman
(00:55:46)
The biggest and the baddest that you can imagine given all the studies you’ve done of the two animals. Species.
Paul Rosolie
(00:55:53)
The biggest and the baddest. You’re talking about an 18-foot, several-hundred-pound black caiman versus a 26-foot, 350-pound anaconda.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:03)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(00:56:05)
I think it’s a death stalemate. I think the caiman slams the anaconda, bites onto it, the anaconda wraps the caiman, and then they both thrash around until they both kill each other. Because I think the caiman will tear him up so bad-
Lex Fridman
(00:56:16)
And the caiman is not going to let go. He’s going to get back-
Paul Rosolie
(00:56:18)
The caiman is never going to let go, but then he’s going to realize that he’s also being constricted, so then he’s going to stop and he’s going to keep slamming down on that anaconda, and the anaconda is just going to keep constricting. But if the caiman can do enough damage before the anaconda… Again, it’s almost like a striker versus a jujitsu. If you can get enough elbows in before they lock you-
Lex Fridman
(00:56:37)
How fast is the constriction? So it’s pretty slow.
Paul Rosolie
(00:56:40)
No, it’s incredibly quick. So it’s you take the back and get me in chokehold, it’s that. It’s I have maybe 30 seconds, maybe, on the upward side, if you haven’t cinched it under my throat. But if you’ve gotten good position, it’s over.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:57)
Is there any way to unwrap a choke, undo the choke, defending-
Paul Rosolie
(00:56:59)
No. Not unless you have outside help. Unless you have another human or another 10 humans coming to unwrap the tail help you. But for an animal, like if a deer gets hit by an anaconda, there’s no way. They don’t stand a chance.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:11)
So the black caiman would bite somewhere close to the head and just try to hold on and thrash.
Paul Rosolie
(00:57:21)
Here’s the thing, every fisherman knows this, the biggest fish, they’re smart. And more importantly, they’re shrewd. They’re careful. A huge black caiman that’s 16 feet long isn’t going to be messing with a big anaconda. They won’t cross paths. Because while they technically occupy the same type of environment, that black caiman is going to have this deep spot in a lake and that anaconda is going to have found this floating forest black stream backwater where it’s going to be, and they’ll have made that their home for decades, and they’ll already have cleaned out the competition. So maybe if there was a flood and they got pushed together, they could have some sort of a showdown, but almost more certainly is that when they get to that size, that caiman, at any sign of danger, boom, right under the water. It’s like what do you learn when you’re a black belt? What do you do with a street fight? You still run away. There’s no reason for a street fight. And I think the animals really understand that. There’s no reason for this.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:25)
So a giant anaconda and a giant black caiman, they could probably even coexist in the same environment just knowing, using the wisdom to avoid the fight.
Paul Rosolie
(00:58:36)
Yeah. Or they would have a big showdown and one of them would either die or have to leave. They would have a territorial dispute.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:42)
Yeah. Without killing either of them.
Paul Rosolie
(00:58:46)
Dude, nature. Anything could happen. One of the things that me and Pat wrote up was that I saw a yellow-tailed cribo, which is like a six-foot rat snake eating an oxyrhopus melanogenys, which is the red snake that we found last night. And just, no one had ever, in scientific literature, we’d never seen a cribo eating an oxyrhopus before. And so I had the observation in the field, I sent it to Pat Champagne, Pat writes it up, paper. That’s a really cool system, because we’re just out here all the time, you end up seeing things. JJ’s dad saw an anaconda eating a tapir. Tapir’s the size of a cow.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:23)
Damn.
Paul Rosolie
(00:59:24)
And that guy didn’t lie. Some people, you trust your sources on that. He saw enough stuff, he didn’t need to make up stories. And you know what I love now is when you ask people, when we were going up the mountain with Jimmy, JJ said to him, he goes, “Have, you ever seen a puma up here in the mountains?” And Jimmy goes, “They’re up here.” And JJ went, “No, no, no, have you seen it?” And Jimmy went, “No, never seen one.” And you know how most people will go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it.” That makes me trust the person when they admit, “No, I haven’t seen it.”
Lex Fridman
(00:59:58)
“They’re up here. I haven’t seen it.” And Jimmy has been living there his whole life.
Paul Rosolie
(01:00:03)
His whole life.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:05)
There’s pumas in the mountains?
Paul Rosolie
(01:00:07)
Mountain lions, pumas, whatever the… There’s all different names for them. They’re distributed from, I think from Alaska down through Argentina. They’re everywhere. It’s extremely successful species. From deserts to high mountains, everything.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:21)
I think you’re saying pumas have a curiosity, have a way about them where they explore, follow people, just to kind of figure out… Just that curiosity as opposed to causing harm or hunting and that kind of stuff. What is this about?
Paul Rosolie
(01:00:40)
I think it’s based in predatory instincts, but I also think there is a playfulness to higher intelligence animals that you don’t see in lower intelligence animals. And so something like a rabbit, for instance, you’re never going to see a rabbit come in to check you out. You can’t even think of it like that. A rabbit is just going to either eat or run away. There’s really two settings. When you think of something like a giant river otter or a tayra, which is, they call it manco here, it’s a huge arboreal weasel, and they’ll come check you out. I woke up at my house the other day and there was a tayra climbing up the side of the house, and he was looking down at me sleeping. And it’s like he came to check me out. It’s like they’re smart enough and they’re brave enough, here’s the important thing, they know that they can fend for themselves, they can fight, they can climb, they can run. And so they’re like, “I’m curious. I got time, let me check this out.”
Lex Fridman
(01:01:35)
Yeah, they’re gathering information. I wonder how complex and sophisticated their world model is, how they’re integrating all the information about the environment, like where all the different trees are, where all the different nests of the different insects are, what the different creatures are by size, all that kind of stuff. I’m sure they don’t have enough storage up there to keep all that, but they probably keep the important stuff, to integrate the experiences they have into what is dangerous, what is tasty, all that kind of stuff.
Paul Rosolie
(01:02:07)
I think it’s more complex than we realize. You go back to that Frans de Waal book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? There’s so many incredible examples of controlled studies where the researchers weren’t understanding how to shed being so insurmountably human and understand that there are other types of intelligence. And whether that’s elephants or cats. So big cats, for instance, we just saw a camera trap video from last night where you see one of our workers walk down the trail, and then five minutes later a cat behind him.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:45)
By the way, we were walking just exactly the same area, also exact same time. Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:02:50)
Yeah. So we’re out there and there’s deer and there’s cats, and there’s a jaguar and there’s a puma, and there’s all these animals out there, and we’re out in the night in the inky black night in this ocean of darkness beneath the trees, and we’re just exploring and getting to see everything, and there’s all these little eyes and heartbeats. I love the jungle at night, man. It’s the most exciting thing.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:08)
One of the things you do when you turn off the headlamp, complete darkness all around you, and just the sounds.
Paul Rosolie
(01:03:14)
Everything you hear, the cicadas, the birds, they’re all screaming about sex all the time, so they’re just trying to get laid. So all of them are making mating calls. Now, the trick is to make your mating call without attracting a predator. But at night, what amazes me is that for us, it’s so… From the caveman logic of, it’s hard to make fire here, it’s hard to even light a fire here, to having this incredible beam of, all of a sudden we can look at the jungle and walk through that darkness. Then we’re seeing the frogs on those leaves, and the snakes moving through the undergrowth, and the deer sneaking through the shadows. It’s almost as supernatural as skydiving. It’s a strange thing to be able to do that technology allows us to do. We’re doing something really complex, and we’re walking on trails that have been cleared for us, that we’ve planned out. And so walking through the jungle at night, you just get this freak show of biodiversity, and I’m addicted to it. I truly love it.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:20)
Except for the times over the last few days when we walked through jungle without a trail, and that’s just a different experience.
Paul Rosolie
(01:04:29)
Well, how would you categorize if somebody said, “Lex, I think I’m going to go for a hike through the jungle, not on the trail,” what would you tell them?
Lex Fridman
(01:04:37)
Every step is really hard work. Every step is a puzzle. Every step is a full of possibility of hurting yourself in a multitude of ways. A wasp nest under a leaf, a hole under a leaf on the ground where if you step into it, you’re going to break a knee, ankle, leg, and going to not be able to move for a long time. There’s all kinds of ants that can hurt you a little or can hurt you a lot. Bullet ants. There’s snakes and spiders and… Oh, my favorite that I’ve gotten to know intimately is different plants with different defensive mechanisms, one of which is just spikes, so sharp.

(01:05:31)
I don’t know if you brought it, but there’s-
Paul Rosolie
(01:05:33)
I didn’t bring it. I didn’t bring it.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:35)
Where’s my club? There’s an epic club with spikes. But there’s so many trees that have spikes on them. Sometimes they’re obvious spikes, sometimes less than obvious spikes, and it could be just an innocent, as you take a step through a dense jungle, it could be an innocent placing of a hand on that tree that could just completely transform your experience, your life, by penetrating your hand with like 20, 30, 40, 50 spikes and just changing everything. That’s just a completely different experience than going on a trail where you are observer of the jungle versus the participant of it.
Paul Rosolie
(01:06:14)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:15)
And it truly is extreme hard work to take every single step.
Paul Rosolie
(01:06:20)
Now, just think about this, I think scientifically, because people like to summarize, people like to get really, really cavalier with our scientific progress, and they go, “We’ve already explored the Amazon.” It’s like, well have we? Because in between each tributary is, let’s say just between some of them, let’s just say a hundred miles of unbroken forest. Who’s explored that? Maybe some of the tribes have been there, maybe. Some areas they haven’t been. Now, when you’re talking about scientists, whether they’re indigenous scientists, western scientists, whatever, so many of the areas in this jungle that is the size of the continental US still have not been accessed.

(01:06:58)
And the places where people are doing research, see, I’ve been down here long enough, I see all the PhDs come down here and they all go to the same few research stations. They’re safe. They have a bed. If you get heli-dropped into the middle of the jungle in the deepest, most remote parts, you’re going to find micro ecosystems. You’re going to see little species variations. You’re going to see a type of flower that JJ has never seen before, like what happened the other day. As you start walking through new patches of forest, you start finding new species, and everything here changes. You just go a little bit upriver and the animals you see differ. You go on this side of the river versus on the north side of the river, there’s two other species of primates there that don’t exist here. And that’s in the mammal paper that we did with the emperor tamarins and the pygmy marmosets that the rangers found.

Mammals

Lex Fridman
(01:07:42)
Yeah. The mammal papers looking at the diversity of life in this one region of the Amazon. Can you talk more about that paper? Mammal Diversity along the Las Piedras River.
Paul Rosolie
(01:07:57)
Once again, the mammal paper, Pat Champagne the prodigy, he was leading on this with a bunch of other scientists who have worked in the region, including Holly O’Donnell out of Oxford, myself. I really just made a few observations. The Junglekeepers Rangers got featured because they’re the ones that spotted a pygmy marmoset that had previously been unrecorded on the river. I got to contribute because I had the only photograph that I believe anyone has of an emperor tamarin on this river. It’s the first proof of emperor tamarin on this river, and that’s exciting. It’s exciting because you can post a picture or share a scientific observation or write about something, and then what happens is you get these couch experts, these armchair experts who will come and say, “No, no, you don’t get blue and yellow macaws there. I can tell from my bird book, it says they’re not there.” And they’ll tell you you’re wrong. “No, you don’t get woolly monkeys there or emperor tamarin.” But we have proof. And so we’re coming together to try and add to that knowledge.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:01)
My general amateur experience of the species I’ve encountered here is, “This should not exist. Whatever this is, this is not real. This is CGI. What?” Just the colors, the weirdness. I mean, I think I called it the Paris Hilton caterpillar because it’s like furry. It looks like a-
Paul Rosolie
(01:09:21)
Looks like Paris Hilton’s dog.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:23)
Yeah, yeah. It’s really furry and it’s transparent. All you see is this white, beautiful fur, and it’s just this caterpillar. It doesn’t look real. Do you think there are species… How many species have we not discovered? And is there a species that are extremely badass that we haven’t discovered yet?
Paul Rosolie
(01:09:43)
If you look up how many trees are in the Amazon rainforest, it’s something in the order of 400 billion trees. There’s something like 70 to 80,000 species of plants, individual types of plants here, 1500 species of-
Paul Rosolie
(01:10:00)
Individual types of plants here, 1500 species of trees. It’s so vast that it’s comparable, the scale is only comparable to the universe in terms of stars and galaxies and for the sheer immensity of it. And so we’re describing new species every year and just walking on the trail at night, you and I have seen, you see a tiny little spider hidden in a crevice. And has the scientific eye ever seen that spider before? Has it been documented? Do we know anything about his life cycle?

(01:10:37)
There’s still so much that’s here that is completely unknown. We have pictures of all these butterflies. Somebody went out with a butterfly net and caught these butterflies, took a picture of it, gave it a name, put it in a butterfly book. What do we know? What host plant do they use for their caterpillars? What’s their geographical range? What do we actually know? Not that much. So are there creatures out here that haven’t been described? Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:00)
And some of them could be extremely effective predators in a niche environment.
Paul Rosolie
(01:11:06)
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean certainly in the canopy, 50% of the life in a rainforest is in the canopy, and we’ve had very limited access to the canopy for all of history. If you wanted to get up into the rainforest canopy, you basically have to climb a vine or with scientists, when I was a kid, I always used to see them with the slingshots or the bow and arrows. They would shoot a piece of paracord over a branch, pull the rope up and then do the Ascension thing. And then you’re up in this tree getting swarmed by sweat bees, getting stung by wasps.

(01:11:37)
You’re trying to do science up there in that environment. It’s incredibly hostile and so having canopy platforms… I actually met a guy at a French film festival who had used hot air balloons to float over the canopy of the Amazon and then lay these big nets over the broccoli of the trees. And the nets were dense enough that humans could walk on the nets and then reach through and pull cactuses and lizards and snakes, whatever. Just take specimens from the canopy. That’s how difficult it is that scientists have resorted to using hot air balloons.

(01:12:10)
And so having a tree house, having canopy platforms, it’s starting to be more and more access to the rainforest canopy. And so we’re beginning to log more data. We’ve even observed in our tree house, which is supposed to be the tallest in the world, we’re seeing lizards that we don’t see on the ground, lizards that have never been documented on this river. We’re seeing snakes where they’re saying, “We saw this snake inside a crevice, on that tree, in the strangler fig, and we don’t know what it is.” It’s just people haven’t been up there.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:41)
And that’s where a lot of the monkeys are.
Paul Rosolie
(01:12:43)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:44)
There’s just a lot of dynamic life up there.
Paul Rosolie
(01:12:47)
Yeah. I mean when you wake up in the canopy in the morning, in the Amazon rainforest, as soon as the darkness lifts, as soon as that purple comes in the east in the morning, the howler monkeys start up, and then the parrots start up, and then the tinamous start going, and then the macaws start going, and pretty soon everybody’s going, and the spider monkey groups are all calling to each other. And it’s just the whole dawn chorus starts and it’s so exciting.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:10)
So you’re saying when they’re screaming, it’s usually about sex.
Paul Rosolie
(01:13:13)
Sex or territory, usually.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:15)
Sex and violence or implied violence-
Paul Rosolie
(01:13:16)
We try to be-
Lex Fridman
(01:13:18)
… or the threat of violence.
Paul Rosolie
(01:13:19)
Yeah. I mean howler monkeys in the morning, they’re letting other groups know this is where we’re at.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:23)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:13:23)
We’re going to be foraging over here. You better stay away. And so it’s a little bit respectful as well. There is order in the chaos.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:30)
So just speaking of screaming, macaws are like these beautiful creatures. They’re lifelong partners. They stick together.
Paul Rosolie
(01:13:40)
Monogamous.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:41)
They’re monogamous. You see two of them together. But when they communicate their love language seems to be very loud screaming.
Paul Rosolie
(01:13:47)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:49)
What do you learn about relationships from macaws?
Paul Rosolie
(01:13:52)
That it can be loud and rough and still be loving.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:54)
And still be loving. But is that interesting to you that there’s monogamy in some species, that they’re lifelong partners, and then there’s total lack of monogamy in other species?
Paul Rosolie
(01:14:04)
It’s all interesting. I mean there’s the anti-monogamy crew who’s like, “We were never meant to be monogamous. We’re supposed to just be animals.” And then there’s the other side of the crew that’s like, “We were meant to be monogamous. We are monogamous creatures. That’s what God wanted between a man and a woman.”

(01:14:19)
And then other people are like, “Yeah. But I know about these two gay penguins, and so that’s natural too.”
Lex Fridman
(01:14:24)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:14:24)
And so then everyone tries to draw their identity. They’re trying to justify their identity off of the laws of nature. So the fact that macaws are monogamous really doesn’t have anything to do with anybody except for that it’s beneficial for them to work together to raise chicks. It’s difficult.

(01:14:40)
They rely on ironwood trees or aguaje palms, and it’s difficult to find the right hole in a tree. There’s only so much macaw real estate. And so they need to use those holes. And each one of those ancient trees, it’s usually 500 years or more, is a valuable macaw generating site in the forest. And so if those trees go down, you lose exponential amounts of macaws, and that’s how you get endangered species. And so that’s why we’re trying to protect the ironwood trees.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:09)
Another ridiculous question.
Paul Rosolie
(01:15:10)
Tell me.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:11)
If every jungle creature was the same size-
Paul Rosolie
(01:15:14)
Oh, boy.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:15)
… who would be the new apex predator, the new alpha at the top of the food chain?
Paul Rosolie
(01:15:19)
Dude, that’s like Super Smash Brothers of the jungle.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:21)
Oh, yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:15:21)
That’s incredible.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:22)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:15:23)
Like bullet ants. If you had a bullet ant that was this size.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:27)
Yeah. Can it be like a tournament?
Paul Rosolie
(01:15:30)
So everyone is pound for pound ratioed for efficiency. So you have basically a six-foot bullet ant versus a huge black caiman versus an anaconda versus ocelots that are the size of jaguars versus-
Lex Fridman
(01:15:42)
Yeah. Well, let’s go bullet ant versus black caiman. Same size.
Paul Rosolie
(01:15:46)
But they’re comparable size?
Lex Fridman
(01:15:46)
Same size.
Paul Rosolie
(01:15:49)
I don’t know, man. I never thought about it. I mean bullet ant has these giant, giant, giant mandibles that could probably grab the black caiman and then at that amount of venom, you’re talking about a bucket of venom going into that black caiman. Black caiman going to get paralyzed immediately.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:03)
Well, insects have just a tremendous amount of strength. I don’t know how they generate, what the geometry of that is. The natural world can’t create that same kind of power in the bigger thing, it seems like.
Paul Rosolie
(01:16:13)
It seems like.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:14)
It seems like ants and just these tiny creatures are the ones they’re able to have that much strength. I don’t know how that works, what the physics of that is.
Paul Rosolie
(01:16:21)
Yeah. So like a leaf cutter ant lifting that leaf, that doesn’t make any sense.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:25)
Yeah. It doesn’t-
Paul Rosolie
(01:16:26)
It doesn’t make any sense.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:28)
I don’t know if that’s the limit of physics. I think it’s just the limit of evolution of how that works.
Paul Rosolie
(01:16:32)
One of the most interesting limits that I heard somebody talking about recently was the reason that dinosaurs didn’t get bigger, even bigger because the conditions on earth were favorable towards it was that at some point their eggs reached this physical limits, that their eggs reached a size, the eggs were so big that that eggs need to breathe for the embryo to survive.

(01:16:52)
And their eggs reached a limit where in order to have a shell that could hold the mass of the liquid and the young dinosaur, if they got bigger, it wouldn’t be permeable anymore. And I thought that was so interesting because the entire size of physical creatures was determined by how thick shell can be before it breaks or before it can’t pass air through it.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:12)
Yeah. There might be a lot of the biophysics limits-
Paul Rosolie
(01:17:16)
That’s fascinating stuff.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:18)
… just like the interplay between biology, chemistry, and physics of a life form, because this thing there’s a lot involved in creating a single living organism that could survive in this world. And being big is not always good, being a big creature for many reasons. Like you were saying, the big creature seemed to be going extinct for many reasons, but in the human world is because they’re seen to be of higher value.
Paul Rosolie
(01:17:46)
Given the current size of the jungle, I think that the MVP, the pound-for-pound goat is ocelots. I mean you’re talking about a mid-size 40, 50-pound cat that can climb. That does, unlike a jaguar, a jaguar every time it hunts, it’s going after a deer. It catches a deer. The deer could hit it with its antlers, it could tear it with its hooves, it’s risking its life for that meal.

(01:18:11)
An ocelot, ocelots walk around at night and they climb a tree, eat a whole bunch of eggs, eat the mother bird too, kill a snake, maybe mess around and eat a baby caiman. They can have whatever they like and they’re sleek enough and smart enough to get away from predators. They don’t really have predators and so they occupy this perfect niche where they can hunt small prey in high quantity without taking on big risks.

(01:18:40)
And so if you had to choose an animal to be, it would probably be like an ocelot or I would say giant river otters, which are so damn cool because the locals call them lobos de rio, river wolves, because they’re so tough and they’re so social and they’re so like us, because they’re intensely familial groups.

(01:18:58)
They live in holes by the sides of lakes and they swim through the water and they catch fish all day long, piranhas. They eat them just like, the scales go flying as they eat these piranhas. And they’re so joyous in the way they swim and they have friends and they have family and I think we could relate to being a river otter, really, because I can’t picture being a cat and being so solitary and just marching along a 15-mile route and making sure there’s no other cats coming in on your territory and marking that territory.

(01:19:28)
It seems very solo and very cat like-
Lex Fridman
(01:19:33)
The lonely existence.
Paul Rosolie
(01:19:34)
Lonely existence.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:35)
And we humans are social beings.
Paul Rosolie
(01:19:36)
We’re so social. And so to me, river otter is like having a big Italian family. You’re constantly eating, you’re freaking out, just causing problems with the black caiman.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:44)
Take down a black caiman.
Paul Rosolie
(01:19:46)
Yeah. Start street fights.

Piranhas

Lex Fridman
(01:19:47)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a family thing. You mentioned piranhas.
Paul Rosolie
(01:19:50)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:51)
They’re a source of a lot of fear for people. What do you find beautiful and fascinating about these creatures? They’re also kind of social, or at least they hunt and operate in groups.
Paul Rosolie
(01:20:00)
Yeah. Not in the mammalian way though. Piranhas are in large schools, but fish are so different. I can talk to you all day about how much I’d love to be an otter. Also, going back to the fighting thing, otters and weasels muscle a day tend to be very loose in their skin. So if you grab an otter, it can still rotate around to bite you.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:00)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:20:20)
So it’s like if I grab you by the back, you’re stuck.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:22)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:20:23)
You grab them by the skin, they can rotate around and just shred you apart. So they’re really cool fighters. Piranha fish. I don’t identify with fish in terms like that. I think living out here has made me think of fish as a rapid food that can or can’t be gotten. To me, when I see a piranha, I think about how I want it to taste.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:50)
Yeah. So fish is a food source for so many creatures in the jungle.
Paul Rosolie
(01:20:55)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:55)
So they’re primarily a food source, but piranhas are-
Paul Rosolie
(01:20:58)
Predators.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:59)
I mean they’re predators. They’re serious predators.
Paul Rosolie
(01:21:01)
They are serious predators. I found a baby black caiman not that long ago, and he was missing all of his toes because the piranhas had eaten them off. It was really sad. He just had these stumps and he was swimming around the water and I was like, “You are not going to make it.”

(01:21:13)
He was like eight inches, and he was such a cute little puppy. He had those big eyes. And I was just like, “Man, you already are missing all your toes.” I was like, “It’s just a matter of time.” Now he can’t get away so some big agami heron is going to come and just nail him, pop him down his throat, and that’s the end of that for the caiman.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:29)
I mean nature is mental.
Paul Rosolie
(01:21:31)
Nature, sure, is mental.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:33)
Bite off a little bit, and then makes you vulnerable. And then that vulnerability is exploited by some other species, and then that’s it. That’s the end.
Paul Rosolie
(01:21:40)
But humans are brutal too. Like that story we heard about that guy the other day who caught a stingray on a fishing hook, chopped its tail off to make it safe for humans, cut a piece of the stingray off so he could use it for bait, and then threw the live fish back in the river.

(01:21:56)
To me, that is incomprehensible amounts of cruelty with flawed logic in every direction. If you’re going to use the thing as bait, use it as bait. If you’re going to remove its tail, well, then just kill it altogether.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:09)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:22:10)
Or if you want to save the animal and not kill it, then don’t maim it before you return it to its… It was such a weird-
Lex Fridman
(01:22:18)
So if you kill an animal, you want to use it to its fullest by using it as a food source, by cooking it, by eating every part of it, all that kind of stuff.
Paul Rosolie
(01:22:26)
Yeah. So we’ve been eating pacu in your time here.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:30)
Fried pacu is great. Fried pacu.
Paul Rosolie
(01:22:31)
Amazing. It’s delicious. Full of nutrients. You could tell it makes you healthy.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:34)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:22:34)
I feel like we have better workouts so that we can go harder in the jungle. And so a few months ago in August when the river was down, there was a day that the river was clear. And a friend of mine, Victor, who’s married to a native girl, he said, “It’s time to go pacu fishing.”

(01:22:52)
And at the time, we were stuck out here and we had no resupply. Everybody was busy. And so everyone was demoralized. The staff was hungry. We were hungry. And it really became this thing of like, “Hey, go catch us some pacu.”

(01:23:05)
They were working on the trails. They were installing the solar. We were working hard and we didn’t have food. And so we went out to the river, and what we did was we went up river, we camped on the beach, and in the morning, Victor’s wife was canoeing with the paddle, dead quiet. Don’t let the paddle touch the wooden boat.

(01:23:25)
Nikita was balancing in the middle of the thing, Victor’s on the front with this huge fishing rod, and I’m sitting there and he goes, “I’ll catch the first one. You catch the second one.” And he’s got this huge fishing rod and a piece of half rotten meat from the day before. And he’s smacking it against the water. 6:00 AM.

(01:23:40)
He’s just letting it smack against the water. And I’m going… And we’re floating down the river and I’m going, “This is not going to work.” And we’re floating and we’re floating, and a half hour passes and I’m going, “It’s dawn. I want to go back to sleep. I’m just not a morning person.”

(01:23:54)
And all of a sudden a fish hits that line, almost pulls this man off of his feet. And He swings the thing in. The fish comes on the boat. And then I realize he’s got a big metal mallet on the boat so that you could try to shut that fish off. And it’s this huge oar shaped, thick, muscular pacu.

(01:24:12)
And as soon as I saw that fish, I just thought, “Wow. The strongest of this species for millions of years have been swimming in this river, and suddenly we’ve…” Through this incredible combination of the boat, and the cord, and the hook, none of which we made, and the skill that he had from knowing how to fish a pacu, because otherwise there’s no chance that you’re getting that fish.

(01:24:36)
They hide. They’re very, very suspicious of what you’re doing. We had gotten this fish onto the boat and boom. You hammer it like a caveman. Boom. It doesn’t die. Boom. You have to crush its skull. And now you have this fish and you’re holding this genetic material, this sustenance for your life that has been developing since the dinosaur times.

(01:24:56)
It’s so beautiful. The act, the sacred act of eating that, of the fish, of the competition with the fish. And we spent the morning fishing. We got three pacus. Three huge giant vegetarian piranha. And I just remember touching them with so much reverence, thinking about the incredible history and how that before these rivers existed, those pacus were swimming through the water and trying to survive through history, through history, through history, until we took just a few.

(01:25:31)
And we did it respectfully and we did it when we needed it most, not at a time when it was just for fun and it was really, really special.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:38)
Well, humans, using them for sustenance, there’s a collaboration there. That’s something also that I’ve seen in the jungle. That there’s creatures using each other and it’s like a dance of either mutually using each other or it’s parasitic or symbiotic.

(01:25:55)
It’s interesting, there’s a medicinal plant you grabbed that was full of ants that were trying to murder you by biting. But they were defending the plant that they were using for whatever purpose, but there’s a clear dance there of the ants using the plant, and the plant existing, therefore other applications and other use for humans and there’s that circle of life happening. But the ants were defense…

(01:26:22)
So the plant didn’t have its own defense mechanism, the ants, the army of ants was there to protect the plant.
Paul Rosolie
(01:26:32)
Remember, we put our backpacks down at that one spot, and it was like the ants got on your backpack. And I said, “Oh, shit. This is that tree.” Did you actually get bitten by one of those? Because they’re incredibly painful, the tangarana one. They’re like-
Lex Fridman
(01:26:44)
Yeah. Surprisingly painful, because they’re small. Luckily, I have not been bitten by a bullet ant yet.
Paul Rosolie
(01:26:50)
But it’s amazing because they live inside the tree.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:51)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:26:54)
The tree comes standard with holes in it that allow ants to move and to exist safe, and it protects their eggs, and they protect the tree. And so we saw that spot where there was a perfect circle around the trees, because the ants had excavated the other vegetation so that those trees could have no competition to grow.

(01:27:15)
The incredible calculation of how ants know to come programmed to garden that tree, and the tree somehow has been genetically informed to have ant habitat within itself. It’s mind-blowing. And actually is the foundation of a lot of existential confusion for me, because how the hell is this possible?
Lex Fridman
(01:27:38)
Yeah. One of the things you mentioned that’s also a source of a lot of existential confusion for me is ants, and the intelligence of different creatures in the forest. There’s these giant colonies, there’s these just giant systems. But even just looking at a single colony of ants, them collaborating, leaf-cutter ants is an incredible system.

(01:28:00)
So individually, the ants seem kind of dumb and simplistic, but taken together, there is a vast intelligence operating that’s able to be robust and resilient in any kind of conditions, is able to figure out a new environment, is able to be resilient to any kinds of attacks and all that kind of stuff. What do you find beautiful about them?
Paul Rosolie
(01:28:21)
As you said, just leaf-cutter ants in this jungle.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:21)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:28:24)
That’s forgetting all the other hundreds of species of ants that are in this jungle. But just the leaf-cutters, apparently, digest roughly 17% of the total biomass of the forest, everything, all these giant trees, all that leaf litter, 17% of that, almost a fifth of this forest cycles through leaf-cutter ant colonies.

(01:28:45)
So they’re constantly regenerating the forest. They’re a huge source of the driver of this ecosystem. And so to me, when you see them working, it’s, again, like I said, you see your friends as you go through the jungle. You see all the K-POK trees. You see a cunea tree. So there’s leaf-cutter ants doing what they’re supposed to do. And it’s just so beautiful. I find them very beautiful army ants. They’re so tough. They’re so ready to fight. They have this huge mandibles. They’re just ready to, they’re transporting their eggs. They’re moving from here to there. Anything that’s in the way is getting eaten. They’re just savage and they’re kind of cute for that unless you’re tied to a tree.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:18)
The savagery is cute.
Paul Rosolie
(01:29:21)
Yeah. It’s reassuring. You want certain things to be tough. That’s their part.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:25)
Oh, that everybody plays a part in the entirety of the nature mechanism?
Paul Rosolie
(01:29:31)
And a powerful play.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:36)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:29:37)
But the army ants are so savage. If you step on army ants, they will all kamikaze just attack onto your feet and they’ll just sacrifice their own life for the good of the thing. And they’ll be trying to kill your shoes, and there’s something funny about that, to me. There’s something like kind of reassuring, again, unless, imagine if you’re going through the jungle and you slip and you fall and you twist your knee and you fall in just the right way, but you can’t get up.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:05)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:30:05)
You Can’t. You’re stuck there.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:07)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:30:08)
And then army ants find you.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:09)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:30:10)
They will take you apart. There are records of horses that have been tied up and army ants come and they’ll take out the whole horse.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:19)
Imagine the pain of that.
Paul Rosolie
(01:30:22)
It might be raining on us very hard very soon.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:25)
You want to pause?
Paul Rosolie
(01:30:26)
No. I think we’ll stay here until the ship goes down.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:29)
We should mention that there’s this one source of light and we’re shrouded in darkness.
Paul Rosolie
(01:30:33)
And now the night shift is going to take over soon, and we are in the Amazon rainforest.

Aliens

Lex Fridman
(01:30:38)
What does the rainforest represent to you when you zoom out and look at the entirety of it?
Paul Rosolie
(01:30:45)
Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot resonated with a lot of people. That everything you’ve ever heard of, all the heroes, all the villains, all of your ancestors, every achievement, tragedy, triumph, everything has happened on that one spot. This one tiny, tiny little rock that has life on it.

(01:31:06)
And to me, the rainforests represent the crown jewel of that as far as we know and to the best of our knowledge and with our shrewd scientific brains at their fullest capacity, this is still the only place that we know that has life. And given that, the fact that there are still these tropical, towering, complex ecosystems that we barely understand, crawling and full of the most incredible life.

(01:31:40)
To me, it’s so wonderful. It’s so incredible. The waterfalls and the birds and the macaws and the jaguars, it’s barely believable. If you were to theoretically tell a hypothetical alien, “I live on this planet and there’s just these places where everything is interconnected, everything means something to something else and the whole thing is this system that keeps us alive. And each tree is pumping air into the river, and there’s an invisible river above the actual river and the whole thing goes into stabilizing our global climate.”

(01:32:09)
And each little tiny leaf cutter ant somehow contributes to this giant, biotic orchestra that keeps us alive and makes our environment possible. That is beautiful. I love that. And so the rainforests to me are the greatest celebration of life and probably the greatest challenge for us as a global society because if we can’t protect the crown jewel, the best thing, the most beautiful part, then we’re really, really missing the point.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:38)
Yeah. The diversity of organisms here is the biggest celebration of life that is at the core of what makes earth a really special thing. That said, you and I have been arguing about aliens for pretty much the day I showed up.

(01:32:56)
All right. You brought a machete to this fight. Luckily, the table is long enough where-
Paul Rosolie
(01:33:02)
I can’t reach-
Lex Fridman
(01:33:03)
… you can’t reach me. To you earth is truly special.
Paul Rosolie
(01:33:07)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:08)
You don’t think there’s other earths out there, millions of other earths in our galaxy. When you look up, we were sitting in the Amazon River.
Paul Rosolie
(01:33:15)
Okay.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:16)
Dark, the storm rolled over and you started counting the stars.
Paul Rosolie
(01:33:19)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:20)
One, two, and that was once you can count the stars, that was a sign that the storm will actually pass. Eventually, it’ll pass. And that’s what you were doing, three, four, five and it’s going to pass. You’re not going to have to sit in that river for all night. So just a couple hours to keep yourself warm.

(01:33:35)
Okay. Each of those stars, there’s earth-like planets around them.
Paul Rosolie
(01:33:39)
Okay.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:41)
Why do you think there’s no alien civilizations there?
Paul Rosolie
(01:33:46)
You can write down a calculation on a napkin, you can cite different Hollywood movies, you can point up to the pieces of light in the stars, but if I talk about show me a single cell that’s not from this planet, it’s still not possible.

(01:34:01)
And so I agree with you that the likelihood is there, all indications point to it. It would be fascinating, especially if it was done, especially imagine finding a planet of alternative life forms, not necessarily even intelligent. Imagine just a planet of butterflies, whatever, something else.

(01:34:18)
That would be amazing, but I’m concerned with the reality that we have in front of us is that this is the spaceship. This is life.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:25)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:34:26)
And so right now given that reality, maybe that’s the case, maybe there are other planets or maybe we are the first, maybe life originated here, maybe God, the universe, whatever, maybe this is it. This is the testing ground for something bigger and this complexity and this diversity of life and this life that we have is that important.

(01:34:57)
And I think that part of what we do when we go, “Oh, yeah, but there’s other planets where…” First of all, we’re taking an assumption into reality without… I mean aliens right now are about as real as Santa Claus. We think they’re out there, but we’re not sure. Maybe a little more real because it could make sense.

(01:35:15)
No one has an alien. No one’s seen an alien. No one’s even seen cellular life. And so I’m not, again, if they showed up tomorrow, great. Let’s study them. But right now we have this very simple threat going on where we can’t stop killing each other in our living environment.

(01:35:33)
And so while some people can specialize in looking to the stars and to other planets and talk about being an interplanetary species. I’m very much concerned with the fact that here in our home turf, our living environment where the air is good and the rivers are clean and the trees are big and there’s macaws flying through the sky and salmon in the rivers, not only do we have a responsibility to each other and to our children to protect this incredible gift that is our entire reality.

(01:36:02)
It seems kind of weird too, at some point, conservation seems ridiculous. You’re begging people to not pollute the things that keep them alive. It’s almost silly at a point. But we have this incredible thing where there are fish in the ocean and in the rivers that come standard with life on earth. And we’re harming the ability of earth’s ecosystems to provide for that life.

(01:36:27)
And we are the generation that’s going to decide if those systems continue to provide life to all the people on earth and all the generations. And by the way, all the other animals that exist for their own reasons, other consciousnesses that we’re just beginning to understand, elephants, humpback whales, whatever, families of giant river otters, not everything can be seen from a human perspective. These are other species that have their own stories.

(01:36:55)
And so I’m more biocentric than anthropocentric in that I think that nature is important, but I also believe that we are special. We are the most intelligent animal.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:10)
So one, I agree with you, there’s some degree to which when you imagine aliens, you forget if for a moment how special and important life is here on Earth.
Paul Rosolie
(01:37:23)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:25)
But it’s also a way to reach out through curiosity in trying to understand what is intelligence, what is consciousness, what is exactly the thing that makes life on earth special?

(01:37:39)
Another way of doing that, and I see the jungle in that same way is basically treating the animals all around us, the life forms all around us as kinds of aliens. That’s a humbling way, that’s intellectual humility with which to approach the study of what the hell is going on here?
Paul Rosolie
(01:37:59)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:59)
This is truly incredible. Are the animals we’ve met over the last few days conscious? What is the nature of their intelligence? What is the nature of their consciousness? What motivates them? Are they individual creatures or are they actually part of the large system? And how large is the system? Is earth one big system and humans are just little fingertips of that system, or are each of the individual animals really the key actors and everything else is in the emerging complexity of the system?

(01:38:33)
So I think thinking about aliens is a necessary… I like my town with a little drop of poison from Tom Waits is a necessary perturbation of the system, of our thinking, to sort of say, “Hey, we don’t know what the fuck is going on around here.”
Paul Rosolie
(01:38:48)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:49)
And aliens is a nice way to say, “Okay. The mystery all around us is immense.” Because to me, likely, aliens are living among us. Not in a trivial sense, little green men, but the force that created life I think permeates the entirety of the universe. That there is a force that’s creative.
Paul Rosolie
(01:39:19)
Now the force that created life is a big one. And then the other thing is, what do you mean by that there’s aliens living among us? You mean extraterrestrials?
Lex Fridman
(01:39:31)
Yes.
Paul Rosolie
(01:39:32)
Living among us?
Lex Fridman
(01:39:33)
Yes.
Paul Rosolie
(01:39:35)
You believe that?
Lex Fridman
(01:39:37)
Not like 100%, but there’s a good percentage. I don’t how it’s possible for there not to be a very large number of alien civilization throughout just our galaxy.
Paul Rosolie
(01:39:51)
But that’s different than saying that they’re living among us. If you tell me that there’s aliens living five galaxies over and that they’re just out there somewhere, I’m more on your side than that they’re here, because just like Bigfoot, we have camera traps. We have DNA sequencing through water now.

(01:40:09)
You’re telling me no one found one wingnut of a ship in all… The Egyptians up until right now, no one in Russia saw a crashed ship, took a picture, tweeted that shit real quick and…
Lex Fridman
(01:40:23)
I think there’s no Bigfoot, there’s no trivial manifestations of aliens. I think if they’re here, they’re here in ways that are not comprehensible by humans, because they’re far more advanced than humans. They’re far more advanced than any life forms on earth.

(01:40:38)
So even if it’s just their probes, we cannot just even comprehend it. I think it’s possible that they operate in the space of ideas, for example, that ideas could be aliens, feelings could be aliens. Consciousness itself could be aliens.

(01:40:55)
So we can’t restrict our understanding of what is a life form to a thing that is a biological creature that operates via natural selection on this particular planet. It could be much, much, much more sophisticated. It could be in a space of computation, for example. As we in the 21st century are developing increasingly sophisticated computational systems with artificial intelligence, it could be operating on some other level that we can’t even imagine.

(01:41:23)
It could be operating on a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand. We barely understand quantum mechanics. We use it. Quantum mechanics is a way we used to make very accurate predictions, but to understand why it’s operating that way, we don’t. And there’s so many gigantic powerful cosmic entities out there that we detect, sometimes can’t detect, dark matter, dark energy, but it’s out there.

(01:41:53)
We know it exists, but we can’t explain why and what the fuck it is. We give it names, black holes and dark energy and dark matter, but those are all names for things that mathematical equations predict, but we don’t understand. And so all of that is just to say that aliens could be here in ways that are for now and maybe for a long time going to be impossible for humans to understand.
Paul Rosolie
(01:42:22)
So aliens in the strict biological sense, like horseshoe crabs, we agree that we haven’t found physical aliens?
Lex Fridman
(01:42:34)
The only way I can imagine finding physical aliens is if alien species, they’re trying to communicate with us humans or with other life forms, and are trying to figure out a way to communicate with us such that we dumb humans would understand. Let’s create a thing…
Paul Rosolie
(01:42:54)
There’s a moth the size of a small eagle.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:01)
That’s trying to get us 15 minutes of attention.
Paul Rosolie
(01:43:01)
It just might-
Lex Fridman
(01:43:05)
Big fan of the podcast.
Paul Rosolie
(01:43:06)
Okay. Lex, I love you. All right. So wouldn’t it be interesting, it’d be really fascinating to me if we found out that there were aliens living among us and we couldn’t see them. And what some of the people were calling aliens, the scientists, the religious people we’re calling angels.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:24)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:43:24)
And then everybody had this realization that whether you call them aliens or angels, there are these other, there is way more to the universe than we’re realizing. Just for me, the fact that there’s-
Lex Fridman
(01:43:40)
There’s a skull on the table.
Paul Rosolie
(01:43:41)
Yeah. There’s a skull on table.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:42)
There’s now a skull on your hand.
Paul Rosolie
(01:43:45)
There’s now a skull in my hand of a monkey with a bullet in its head that I found on the floor of an indigenous community where they eat monkeys. I didn’t kill the monkey, so save your comments. But in terms of the animals, I think that when I see space, my feeling, and I’m not requiring anybody else to have this feeling, but because we know, because it’s the only place that we know that there’s life and we have no idea how it started.

(01:44:15)
I just think it’s so important to protect it. And for me, it’s just as much about our children as it is about the little spider monkeys and the little baby caiman that are in the river right now, because life is so beautiful.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:28)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(01:44:29)
And I think that there’s a huge amount of intellectual responsibility that we can transfer off of ourselves if we go, “Yeah. The rivers are filled with trash and, yeah, extinction is happening, but we have to be an interplanetary species anyway, because at any moment this could all end from an asteroid and everything’s going to shit anyway, and so it’s like we’re fucking up this planet.”

(01:44:51)
And so we’re just being angry teenagers who are going goth for a while. And it’s like what if you just rolled up your sleeves, and said, “Holy shit. Wait a second. We can pretty much do whatever we want-“
Paul Rosolie
(01:45:00)
I said, holy shit, wait a second. We can pretty much do whatever we want. We can fly all over the world. We can do heart transplants, we can watch Netflix in the Amazon if we wanted to. We could do all this amazing stuff. We can capture on video our adventures and go back and watch them again and again and again. There’s so much incredible opportunity that technology has allowed us to do, and we’re the richest in history. We could do everything. We could cross the whole planet in a second, and it’s like, that’s an amazing time to be alive. And if we just don’t fuck up the ecosystems and kill all the other animals, we got it made.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:35)
It is true that we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, but it also is true that that snake that I got to handle yesterday is one of the most beautiful things Earth has ever created. In that little organism is encapsulated the entire history of Earth, and it’s beautiful. Both things are true. We should worry about the existential destruction of human civilization through the weapons we create, and we should become multi-planetary species as a backup for that purpose. But also remember, this place is really, really special and probably, if not difficult, probably impossible to recreate elsewhere. And by the way, there’s something incredibly powerful about a skull.
Paul Rosolie
(01:46:23)
If you ever hold a human skull, it’ll weigh on you for a sec because you look into the hollow eyes of this face and suddenly you go, you feel your own cheek, you feel your own skull, and you go, holy shit. You go, what is going on? It’s like taking acid. You just go, oh boy, I forgot that I’m a ghost inhabiting a meat vehicle on a floating rock.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:47)
But even a monkey, it’s like looking at a ancestor, not a direct ancestor, but it’s like you’re looking at a puddle, at a reflection.
Paul Rosolie
(01:47:05)
A little blurry, but it’s still living.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:06)
It’s a little blurry, but it’s still there. It’s still there. And the roots of who we are is still there, and it’s all incredible. Do you ever think of the tree of life, just where we came from?
Paul Rosolie
(01:47:19)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:20)
The jungle is ephemeral. It’s a system that just keeps forgetting because it’s just churning and churning and churning, and churning. It has, in some ways, no history. But to create the jungle, to create life on Earth, there’s a deep history of lots of death, sex and death.
Paul Rosolie
(01:47:39)
A festival of sex and death. Life on Earth.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:44)
That’s what I see in the skull.
Paul Rosolie
(01:47:47)
There’s something terrifying about that image to me. Every now and then at night, you hold that skull and it just reminds you that you’re temporary.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:58)
Yeah. Both you and I will one day have one of those.
Paul Rosolie
(01:48:01)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:06)
Mine will be bigger.
Paul Rosolie
(01:48:10)
My, God.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:11)
The male competition continues.
Paul Rosolie
(01:48:12)
The silverback slaps the lesser male once again.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:17)
Do you have a lighter?
Paul Rosolie
(01:48:18)
Yeah, bro. You want to light this blunt?

Elephants

Lex Fridman
(01:48:21)
Yeah. What are your favorite animals to interact with?
Paul Rosolie
(01:48:28)
My favorite, absolute favorite animal to interact with is 100% elephants, which there’s no elephants here, but I’ve been incredibly privileged to spend some time with elephants, both in India and in Africa. And I think that they’re so smart and so complex that we do a really bad job of understanding what an elephant really is.

(01:48:51)
I think that most children probably think of elephants as something cuddly. Most adults probably have a similar misconception of them. When you see an elephant, when you see a 12-foot tall bull elephant with bone coming out of its face with huge tusks and those giant… It’s an octopus faced butterfly eared behemoth that’s a survival machine. And it’ll look at you and just go, do I have to kill you to keep safe? And it’s just they’re so tough and they have dirt on their back and they have flower petals and the little hair. You realize they have hair all over their body. And the power to throw a car over, to flip it. Just one of the most impressive animals on Earth.

(01:49:36)
And I think that I’ve gotten really good at interacting with wild elephants in a way that’s respectful to them. And I think that when an elephant allows you to be in its space, it’s because you’re showing submissiveness and respect for the elephant’s space. And they’re so intelligent that they’re communicating with seismic vibrations through the Earth, that they have a matriarchal society, that they can remember the maps of their ancestors and they know how to find water, that they can solve problems. They’re such beautiful animals and they’re so… Talk about aliens. They’re so alien looking, these big, weird heads and the trunks with all those muscles.

(01:50:17)
And they’re so different than us, but yet I actually think that we grew up together. They raised us, sibling species, that we’ve inhabited the same epoch in history, and we’ve relied on the ecosystems that they’ve created. And I think that they have a deep understanding of humans, elephants, and I think I see them more like aliens, more like non-human beings that we share the Earth with. I don’t see it as we’re humans and they’re animals. I actually see elephants as a separate society along with humans as one of the dominant species on the planet.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:55)
Almost every species, especially the intelligent ones, especially the big ones, are their own societies that overlap and sometimes co-develop.
Paul Rosolie
(01:51:04)
Yeah, I think whales, I think elephants. I think that there’s those higher… No one’s suggesting that sardines somehow need human rights or something, but I think that elephants need representation in governments because they influence their landscape, they engineer their environment. They have emotions, they have families, they have burial rituals. They’re so like us, and yet we treat them like they’re just oversized cows that we have to be scared of. They’re not the same as domesticated livestock. They’re one of the treasures of Earth. Look, let’s just say little green men showed up and they said, well, what’s Earth? It’s, well, there’s mountains, there’s rivers. It’s, well, how do I do this? There’s mountains, rivers, there’s elephants. It’s one of the first things a baby learns is elephant, even if he’s never seen one. It’s just so iconic on Earth. Like you said-
Lex Fridman
(01:51:59)
Darren Aronofsky.
Paul Rosolie
(01:52:00)
… Darren Aronofsky, the elephant walking over the camera. I haven’t seen it. You said it’s incredible.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:05)
At the Sphere, the Postcard from Earth, it’s a celebration of Earth in all forms. And one of the critical big creatures in that film is an elephant. And it steps over the audience and the whole Sphere reverberates that power. Some of it is size, some of it is, how did Earth create this? It is a weird looking creature, but we take it for granted because we’ve accepted that this Earth can create this kind of thing, but it is weird, beautifully weird.
Paul Rosolie
(01:52:43)
Oh, it’s beautifully weird. Elephants, there’s something really impressive and wise about them. There’s also beautiful weird that doesn’t come with so much grandeur. To me, a giraffe is beautifully weird, but they’re 18 foot tall camel deer things with giant necks. And they’re strange, and they’re absolutely serenely beautiful, but they don’t have that deep intelligence that elephants have. There’s something that elephants have.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:13)
Do you see it in their eyes?
Paul Rosolie
(01:53:13)
You see it in their eyes.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:15)
How does the intelligence manifest itself?
Paul Rosolie
(01:53:18)
Well, this is the thing. A lot of people, a lot of when I was reading Frans de Waal’s book, a lot of what he was saying was that people give elephants human problems to solve in controlled environments and call it a study on elephant intelligence. Whereas if you’re watching wild elephants and you’re in the wild, you’re going to be watching them in a way that they’re looking… You’ve pulled up in a safari vehicle or you’ve pulled over to the side of the road and the elephants are wary of you so they’re not acting natural. But as soon as you start watching wild elephants, truly in the wild and comfortable with your presence, you see how they start caring for their babies or how they can get annoyed. I once watched elephants around a water hole, and there’s this warthog, and I don’t know why, but this warthog decided he needed to get in. And there was this young male elephant, and he kept turning around to this warthog and just being, don’t make me do it. Now, this elephant did not need to hurt the warthog. And the warthog was just, I need a drink, I need a drink, I need a drink. Much simpler brain. The elephant was, you could just tell. He was, watch this. And he just went and crushed the warthog like it was a big beetle, and crushed his pelvis. And the warthog dragged itself away on its front legs and probably went off to die. But this young elephant put out his ears and he paraded around with his tail up and he was, look what I did. Destruction. And it’s like, that’s a very relatable type of… He was annoyed with the warthog. And so you see them do these things.

(01:54:50)
The most magical thing, and I’ve spoken about this many times, was that I was walking with a herd of semi-wild elephants that were crossing through a village in India, because elephants have lost a lot of their territory because there’s so much population in India. And so we were crossing through a village, which is very delicate because the matriarchs are leading the babies, and there’s villagers who have no idea what an elephant is, and they’re watching the elephants cross. And the matriarchs backed this girl up against a wall, and she was terrified standing there with her back against the wall, and the elephant just put a trunk out and touched the girl’s stomach. And then the other elephants came and they all started touching her stomach. And the ranger there explained to me, he just went, ” She’s pregnant. They know she’s pregnant. They can smell, they can tell, and they’re curious.” And all the female elephants came to investigate the pregnant girl. And she had no idea what was going on. And so it’s like that stuff. That stuff…
Lex Fridman
(01:55:44)
And it’s cool to hear that with the crushing and the pride of a young elephant that there’s a complexity of behavior. It’s just like with humans.
Paul Rosolie
(01:55:55)
Yeah, it’s not always pretty.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:57)
That’s the thing, man. Humans are capable of good and evil, and sometimes we attach these words. I love that there’s just… It’s an orchestra of different sounds. And that one is sex.
Paul Rosolie
(01:56:13)
That’s a bamboo rat calling out for a mate.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:15)
A mate. All right.
Paul Rosolie
(01:56:16)
Good luck.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:18)
Good luck to you, buddy.
Paul Rosolie
(01:56:20)
Good hunting.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:23)
Humans are capable of evil things and beautiful things, and I wonder if animals are the same. You think there’s just different personalities and different life trajectories for animals as they develop in their understanding of social interaction, of survival, of maybe even primitive concepts of right and wrong within the social system. Do you think there’s a lot of diversity in personalities and behavior? Just like different people, is there different elephants?
Paul Rosolie
(01:57:02)
Of course. And what I really like is that you said, is there a perception of what’s right and wrong? Because elephants have a code of ethics. The simplest example is that as young males begin to grow, they start developing these tusks and those tusks are a tool and they use them. For Indian elephants, the females don’t have tusks and the males do. The females kick the males out of the herd. The females keep all the sisters and the aunts and the cousins together, but the males are their own thing.

(01:57:33)
And so here’s the thing. What you get is these crews of male elephants and the older males, there’s play fighting that goes on around, two young males can play fight, but the older males, they’ll kick some ass. They’ll show them how to behave, they’ll explain who gets to talk to the females, who gets to interact, who gets to mate, who gets the best vegetation to eat. And so there’s an order established and so young male elephants have to be taught how to act. Just like a teenage human, has to be taught you can’t just haul off and break another kid’s nose. There’s going to be consequences. Maybe you’ll get suspended or maybe that kid will get his friends and beat the living shit out of you. Whatever it is, society regulates your behavior. And elephants have a very strict, very predictable… The males teach the males how to run things, and the females, which really have the final say, they’re matriarchal, they’re the ones leading the herd where to go. The males follow where the wise females tell them where to go.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:37)
That regulation mechanisms from that emerges a moral system under which they operate what’s right and wrong?
Paul Rosolie
(01:58:46)
For an elephant, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:47)
For an elephant.
Paul Rosolie
(01:58:47)
Right and wrong for an elephant is not the same as what’s right and wrong for a grizzly bear. If you’re a male grizzly bear and you see a female with cubs, you just kill those cubs and then you can mate with her and put your own cubs in there. And that’s a whole different type of ethics.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:02)
The value of child life is different from species to species. Some of them hold it sacred, some of them not at all.
Paul Rosolie
(01:59:10)
And that’s why I think I resonate so much with elephants because I think that we are matriarchal, at least I grew up matriarchal, women were the force in my life. My family and most of my friends’ families, women have the final say. And I feel like that’s the way it is with elephants. You might be bigger and stronger, but it doesn’t really account for much if you’re not smarter and more emotionally intelligent and you know how to take care of the group.

Origin of life

Lex Fridman
(01:59:40)
Just to zoom out into the ridiculous questions as we were talking about aliens, there’s a lot of people trying to understand, trying to study the origin of life.
Paul Rosolie
(01:59:51)
Oh, I love this.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:53)
First of all, what do you think is life versus non-life? When you look at ants or even the simplest of organisms, we saw a frog in a stream yesterday, that was a leaf frog. It was as flat as a sheet of paper and it does a lot of weird things and it found a way to exist in this world. But that’s a single living organisms with a bunch of components to it, but there’s a life form that exists in this world. What is the difference between that and a rock? What is the essence of that life? This might be an unanswerable question. There’s probably a chemistry, physics, biology way of answering that. What to you is that?
Paul Rosolie
(02:00:40)
I think, to me, life is something that grows in response to stimuli, like in basic biology 101. And I’m fine with that. I don’t need it to be more romantic than that. But I think it’s actually comical, how do you get from a rock to an orangutan? And our answer for that is primordial soup. Maybe there was just stuff on Earth and then the stuff just got up and started walking. Maybe there was nothing happening and then all of a sudden there was a cell and the cell had function, and then it complexified and then it started reproducing and found male and female parts. What? We are so under equipped to understand how the hell we got here, let alone ants or even bacteria.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:32)
I see this in very simple mathematical models like something called game of life, they’re cellular automata. You can see from simple rules and simple objects when they’re interacting together, as you grow that system, complex objects arise. That emergence of complexity is not understood by science, by mathematics at all. And it seems like from primordial soups, you can get a lot of cool shit. And the force of getting from soup to two humans on microphones, not understood, and it seems to be a thing that happens on Earth. I tend to think that it’s a thing that happens everywhere in the universe, and there’s some deep force that’s pushing this along in some way. I don’t want to simplify it, but there is something that creates complexity out of simplicity that we don’t quite understand. And that’s the thing that created the first organism, living organism on Earth. That leap from no life to life on Earth, that’s a weird one.
Paul Rosolie
(02:02:52)
That’s a weird one. I think that, what, the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and you can imagine just this rock of a planet with rain and storms and elements and iron and granite and just random stuff. It’s pretty easy to imagine that. But then I remember that book, I think we all had the same book when we were kids, and they show this fish-like animal crawling out of the primordial soup, and it’s, bro, you just missed the most important part. Author of that book, bro. And I think the first bacteria came in around 3.7 billion years ago so there’s at least a bunch of billion years where there’s just nothing, it was just a planet. And then we start seeing fossils of the first bacteria.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:47)
And the bacteria stuck around for-
Paul Rosolie
(02:03:49)
Long time.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:49)
… a long time, a billion, 2 billion years. It’s just very, very long.
Paul Rosolie
(02:03:53)
Just bacteria.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:54)
Just bacteria. But a lot of them, a lot of them. There’s probably a lot of innovation, a lot of murder, a lot of interaction. And then there’s a few big leaps along the history of life on Earth. The predator-prey dynamic, that was a really cool innovation. It’s almost like innovations, like features on an iPhone. It’s nice. Predator-prey, eukaryotes, complex multicellular organisms emerging from the water to land. That was weird. That was an interesting innovation. Whatever led to humans, there’s a lot of interesting stuff there.
Paul Rosolie
(02:04:39)
See, I can’t even get that far. I can’t get from rock and sand to cells. That’s a huge… Everything around us that has cells, it’s wild. And I could imagine being on another planet and how incredibly valuable this thing would be. It’s impossible to replicate. I’m looking at it through the candlelight right now, and I can see all of the structures in this leaf, the incredible structures in this leaf that look exactly like the veins in my arm, which look exactly like the rivers that are flowing across this landscape. And it’s like life has this overwhelming pattern that it uses and it’s so beautiful. I just think it’s… When you imagine the days of the lightning and the volcanoes and the primordial soup, there’s a big gap there. And it’s fascinating to think about, and it’s fascinating to see how different people’s belief systems lead them to different answers there.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:43)
Not to give any spoilers, but Postcards from Earth, Darren Aronofsky’s film, the idea there is there’s probes that are sent out from Earth-
Paul Rosolie
(02:05:43)
Oh, that’s so cool.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:54)
… to all these other planets. And each probe contains two humans, a man and a woman, and those two humans are in love. Think of a couple in love. They’re sent there with all the information, basically a leaf that holds the information of what it takes to create life on other planets, to recreate an Earth on other planets. And the two humans hold all the information for the things that make life on Earth special, especially in human civilization, love, consciousness, the social connection. All that information is sent in the probe and the Postcard from Earth is those humans waking up, remembering all the information that is Earth, a celebration of all the things that make Earth magical throughout its history, all the diversity of organisms, all of that. You’re loading all that in to create life on that new planet, which is something I think alien civilizations are doing. They’re sending probes all throughout the galaxy and they just haven’t arrived yet, but anyway. That’s another…
Paul Rosolie
(02:07:01)
That’s so beautiful. I want to see that so much, and one of the things that I love about Aronofsky’s work is The Fountain. And what I find so beautiful about that is that now here he’s saying, okay, we’re sending probes out to other worlds, alien civilizations. And in The Fountain, it was what I thought he did so beautifully was braid together those three stories, where in one, I don’t remember if he’s in a spaceship or if that’s supposed to be his soul. The other one, he’s a scientist in comparable times to ours, and then he’s the Spanish Explorer. But either way, there’s the tree of life and it braids together all of the major religions.

(02:07:41)
And it made me think of that quote that you hear where it says… Oh God, what was it? “Christ wasn’t a Christian, and Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist, and Mohammed wasn’t a Muslim, they were all just teachers who are teaching love.” And it’s like The Fountain says, nature is that driving force and it’s our job to understand that the game is love. And that’s what the main character in The Fountain needs to learn is that it’s nature that’s going to carry your soul through this thing, and that there’s so much you don’t understand, and the epiphany at the end. God, I love that movie. God, I love that movie.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:15)
Among many things you’re also an artist is trying to convert the thing that is nature into the thing that we humans can understand, the complexity, the beauty of it. That’s what Darren Aronofsky tried to do with those couple of films. That’s something that I hope you do actually in a medium of film too, that would be very interesting. And you do that in a medium of books currently. How much do you think we understand about the history of life on Earth?
Paul Rosolie
(02:08:42)
I think we got it all wrong. N, I don’t know. It seems like they change it all the time. They say that Easter Island, when I was in college, they were big on telling you that Easter Island they ruined their environment and they had environmental collapse, and that’s why there’s nobody on Easter Island. It was a cautionary tale. We could ruin our environment. And now it seems like they’ve changed their mind on that.

(02:09:05)
And then when humans entered North America, seems to be hugely up to speculation. And Africa, that we all spread out of Africa, and then the Pleistocene Overkill Extinction theory, and it seems like every few years they update it and they change it and they say, “Oh, no, no, no, no. The guys from 10 years ago, actually my new theory is the best theory. Let’s write some books and get me on Letterman.” And it seems like there’s a new prevailing theory, that’s really always exciting and edgy, about how we got here and where we came from and how we dispersed and maybe even has some political implications like how we should use the Amazon moving forward. The Amazon was engineered by people, so fuck it, let’s just cut it down.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:47)
Yeah, I tend to believe that we mostly don’t understand anything, but there is an optimism in continuously figuring out the puzzle of that.
Paul Rosolie
(02:09:55)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:56)
We, offline, talked about the Graham Hancock, Flint Dibble debate on Rogan. I like debates personally. Flint Dibble represents mainstream archeology, and I actually like the whole science, the whole field of archeology. You’re trying to figure out history with so little information. You’re trying to put together this puzzle when you have so little and you’re desperately clinging onto little clues and from those clues using the simple possible explanation to understand. And now with modern technology, as Flint was trying to express, that you can use large amounts of data that’s imperfect, but just the scale and using that to reconstruct civilizations. There are different practices from the little details of what things they eat, how they interact with each other, what art they create to when they existed, what are the timeframes, all that kind of stuff.

(02:10:50)
And that starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding. But still, the error bars are large in terms of what really happened. And that leaves room for things like Graham Hancock talks about lost civilizations, which I like also because you have a humility about, maybe there’s giant things we don’t know about or we got completely wrong. And that’s always good to remember.
Paul Rosolie
(02:11:20)
It’s confusing to me to imagine what… I don’t even know, where’d the Egyptians go? What happened? It seemed like they were doing so good. They had so much cool shit. But I was reading anthropological stuff in the Amazon about tribes that just through their societal structures and through their hunting practices that didn’t really develop practices that worked and bands of people that went extinct before they could turn into larger societies. And there’s a lot of people that got it wrong. For every explorer that leaves Borneo and arrives in South America, there’s probably hundreds more that just die at sea, get eaten by sharks, avalanche. And it’s so fascinating to me that all of us really, past our grandparents, don’t really even know where we came from. Do you know who your great great great grandparents are?
Lex Fridman
(02:12:20)
No.
Paul Rosolie
(02:12:20)
No.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:21)
There’s methods of trying to figure that out, but really again, the error bars are so large that it’s almost like we trying to create a narrative that makes sense for us, that I’m 10% Neanderthal, therefore I can bench press this much and therefore my aggressive tendencies have an explanation. When in reality there’s so much diversity of personalities that they far overshadow any possible histories we might have.
Paul Rosolie
(02:12:48)
Your aggressive tendencies don’t have any explanation.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:51)
No, you listen to me right now.
Paul Rosolie
(02:12:54)
I’m sorry. Don’t hit me again. Don’t choke me out again.

Explorers

Lex Fridman
(02:12:58)
Yeah, man. One of the things you and I talk a lot about is different explorers. Who do you think is… I’m just throwing ridiculous question one after the other. Who do you think is the greatest explorer of all time?
Paul Rosolie
(02:13:11)
Oh God. I love Shackleton, but I hate the cold, so I can’t even read about it. I hate the cold so much. I can’t even go there for fun. I think Percy Fawcett in the Amazon was the GOAT in terms of just sheer… The last of the Victorian era, march forward, go deeper, just stop at nothing and then eventually take such big risks that you never come back. It’s hard for me to relate to that exploration because, to me, I’m such a softie, I wouldn’t want to leave my family behind, I wouldn’t want to… Even if you told me that I could leave Earth and go exploring and I could go touch the moon, I’d be, nope. Absolutely not. The highway is dangerous enough. I would never risk dying in space. This guy left his home, went out into the jungle, out there with horrendous gear compared to the camping gear we have today, no headlamp, and just explored for years on end.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:13)
Well, let me actually push back. You have that explorer. There is definitely a thing in you, just me having observed you behave in the jungle and in the world, you’re pulled towards exploration, towards adventure, towards the possibility of discovering something beautiful, including a small little creature or a whole new part of the rainforest, a part of the world that is, holy shit, this is beautiful. I think that’s the same imperative. Maybe not going out to the stars, but I could see you doing exactly the same thing. He disappeared in 1925 during an expedition to find an ancient lost city, which he and other people believed existed in the Amazon rainforest. There’s that pull, I’m going to go into there with shitty equipment with the possibility of finding something.
Paul Rosolie
(02:15:02)
And they said he ran into uncontacted tribes and started goofing off. I think he started dancing and singing. The tribes were ready to kill him, and he started goofing and doing a song and a dance and just being ridiculous. And the tribes were, what now? And they’re, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Don’t shoot him yet. That’s a funny one. And actually he, on a human level, used humor to save his own life on multiple occasions, to the point where he deescalated the situation where it was, “Look, we’re not here to fight. We have a pile of maps. All my guys have beriberi, dengue, malaria. We’re dying out here. If you guys just go on your merry way, we’ll go on our merry way.” Incredible. He was so tough.

(02:15:45)
And then that guy from Shackleton’s Expedition ended up on one of Fawcett’s expeditions and you go, oh yeah, he’s a proven explorer. He’s been through the Antarctic. And the guy was, fuck the jungle. Absolutely fuck the jungle. And there’s a great quote where he says, ” Without a machete…,” something, I don’t remember exactly the words he used, but he said, “Without a machete in this environment, you don’t last.” And you know that now. In that tangle, to just take three steps that way, I would immediately be taking on… I’m not wearing shoes right now. Bullet ants, venomous snakes, spikes through my feet, tripping over myself. I don’t have a headlamp. Unbelievable risk right there. We’re sitting on the edge of tragedy.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:29)
Can you explain what the purpose of the machete in this situation is? What is a machete? How does it work? How does it allow you to navigate in this exceptionally dense environment?
Paul Rosolie
(02:16:40)
This is the tool that I spend most of my life carrying. This is in my hand for 90% of my time. And in the jungle, you really need a machete. There’s so much plant life here that you have to cut your way through. And like a jaguar, an ocelot, a lot of these other animals that are more horizontally based and low to the ground, they can make it. Like when we got stuck in those bamboo patches and we were just hacking through them. And it’s dangerous, and as you hit the bamboo it ricochets and there’s spikes, and then one piece falls and it pulls a vine that has spikes on it, and that hits you in the neck. The jungle is savage to humans.

(02:17:19)
But if you are an agouti, a little rodent, or a jaguar, or a deer, you can slip through this stuff. And the deer have developed really small antlers, they can just weave through low to the ground. And so for us being these vertical beings walking through the jungle, it really helps to be able to move the sticks that are diagonally opposing your movement at all times, so a machete is just a very, very useful tool. It can help you pull thorns out of your body. As you saw last night, we can use it to find food.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:50)
You went machete fishing. You cut a fish head off with a machete. It was swimming and then you basically macheted the water. And the other fascinating thing about that fish without its head, it kept moving.
Paul Rosolie
(02:18:09)
That was amazing.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:10)
It was just using, I guess, its nervous system to swim beautifully. There’s so many questions there about how nature works.
Paul Rosolie
(02:18:17)
Well, let’s explain it, because the way the machete hit this fish, it took just his eyes off and his lower jaw was still there, so it was really just the brain and the top jaw that came off. And this fish, as the dust cleared in this stream, this fish was… I found it very haunting in a very interstellar way. It was just the programming was still there, but the brain was gone and the fish was just still moving and it was going to die, but it was still swimming and it looked like a live fish. It was gruesome.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:46)
And you’re still trying to catch it, which is interesting to watch.
Paul Rosolie
(02:18:48)
And I still had to work to catch it. Because every time I caught it would freak out and then it would jump back in the water. And I’m programmed here from years and years of living in the Amazon that everything can hurt you so you actually become quite… If a moth lands on, you flick it because it could be a bullet ant. And so even the fish here, a lot of the fish here have spikes coming out of them. And so even though I know that fish, I know its name, I’ve eaten them many times, as I was holding it, when it would twitch with that explosive power, just like the Cayman, I would get that fear response and release it. And so that happened three or four times before I finally said, this is stupid. Even though he’s slippery, he hasn’t got a head. I can hold onto him and I put them in my pocket.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:26)
Put him in your pocket.
Paul Rosolie
(02:19:27)
And then we fried him up and we ate him.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:28)
And he was delicious. And I’m grateful for his existence, of his role, and for my existence on this planet, this brief existence that I was able to enjoy that delicious, delicious fish. The machete is used to cut through this extremely dense jungle. There’s vines, by the way. There’s rope like things that are extremely strong and they go all kinds of directions. They go horizontal and all of this. We have a tree right above us that makes no sense. There’s a tree that failed, and then a new tree was created on top of…
Lex Fridman
(02:20:00)
… failed and then a new tree was created on top of it. It just makes no sense. It feels like sometimes trees come from the sky, sometimes they come from the ground. I don’t really quite understand how that works because there’s new trees that grow on old trees and the old trees rot away and the new trees come up, that whole mechanism.
Paul Rosolie
(02:20:23)
Strangler figs. And so strangler figs, as you go across the world’s ecosystems, that whole belt of, whether you’re in rainforests in the Amazon, the Congo Indonesia, all across the tropics you have strangler figs. And the amazing thing that this species does, it’s become a keystone species across the planet with a hyper influence on its ecosystem wherever it is, because they produce fruit in the dry season when the rest of the forest is making it hard for animals to find fruit, to find food. And so the bats, the birds, the monkeys, they all go to the strangler fig. They eat the fruit. And the fruit, of course, is just tricking the animals. The plants are tricking the animals into carrying their seeds to another tree. And so they’re getting free transportation.

(02:21:07)
Monkey takes a poop on another tree after eating strangler figs, and then that strangler fig sends out its vines, gets to the ground, and then, as soon as it begins sucking up nutrients, out competes that tree for light grows hyper drive around the trunk of that tree and then eventually that tree will die and the strangler fig will win because it got a boost up to the top. Whereas these little trees down here, they’re going to have to wait their turn. They have to wait until a tree falls until there’s a light gap and then they have enough food to grow quick. And so this whole thing is an energy economy. Everything is just trying to get sunlight. And so strangler figs, yeah, top-down trees growing, parasitic top-down octopus trees growing over other giant trees. And you’ve seen the size of some of the trees here.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:53)
So back to Percy Fawcett and exploration. What do you think it was like for him back then 100 years ago, God damn, going through the jungle?
Paul Rosolie
(02:22:02)
Well, see, the thing is those guys didn’t go with the locals. They came down here with mules and they tried to do it their way. And so he’s one of the people that wrote about the green hell, the jungle as the oppressive war zone where there’s nothing to eat and everything is killing you. I think that, that image is so wrong because, as you saw last night, we could go. If we went out with JJ right now, we would machete fish some fish, we could start a little fire, we’d do it all in shorts. To JJ, it’s green paradise, and it’s intense, but if you know what you’re doing, which the local people surely do, well then, just beneath the sand, there’s turtle eggs that you can eat and inside the nuts on the ground there’s grubs that you can eat. And if you really needed to, you could just jump on a caiman and eat that because their tails are pretty full of meat and it’s like there’s actually unending amounts of food here. They were a strange bunch.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:08)
If you’re able to tune into that frequency, I feel like you and JJ are able to tune into the frequency of the jungle that is a provider, not a destroyer of human life. I think to be collaborated with, not fought against.
Paul Rosolie
(02:23:30)
Yes, but we’re coming at that with our modern lens because we’re coming down here with, I’ve survived how many infections in the jungle where those probably would’ve killed me before. So my dead-ass opinion of the jungle would’ve been “overwhelming and collective murder, as Herzog says. And so Percy Fawcett was coming down here with this view of it’s trying to kill us at all times. We are flying down here and coming out here with our superior medicines and our ability to survive infections, and so it is different for us. It is different. We’re coming at this very, very different. But Fawcett to me was the last of the real swashbucklers, the really batshit crazy explorers that just went out into the dark spaces on the map.

(02:24:17)
And it’s very hard for me to identify with him. But. For instance, Richard Evans Schultes from Harvard, that’s someone where you go, okay, now we’re getting to the point where I can start to understand. Just like the conquistadors. And they tell you the conquistadors showed up, the Spanish killed 2,000 Inca on the first day, and then they marched to this city and can you imagine yourself just slaughtering a bunch of women and children and soldiers and then just drinking some wine and doing it again tomorrow? I can’t actually wrap my head around that.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:52)
Yeah, it just seems like an entire different world. No.
Paul Rosolie
(02:24:57)
Different world.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:57)
Different value system.
Paul Rosolie
(02:24:59)
Different value system.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:00)
A different relationship with violence and life and death I think. We value life more. We resist violence more.
Paul Rosolie
(02:25:08)
Yeah. If we saw a car accident, I feel like if I saw a car accident or if you see a little bit of war, some violence, it affects you. These people were so comfortable with those things. It was such a normal part of their… The Spartans, the Comanches, they became so comfortable with war to the point that it became what they did as a culture.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:33)
And they celebrated it too.
Paul Rosolie
(02:25:34)
They celebrated it.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:35)
And direct violence too, like taking that machete and murdering me, or if I got to the machete first me murdering you.
Paul Rosolie
(02:25:42)
Not a chance, bitch.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:44)
And then I would put it on Instagram show off. And the number of DMs I would get from murdering you with a machete.
Paul Rosolie
(02:25:52)
Meanwhile, half the world right now is messaging me saying, “My DMs are filled with take care of Lex. Don’t lose Lex. Make sure Lex comes back safe. Lex is a national treasure. We love Lex. Make sure he holds a snake.” The amount of love that is out there.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:06)
Meanwhile, I emerge from the jungle with blood around me with a machete and I take over the Instagram account.
Paul Rosolie
(02:26:11)
He’s very humble. He doesn’t want hear about the love.

Ayahuasca

Lex Fridman
(02:26:15)
All right, so what do you think makes a great explorer, whether it’s Percy Fawcett, Richard Evans Schultes? By the way, I’ll say who Richard Evans Schultes is. He’s a biologist. So that’s another lens through which to be an explorer, is to study the biology, the immense diversity of biological life all around us.
Paul Rosolie
(02:26:36)
Richard Evans Schultes, I know about him from reading Wade Davis’s book, One River, which is this big, hefty 500 or 600 page tome about the Amazon, and it covers two stories. It’s Richard Evans Schultes, and I think it’s in the ’40s. I think it’s pre-World War Two era era where he’s in the Amazon looking for the blue orchid and the cure for this and that, and he’s pressing plants and he’s going to these Indigenous communities where they still live completely with the forest and they drink ayahuasca and they talk to the gods and he learns about how they believe that the Anaconda came down from the Milky Way and swam across the land and created the rivers. He came down and even though he was a western scientist from Harvard, he embraced the Indigenous perspective on the world, on creation, on spirituality.

(02:27:28)
And he resigned himself and gave himself fully to that and spent years and years traveling around parts of the Amazon that had hardly been explored and certainly never been explored in the way he was doing it, and the ethno botanical spiritual way of what medicinal compounds are contained in these plants and how do the local Indigenous people use and understand them? For example, of 80,000 species of plants in the Amazon rainforest and 400 billion trees in the Amazon rainforest, the statistics of likelihood that through trial and error that humans could discover ayahuasca, it’s astronomical, that one of these trees and a root when put together allow you to go and access the spirit realm and see hallucinogenic shapes and talk to the gods.

(02:28:21)
That’s almost enough to inspire spiritual thought itself, the fact that trial and error, it would take millions of years or something. I forget what the figure is, it’s incredible. But Richard Evans Schultes was one of the first people that came down and saw that. And then One River is where Wade Davis comes back, I believe, in the ’70s. And the heartbreak of the book is that all of these incredibly wild places with naked native tribes and these intact belief systems, Wade Davis comes back and a lot of the same places that Schultes went, now there’s missionary schools and they’re wearing discarded Nikes and whatever. I don’t know if there’s Nikes in the ’70s, but Western stuff has made it in. They’ve been contacted, domesticated, forced into Western society, and a lot of them then forget the thousands and thousands of years that have gone into creating the medicinal botanical knowledge that the Indigenous possess about how to cure ear infections and how to treat illnesses from the medicinal compounds flowing through these trees is lost in a single generation with the modernization.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:38)
Yeah, he wrote The Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred Healing and the Hallucinogenic Powers. That is interesting. You mentioned how to discover that. How do you find those incredible plans, those incredible things that can warp your mind in all kinds of ways? Of course, physically heal, but also take you on a mental journey. That’s interesting. So you don’t think trial and error is possible?
Paul Rosolie
(02:30:05)
I was reading about ayahuasca and they were saying statistically, if you put 1,000 humans in the Amazon and gave them villages to live in, because humans are a communal species, it would take tens and tens of thousands of years or perhaps even centuries before even the possibility. It’s like that thing, a bunch of chips on a keyboard how they write Hamlet. It’s astronomical odds to get to, oh wait, this and this dose together. What the local people believe is that the gods revealed this secret through the jungle to us as a link to the spirit world, and that that’s how we know this. Because if they didn’t remember it from their ancestors, we would have no idea how to get this information from the wild.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:55)
So I will likely do ayahuasca. What do you think exists in the spirit world that could be found by taking that journey?
Paul Rosolie
(02:31:10)
I think that ayahuasca is, I can only speak from personal experience, and for me it was as if your brain is a house you’ve lived in your entire life and it’s a big house, it’s a mansion, and there’s many, many rooms that you didn’t even know exist. Hidden rooms behind the bookshelves, under the floorboards, rooms that you had no idea were there. And some of them are fantastic and some of them are terrifying basements. And ayahuasca takes you on a journey through that. At its most effective, you sit in front of the shaman with the candlelight, with the sounds of the jungle, and you drink this substance. And after that, what happens is the journey is all inside and the shaman is supposed to be able to guide you through that.

(02:32:04)
But in my experience, you’re so deep inside like falling through nebulas out in space. No physical form. Or crawling through the jungle. It’s really, really powerful. It’s not like the recreational drugs that everyone does where you go, “I did mushrooms and I could see music and I was talking to my friends.” But no, you’re face down on the floor, usually vomiting, sometimes shitting, having dialogues with the creator. And that can be traumatizing as well as amazing.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:41)
It’s a really good way of looking at it. It’s a big house and you get to open doors that you never had before and discover what rooms are there inside you. You ever think about that, that there’s parts of yourself you haven’t discovered yet or maybe you’ve been suppressing? How much are you exploring the shadow?
Paul Rosolie
(02:33:00)
Oh, boy.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:00)
So say you, me, Carl Jung, and Jordan Peterson are on a deserted island together.
Paul Rosolie
(02:33:05)
Fuck. I didn’t even make my bed today.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:08)
There’s no bed in an island.
Paul Rosolie
(02:33:09)
Great. I want to see you and Jordan Peterson do Ayahuasca together. I think that’s the thing. Ayahuasca, to me, I’ve told you about, I’ve experienced some things that really made me believe that there’s a benevolent force around us, but to me, Ayahuasca was a ride through the scariest parts of the universe to be like, here’s what it could be like. That’s where I came up with my idea that deep space or just space, outer space is just the outside of the video game. And this is it. Because when I was on Ayahuasca, I was one of the jungle creatures and I wasn’t Paul and I didn’t have a name. And for a long time I saw many things.

(02:34:02)
I arrived at this spot in the jungle where there’s a big tree and all the animals were there and they were all, not in words, not in any language that we can understand, but they were all discussing what to do about the threat. It was all leaving. It was all flying up, and it was fire and the jungle was being destroyed. And then after that it was just space and stars and silence, crushing vacuum silence for years. And that was terrifying. That was fucking terrifying. When I came back and I had hands, man, I could remember my own name.

Deep jungle expedition

Lex Fridman
(02:34:37)
You grounded. Things are simpler. You’re back inside the video game. What are the chances you think we’re actually living in a video game?
Paul Rosolie
(02:34:46)
When you say a video game, it implies that there’s a player. Who’s the player? It’s God?
Lex Fridman
(02:34:50)
No. There’s a main player, usually. That’s not going to be God. God is the thing that creates the video game.
Paul Rosolie
(02:34:54)
So then we’re just…
Lex Fridman
(02:34:55)
And then some of these are NPCs. I’m an NPC.
Paul Rosolie
(02:34:59)
You’re an NPC? Jesus Christ. So I’m the main character?
Lex Fridman
(02:35:01)
Yeah, you created me.
Paul Rosolie
(02:35:03)
Is this Halo where you can kill the NPCs?
Lex Fridman
(02:35:07)
I see how you put the machete behind you.
Paul Rosolie
(02:35:09)
Okay, I think I’m just going to take a stand here. I’m just sick of fucking playing it halfway. I think that because people live indoors in climate controlled boxes in cities far away from nature, they’ve completely lost track of everything that’s real. And they’ve started to think that we’re living inside of a simulation. Notice that nobody carrying an alpaca up a mountain thinks that we’re living inside of a video game. They all know that it’s real because they’ve had babies on the floor of a cold hut.

(02:35:35)
They understand the consequences of life. They understand the fish and how hard it is to get them and the basic rules of the wind and the rain and the river and that we all have to play by those. Talk to a grieving mother and ask her if she’s living inside a video game. And to me, this whole thing of, are we living in a simulation, to me, that’s the infirmary of society starting to parody itself. It’s people going, “I have no meaning in my life anymore. So is this even real?” And again, go ask the Sherpa, go ask the Eskimo. They’re not worried.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:16)
You forget what fundamentally matters in life. What is the source of meaning in a human life, if you talk about such subjects. Nevertheless, you could for a time stroll in the big philosophical questions. And if you do it for short enough a time, you won’t forget about the things that matter, that there is human suffering, that there is real human joy that is real. Our time in the jungle was very hard.
Paul Rosolie
(02:36:50)
Did you suffer enough to know that it’s real?
Lex Fridman
(02:36:52)
Yeah. Man, I was hoping we were in a video game that whole time.
Paul Rosolie
(02:36:57)
That’s actually a really good way to… There was this moment that I watched where you were washing a shirt in this pathetic puddle because we had no water and because we had walked all day and tripped all day and gotten thorns in our hands and our feet and our legs, and we were lost in the jungle and it was nighttime and we didn’t know if a big tree was going to just fall on us and mousetrap kill us. There was a lot of uncertainty, but I watched something very special happen to you, and that was, I saw you crouching by the side of this puddle, it wasn’t even a flowing stream, so we couldn’t drink it, and you were just trying to wash the sweat off of your shirt. And you looked at me and you just said, “The only thing that I care about right now is water.” And I feel like in that moment we were united in the simple reality of the fact that we were so thirsty that it hurt and that it was a little scary.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:55)
Yeah, it was scary. But also there was a joy in the interaction with the water because it cools your body temperature down and there’s a faith in that interaction that eventually we’ll find clean water because water’s plentiful on earth. It’s like a delusional faith that eventually we’ll find. It was just a little celebration. I think the cooling aspect of the water, because the body temperature is really high from traversing the really dense jungle, just the cooling was somehow grounding in a way that nothing else really is. It was a little celebration of life, of life on earth, of earth, of the jungle, of everything. It was a nice moment. I think about that. Had a couple of those. There was one in the puddle and one in the river. One was full of delusion and fear, and the other one was full of relief and celebration.
Paul Rosolie
(02:39:09)
There’s this thing that they say where all the pleasure in life is derived from the transitions. When you’re cold, warm feels good. When you’re hot, cold feels good. When you’re hungry, food feels good. And when you’re that thirsty, water becomes God and it’s all you want. And also the other thing is that, when we’re out there, it felt so good to be so lost and so tired. How would you describe the physicality of what we were doing, the level of physical exertion?
Lex Fridman
(02:39:44)
Well, it’s something that I haven’t trained. I don’t even know how you would train for that kind of thing, but it’s extremely dense jungle so every single step is completely unpredictable in terms of the terrain your foot interacts with. So the different variety of slippery that is on the jungle floor is fascinating. Because some things, the slope matters, but some roots of trees are slippery, some are not. Some trees in the ground are already rotted through so if you step through, you’re going to potentially fall through. It could be a shallow hole. It could be a very deep hole with some leaves and vegetation covering up a hole where, if you fall through, you could break a leg and completely lose your footing or fall rolling downhill. And if you roll downhill, I’m pretty sure there’s a 99% probability that you’ll hit a thing with spikes on it.

(02:40:42)
So there’s so many layers of avoiding dangers, of small dangers and big dangers, all around you with every single step. So there’s a mental exhaustion that sets in, just the perception. And just observing you, you’re extremely good at perceiving, having situational awareness, of taking the information in that’s really important and filtering out the stuff that’s not important. But even for you, that’s exhausting. And, for me, it was completely exhausting just paying attention, paying attention to everything around you. So that exhaustion was surprising. Because there’s moments when you’re like, “I don’t give a anymore. I’m just going to step. I’m just going to [inaudible 02:41:22].”
Paul Rosolie
(02:41:21)
And so that’s it. You go, “I don’t care anymore,” and you reach out, and I’m just going to lean against this tree. And then what happened every time?
Lex Fridman
(02:41:28)
You get spikes in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(02:41:29)
And then you have to care.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:32)
And then there’s just bad luck because there is wasp nests. There’s just a million things. And that is physically, is mentally, psychologically exhausting, because there’s the uncertainty, when is this going to end? It’s, in our particular situation, up and down hills, up and down hills, very steep downward, very steep upward, no water, all this kind of stuff. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, but it’s very difficult to describe what are the parameters that make it difficult because I run long distances very regular. I do extremely difficult physical things regularly that on some surface level could seem much more challenging than what we did. But no, this was another beast. This is something else but it was also raw and real and beautiful because it’s what the explorers did. It’s what earth is without humans.

(02:42:25)
And also just the massive scale of the trees around us was the humbling size difference between human and tree. It’s both humbling in that, “That tree is really old. It’s the time difference, lifetime difference, and just the scale, it’s like, holy shit. We live on an earth that can create those things. Makes me feel small in every way, that life is short, that my physical presence on this earth is tiny, how vulnerable I am. All of those feelings were there. And in that, the physical endurance of traversing the jungle was the hardest journey that I remember ever taking, every step. And then that made making it out of the jungle and then made it the swim in the water that we could drink, that was just pure joy.

(02:43:40)
It was probably one of the happiest moments in my life just sitting there with you, Paul, and with JJ in the water, full darkness, the rain coming down and us all just laughing having made it through that, having eaten a bit of food before and the absurdity of the timing of all of it that it somehow worked out. And how we’re just three little humans sitting in a river. Just our heads emerged barely above water with jungle all around us. What a life.
Paul Rosolie
(02:44:30)
That was a real adventure.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:32)
That was a real adventure.
Paul Rosolie
(02:44:33)
That was a real one.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:33)
Yeah. I’ll never forget that. So it’s a real honor to have shared that. Of course, we had very different experiences. When you saw a caiman in that situation, you’re like, “I have to go meet that guy. That’s a friend of mine.”
Paul Rosolie
(02:44:50)
Well, I mean we were in the river in a thunderstorm, just our necks above, we’re all laughing our asses off. I mean, we’re in the river with the stingrays and the black caiman and the piranha and all the electric eels and everything, and it’s pitch black out. And then, what were we doing? We’re holding our headlamps up and there were those swirling moths, the infinity moths, all making those geometric patterns. And it’s like we were just three ridiculous primates, three friends in a river, just laughing because we were safer in that river than we had been in there. And we were rejoicing that the thunderstorm was, compared to the war zone that we’d been living in, the thunderstorm was safe. And it really was a beautiful moment.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:32)
And also, very different life trajectories have taken these three humans into this one place.
Paul Rosolie
(02:45:38)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:39)
It’s like, what?
Paul Rosolie
(02:45:40)
Yeah. That’s true.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:41)
Wow. Is this the universe that would? Because we’re like those moths, you know what I mean? We come from some weird place on this earth and we’d have all kinds of shit happen to us and we’re all pursuing some and some light, and we ended up here together enjoying this moment. That’s something else. It just felt absurd, and in that absurdity was this real human joy. And damn, water tasted good.
Paul Rosolie
(02:46:07)
Oh, water’s good. Man, water and those little oranges, those things. And then I would just say, do you feel, I feel like running, no matter how much I run, I feel like you run, you do a workout, and then you stop. Maybe people who do ultras feel this, but I felt like we woke up, it was like, wake up at dawn. 6:00 a.m, let’s start walking. Break camp, go. And it’s like pretty much you just don’t stop all day. And it’s level 10 cardio all day long and you’re sweating buckets and there’s no water. And it’s like you would never put yourself through that voluntarily. You couldn’t. You would never have the resolve to continue torturing yourself, except for that we were trying to make it to freedom to get out. And it’s like the obsession of that with the compass and the machete and the navigating, fuck.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:01)
I think there’s something to be said about the fact that we didn’t think through much of that and we just dived into it. I think we were laughing, enjoying ourselves moments before, and once you go in you’re like, “Oh shit.”
Paul Rosolie
(02:47:13)
Oh shit.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:14)
And you just come face to face with it.
Paul Rosolie
(02:47:15)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:16)
I think that whatever that is in humans that goes to that, that’s what the explorers do. And the best of them do it to the extreme levels.
Paul Rosolie
(02:47:28)
Well, I think that what we did was to a pretty extreme level because we left the safety of a river, of knowing where we were, and voluntarily got lost in the Amazon with very little provisions on a very, now that we’re back, now that we experienced what we experienced, I really can’t stop thinking about how fucking stupid it was that we did that. Because if we had gotten lost, Pico was saying to me, “If one of you had broken your leg, it’s days in either direction.” Even if they had sent help for us, help would take how long to scour all that jungle? Sound doesn’t travel. Even a helicopter, even if they looked for us, they wouldn’t be able to see us. How would we signal for help?

(02:48:15)
You can’t really build a fire. And so it’s like, if anything had gone wrong, if we’d gone a few degrees different to the west, would’ve taken us two more days. If we’d gotten injured, it’d be carry through that. And so somehow only afterwards am I really going, wow, thank God we got out of this. Thank God. After I see so many people going, make sure nothing happens to Lex Friedman, I’d be the deadest motherfucker on earth if anything happened.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:44)
It somehow works out.
Paul Rosolie
(02:48:46)
It does seem to somehow work out.

Jane Goodall

Lex Fridman
(02:48:48)
Let me ask you about Jane, Goodall, another explorer of a different kind. What do you think about her, about her role in understanding this natural world of ours?
Paul Rosolie
(02:48:59)
I think that Jane is a living historical treasure. I think somehow she’s alive, but she’s already reached that level where it’s like Einstein, Jane Goodall, there’s these incredible minds. And growing up as a child, my parents would read to me because I was so dyslexic. I didn’t learn to read until I was quite old. And my mom was a big Jane Goodall fan and all I wanted to hear about was animals. And so I would get read to about this lady named Jane Goodall, this girl who went to Africa and studied chimps and who broke all the rules and named her study subjects even though that wasn’t what she was supposed to do and she became this incredible advocate for earth and for ecosystems. And she seemed to realize as her career went on that teaching children to appreciate nature was the key.

(02:49:54)
Because they’re going, that thing where she says, “We don’t so much inherit the earth from our ancestors, but borrow it from our children. We’re just here. We’re just passing through.” And so if we destroy it, we’re dimming the lights on the lives of future generations. And so she’s been really, really cognizant of that. And she’s been a light in the darkness in terms of saying that animals have personalities and culture and their own inalienable rights and reasons for existing and that human life is valuable. She’s very big on that. Every day we influence the people around us and the events of the earth, even if you feel like your life is small and insignificant, that you do have an impact. And I think that’s a really powerful little candle out there in the darkness that Jane carries.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:44)
What do you think about her field work with the chimps?
Paul Rosolie
(02:50:48)
Badass. The fact that she did what she did at the age that she did at the time that she did is incredible. It’s actually incredible. She has that explorer gene, and she also has that relentless. Relentlessness is this incredible quality. She travels 300 days a year educating people, talking around the world, trying to help bolster conservation now before it’s too late. And traveling 300 days a year is not fun. Traveling at all can be not fun.

Theodore Roosevelt

Lex Fridman
(02:51:20)
So I started reading the River of Doubt book you recommended to me on Teddy Roosevelt. That guy is badass on many levels, but I didn’t realize how much of a naturalist he was, how much of a scholar of the natural world he was. That book details his journey into the Amazon jungle. What do you find inspiring about Teddy Roosevelt and that whole journey of just saying, “Fuck it. I’m going to the Amazon jungle,” of taking on that expedition?
Paul Rosolie
(02:51:50)
Well, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, you could write volumes on what’s inspiring about him. I think that he was a weak, asthmatic, little rich kid that wasn’t physically able, that had no self-confidence, and he had pretty severe depression. He had tragedy in his life and he was very, at least for me, he’s been one of the people, one of the first historical figures where he wrote about the struggle to overcome those things and to make himself from being a weak asthmatic little teenager, to strengthening himself and building muscle and becoming this barrel-chested lion of a guy who could be the President, who could be an explorer and one of the rough riders. Just everything he does is so hyperbolically incredible. To come out of war and have the other people you fought with go, “This guy has no fear,” he must’ve just been a psychopath and had no fear. And then proving it further was that thing where he was going to give a speech to a bunch of people and he got shot in the chest.
Lex Fridman
(02:53:00)
[inaudible 02:53:00].
Paul Rosolie
(02:53:00)
It went through his spectacle case and through his speech, and even though the bullet was lodged in his chest, this man said, “Don’t hurt the guy that shot me.” I believe he asked him, why’d you do it? And then as he’s bleeding and in the rain said, “No, no, no. I’m not going to the hospital. I’m going to keep going with the speech.” What a badass. That’s incredible.
Lex Fridman
(02:53:23)
But going to the jungle on many levels is really difficult for him at that time. There’s so many things, so many more things even than now that can kill you, all the different infections, everything. And the lack of knowledge, just the sheer lack of knowledge. So that truly is an expedition, a really, really challenging expedition. There’s lessons about what it takes to be a great explorer from that, the perseverance. How important do you think is perseverance in exploration, especially through the jungle?
Paul Rosolie
(02:53:56)
I think it’s all there is, if you hear about the people. And I think that, that is a tremendous metaphor for life, because whether you hear about that plane that crashed in the Andes and the people were alone and freezing and they had to eat each other, some of them made it out, some of them kept the fire burning. And Teddy Roosevelt voluntarily, after being President, threw himself into the Amazon rainforest and survived. Came so close to dying, but survived. And so perseverance is all of it. I think that’s our quality as a human.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:33)
So they also mapped. On the biology side it’s interesting, but they mapped and documented a lot of the unknown geography and biodiversity. What does it take to do that? So when I see you move about the jungle, you’re capturing a creature. You take a picture, write it down so you can find new creatures, find new things about the jungle, document them, a scientific perspective on the jungle. Back then there was even much less known about the jungle. So what do you think it takes to document, to map?
Lex Fridman
(02:55:00)
…less known about the jungle. So what do you think it takes to document, to map that world and new unexplored wilderness?
Paul Rosolie
(02:55:07)
I mean, they’re clearly pressing botanical specimens. They’re probably shooting birds. And Roosevelt knew how to, knew how to preserve those specimens. I mean, he really was a naturalist, so he knew exactly. So if he’s seeing these animals to them, whereas we’ll take a picture and identify it, they were harvesting specimens, taking them with them, drying them out. For them, it was totally different. And it could be the first, there’s, I don’t know, I forget what JJ said, there’s something like 70 species of ant birds here and it’s like, so how likely are you to be the first person to ever see this one species of bird? And so for them, phew, as you have this bird and so perfectly preserving that specimen.

(02:55:52)
And I think a lot of non-scientific people don’t realize that every species from blue whale to elephant to blue jay to sparrow, whatever, whatever it is, whatever species we have on record, there are scientific specimens and the first people to see them, shot them. And museums are filled with these catalogs preserved birds that these explorers brought back from New Guinea and South America and Africa and then put into these drawers. And now we labeled them and we said, this is red and green macaw, this is scarlet Macaw, this is brown crested ant bird. And they’re just categorized.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:31)
That book of birds you have, it is encyclopedia of birds.
Paul Rosolie
(02:56:34)
Yo.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:35)
What?
Paul Rosolie
(02:56:36)
The human achievement in these pages.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:39)
For people listening, Paul just flipping through a huge number of pages. Is this in the Amazon or is this in Peru?
Paul Rosolie
(02:56:47)
This is just here. This is birds of Peru. Dude pages on pages of toucans and aracari and hummingbirds and ant birds and smoky brown woodpecker and tropical screech owl, which we just heard, by the way. It’s endless. Who knew there were so many birds? I had no idea there was so many birds.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:07)
Documenting all of that. I mean there’s also, which we got to experience and you’re pretty good at also is actually understanding and making the sounds of the different birds. What’s your favorite bird song to make?
Paul Rosolie
(02:57:21)
Undulated tinamou, because in the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk, they’re usually the ones that make up what is considered by many to be the anthem of the Amazon.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:34)
Can you do a little bird for us?
Paul Rosolie
(02:57:36)
(singing). That’s what a undulated tinamou sounds like. And it’s usually like, “Oh, it is getting to be afternoon.” It’s almost like hearing church bells on a Sunday. It’s like you just, there’s something about it, you go, “Ah! There it is.”
Lex Fridman
(02:57:53)
And like you were saying, it’s a reminder, “Oh, that’s a friend of mine”.
Paul Rosolie
(02:57:56)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:57)
Surrounded by friends.
Paul Rosolie
(02:57:58)
I have so many friends here.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:00)
What does it take to survive out here? What are some basic principles of survival in a jungle?
Paul Rosolie
(02:58:07)
Cleanliness. I mean really, we talked about this, but keeping, I have so many holes in my skin right now. Look, I have a mosquito… There we go. I have so many spots that I’ve scratched off of my skin because mosquito bites me and then I scratch it. Or the other big one is that I worry that I have a tick. Not deliberately, not with my thinking brain, but my simian brain just wants to find and remove ticks and so I scratch. And then if my fingernails get too long, I remove my skin and then those get infected in the jungle. And so staying hyper clean, using soap, like basic stuff, keeping order to your bags, order to your gear, things in dry bags, make sure…

(02:58:59)
We explained that we got in the river during a thunderstorm. We didn’t explain why we did that because the thunderstorm came when we had eaten dinner, but we hadn’t set up our tents and so we decided to cover our bags with our boats that we had been carrying, our pack rafts that we’d been carrying in our backpacks, so all of our gear would stay dry. So the only thing we could do is either sit in the rain and be cold or sit in the river and be warm. And so keeping our gear dry, momentary discomfort for future, that to me was an incredibly smart calculation to make, is you got to be smart out here, you can not running out of a headlamp while you’re out on the trail and being stuck in that darkness. It really takes just being a little bit on your toes. And I find that that necessity of being on your toes is a place that I like to live in. It’s just the right amount of challenge here.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:54)
So keeping the gear organized and all of that, but also being willing to sort of improvise. I’ve seen you improvise very well because there is so much unknowns, there’s so much chaos and dynamic aspects that planning is not going to prevent you from having to face that in the end of the day.
Paul Rosolie
(03:00:11)
No, it’s been really funny watching you sort of shed your planning brain. Like day one, it was very much like “So are we going to…”, and then I could see your brow sort of furrow and I would go, “I don’t know what time we’re going to get there.” And you’d go, “Well, just tell me.” And I’d be like, “I don’t know what the jungle’s going to let us do.” “Let’s record the podcast tomorrow.” Okay, but if it rains, if it gets windy, if a [inaudible 03:00:39] comes, if there’s a Jaguar with rabies, anything could happen. Landslides, like anything, literally.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:48)
It’s tree, I mean the thing you mentioned, trees falling. That’s a thing in the jungle.
Paul Rosolie
(03:00:52)
That’s a major thing in the jungle.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:53)
Holy shit. First of all, a lot of trees fall and they fall quickly and they could just kill you.
Paul Rosolie
(03:00:58)
They fall quickly. They’re huge. We’re talking about trees that are the size of school buses stacked and connected to other trees with vines so that when they fall, this millennium tree, this thousand year old tree, boom, it shakes the ground, pulls down other trees with it. So if you’re anywhere near that for a few acres, you’re getting smashed. That’s the end of you. And so the jungle, at any moment that you’re out there could just decide to delete you. And then the leaf cutter ants and the army ants and the flies and everything, you’ll be digested in three days. You’ll be gone. Gone. No bones, nothing.
Lex Fridman
(03:01:33)
Who do you think would eat most of you?
Paul Rosolie
(03:01:37)
I would hope that a king vulture with a colorful face would just…
Lex Fridman
(03:01:41)
Dramatically just going there [inaudible 03:01:43].
Paul Rosolie
(03:01:42)
…get in there right in the arse. Just like nature is metal. Just like when they walk in through the elephant’s ass. I’d want that on camera trap. I think that would be a great way to go.
Lex Fridman
(03:01:50)
And we slowly look up and just kind of smile at the camera.
Paul Rosolie
(03:01:53)
Yeah. It’ll just rip out your intestine and just shake it. Just victorious over your dead body.
Lex Fridman
(03:01:58)
Well, but also honor a friend. That’s another way to go.
Paul Rosolie
(03:02:01)
Yeah, sure. But you look so, your white naked ass laying there in the jungle, you’d be like face down in the shit.
Lex Fridman
(03:02:08)
That’s why you always have to look good. Any moment, a tree can fall on you and a vulture just swoops in and eats your heart.
Paul Rosolie
(03:02:13)
That’s right.

Alone show

Lex Fridman
(03:02:16)
We talked about Alone, this show a bit.
Paul Rosolie
(03:02:18)
Yo. Rock House.
Lex Fridman
(03:02:20)
Yeah. What do you think about that guy? Rock House Roland Welker from season 7, he built the Rock House, he killed the musk ox with bow and arrow and then finished it with a knife.
Paul Rosolie
(03:02:34)
And had the GoPro mounted to document it. That’s a really mind-blowing.
Lex Fridman
(03:02:40)
I mean, so for people who don’t know that show, you’re supposed to survive as long as possible. On season 7 of the show, they literally said you can only win it if you survive a hundred days. And there’s a lot of aspects of that show that’s difficult, one of which is it’s in the cold. The other is they get just a handful of supplies, no food, nothing, none of that. So they have to figure all of that out. And this is probably one of the greatest performers on the show, Roland Welker, he built a rock house shelter. So I mean, what does survival entail? It’s building a shelter, fire, catching food, staying warm, getting enough energy to sort of keep doing the work. It takes a lot of work. Like building the Rock House, I read that, it took 500 calories an hour from him, so he had to feed himself quite a lot. You’re lifting 200 pound boulders and still the guy lost, I read, 44 pounds, which is 20% of his body weight. So that’s survival. What lessons, what inspiration do you draw from him?
Paul Rosolie
(03:03:55)
I think he was fun to watch because he had this indomitable spirit. He wasn’t there to commune with nature, he was there to win. And he was like, to me, that’s the pioneer mentality. He goes, “I’m a hunting guide. I’m out here. I’m going to win that money. I’m going to survive through the winter.” He wasn’t worried. I feel like so many people, they worry second guessing themselves, “Am I in a video game? I don’t know. What’s my…”, just questioning their entire existential identity. And this guy was like, “You know what? There’s a muskox over there. I’m going to shoot it. I’m going to stab it now. I’m going to make a pouch out of its ball sack and I’m going to live off that for the next few months and win a half a million dollars.”

(03:04:36)
And that’s an amazing amount of pragmatic optimism that I just enjoyed. And every time he would go, “We got to get back to Rock House”, and it became, even though he is all alone, he had a big smile on his face. And what made that season so great was that it was him and then it was Callie. And Roland had the muscle and could make Rock House and then Callie was the opposite. She was this girl who, yes, she could hunt with her bow and she knew how to fish and she wasn’t using raw power, but what was so endearing about her was that how much she loved being out there. As hard as it was, and as isolationist as it was, she was smiling. Every time the show cut to her, she was like, “Hey everybody, it’s morning. Can you believe the frost?” You’ve been out there for a hundred days! Amazing. I think it was really an amazing show of that the game is all here. The game of life, the game of alone and the game of life because that’s the same thing.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:37)
Yeah. She maintained that sort of silliness, the goofiness, all through it when the condition got really tough. And she had a very different perspective as you know Roland didn’t want any of the spirituality, it’s very pragmatic. And for Callie, it is very spiritual connection to the land. She said something like she wanted not only to take from the land, but to give back. I mean, there’s this kind of poetic spiritual connection to the land. It’s such a dire contrast to Roland. But she’s still a badass. I mean to survive no matter what, no matter the kind of personality, you have to be a badass. I think she took a porcupine quill from her shoulder.
Paul Rosolie
(03:06:21)
That was crazy. I think it went in somewhere completely different and it migrated to their shoulder.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:27)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(03:06:28)
And the way they understood that is because they have, I said, that’s impossible. I remember that she’s pulling up her shirt and she’s like, there’s something. And then she pushes it out. And I remember I was like, “Hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. How?” And it was because the barbs, once it goes in, as you move and flex your body, it moves a little bit each time and it gets migrated. I didn’t even think of that shit.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:51)
Plus, if I remember correctly, I think she caught two porcupines. The second one was rotting or something, or it had an infected body, whatever.
Paul Rosolie
(03:07:00)
It had the spots on it.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:01)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(03:07:02)
She chose not to eat it.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:03)
No. And then she chose not to eat it at first, and then she decided to eat it eventually, yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(03:07:07)
Oh. I forgot that.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:09)
And she starves, that was an insane sort of really thoughtful, focused, collective decision. Waiting a day and then saying, “Fuck it, I need this fat.” And that was the other thing, is like fat is important.
Paul Rosolie
(03:07:24)
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:25)
It’s like meat is not enough. You learn about what are the different food sources there. Apparently there’s rabbit starvation is a thing because when you have too much lean meat, it doesn’t nourish the body. Fat is the thing that nourishes the body, especially in cold conditions. So that’s the thing.
Paul Rosolie
(03:07:47)
Yeah, she was incredible. And I thought as brash and sort of fun as Roland was, she represented a much more beautiful take on it. It was really heartbreaking when she lost. And like you said, still a badass. It’s kind like Forrest Griffin vs Stephan Bonnar. It doesn’t matter who won. You guys beat the out of each other.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:13)
And she didn’t really lose, right? She got evaced because her toe was going…
Paul Rosolie
(03:08:21)
Frostbite.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:22)
Frostbite. A hundred days, you think you can do a hundred days?
Paul Rosolie
(03:08:26)
Honestly, I’ve done… 18 years in the Amazon, man, at this point, I could. I wouldn’t sign up for another a hundred days. At this point, I don’t have that to prove I’ve survived in the wild and I wouldn’t want to voluntarily take a hundred days away from everyone I know.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:51)
Yeah, the loneliness aspect is tough.
Paul Rosolie
(03:08:54)
We’re not meant for that. I really love the people I have in my life and I wouldn’t, and you see it on the show, a lot of the people, big tough ex-Navy SEALs who are survival experts who know what they’re doing, they get out there and they go, “You know what? I miss my family.” And they go, “It’s not worth it.” They have this existential realization. They go, “I only got so many years here. This is crazy. It’s just some money. Fuck it.” And they go home.
Lex Fridman
(03:09:21)
That’s funny because you sometimes feeling yourself in the jungle and you’re alone. And there’s another guy, Jordan Jonas Hobojordo, he’s the season 6 winner. And he said that the camera made him feel less lonely. I’ve heard of him from multiple channels, one of the things is he spent all of his twenties living in Siberia with the tribes out there.
Paul Rosolie
(03:09:50)
Whoa.
Lex Fridman
(03:09:52)
Herzog Happy People. And so he actually talked about that it’s one of the loneliest time of his life because when you went up there, he didn’t speak Russian and he needed to learn the language. And even though you have people around you when you don’t speak their language, it feels really, really lonely. And he felt less lonely on the show because he had the camera and he felt like he could talk to the camera. There is an element when you have in these harsh conditions, if you record something, you feel like you’re talking to another human through it, even if it’s just a recording. I sometimes feel that maybe because I imagine a specific person that will watch it and I feel like I’m talking to that person.
Paul Rosolie
(03:10:36)
Well, I noticed that when things got especially hard, and they did get especially hard when we were out in the wilderness, that you would begin filming to share that struggle. But I also think that I’ve used that at times where, yeah, you go, well, maybe if I, because if you can tell someone else about it, then you’re on the hero’s journey. And then it sort of has to make you braver and it changes how you, because you’re “I’m cold and I’m tired and I’m hungry and this hurts and that hurts and I don’t know when we’re going to make it and how is this going to go?” And then all of a sudden you go, “Well guys, we’re here and we’re going that way.” And then you’re like, “Well, I got to keep going” because you’re like, they’re still out there if you forget.
Lex Fridman
(03:11:24)
You have to step up. That’s one of the reasons I want a family. I think when you have kids, you have to be the best version of yourself for them.
Paul Rosolie
(03:11:33)
All my friends with kids that I’ve seen them go through, where until you have a family, you’re just playing around, man. I mean, you could do important work, you can have skin in other games, but it’s once you have a little tribe of humans that depends on you. If you take that seriously, if you want to do that right, it’s one of the hardest things you could do. And it just changes everything.

Protecting the rainforest

Lex Fridman
(03:12:02)
How has your life changed since we last met?
Paul Rosolie
(03:12:05)
Speak about changing, everything.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:08)
So you’ve been, for people who don’t know, pushing Jungle Keepers forward into uncharted territories, saving more and more and more and more rainforests. There’s a lot I could ask you about that. There’s a lot of stories to be told there. It’s a fight, it’s a battle. It’s a battle to protect this beautiful area of rainforest of nature. But since we last met, you’ve continued to make a lot of progress. So what’s the story of Jungle Keepers leading up to the moment we met and after and everything you’re doing right now?
Paul Rosolie
(03:12:46)
18 years ago when I first came to the jungle, I was a kid from New York who always dreamed since I was six years old, maybe even younger, of going to a place where animals were everywhere and there’s big trees and skyscrapers of life. And so being dyslexic and not fitting in school and reading about Jane Goodall and having Lord of the Rings be one of the things I grew up on, I just chose to come to the Amazon and the first person I met was this local indigenous conservationist named Juan Julio Duran, who was trying to protect this remote river, the Las Piedras River, which in history, apparently Fawcett referenced either the Las Piedras, but he called it Tahuamanu and said, “Don’t go there, you’ll surely die from tribes.”

(03:13:37)
And so there’s very few references to this river in history. It’s stayed very wild because it’s been a place that the law hasn’t made it, that the government hasn’t really extended to, we’re sort of past the police limit. And so JJ was out here ages ago, trying to protect this river before it was too late. And when I met him, I was just a barely out of high school kid with a dream of just seeing the rainforest, let alone seeing a giant anaconda or having any sort of meaningful experience or contribution to the narrative. And somehow overall, the years that we began working together and sparked a friendship and began exploring and going on expeditions and bringing people to the rainforest and asking them for help and manifesting the hell out of this insane dream that we had. I mean, we didn’t even have a boat. We would take logs down the river, we would have to cut a tree down. Every time we wanted to return to civilization, we’d have to cut down a balsa tree and float down the river.
Lex Fridman
(03:14:35)
Float down the river on it, yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(03:14:39)
It’s madness. It’s madness. It’s pure madness. And I don’t know what made us keep going, but along the way, people showed up who cared and who wanted to help. And if it was a movie, it wouldn’t even necessarily be a good movie because you’d go, “Oh, please. You’re just telling me that you just kept doing the thing and just magically people showed up.” But yeah, that’s what happened. That’s exactly the way it went. We kept doing the thing that we loved. We said, it doesn’t matter if we don’t have funding or a boat or gasoline or friends or anything. We just kept going. And along the way we found someone who could help us start a ranger program. And then we found Dax Dasilva who helped us fund the beginning of Jungle Keepers. And then people like Mohsen and Stefan who were there making sure that this thing actually took flight off the ground.

(03:15:28)
And then right around the time that we were wondering what was going to happen and if we’re all going to have to quit and get real jobs and if we could actually save the rainforest from the destruction that was coming, Lex Fridman sends me a DM and honestly changed the entire narrative because up until then we had been playing in the minor leagues pretending, trying real, real hard and the listeners of your show in the moments after you published your episode with our conversation began showing up in droves and supporting Jungle Keepers putting in five, ten, a hundred, a thousand, we started getting these donations and the incredible team that I work with, we all went into hyperdrive, everybody, everybody started going nuts.

(03:16:17)
We all started spending 16-hour days working to try and deal with the tidal wave that Lex sent towards us just because so many people knew that we were doing this, that it was an indigenous led fight to protect this incredibly ancient virgin rainforest before it was cut and people resonated with that. And so we got this huge swell of support and this year we’ve protected thousands and thousands of more acres of rainforest because of that swell of support.
Lex Fridman
(03:16:47)
So current 50,000 acres, what’s the goal, what’s the approach to saving this rainforest?
Paul Rosolie
(03:16:53)
Since we printed this, it’s gone up to 66,000 acres. And as you know, in each of those little acres are millions and millions of animal heartbeats and societies of animals. And the goal here is that we’re between Manu National Park, Alto Purús National Park, the Tambopata Reserve, we’re in a region that’s known as the biodiversity capital of Peru, one of the most bio-diverse parts of the Western Amazon. And we’re fighting along the edge of the Trans-Amazon Highway.

(03:17:29)
And so it’s just a small group of local people and some international experts who have come together and used these incredibly out of side of the box strategies to sort of crowd fund conservation to go, “Look, we know that this incredible life is here. We have the scientific evidence, we have the national park system. If we can protect this before they cut it down, we could do something of global significance. All these Jaguars, all these monkeys, all these undescribed medicines, the uncontacted tribes that we share this forest with could all be protected.” And people have stepped up and begun to make that happen. And there’s people from all over the world and it’s incredible.
Lex Fridman
(03:18:10)
But what’s the approach? So trying to, with donations, to buy out more and more of the land and then protect it?
Paul Rosolie
(03:18:18)
So the approaches that currently the government favors extractors. So if you’re a gold miner or an illegal logger or you just want to cut down and burn a bunch of rainforests and set up a cacao farm, the government’s fine with that. It doesn’t matter. You’re not really breaking the law if you’re destroying nature.
Lex Fridman
(03:18:36)
So as long as you’re producing something from the land, they don’t see it as a loss, that nature was destroyed permanently?
Paul Rosolie
(03:18:43)
Yeah, it’s just wilderness. It’s sort of just beyond the scope of, or the local people that technically own the land out here, the local indigenous people, for instance, we fought this year to help the community of Puerto Nuevo, who’s been fighting for 20 years to have government recognized land. These are indigenous people in the Amazon, fighting to protect their own land. And you know what it was that was holding them back? They didn’t understand how the system of legal documents worked to certify that titled land. They didn’t really have the funding to go from their very, very remote community into the offices and so Jungle Keepers helped them with that. And so really all we’re doing is helping local people protect the forest, that is their world. That’s it.
Lex Fridman
(03:19:30)
If people donate, how will that help?
Paul Rosolie
(03:19:35)
If people donate to Jungle Keepers, what you’re doing is you’re helping someone like JJ, who’s an indigenous naturalist who has the vision, who has seen forest be destroyed, he’s trying to protect it before it’s too late. You’re saving mahogany trees, ironwood trees, kapok trees, skyscrapers of life, just monkeys, birds, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, this entire avatar on earth, world of rainforest that produces a fifth of the oxygen we breathe and the water we drink, this incredible thing. As far as I know, it’s the most direct way to protect that.

(03:20:12)
And so the fact that we have large funders who give us a hundred thousand dollars to protect this huge swath of land and that goes through things like this and through Instagram, it goes directly to the local conservationists who work with the loggers to protect that land before it’s cut. But one of the most impactful things that has happened this year in the wake of our last conversation was that I got an email from a mother and she said, “I’m a single mom and I work a few jobs and I can’t afford to give you a ton of money, but me and my kids look at your Instagram often after dinner, and they really want to protect the heartbeats. They really want to protect the animals and the rainforest. And so we give $5 a month to Jungle Keepers.” And it was, to me that was so impactful because I used to be that little kid worried about the animals. I saw how a few million raindrops can create a flood.
Lex Fridman
(03:21:07)
Yeah. I ask that people donate to Jungle Keepers. You guys are legit. That money is going to go a long way, junglekeeper.org. If you somehow were able to raise very large, so the raindrops would make a waterfall, a very large amount of money, I don’t know what that number is, maybe $10 million, $20 million, $30 million, what are the different milestones along the way that could really help you on the journey of saving the rainforest?
Paul Rosolie
(03:21:48)
If we did, if let’s just say some company organization or if enough people donated it, let’s just say we got that $30 million. That money would go directly into stopping logging roads, into creating a corridor, a biological corridor that connects the uncontacted indigenous reserves with other tribal lands, with Manu National Park, with the Tambopata, which establishes essentially the largest protected area in the Amazon rainforest. And what makes this groundbreaking is that we’re not doing this in the traditional way. We’re doing this, take it to the people.

(03:22:22)
And that’s what’s been so exciting is that when he started this, when JJ started this 30 years ago, he had no idea. His father wanted him to be a logger. He didn’t have shoes until he was 13 years old. He grew up bathing in the river. He had no idea that a bunch of crazy foreigner scientists were going to show up and some guy in a James Bond suit was going to come down here with microphones. And that all of a sudden the world would know that he was on this quest to protect this incredible ecosystem. And all those little aliens.
Lex Fridman
(03:22:53)
Well, that’s all the important thing to remember, that the people that are cutting down the forest, the loggers are also human beings. They’ve families, they’re basically trying to survive and they’re desperate and they’re doing the thing that will bring them money. And so they’re just human beings at the core of it. If they have other options, they will probably choose to give their life to saving the community, to first and foremost providing for their family, and after that, saving the community, helping the community flourish. And I think probably a lot of them love the rainforest. They grew up in the rainforest.
Paul Rosolie
(03:23:34)
Yeah. I mean, look at Pico.
Lex Fridman
(03:23:36)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(03:23:36)
Pico used to be a logger, full-time logger, long-time logger. Now he loves conservation. He’s like, [foreign language 03:23:46].
Lex Fridman
(03:23:46)
Yeah, it’s all about just providing people options. There’s some dark stuff on the goldmine stuff you’ve talked about. You showed me parts of the rainforest where the goldmines are, and they’re just kind of erasing the rainforest.
Paul Rosolie
(03:24:02)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:24:03)
So at the edges, that’s when the mining happens and it’s this ugly process of they’re just destroying the jungle just for the surface layer of the sand or whatever that they processed to collect just little bits of gold. And there’s also very dark things that happen along the way as the communities around the goldmines are created. So that the entirety of the moral system that emerges from that, that has things like prostitution where one third of the women that are drawn into that sex traffic and prostitution are minors under 17 years old, 13 to 17-year-old. There’s just a lot of really, really dark stuff.
Paul Rosolie
(03:24:52)
I think that we have a rare chance to do something against that darkness. I think that this is an example of local people who have taken action, done good work, been good to the people that have visited, harnessed a certain amount of international momentum, and now we’re on the cusp of doing something historic. And so for the children in the communities along this river, it won’t be being a prostitute in a gold mine. It’ll be becoming a trained ranger.

(03:25:35)
Like last month, our ranger coordinator and one of our female rangers went to Africa for a ranger conference. And it’s like we’re beginning to, this is someone from a little tiny village with thatched huts upriver, she went to Africa to talk about being a professional conservation ranger. And it’s like that’s changing lives. And her daughters then, she’s married to Ignacio, the guy, their kids are going to grow up seeing their parents walking around with the emblem on and go, “Oh, I want to.” And then people like Pico and Pedro and all these guys that work here are going to go, “Well, we have to protect this forest”, and then they start getting fascinated about the snakes. And then they start caring about the turtle eggs. And then all of a sudden they have a way of life and nobody needs to go steal anybody’s kids to be a prostitute in a gold mine. That’s horrible. And so it’s really a win-win for the animals, for the rangers, for the rainforest, for people, it’s biocentric conservation. It’s just making everything better.
Lex Fridman
(03:26:36)
Yeah. I’ve read in an article that said, “An estimated 1200 girls between ages of 12 and 17 are forcibly drafted into child prostitution around the communities in the gold mines, at least one-third of the prostitutes in the camp are underage. The girls had ended up in the camp after receiving a tip that there were restaurants looking for waitresses and willing to pay top dollar. They jumped on a bus together and came down to the rainforest. What they found was not what they were expecting. The mining camp restaurants served food for only a few hours a day. The rest of the time, it was the girls themselves who were on the menu. Literally at the end of the road, and without the money to return home, the girls would soon become trapped in prostitution.”
Paul Rosolie
(03:27:24)
It’s interesting to me that the most devastating destruction of nature, the complete erasure of the rainforest burned to the ground, sucked through a hose, spit out into a disgusting mercury puddle, like the complete annihilation of life on earth, goes hand in hand with the complete annihilation of a young life. It’s like it’s all based around the same thing. It’s the light versus the dark, it’s the destruction in the chaos versus a move towards order and hope. And it is incredibly dark and this region is heavy with it.

Snake makes appearance

Lex Fridman
(03:28:10)
Well, I’m glad you’re fighting for the light. Is there a milestone in the near future that you’re working towards, like financially in terms of donations?
Paul Rosolie
(03:28:22)
There is. In the next year and a half, as you saw in your time here, there’s roads working around the Jungle Keepers concessions. All the work that the local people are doing to protect this land is trying to be dismantled by international corporations that are subcontracting logging companies here. And really what we need is $30 million in the next two years to protect the whole thing. You’ve seen the ancient mahogany trees, you’ve seen the families of monkeys, you’ve seen the caiman in the river. All of this is standing in the pathway of destruction. That road, they’re going to come down that road, and men with chainsaws are going to dismantle a forest that has been growing since the beginning. This is so magical. Do you see the snake over there?
Lex Fridman
(03:29:10)
Yeah.
Paul Rosolie
(03:29:11)
Do you?
Lex Fridman
(03:29:12)
There’s a snake.
Paul Rosolie
(03:29:13)
Okay. I’m just going to, don’t move. I don’t want you to move. I’m going to just, this is one of the most beautiful snakes in the Amazon rainforest. This is the blunt-headed tree snake, my favorite snakes. I’ve been hoping that you would get to see this snake. I have been praying.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:29)
Oh, boy.
Paul Rosolie
(03:29:30)
Okay. Okay. Let’s just go right back into this. Okay. Look at this little beauty creation. Let’s keep you away from the fire. Look at this little blunt-headed tree snake.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:47)
Wow.
Paul Rosolie
(03:29:49)
Such an incredible.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:50)
So tell me about the snake.
Paul Rosolie
(03:29:52)
Harmless little snake. If you put your hand out, he’ll probably just crawl onto your hand. Just be real careful with the fire. So look, I’m just going to put them like this…
Paul Rosolie
(03:30:00)
Put him like this. We’re going to… Yeah, let’s just snake safety. So he’s a tree snake. Yep. Nice and slow. Nice and slow. Nice and slow. So you nice and slow. Just really slow. Just be the tree. Be the tree that he climbs on. And this is again, this is a snake that’s so thin and so small.

(03:30:25)
There you go. There you go. Nice and slow. Just be the tree. Let him crawl around. So he is going to try and do all this stuff. Let me see if I can just calm him down for a second. Let me just see. He’s a very active little snake.

(03:30:38)
So see like the snake the other night. Just look at this. I can see the light through his body. To me, this is an alien. This is strange little life form. His eyes are two thirds of his head. I’m not joking. You look at their skull. He’s so tiny. He’s so tiny.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:02)
For people listening, there’s a snake in Paul’s hands right now is very… It’s long, of course, but very skinny. Very skinny.
Paul Rosolie
(03:31:11)
Very, very light. And also for everyone listening, the odds of that as we’re sitting here, doing this podcast, that a snake would just be crawling by in the jungle, might sound like something that would happen. But the density of snakes in the Amazon rainforest makes this a very unique experience.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:34)
Can you tell me a little bit about the coloration scheme? A little bit brown?
Paul Rosolie
(03:31:39)
Yeah. Just to describe this as we were talking here, it’s just a banded white and brown snake, with this tiny little head about the size of my pinky nail. Two thirds of this snake’s head is made up of its gigantic eyes.

(03:31:57)
It’s got a small mouth, and it’s about a third as thick as a pencil. It’s basically a moving shoestring. It’s incredibly, incredibly thin. The only thing I am thinking, Lex, is that if we have Dan come and just do some shots of…
Lex Fridman
(03:32:17)
Yeah, that’s true.
Paul Rosolie
(03:32:19)
Dan.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:22)
So what are we looking at here?
Paul Rosolie
(03:32:25)
The snake that was crawling behind us in the jungle that we were talking about jungle keepers and what we could do, and the snake just showed up at that moment. And this is a very active little snake who’s out for a hunt tonight and wants to find something to eat.

(03:32:41)
So this is a blunt-headed tree snake, totally harmless, little… Literally a moving shoestring. Super beautiful little animal. When you talk about aliens, to me, this is an alien. What are you thinking? What are you doing right now? What do you think about the fact that you are being handled by these giant humans?
Lex Fridman
(03:33:05)
And as you were saying, it reaches up to the leaves, you get closer.
Paul Rosolie
(03:33:08)
Yeah. The snake just naturally knows to go look. You just put them anywhere near leaves and he is like, I got this. He just wants to go right up into that tree. I just want you to try holding them and real gentle, just be the tree.

(03:33:22)
And just do the same thing you learned last night, just nice and gentle. Yep. And see, he’s holding onto my finger right now. He’s just going up. There you go. Perfect. Nice and easy. He’s a little erratic. He’s a little goofy.
Lex Fridman
(03:33:41)
Maybe he’s camera shy. Maybe a fan of the podcast. And gigantic eyes relative to his body size. Oh-
Paul Rosolie
(03:33:56)
Jeez.
Lex Fridman
(03:33:57)
… hello, moth. Traffic, traffic in the jungle.
Paul Rosolie
(03:34:01)
And then for everyone listening as we’re handling the snake that we found that was crawling by us, literally by our shoulders as we’re talking, a bat flies through, no joke, eight inches from Lex’s ear. Just zips past his head as he’s holding a snake while we’re sitting here in the jungle is just… We’re just in it now. Now, he’s going to try and back up.
Lex Fridman
(03:34:26)
And how do you…
Paul Rosolie
(03:34:27)
Yeah, why don’t you… Let’s encourage him to come back this way.
Lex Fridman
(03:34:31)
He’s weaved this way.
Paul Rosolie
(03:34:33)
He’s okay. He’s just trying to back up. Yeah, right there. Release.
Lex Fridman
(03:34:36)
Oh.
Paul Rosolie
(03:34:36)
Release. Okay. This is what I’m going to do. We’re going to say thank you, Mr. Snake.
Lex Fridman
(03:34:42)
Thank you, Mr. Snake.
Paul Rosolie
(03:34:43)
Thank you, Mr. Snake. Go back up into the tree. Here we go. There you go. There you go. There you go. And then we can resume normal podcasting now, because-
Lex Fridman
(03:34:56)
We really are in the jungle right now.
Paul Rosolie
(03:34:57)
We really are in the jungle. That’s one of my favorite snakes. That’s one of my favorite little aliens on this planet. Look at that.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:09)
And it’s going on some long journey. It’s going to-
Paul Rosolie
(03:35:14)
Up into the canopy.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:15)
… carry the rest of the night. So that little snake is one of the millions of life forms heartbeats that you’re trying to protect.
Paul Rosolie
(03:35:27)
Exactly. To me, after almost 20 years down here, the people here have become my friends, the caiman on the river, the monkeys. When I fall asleep at night, I think about all the different forests that when they bulldoze this forest, when they chop down these trees, that they vanish, that we take away their world.

(03:35:54)
And in that very evolutionary historical sense of remembering the primordial soup, it’s like this little creature is surviving out here somehow. And we have the chance to save it.

(03:36:08)
And even if you don’t care about the little creature on the pale blue dot, each of these little creatures contributes to this massive orchestral hole that creates climactic stability on this planet. And the Amazon is one of the most important parts of that. And each of these little guys is playing a role in there.

Uncontacted tribes

Lex Fridman
(03:36:26)
So one of the other fascinating life forms is other humans, but living a very different kind of life. So uncontacted tribes, what do you find most fascinating about them?
Paul Rosolie
(03:36:38)
What I find most fascinating about the uncontacted tribes is that while me and you are sitting here with microphones and a light, somewhere out there, in that darkness, in that direction, not so far away as the crow flies, there are people sitting around a fire in the dark.

(03:36:57)
Probably with little more than a few leaves over their heads, who don’t even have the use of stone tools, who only have metal objects that they’ve stolen from nearby communities. They’re living such primitive, isolated nomadic lives in the modern world.

(03:37:21)
And they’re still living naked out in the jungle. It’s truly incredible. It’s truly remarkable. And I think that it’s because they can’t advocate for themselves. They can’t protect themselves.

(03:37:33)
It’s sort of like, well, we can let them get shot up by loggers and let their land get bulldozed while they hide. They have no idea that their world is being destroyed. But they’re the scariest and most fascinating thing out there right now in the jungle.
Lex Fridman
(03:37:51)
Because you’ve spoken about them being dangerous, what do you think their relationship with violence is? Why is violence part of their approach to the external world?
Paul Rosolie
(03:38:02)
So from the best I understand it that at the turn of the century, industrial revolution, we had sudden immense need for rubber, for hoses, and gaskets, and wires, and tires and the war machine.

(03:38:18)
And the only way to get rubber was to come down to the Amazon rainforest and get the local people who knew the jungle to go out into the jungle and cut rubber trees and collect the latex. And Henry Ford tried doing Fordlandia, tried having rubber plantations, but leaf blight killed it. And so you had this period of horrendous extraction in the Amazon where the rubber barons were coming down and just raping and pillaging the tribes and making them go out to tap these trees.

(03:38:48)
And the uncontacted tribes said, no. They had their six-foot-long longbows, seven-foot-long arrows with giant bamboo tips. And they moved further back into the forest. And they said, we will not be conquered. And since that time, they’ve been out there.

(03:39:05)
And it’s confusing, because in a way, they’re still running scared a century later. And their grandparents would’ve told them, the outside world, everyone you see in the outside world is trying to kill you. So kill them first. So can you blame them for being violent? No.

(03:39:21)
Is this river still wild? Because loggers were scared to go here, for a long time for almost a century late? That’s why this forest is still here? Yes. And so is it a human rights issue that we protect the last people on earth that have no government, no affiliation, no language that we can explain?

(03:39:43)
We don’t know what their medicinal plant knowledge is. We don’t know their creation myths. We know nothing about them. And they’re just out there right now with arrows and arrows living in the dark, surviving in the jungle, naked without even spoons. Forget about the wheel, forget about iPhones. They got nothing. And they’re making it work.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:01)
We don’t know their creation myths. So they have a very primitive existence. Do you think their values… First of all, do you think their nature is similar to ours? And how do their values differ from ours?
Paul Rosolie
(03:40:21)
This is complicated because the anthropologist in me wants to say that they have a historical reason for the violent life that they have. They experienced incredible generational trauma some time ago.

(03:40:40)
And because they’ve been living isolated in the jungle, that has permeated to become their culture, they’ve become a culture of violence. But yet, the contacted modern indigenous communities that we work with, that are my friends that work here…

(03:40:56)
Just the other day, we were speaking to one of them who was pulling spikes out of your hand while he was explaining that he tried to help them, the brothers, Los Hermanos, he tried to help them. He tried to give them a gift. And what did they do? They shot him in the head.
Lex Fridman
(03:41:13)
Yeah. He said, there are brothers. And he tried to give them bananas.
Paul Rosolie
(03:41:20)
Plantains.
Lex Fridman
(03:41:21)
Plantains, boat full of plantains. And they shot at him.
Paul Rosolie
(03:41:24)
They shot three arrows at him, and one of them actually hit him in the skull and put in the hospital, and he got helicopter evacuated from his community. And so he’s brave for surviving, but he’s a lucky survivor.

(03:41:38)
They are incredibly accurate with those bamboo tipped arrows. And those arrows are seven feet long. So when you get hit by one, they come at a velocity that can rip through you. And the range on a shotgun is way shorter than the range on a longbow.

(03:41:57)
You’re talking about a couple of hundred meters on a longbow. And they’re deadly accurate. They can take spider monkeys out of a tree. And so there’s stories of loggers, and I’ve seen the photos of the bodies of loggers who attacked one of the tribes.

(03:42:14)
And the tribes hadn’t done anything. But these loggers came around a bend. They started shooting shotguns at the tribe, and the tribe scattered into the forest. And as the loggers boat went around a bend, they just started flying arrows.

(03:42:25)
Took out the boat driver, boat skidded to the side, and then everybody was standing in the river and you can’t run. And the tribe just descended on them and just porcupined them full of arrows.
Lex Fridman
(03:42:35)
Shotgun versus bow. There’s a shotgun shell here, by the way, from the loggers.
Paul Rosolie
(03:42:43)
Yeah, we picked that up yesterday. Was that yesterday?
Lex Fridman
(03:42:45)
That was… I don’t know.
Paul Rosolie
(03:42:47)
I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(03:42:48)
One of the things that happens here is time loses meaning in some kind of deep way that it does when you’re in a big city, in the United States, for example, and there’s schedules and meetings and all this kind of stuff. It transforms the meaning, your experience of time, your interaction with time, the role of time, all of this. I’ve forgotten time and I’ve forgotten the existence of the outside world.
Paul Rosolie
(03:43:20)
And how does that feel?
Lex Fridman
(03:43:26)
It feels more honest. It also puts in perspective like all the busyness, all the… It kind of takes the ant out of the ant colony and says, hey, you’re just an ant. This is just an ant colony. And there’s a big world out there.

(03:43:47)
It’s a chance to be grateful, to celebrate this earth of ours and the things that make it worth living on, including the simple things that make the individual life worth living, which is water, and then food and the rest is just details.

(03:44:04)
Of course, the friendships and social interaction. That’s a really big one actually. That one, I’m taking for granted because I didn’t get a chance yet to really spend time alone. And when I came here, I’ve gotten a chance to hang out with you.

(03:44:19)
And there’s a kind of camaraderie, there’s a friendship there that if that’s broken, that’s a tough one too. You spent quite a lot of time alone in the jungle. Ever get a alone out here?
Paul Rosolie
(03:44:34)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the first 15 years we were doing this, there would be times that JJ would be busy in town with his family. And for sheer love of the rainforest, I would have to come alone out here.

(03:44:49)
And we didn’t have running water. I didn’t have running water. I didn’t have lights. All I had was a couple of candles in the darkness and a tent. And I was 20-something years old, living in the Amazon by myself.

(03:44:59)
Your boat sunk. And yeah, it’s incredibly lonely. I had to learn through experience because I thought there’s a period, I think when you’re young… As a young man, I had this thing. I wanted to prove that I could be like the explorers.

(03:45:15)
I wanted to prove that I could handle the elements, that I could go out alone, that I could have these deep connective moments with the jungle. And it’s like, I did that and that’s great. And you know what? The kid from Into the Wild learned right before he died in that bus? That if you don’t have somebody to share it with, it doesn’t matter.
Lex Fridman
(03:45:40)
But some kind of even just deep human level, even if you have somebody to share it with… You ever just get alone out here. Just this sense of existential dread of what… The jungle has a way of not caring about any individual organism because it just kind of churns. It’s like it makes you realize that life is finite quite intensely.
Paul Rosolie
(03:46:23)
For me, it’s comforting being out here, because I find the rat race, the national narrative, the need to make money, to worry about war, to be outraged about the newest thing that politician said and what that actor did.

(03:46:39)
And there’s always just this unending media storm. And everyone’s worried and everyone’s trying to optimize their sunlight exposure and find the solution and buy the right new thing.

(03:46:53)
And to me coming out here, first of all, I mean something out here because I can help someone. I can help people. I can help these animals. And so I find my meaning out here. But also, there’s losing the madness over the mountains.

(03:47:11)
It’s nature has always, and for many people, been where things make sense. And to me, I think I’m a simple analog type of person. That it makes sense that when it rains, you get in the river to stay warm and you wait for the dawn and you see a little tree snake and it makes more sense.

(03:47:33)
And I think that the overwhelming teaming complexity that is inside the ant mound of society can be dizzying for some people. And I think that maybe it’s the dyslexia, maybe it’s just that I love nature, but now when I land in JFK, I feel like a frightened animal.

(03:47:58)
As if you released some animal that had never seen it onto a Times Square, and you could just imagine this dog with its ears back, running away from taxis and just cowering from the noise.

(03:48:10)
And it’s just hustle and bustle and people are brutal, and how much you want it for? Get in the car, screaming over the intercom and just everything, sensory changes and let’s get home. Okay, let’s go. You got a meeting, you got to get to the next place. You got to give a talk. You got to say…

(03:48:27)
Out here, when we finish up here, what are we going to do? We’re going to eat some food, maybe go catch a crocodile. Go walk around the jungle a night. It’s slower. It makes sense. And again, there’s that deep meaning of that here, we can be the guardians for good.

(03:48:44)
We can hold that candle up and know for sure that we’re protecting the trees from being destroyed. And it’s that simple thing of just, this is good. There you go. It’s simple.

(03:48:57)
In society, I feel like everyone’s always losing their minds and forgetting the most basic of fundamental truths. And out here, you can’t really argue with them. When we needed water, it was like, shit, if we don’t get water, we’re fucked.

(03:49:11)
And that’s, to me, that’s where the camaraderie comes from. Because no matter what, we could go to the most fancy-ass restaurant through the biggest, most famous people in the world. It doesn’t matter.

(03:49:23)
We still remember what it was like standing around in the jungle going, fuck, we’re scared and we don’t have water. We got reduced to the simplest form of humans. And that’s something. And we survived. And that’s cool.
Lex Fridman
(03:49:36)
And you take all those people in their nice dresses and their fancy restaurants, you put in those conditions, they’re all going to want the same thing, that’s water.
Paul Rosolie
(03:49:45)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(03:49:46)
It’s all the same thing.
Paul Rosolie
(03:49:47)
All the beautiful people.

Mortality

Lex Fridman
(03:49:49)
How has your view of your own mortality evolved over your interaction with the jungle? How often do you think about your death?
Paul Rosolie
(03:49:58)
Well, I don’t anymore because I’ve come to believe that there is a benevolent God, spirit, creator taking care of us. And I don’t think about my own death. We have a little bit of time here and we clearly know nothing about what we’re doing here.

(03:50:19)
And it seems like we just have to do the best we can. And so it doesn’t scare me. I’ve come close to dying a lot of times and I just don’t think… You don’t want to have a bad death. First of all, you don’t want to be a statistic.

(03:50:37)
You don’t want to find out. You don’t want to try out a… Be the first to try out a new product and oops, it crushed you. That’s a terrible way to go, or the people that used to… In the Gold Rush, they were using mercury and they were all getting… Or lead. It was lead poisoning.

(03:50:52)
And it’s like, oh, a few million people died that way. And it’s like, you want a good death. You want to staring down the eyes of a tiger or hanging off the edge of a cliff, saving somebody’s… Something, something worthy. Warrior’s death.
Lex Fridman
(03:51:07)
Riding a 16-foot black caiman just-
Paul Rosolie
(03:51:11)
Boots on, screaming. Yeah. That would be fun. That’d be a good one.

Steve Irwin

Lex Fridman
(03:51:18)
A lot of people say that you carry the spirit of Steve Irwin in your heart, in the way you carry yourself in this world. I mean, that guy was full of joy.
Paul Rosolie
(03:51:31)
If I have a percentage of Steve Irwin, I would be honored. But that guy… I think there’s only one Steve. I think that he occupied his own strata of just shining light. Everything was positive, enthusiasm, love and happiness, and save the animals and do better and let’s make it fun.

(03:51:52)
And that was so infectious that it sort of transcended his TV show. It transcended his conservation work. It transcended business and entrepreneurship. It just through sheer magnetism and enthusiasm, I mean, everyone knew who Steve was. Everyone loved Steve.

(03:52:12)
We still all love Steve. And so it’s just amazing what one spirit can do. So if anybody makes that comparison, I get really uncomfortable because to me, Steve Irwin is just the G.O.A.T. And so I’m okay with that.
Lex Fridman
(03:52:31)
Well, I at least agree with that comparison. Having spent time with you, there’s just an eternal flame of joy and adventure too. Just pulling you. A dark question, but do you think you might meet the same end, giving your life in some way to something you love?
Paul Rosolie
(03:52:53)
That is a dark question, but I think most likely, I’ll get whacked by loggers. I think that loggers or gold miners will take me out. I don’t picture myself going from animals, but…
Lex Fridman
(03:53:06)
That would be heartbreaking too.
Paul Rosolie
(03:53:08)
Yeah, it would. But yeah, at the same time though, the Kurt Cobain value of that, if I died doing what I love to protect the river, it’d be worth so much more. A lot… We’d get the 30 million if I died tomorrow for sure.

(03:53:18)
So we’ve already talked about this with my friends. I’m like, if I get whacked, do the foundation, make the documentary, protect the river, protect the heartbeats. Call it The Heartbeats, Jungle Keepers, The Heartbeats. Be ready for it because these things do happen.

(03:53:33)
People get pissed if you get in their way. And as many happy people whose lives were changing, there’s also going to be some jealous, shitty, upset people who are mad that they can’t make prostitutes out of young girls and keep destroying the planet. And so they might just erase you. Me.
Lex Fridman
(03:53:51)
Well, I hope you… Like a Clint Eastwood character, just impossible to kill. I like how you squinted your eyes. On cue. Who do you think will play you in a movie?
Paul Rosolie
(03:54:09)
God, somebody with the right nose. Somebody who can live up to this [inaudible 03:54:15]. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:54:15)
All right. Italian?
Paul Rosolie
(03:54:16)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:54:18)
It’s funny. Do you think of yourself as Italian or human, American?
Paul Rosolie
(03:54:23)
That’s the thing. My life has been the United Nations of whatever. To me, that’s the other thing. You go back to society and everyone’s obsessed with race. To me, I’m like, look, leopards have black babies and yellow babies, one mother. They’re all leopards.

(03:54:44)
And I’m so color-blind and race blind and everything else. I’ve lived in India. My friends are Peruvian, my family, we got Italian, Filipino, just everything. And so I’m so immersed in it that I find it very jarring and disconcerting, how much time we spend talking about different religions and just the differences in humans.

(03:55:08)
I’m like, dude, we’re talking about whether or not our ecosystems are going to be able to provide for us. We’re talking about nuclear. What we’re talking about this some pretty serious shit on the table.

(03:55:19)
And we’re over here arguing over shades of gray of… It’s so trivial and that drives me crazy. And as does the outrage where it’s like, no, you have to care. I’ve been criticized for not caring enough about that. And I’m like, who cares what the hell I am? Who gives a shit what the hell? I’m a human. We’re all human.

(03:55:40)
It’s not that easy. But it’s kind of fun sometimes. And we’re at a better time. And when you think about the Middle Ages, even if you were a king, you still didn’t have it that good. You didn’t have pineapples in the winter. You didn’t even know what the fuck a pineapple was. We have pineapples whenever we want them. We can fly on planes to other countries.
Lex Fridman
(03:56:02)
By the way, let’s clarify, we, you mean a large fraction of the world? I mentioned to you, one of the biggest things I’ve noticed when I immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States is how plentiful bananas and pineapples were. The fruit section, the produce section of the…

(03:56:23)
Didn’t have to wait in line at the grocery store, could just eat as many bananas and pineapples, and cherries, and watermelon as you want. That’s not everybody has that.
Paul Rosolie
(03:56:34)
No, that’s true. Not everybody has that, but…
Lex Fridman
(03:56:37)
But everybody could be that king. No.
Paul Rosolie
(03:56:41)
But a growing number of people today-
Lex Fridman
(03:56:43)
Can feast on pineapple.
Paul Rosolie
(03:56:45)
… can feast on pineapple and have toasters and new distracting apps all the way until the grave.
Lex Fridman
(03:56:51)
That’s the thing that I also noticed is I don’t think so much about politics when I’m here, or-
Paul Rosolie
(03:56:57)
We haven’t even talked about it. We haven’t.
Lex Fridman
(03:56:59)
Do you want to talk about the stupid differences between humans? Except to just laugh at the absurdity of it on occasion.
Paul Rosolie
(03:57:08)
We’ve been too busy trying to survive glaciers and jungles and avalanches and all kinds of shit.
Lex Fridman
(03:57:14)
Do you think nature is brutal as Werner Herzog showed it? Or is it beautiful?
Paul Rosolie
(03:57:21)
I think the brutality of nature is the chaos, and I think that we are the only ones in it that are capable of organizing in the direction of order and light. So yes, there are going to be hyenas tearing each other apart. Yes, there’s going to be war-torn nations and poor starving children, but we as humans, have the power to work towards something more organized than that.
Lex Fridman
(03:57:54)
So there is a force within nature that’s always searching for order, for good.
Paul Rosolie
(03:58:01)
It’s kind of a unifying theory if you think about it. I mean, all of the chaos of history and the wars and the chaos of nature. Through technology and organization, there’s so many people, more people today than ever before, I think, who are so concerned, who realize that the incredible power, like what Jane Goodall says about how you can affect the people around you.

(03:58:22)
How you can do good in the world, how you can change the narrative of conservation from one of loss and darkness to one of innovation and light. We can do incredible things. We are the masters as humans.

(03:58:36)
And I think that we’re on the cusp of understanding the true potential of that. I just think that more than ever, people have harnessed this ability to do good in the world and be proud of it and just change the darkness into something else.

God

Lex Fridman
(03:58:57)
When you have lived here and taken in the ways of the Amazon jungle, how have your views of God… You mentioned, how have your views of God change? Who is God?
Paul Rosolie
(03:59:12)
I’ve come to believe that, again, back to that Christ wasn’t a Christian, Muhammad wasn’t a Muslim, and Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist. That the game game is love and compassion and the universe is chaotic and dangerous and nature is chaotic and dangerous. But if this is some sort of a biological video game that our reality, that the test is, can we be good? And we go through it every day.

(03:59:44)
Can you be good to your parent? Can you be good to your partner? Can you be good to your coworkers? It’s so difficult and we see how people can cheat and steal and hurt and destroy.

(03:59:57)
And the incredible impact that it has on the world, the returning exponential impact that one act of kindness, one act of good can do. And so I see nature as God. I see the religions as different cultural manifestations of the same truth, the same creative force. Maybe me and you have the same beliefs, and your aliens are my angels.
Lex Fridman
(04:00:34)
Well, thank you for being one of the humans trying to do good in this world, and thank you for bringing me along for some adventure and I believe more adventure awaits.
Paul Rosolie
(04:00:50)
Thank you for being enough of a psychopath to actually just sign on to come into the Amazon rainforest in a suit. And a year ago when you told me that you were going to do this, I truly didn’t believe you.

(04:01:05)
So for being a man of your word and for the incredible work you do to connect humans, and to create dialogue, and to do good in the world and for all the adventures that we’ve had, thank you so much.
Lex Fridman
(04:01:15)
Thank you, brother.
Paul Rosolie
(04:01:16)
Lex, thanks man.
Lex Fridman
(04:01:19)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosalie. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Joseph Campbell. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #428 with Sean Carroll.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Sean Carroll
(00:00:00)
The whole point of relativity is to say there’s no such thing as right now when you’re far away. That is doubly true for what’s inside a black hole. You might think, “Well, the galaxy is very big.” It’s really not. It’s some tens of thousands of light years across and billions of years old. You don’t need to move at a high fraction of the speed of light to fill the galaxy.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:23)
The number of worlds is …
Sean Carroll
(00:00:26)
Very big.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:26)
… very, very, very big. Where do those worlds fit, where they go?
Sean Carroll
(00:00:34)
The short answer is the worlds don’t exist in space. Space exists separately in each world.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:48)
The following is a conversation with Sean Carroll. His third time in this podcast. He is a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins, host of the Mindscape Podcast that I personally love and highly recommend, and author of many books, including the most recent book series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe.

(00:01:07)
The first book of which is titled Space, Time, and Motion. It’s on the topic of general relativity. The second coming out on May 14th, you should definitely pre-order it, it’s titled the Quanta and Fields. That one is on the topic of quantum mechanics.

(00:01:24)
Sean is a legit, active, theoretical physicist and at the same time is one of the greatest communicators of physics ever. I highly encourage you listen to his podcast, read his books, and pre-order the new book to support his work. This was, as always, a big honor and a pleasure for me. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends here’s Sean Carroll.

General relativity


(00:01:55)
In book one of the series, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe called Space, Time, Motion, you take on classical mechanics, general relativity by taking on the main equation of general relativity and making it accessibly easy to understand. Maybe at the high level, what is general relativity? What’s a good way to start to try to explain it?
Sean Carroll
(00:02:18)
Probably the best way to start to try to explain it is special relativity, which came first, 1905. It was the culmination of many decades of people putting things together. But it was Einstein in 1905. In fact, it wasn’t even Einstein. I should give more credit to Minkowski in 1907. Einstein in 1905 figured out that you could get rid of the ether, the idea of a rest frame for the universe and all the equations of physics would make sense with the speed of light being a maximum.

(00:02:50)
But then it was Minkowski who used to be Einstein’s professor in 1907 who realized the most elegant way of thinking about this idea of Einstein’s was to blend space and time together into spacetime to really imagine that there is no hard and fast division of the four-dimensional world in which we live into space and time separately.

(00:03:11)
Einstein was at first dismissive of this. He thought it was just like, “Oh, the mathematicians or over-formalizing again.” But then he later realized that if spacetime is a thing, it can have properties and in particular it can have a geometry. It can be curved from place to place. That was what let him solve the problem of gravity.

(00:03:33)
He had previously been trying to fit in what we knew about gravity from Newtonian mechanics, the inverse square law of gravity, to his new relativistic theory. It didn’t work. The final leap was to say gravity is the curvature of spacetime, and that statement is basically general relativity.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:54)
The tension with Minkowski was he was a mathematician.
Sean Carroll
(00:03:56)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:57)
It’s the tension between physics and mathematics. In fact, in your lecture about this equation, one of them, you say that Einstein is a better physicist than he gets credit for.
Sean Carroll
(00:04:09)
Yep. I know that’s hard. That’s a little bit of a joke there, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:04:14)
Yeah.
Sean Carroll
(00:04:15)
Because we all give Einstein a lot of credit. But then we also, partly based on fact, but partly to make ourselves feel better, tell ourselves a story about how later in life, Einstein couldn’t keep up. There were younger people doing quantum mechanics and quantum field theory and particle physics, and he was just unable to really philosophically get over his objections to that.

(00:04:37)
I think that that story about the latter part is completely wrong, almost 180 degrees wrong. I think that Einstein understood quantum mechanics as well as anyone, at least up through the 1930s. I think that his philosophical objections to it are correct. He should actually have been taken much more seriously about that.

(00:04:58)
What he did, what he achieved in trying to think these problems through is to really basically understand the idea of quantum entanglement, which is important these days when it comes to understanding quantum mechanics. Now, it’s true that in the ’40s and ’50s he placed his efforts in hopes for unifying electricity and magnetism with gravity. That didn’t really work out very well.

(00:05:23)
All of us try things that don’t work out. I don’t hold that against him. But in terms of IQ points, in terms of trying to be a clear-thinking physicist, he was really, really great.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:33)
What does greatness look like for a physicist? How difficult is it to take the leap from special relativity to general relativity? How difficult is it to imagine that, to consider spacetime together and to imagine that there’s a curvature to this whole thing?
Sean Carroll
(00:05:53)
Yeah. That’s a great question. I think that if you want to make the case for Einstein’s greatness, which is not hard to do, there’s two things you point at. One is in 1905, his famous miracle year, he writes three different papers on three wildly different subjects, all of which would make you famous just for writing that one paper.

(00:06:17)
Special relativity is one of them. Brownian motion is another one, which is just the little vibrations of tiny little dust specks in the air. But who cares about that? What matters is it proves the existence of atoms. He explains Brownian motion by imagining there are molecules in the air and deriving their properties. Brilliant.

(00:06:35)
Then he basically starts the world on the road to quantum mechanics with his paper on, which again, is given a boring label of the photoelectric effect. What it really was is he invented photons. He showed that light should be thought of as particles as well as waves. He did all three of those very different things in one year.

(00:06:55)
Okay. But the other thing that gets him genius status is, like you say, general relativity. This takes 10 years from 1905 to 1915. He wasn’t only doing general relativity. He was working on other things. He invented refrigerator. He did various interesting things. He wasn’t even the only one working on the problem.

(00:07:13)
There were other people who suggested relativistic theories of gravity. But he really applied himself to it. I think as your question suggests, the solution was not a matter of turning a crank. It was something fundamentally creative. In his own telling of the story, his greatest moment, his happiest moment was when he realized that if the way that we would modern … say it in modern terms, if you were in a rocket ship accelerating at 1G, at acceleration due to gravity, if the rocket ship were very quiet, you wouldn’t be able to know the difference between being in a rocket ship and being on the surface of the earth.

(00:07:55)
Gravity is not detectable or at least not distinguishable from acceleration. Number one, that’s a pretty clever thing to think. But number two, if you or I had had that thought, we would’ve gone, “Huh. We’re pretty clever.” He reasons from there to say, “Okay. If gravity is not detectable, then it can’t be like an ordinary force.”

(00:08:17)
The electromagnetic force is detectable. We can put charged particles around. Positively charged particles and negatively charged particles respond differently to an electric field or to a magnetic field. He realizes that what his thought experiment showed, or at least suggested, is that gravity isn’t like that. Everything responds in the same way to gravity. How could that be the case?

(00:08:39)
Then this other leap he makes is, “Oh, it’s because it’s the curvature of spacetime.” It’s a feature of spacetime. It’s not a force on top of it. The feature that it is, is curvature. Then finally he says, “Okay. Clearly, I’m going to need the mathematical tools necessary to describe curvature. I don’t know them, so I will learn them.” They didn’t have MOOCs or AI helpers back in those days. He had to sit down and read the math papers, and he taught himself differential geometry and invented general relativity.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:09)
What about the step of including time as just another dimension, combining space and time, is that a simple mathematical leap as Minkowski suggested?
Sean Carroll
(00:09:21)
It’s certainly not simple, actually. It’s a profound insight. That’s why I said I think we should give Minkowski more credit than we do. He’s the one who really put the finishing touches on special relativity. Again, many people had talked about how things change when you move close to the speed of light, what Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism predict and so forth, what their symmetries are. People like Lorenz and Fitzgerald and Poincare, there’s a story that goes there.

(00:09:52)
In the usual telling Einstein puts the capstone on it. He’s the one who says, “All of this makes much more sense if there just is no ether. It is undetectable. We don’t know how fast. Everything is relative.” Thus, the name relativity. But he didn’t take the actual final step, which was to realize that the underlying structure that he had invented is best thought of as unifying space and time together.

(00:10:16)
I honestly don’t know what was going through Minkowski’s mind when he thought that. I’m not sure if he was so mathematically adept that it was just clear to him or he was really struggling it and he did trial and error for a while. I’m not sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:31)
Do you, for him or Einstein, visualize the four-dimensional space, try to play with the idea of time is just another dimension?
Sean Carroll
(00:10:38)
Oh, yeah. All the time. I mean, we, of course, make our lives easy by ignoring two of the dimensions of space. Instead of four-dimensional spacetime, we just draw pictures of one dimension of space, one dimension of time. The so-called spacetime diagram.

(00:10:54)
I mean, maybe this is lurking underneath your question. But even the best physicists will draw a vertical axis and a horizontal axis and will go space, time. But deep down that’s wrong, because you’re sort of preferring one direction of space and one direction of time. It’s really the whole two-dimensional thing that is spacetime.

(00:11:16)
The more legitimate thing to draw on that picture are rays of light, are light cones. From every point, there is a fixed direction at which the speed of light would represent. That is actually inherent in the structure. The division into space and time is something that’s easy for us human beings.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:36)
What is the difference between space and time from the perspective of general relativity?
Sean Carroll
(00:11:41)
It’s the difference between X and Y when you draw axes on a piece of paper.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:46)
There’s really no difference?
Sean Carroll
(00:11:47)
There is almost no difference. There’s one difference that is important, which is the following; If you have a curve in space, I’m going to draw it horizontally, because that’s usually what we do in spacetime diagrams, if you have a curve in space, you’ve heard the motto before that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

(00:12:06)
If you have a curve in time, which is by the way, literally all of our lives, we all evolve in time. You can start with one event in spacetime, and another event in spacetime. What Minkowski points out is that the time you measure along your trajectory in the universe is precisely analogous to the distance you travel on a curve through space.

(00:12:29)
By precisely, I mean it is also true that the actual distance you travel through depends on your path. You can go a straight line, shortest distance and curvy line would be longer. The time you measure in spacetime, the literal time that takes off on your clock also depends on your path, but it depends on it the other way.

(00:12:49)
That the longest time between two points is a straight line. If you zig back and forth in spacetime, you take less and less time to go from point A to point B.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:01)
How do we make sense of that, the difference between the observed reality and the objective reality are underneath it, or is objective reality a silly notion given general relativity?
Sean Carroll
(00:13:13)
I’m a huge believer in objective reality. I think that objective reality, objectivity …
Lex Fridman
(00:13:16)
You’re fan.
Sean Carroll
(00:13:17)
… is real. But I do think that people are a little overly casual about the relationship between what we observe and objective reality in the following sense. Of course, in order to explain the world, our starting point and our ending point is our observations, our experimental input, the phenomena we experience and see around us in the world.

(00:13:43)
But in between, there’s a theory, there’s a mathematical formalization of our ideas about what is going on. If a theory fits the data and is very simple and makes sense in its own terms, then we say that the theory is right. That means that we should attribute some reality to the entities that play an important role in that theory, at least provisionally until we can come up with a better theory down the road.

Black holes

Lex Fridman
(00:14:13)
I think a nice way to test the difference between objective reality and the observed reality is what happens at the edge of the horizon of a black hole. Technically, as you get closer to that horizon, time stands still?
Sean Carroll
(00:14:31)
Yes and no. It depends on exactly how careful we are being. Here is a bunch of things I think are correct. If you imagine there is a black hole, spacetime, the whole solution Einstein’s equation, and you treat you and me as what we call test particles. We don’t have any gravitational fields ourselves. We just move around in the gravitational field. That’s obviously an approximation. Okay. But let’s imagine that.

(00:14:59)
You stand outside the black hole and I fall in. As I’m falling in, I’m waving to you because I’m going into the black hole, you will see me move more and more slowly. Also, the light for me is redshifted. I kind of look embarrassed, because I’m falling into a black hole. There is a limit. There’s a last moment that light will be emitted from me, from your perspective forever. Okay.

(00:15:27)
Now you don’t literally see it because I’m emitting photons more and more slowly because from your point of view. It’s not like I’m equally bright. I basically fade from view in that picture. Okay. That’s one approximation. The other approximation is I do have a gravitational field of my own, and therefore as I approach the black hole, the black hole doesn’t just sit there and let me pass through. It moves out to eat me up because its net energy mass is going to be mine, plus its.

(00:16:01)
But roughly speaking, yes, I think so. I don’t like to go to the dramatic extremes because that’s where the approximations break down. But if you see something falling into a black hole, you see its clock ticking more and more slowly.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:12)
How do we know it fell in?
Sean Carroll
(00:16:13)
We don’t. I mean, how would we. Because it’s always possible that right at the last minute it had a change of heart and starts accelerating away. If you don’t see it passing, you don’t know. Let’s point out that as smart as Einstein was, he never figured out black holes, and he could have. It’s embarrassing. It took decades for people thinking about general relativity to understand that there are such things as black holes.

(00:16:39)
Because basically Einstein comes up with general relativity in 1915. Two years later, Schwarzschild, Karl Schwarzschild derives the solution to Einstein’s equation that represents a black hole, the Schwarzschild solution. No one recognized it for what it was until the ’50s, David Finkelstein and other people. That’s just one of these examples of physicists not being as clever as they should have been.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:04)
Well, that’s the singularity. That’s the edge of the theory. The limit. It’s understandable that it’s difficult to imagine the limit of things.
Sean Carroll
(00:17:14)
It is absolutely hard to imagine. A black hole is very different to many ways from what we’re used to. On the other hand, I mean the real reason, of course, is that between 1915 and 1955, there’s a bunch of other things that are really interesting going on in physics. All of particle physics and quantum field theory. Many of the greatest minds were focused on that.

(00:17:33)
But still, if the universe hands you a solution to general relativity in terms of curved spacetime and its mysterious certain features of it, I would put some effort in trying to figure it out.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:44)
How does a black hole work? Put yourself in the shoes of Einstein and take general relativity to its natural conclusion about these massive things.
Sean Carroll
(00:17:53)
It’s best to think of a black hole as not an object so much as a region of spacetime. Okay. It’s a region with the property, at least in classical general relativity, quantum mechanics makes everything harder. But let’s imagine we’re being classical for the moment. It’s a region of spacetime with the property that if you enter, you can’t leave. Literally the equivalent of escaping a black hole would be moving faster than the speed of light. They’re both precisely equally difficult. You would have to move faster than the speed of light to escape from the black hole.

(00:18:24)
Once you’re in, that’s fine. In principle, you don’t even notice when you cross the event horizon, as we call it. The event horizon is that point of no return, where once you’re inside, you can’t leave. But meanwhile, the spacetime is collapsing around you to ultimately a singularity in your future, which means that the gravitational forces are so strong, they tear your body apart and you will die in a finite amount of time.

(00:18:51)
The time it takes, if the black hole is about the mass of the sun to go from the event horizon to the singularity takes about 1 millionth of a second.

Hawking radiation

Lex Fridman
(00:19:03)
What happens to you if you fall into the black hole? If we think of an object as information, that information gets destroyed.
Sean Carroll
(00:19:11)
Well, you’ve raised a crucially difficult point. That’s why I keep needing to distinguish between black holes according to Einstein’s theory, General Relativity, which is book one of Spacetime and Geometry, which is perfectly classical. Then come the 1970s, we start asking about quantum mechanics and what happens in quantum mechanics.

(00:19:34)
According to classical general relativity, the information that makes up you when you fall into the black hole is lost to the outside world. It’s there, it’s inside the black hole, but we can’t get it anymore. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking comes along and points out that black holes radiate. They give off photons and other particles to the universe around them. As they radiate, they lose mass, and eventually they evaporate, they disappear.

(00:20:03)
Once that happens, I can no longer say the information about you or a book that I threw in the black hole or whatever is still there, is hidden behind the black hole because the black hole has gone away. Either that information is destroyed, like you said, or it is somehow transferred to the radiation that is coming out to the Hawking radiation.

(00:20:23)
The large majority of people who think about this belief that the information is somehow transferred to the radiation and information is conserved. That is a feature both of general relativity by itself and of quantum mechanics by itself. When you put them together, that should still be a feature.

(00:20:40)
We don’t know that for sure. There are people who have doubted it, including Stephen Hawking for a long time. But that’s what most people think. What we’re trying to do now in a topic which has generated many, many hundreds of papers called the Black Hole Information Loss Puzzle is figure out how to get the information from you or the book into the radiation that is escaping the black hole.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:03)
Is there any way to observe Hawking radiation to a degree where you can start getting insight? Or is this all just in the space of theory right now?
Sean Carroll
(00:21:12)
Right now, we are nowhere close to observing Hawking radiation. Here’s the sad fact. The larger the black hole is, the lower its temperature is. A small black hole, like a microscopically small black hole might be very visible. It’s given off light. But something like the black hole, the center of our galaxy, 3 million times the mass of the sun or something like that, Sagittarius A star, that is so cold and low temperature that it’s radiation will never be observable.

(00:21:43)
Black holes are hard to make. We don’t have any nearby. The ones we have out there in the universe are very, very faint. There’s no immediate hope for detecting Hawking radiation.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:51)
Allegedly. We don’t have any nearby?
Sean Carroll
(00:21:53)
As far as we know, we don’t have any nearby.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:56)
Tiny ones be hard to detect somewhere at the edges of the solar system, maybe?
Sean Carroll
(00:22:00)
You don’t want them to be too tiny or they’re exploding. They’re very bright and then they’ll be visible. But there’s an absolutely regime where black holes are large enough not to be visible because the larger ones are fainter. Not giving off radiation, but small enough to not been detected through their gravitational effect. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:17)
Psychologically, just emotionally, how do you feel about black holes? They scare you.
Sean Carroll
(00:22:21)
I love them. I love black holes. But the universe weirdly makes it hard to make a black hole, because you really need to squeeze an enormous amount of matter and energy into a very, very small region of space. We know how to make stellar black holes. A supermassive star can collapse to make a black hole.

(00:22:42)
We know we also have these supermassive black holes, the center of galaxies. We’re a little unclear where they came from. I mean, maybe stellar black holes that got together and combined. But that’s one of the exciting things about new data from the James Webb Space Telescope is that quite large black holes seem to exist relatively early in the history of the universe. It was already difficult to figure out where they came from. Now it’s an even tougher puzzle.

Aliens

Lex Fridman
(00:23:11)
These supermassive black holes are formed somewhere early on in the universe. I mean, that’s a feature, not a bug, that we don’t have too many of them. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have the time or the space to form the little pockets of complexity that we’ll call humans.
Sean Carroll
(00:23:28)
I think that’s fair. Yeah. It’s always interesting when something is difficult, but happens anyway. I mean, the probability of making a black hole could have been zero. It could have been one. But it’s this interesting number in between, which is fun.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:42)
Are there more intelligent alien civilization than there are supermassive black holes?
Sean Carroll
(00:23:46)
Yeah. I have no idea. But I think your intuition is right that it would’ve been easy for there to be lots of civilizations then we would’ve noticed them already and we haven’t. Absolutely the simplest explanation for why we haven’t is that they’re not there.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:04)
Yeah. I just think it’s so easy to make them though. There must be … I understand that’s the simplest explanation. But also …
Sean Carroll
(00:24:12)
How easy is it to make life or eukaryotic life or multicellular life?
Lex Fridman
(00:24:17)
It seems like life finds a way. Intelligent alien civilizations, sure, maybe there is somewhere along that chain a really, really hard leap. But once you start life, once you get the origin of life, it seems like life just finds a way everywhere in every condition. It just figures it out.
Sean Carroll
(00:24:37)
I mean, I get it. I get exactly what you’re thinking. I think is a perfectly reasonable attitude to have before you confront the data. I would not have expected earth to be special in any way. I would’ve expected there to be plenty of very noticeable extraterrestrial civilizations out there. But even if life finds a way, even if we buy everything you say, how long does it take for life to find a way? What if it typically takes 100 billion years, then we’d be alone.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:07)
It’s a time thing. To you, really most likely, there’s no alien civilizations out there. I can’t see it. I believe there’s a ton of them, and there’s another explanation why we can’t see them.
Sean Carroll
(00:25:19)
I don’t believe that very strongly. Look, I’m not going to place a lot of bets here. I’m both pretty up in the air about whether or not life itself is all over the place. It’s possible when we visit other worlds, other solar systems, there’s very tiny microscopic life ubiquitous, but none of it has reached some complex form.

(00:25:41)
It’s also possible there isn’t any. It’s also possible that there are intelligent civilizations that have better things to do than knock on our doors. I think we should be very humble about these things we know so little about.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:53)
It’s also possible there’s a great filter where there’s something fundamental about once the civilization develops complex enough technology, that technology is more statistically likely to destroy everybody versus to continue being creative.
Sean Carroll
(00:26:10)
That is absolutely possible. I’m actually putting less credence on that one just because you need to happen every single time. If even one, I mean, this goes back to John von Neumann pointed out that you don’t need to send the aliens around the galaxy. You can build self-reproducing probes and send them around the galaxy. You might think, “Well, the galaxy is very big.” It’s really not. It’s some tens of thousands of light years across and billions of years old. You don’t need to move at a high fraction of the speed of light to fill the galaxy.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:45)
If you were an intelligent alien civilization, the dictator of one, you would just send out a lot of probes, self-replicating probes …
Sean Carroll
(00:26:52)
100%.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:53)
… to spread out.
Sean Carroll
(00:26:54)
Yes. What you should do … If you want the optimistic spin, here’s the optimistic spin. People looking for intelligent life elsewhere often tune in with their radio telescopes, at least we did before Arecibo was decommissioned. That’s not a very promising way to find intelligent life elsewhere, because why in the world would a super intelligent alien civilization waste all of its energy by beaming it in random directions into the sky?

(00:27:22)
For one thing, it just passes you by. If we are here on earth, we’ve only been listening to radio waves for or a couple 100 years. Okay. If an intelligent alien civilization exists for a billion years, they have to pinpoint exactly the right time to send us this signal. It is much, much more efficient to send probes and to park, to go to the other solar systems, just sit there and wait for an intelligent civilization to arise in that solar system.

(00:27:55)
This is the 2001 monolith hypothesis. I would be less surprised to find a quiescent alien artifact in our solar system than I would to catch a radio signal from an intelligent civilization.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:13)
You’re a sucker for in-person conversations versus remote.
Sean Carroll
(00:28:17)
I just want to integrate over time. A probe can just sit there and wait, whereas a radio wave goes right by you.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:27)
How hard is it for an alien civilization, again, you have the dictator of one, to figure out a probe that is most likely to find a common language with whatever it finds.
Sean Carroll
(00:28:38)
Couldn’t I be like the elected leader of alien civilization?
Lex Fridman
(00:28:40)
Elected leader, democratic leader. Elected leader of a democratic alien civilization. Yes.
Sean Carroll
(00:28:47)
I think we would figure out that language thing pretty quickly. I mean, maybe not as quickly as we do when different human tribes find each other, because obviously there’s a lot of commonalities in humanity. But there is logic in math, and there is the physical world. You can point to a rock and go “rock.” I don’t think it would take that long.

(00:29:08)
I know that Arrival, the movie, based on a Ted Chiang story suggested that the way that aliens communicate is going to be fundamentally different. But also, they had recognition and other things I don’t believe in. I think that if we actually find aliens, that will not be our long-term problem.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:28)
There’s a folks … One of the places you’re affiliated with is Santa Fe, and they approach the question of complexity in many different ways and ask the question in many different ways of what is life, thinking broadly? To you would be able to find it. You’ll think you show up, a probe shows up to a planet, we’ll see a thing and be like, “Yeah. That’s a living thing.”
Sean Carroll
(00:29:51)
Well, again, if it’s intelligent and technologically advanced, the more short-term question of if we get some spectroscopic data from an exoplanet, so we know a little bit about what is in its atmosphere, how can we judge whether or not that atmosphere is giving us a signature of life existing? That’s a very hard question that people are debating about.

(00:30:15)
I mean, one very simple-minded, but perhaps interesting approach is to say, “Small molecules don’t tell you anything, because even if life could make them something else could also make them. But long molecules, that’s the thing that life would produce.”
Lex Fridman
(00:30:32)
Signs of complexity. I don’t know. I just have this nervous feeling that we won’t be able to detect. We’ll show up to a planet. There have a bunch of liquid on it. We take a swim in the liquid. We won’t be able to see the intelligence in it, whether that intelligence looks like something like ants or … We’ll see movement, perhaps, strange movement. But we won’t be able to see the intelligence in it or communicate with it. I guess if we have nearly infinite amount of time to play with different ideas, we might be able to.
Sean Carroll
(00:31:13)
I think I’m in favor of this kind of humility, this intellectual humility that we won’t know because we should be prepared for surprises. But I do always keep coming back to the idea that we all live in the same physical universe. Well, let’s put it this way. The development of our intelligence has certainly been connected to our ability to manipulate the physical world around us.

(00:31:40)
I would guess, without 100% credence by any means, but my guess would be that any advanced kind of life would also have that capability. Both dolphins and octopuses are potential counterexamples to that. But I think in the details, there would be enough similarities that we would recognize it.

Holographic principle

Lex Fridman
(00:32:02)
I don’t know how we got on this-
Sean Carroll
(00:32:00)
… would be enough similarities that we would recognize it.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:02)
I don’t know how we got on this topic, but I think it was from super massive black holes. So if we return to black holes and talk about the holographic principle more broadly, you have a recent paper on the topic. You’ve been thinking about the topic in terms of rigorous research perspective and just as a popular book writer?
Sean Carroll
(00:32:22)
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:22)
So what is the holographic principle?
Sean Carroll
(00:32:25)
Well, it goes back to this question that we were talking about with the information and how it gets out. In quantum mechanics, certainly, arguably, even before quantum mechanics comes along in classical statistical mechanics, there’s a relationship between information and entropy. Entropy is my favorite thing to talk about that I’ve written books about and will continue to write books about. So Hawking tells us that black holes have entropy, and it’s a finite amount of entropy. It’s not an infinite amount. But the belief is, and now we’re already getting quite speculative, the belief is that the entropy of a black hole is the largest amount of entropy that you can have in a region of space-time. It’s the most densely packed that entropy can be. What that means is there’s a maximum amount of information that you can fit into that region of space, and you call it a black hole.

(00:33:20)
Iinterestingly, you might expect if I have a box and I’m going to put information in it and I don’t tell you how I’m going to put the information in, but I ask, “How does the information I can put in scale with the size of the box?” You might think, “Well, it goes as the volume of the box because the information takes up some volume, and I can only fit in a certain amount.” That is what you might guess for the black hole, but it’s not what the answer is. The answer is that the maximum information as reflected in the black hole entropy scales as the area of the black hole’s event horizon, not the volume inside. So people thought about that in both deep and superficial ways for a long time, and they proposed what we now call the holographic principle, that the way that space-time and quantum gravity convey information or hold information is not different bits or qubits for quantum information at every point in space-time.

(00:34:20)
It is something holographic, which means it’s embedded in or located in or can be thought of as pertaining to one dimension less of the three dimensions of space that we live in. So in the case of the black hole, the event horizon is two-dimensional, embedded in a three-dimensional universe. The holographic principle would say all of the information contained in the black hole can be thought of as living on the event horizon rather than in the interior of the black hole. I need to say one more thing about that, which is that this was an idea, the idea I just told you was the original holographic principle put forward by people like Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind, the super famous physicist. Leonard Susskind was on my podcast and gave a great talk. He’s very good at explaining these things.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:08)
Mindscape Podcast-
Sean Carroll
(00:35:08)
Mindscape Podcast.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:09)
Everybody should listen.
Sean Carroll
(00:35:10)
That’s right, yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:11)
You don’t just have physicists on.
Sean Carroll
(00:35:13)
I don’t.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:14)
I love Mindscape.
Sean Carroll
(00:35:15)
Oh, thank you very much.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:16)
Curiosity-driven-
Sean Carroll
(00:35:17)
Yeah, ideas-
Lex Fridman
(00:35:18)
… exploration of ideas.
Sean Carroll
(00:35:18)
Fresh ideas from smart people.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:19)
Yeah.
Sean Carroll
(00:35:20)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:20)
But anyway, what I was trying to get at with Susskind and also at ‘t Hooft were a little vague. They were a little hand wavy about holography and what it meant, where holography, the idea that information is encoded on a boundary really came into its own was with Juan Maldacena in the 1990s and the AdS-CFT correspondence, which we don’t have to get into that into any detail, but it’s a whole full-blown theory of… It’s two different theories. One theory in N dimensions of space-time without gravity, and another theory in N+1 dimensions of space-time with gravity. The idea is that this N dimensional theory is casting a hologram into the N+1 dimensional universe to make it look like it has gravity. That’s holography with a vengeance, and that’s an enormous source of interest for theoretical physicists these days.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:16)
How should we picture what impact that has, the fact that you can store all the information you can think of as all the information that goes into a black hole can be stored at the event horizon?
Sean Carroll
(00:36:27)
Yeah, it’s a good question. One of the things that quantum field theory indirectly suggests is that there’s not that much information in you and me compared to the volume of space-time we take up. As far as quantum field theory is concerned, you and I are mostly empty space, and so we are not information dense. The density of information in us or in a book or a CD or whatever, computer RAM, is indeed encoded by volume. There’s different bits located at different points in space, but that density of information is super-duper low. So we are just like the speed of light or just the big bang for the information in a black hole, we are far away in our everyday experience from the regime where these questions become relevant. So it’s very far away from our intuition. We don’t really know how to think about these things. We can do the math, but we don’t feel it in our bones.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:23)
So you can just write off that weird stuff happens in a black hole.
Sean Carroll
(00:37:27)
Well, we’d like to do better, but we’re trying. That’s why we have an information loss puzzle because we haven’t completely solved it. So here, just one thing to keep in mind. Once space-time becomes flexible, which it does according to general relativity and you have quantum mechanics, which has fluctuations in virtual particles and things like that, the very idea of a location in space-time becomes a little bit fuzzy, ’cause it’s flexible and quantum mechanics says you can even pin it down. So information can propagate in ways that you might not have expected, and that’s easy to say and it’s true, but we haven’t yet come up with the right way to talk about it that is perfectly rigorous.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:10)
It’s crazy how dense with information a black hole is, and then plus like quantum mechanics starts to come into play, so you almost want to romanticize the interesting computation type things that are going on inside the black hole.
Sean Carroll
(00:38:23)
You do. You do, but I’ll point out one other thing. It’s information dense, but it’s also very, very high entropy. So a black hole is kind of like a very, very, very specific random number. It takes a lot of digits to specify it, but the digits don’t tell you anything. They don’t give you anything useful to work on, so it takes a lot of information, but it’s not of a form that we can learn a lot from.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:52)
But hypothetically, I guess as you mentioned, the information might be preserved. The information that goes into a black hole, it doesn’t get destroyed. So what does that mean when the entropy is really high?
Sean Carroll
(00:39:05)
Well, I said that the black hole is the highest density of information, but it’s not the highest amount of information because the black hole can evaporate. When it evaporates and people have done the equations for this, when it evaporates, the entropy that it turns into is actually higher than the entropy of the black hole was, which is good because entropy is supposed to go up, but it’s much more dilute. It’s spread across a huge volume of space-time. So in principle, all that you made the black hole out of, the information that it took is still there, we think, in that information, but it’s scattered to the four winds.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:44)
We just talked about the event horizon of a black hole. What’s on the inside? What’s at the center of it?
Sean Carroll
(00:39:48)
No one’s been there, so-
Lex Fridman
(00:39:50)
And came back to tell?
Sean Carroll
(00:39:51)
… again, this is a theoretical prediction. But I’ll say one super crucial feature of the black holes that we know and love, the kind that Schwarzschild first invented, there’s a singularity, but it’s not at the middle of the black hole. Remember space and time are parts of one unified space-time, the location of the singularity in the black hole is not the middle of space, but our future. It is a moment of time. It is like a big crunch. The big bang was an expansion from a singularity in the past. Big crunch probably doesn’t exist, but if it did, it would be a collapse to a singularity in the future. That’s what the interiors of black holes are like. You can be fine in the interior, but things are becoming more and more crowded. Space-time is becoming more and more warped, and eventually you hit a limit, and that’s the singularity in your future.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:42)
I wonder what time is on the inside of a black hole.
Sean Carroll
(00:40:46)
Time always ticks by at one second per second. That’s all it can ever do. Time can tick by differently for different people, and so you have things like the twin paradox where two people initially are the same age, one goes off in the speed of light and comes back, now they’re not. You can even work out that the one who goes out and comes back will be younger because they did not take the shortest distance path. But locally, as far as you and your wristwatch are concerned, time is not funny. Your neurological signals in your brain and your heartbeat and your wristwatch, whatever’s happening to them is happening to all of them at the same time. So time always seems to be ticking along at the same rate.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:28)
Well, if you fall into a black hole and then I’m an observer just watching it, and then you come out once it evaporates a million years later, I guess you’d be exactly the same age? Have you aged at all?
Sean Carroll
(00:41:45)
You would be converted into photons. You would not be you anymore.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:49)
Right. So it’s not at all possible that information is preserved exactly as it went in.
Sean Carroll
(00:41:55)
It depends on what you might preserve. It’s there in the microscopic configuration of the universe. It’s exactly as if I took a regular book, made it paper and I burned it. The laws of physics say that all the information in the book is still there in the heat and light and ashes. You’re never going to get it. It’s a matter of practice, but in principle, it’s still there.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:15)
But what about the age of things from the observer perspective, from outside the black hole?
Sean Carroll
(00:42:21)
From outside the black hole, doesn’t matter ’cause they’re inside the black hole.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:26)
No. Okay. There’s no way to escape the black hole-
Sean Carroll
(00:42:30)
Right.
Sean Carroll
(00:42:30)
… except-
Lex Fridman
(00:42:32)
To let it evaporate.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:33)
… to let it evaporate. But also, by the way, just in relativity, special relativity, forget about general relativity, it’s enormously tempting to say, “Okay, here’s what’s happening to me right now. I want to know what’s happening far away right now.” The whole point of relativity is to say there’s no such thing as right now when you’re far away, and that is doubly true for what’s inside a black hole. So you’re tempted to say, “Well, how fast is their clock ticking?” Or, “How old are they now?” Not allowed to say that according to relativity.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:05)
‘Cause space and time is treated the same, and so it doesn’t even make sense.
Sean Carroll
(00:43:08)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:09)
What happens to time in the holographic principle?
Sean Carroll
(00:43:12)
As far as we know, nothing dramatic happens. We’re not anywhere close to being confident that we know what’s going on here yet. So there are good unanswered questions about whether time is fundamental, whether time is emergent, whether it has something to do with quantum entanglement, whether time really exists at all, different theories, different proponents of different things, but there’s nothing specifically about holography that would make us change our opinions about time, whatever they happen to be.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:42)
But holography is fundamentally about, it’s a question of space?
Sean Carroll
(00:43:46)
It really is, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:47)
Okay. So time is just like an-
Sean Carroll
(00:43:49)
Time just goes along for the ride as far as we know. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:51)
So all the questions about time is just almost like separate questions, whether it’s emergent and all that kind of stuff?
Sean Carroll
(00:43:56)
Yeah, that might be a reflection of our ignorance right now, but yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:01)
If we figure out a lot, millions of years from now about black holes, how surprised would you be if they traveled back in time and told you everything you want to know about black holes? How much do you think there is still to know, and how mind-blowing would it be?
Sean Carroll
(00:44:20)
It does depend on what they would say. I think that there are colleagues of mine who think that we’re pretty close to figuring out how information gets out of black holes, how to quantize gravity, things like that. I’m more skeptical that we are pretty close. I think that there’s room for a bunch of surprises to come. So in that sense, I suspect I would be surprised. The biggest and most interesting surprise to me would if quantum mechanics itself were somehow superseded by something better. As far as I know, there’s no empirical evidence-based reason to think that quantum mechanics is not 100% correct, but it might not be. That’s always possible, and there are, again, respectable friends of mine who speculate about it. So that’s the first thing I’d want to know.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:15)
Oh, so the black hole would be the most clear illustration-
Sean Carroll
(00:45:18)
Yeah, that’s where it would show up.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:19)
… or if there’s something new it would show up there.
Sean Carroll
(00:45:22)
Maybe. The point is that black holes are mysterious for various reasons. So yeah, if our best theory of the universe is wrong, that might help explain why.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:30)
But do you think it’s possible we’ll find something interesting, like black holes sometimes create new universes or black holes are a kind of portal through space-time to another place or something like this. Then our whole conception of what is the fabric of space-time changes completely ’cause black holes, it’s like Swiss cheese type of situation.
Sean Carroll
(00:45:52)
Yeah. That would be less surprising to me ’cause I’ve already written papers about that. We don’t have, again, strong reason to think that the interior of a black hole leads to another universe. But it is possible, and it’s also very possible that that’s true for some black holes and not others. This is stuff, it’s easy to ask questions we don’t know the answer to. The problem is the questions that are easy to ask that we don’t know the answer to are super hard to answer.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:20)
Because these objects are very difficult to test and to explore for us-
Sean Carroll
(00:46:23)
The regimes are just very far away. So either literally far away in space, but also in energy or mass or time or whatever.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:30)
You’ve published a paper on the holographic principle or that involves the holographic principle. Can you explain the details of that?
Sean Carroll
(00:46:38)
Yeah, I’m always interested in, since my first published paper, taking these wild speculative ideas and trying to test them against data. The problem is when you’re dealing with wild speculative ideas, they’re usually not well-defined enough to make a prediction. It’s kind of, “I know what’s going to happen in some cases, I don’t know what’s going to happen in other cases.” So we did the following thing: As I’ve already mentioned, the holographic principle, which is meant to reflect the information contained in black holes seems to be telling us that there’s less information, less stuff that can go on than you might naively expect. So let’s upgrade naively expect to predict using quantum field theory. Quantum field theory is our best theory of fundamental physics right now. Unlike this holographic black hole stuff, quantum field theory is entirely local. In every point of space, something can go on. Then you add up all the different points in space, okay? Not holographic at all.

(00:47:40)
So there’s a mismatch between the expectation for what is happening even in empty space in quantum field theory versus what the holographic principle would predict. How do you reconcile these two things? So there’s one way of doing it that had been suggested previously, which is to say that in the quantum field theory way of talking, it implies there’s a whole bunch more states, a whole bunch more ways the system could be than there really are. I’ll do a little bit of math just because there might be some people in the audience who like the math. If I draw two axes on a two-dimensional geometry, like the surface of the table, you know that the whole point of it being two-dimensional is I can draw two vectors that are perpendicular to each other. I can’t draw three vectors that are all perpendicular to each other. They need to overlap a little bit. That’s true for any numbers of dimensions. But I can ask, “Okay, how much do they have to overlap?

(00:48:40)
If I try to put more vectors into a vector space, then the dimensionality of the vector space, can I make them almost perpendicular to each other?” The mathematical answer is, as the number of dimensions gets very, very large, you can fit a huge extra number of vectors in that are almost perpendicular to each other. So in this case, what we’re suggesting is the number of things that can happen in a region of space is correctly described by holography. It is somewhat over-counted by quantum field theory, but that’s because the quantum field theory states are not exactly perpendicular to each other. I should have mentioned that in quantum mechanics, states are given by vectors in some huge dimensional vector space; very, very, very, very large dimensional vector space. So maybe the quantum field theory states are not quite perpendicular to each other. If that is true, that’s a speculation already. But if that’s true, how would you know what is the experimental deviation?

(00:49:45)
It would’ve been completely respectable if we had gone through and made some guesses and found that there is no noticeable experimental difference because, again, these things are in regimes very, very far away. We stuck our necks out. We made some very, very specific guesses as to how this weird overlap of states would show up in the equations of motion for particles like neutrinos. Then we made predictions on how the neutrinos would behave on the basis of those wild guesses and then we compared them with data. What we found is we’re pretty close but haven’t yet reached the detectability of the effect that we are predicting. In other words, well, basically one way of saying what we predict is if a neutrino, and there’s reasons why it’s neutrinos, we can go into if you want, but it’s not that interesting, if a neutrino comes to us from across the universe from some galaxy very, very far away, there is a probability as it’s traveling that it will dissolve into other neutrinos because they’re not really perpendicular to each other as vectors as they would ordinarily be in quantum field theory.

(00:50:53)
That means that if you look at neutrinos coming from far enough away with high enough energies, they should disappear. If you see a whole bunch of nearby neutrinos, but then further away you should see fewer. There is an experiment called IceCube, which is this amazing testament to the ingenuity of human beings where they go to Antarctica and they drill holes and they put photodetectors on a string a mile deep in these holes. They basically use all of the ice in a cube, I don’t know whether it’s a mile or not, but it’s like a kilometer or something like that, some big region. That much ice is their detector. They’re looking for flashes when a cosmic ray or neutrino or whatever hits a water molecule in the ice [inaudible 00:51:47]
Lex Fridman
(00:51:46)
Make flashes in the ice.
Sean Carroll
(00:51:48)
Yes-
Lex Fridman
(00:51:48)
… they’re looking for-
Sean Carroll
(00:51:49)
… they’re looking for flashes in the ice.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:51)
What does the detector of that look like?
Sean Carroll
(00:51:55)
It’s a bunch of strings, many, many, many strings with 360 degree photodetectors. You will-
Lex Fridman
(00:52:03)
That’s really cool.
Sean Carroll
(00:52:04)
It’s extremely cool. They’ve done amazing work, and they find neutrinos.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:09)
So they’re looking for neutrinos.
Sean Carroll
(00:52:10)
Yeah. So the whole point is most cosmic rays are protons because why? Because protons exist, and they’re massive enough that you can accelerate them to very high energies. So high-energy cosmic rays tend to be protons. They also tend to hit the Earth’s atmosphere and decay into other particles. So neutrinos on the other hand, punch right through, at least usually, to a great extent, so not just Antarctica, but the whole earth. Occasionally, a neutrino will interact with a particle here on earth, and there’s neutrinos is going through your body all the time from the sun, from the universe, etc. So if you’re patient enough and you have a big enough part of the Antarctic ice sheet to look at, the nice thing about ice is it’s transparent, so nature has built you a neutrino detector. That’s what IceCube does.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:02)
So why ice? So is it just because the low noise and you get to watch this thing and it’s-
Sean Carroll
(00:53:07)
It’s much more dense than air, but it’s transparent.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:13)
So yeah, much more dense, so higher probability, and then it’s transparency, and then it’s also in the middle of nowhere, so you can… Humans are great-
Sean Carroll
(00:53:20)
That’s all you need. There’s not that much ice-
Lex Fridman
(00:53:21)
I love it-
Sean Carroll
(00:53:21)
… right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:22)
… so humor me impressed.
Sean Carroll
(00:53:24)
There’s more ice in Antarctic than anywhere else. Right. So anyway, you can go and you can get a plot from the IceCube experiment, how many neutrinos there are that they’ve detected with very high energies. We predict in our weird little holographic guessing game that there should be a cutoff. You should see neutrinos as you get to higher and higher energies and then they should disappear. If you look at the data, their data gives out exactly where our cutoff is. That doesn’t mean that our cutoff is right, it means they lose the ability to do the experiment exactly where we predict the cutoff should be.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:58)
Oh, boy, okay, but why is there a limit?
Sean Carroll
(00:54:03)
Oh, just because there are fewer, fewer high-energy neutrinos. So there’s a spectrum and it goes down, but what we’re plotting here is-
Lex Fridman
(00:54:11)
Got it.
Sean Carroll
(00:54:11)
… number of neutrinos versus energy, it’s fading away, and they just get very, very few.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:17)
You need the high-energy neutrinos for your prediction.
Sean Carroll
(00:54:20)
Our effect is a little bit bigger for higher energies, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:23)
Got it, and that effect has to do with this almost perpendicular thing.
Sean Carroll
(00:54:26)
Let me just mention the name of Oliver Friedrich, who was a post-doc who led this. He deserves the credit for doing this. I was a co-author and a collaborator and I did some work, but he really gets the lion’s share.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:36)
Thank you, Oliver. Thank you for pushing this wild science forward. Just to speak to that, the meta process of it, how do you approach asking these big questions and trying to formulate as a paper, as an experiment that could make a prediction, all that kind of stuff? What’s your process?
Sean Carroll
(00:54:56)
There’s very interesting things that happens once you’re a theoretical physicist, once you become trained. You’re a graduate student, you’ve written some papers and whatever, suddenly you are the world’s expert in a really infinitesimally tiny area of knowledge and you know not that much about other areas. There’s an overwhelming temptation to just drill deep, just keep doing basically the thing that you started doing, but maybe that thing you started doing is not the most interesting thing to the world or to you or whatever. So you need to separately develop the capability of stepping back and going, ” Okay, now that I can write papers in that area, now that I’m trained enough in the general procedure, what is the best match between my interests, my abilities and what is actually interesting?” Honestly, I’ve not been very good at that over my career.

(00:55:51)
My process traditionally was I was working in this general area of particle physics, field theory, general relativity, cosmology, and I would try to take things other people were talking about and ask myself whether or not it really fit together. So I guess I have three papers that I’ve ever written that have done super well in terms of getting cited and things like that. One was my first ever paper that I get very little credit for, that was my advisor and his collaborator set that up. The other two were basically, my idea. One was right after we discovered that the universe was accelerating. So in 1998 observations showed that not only is the universe expanding, but it’s expanding faster and faster. So that’s attributed to either Einstein’s cosmological constant or some more complicated form of dark energy, some mysterious thing that fills the universe.

Dark energy


(00:56:47)
People were throwing around ideas about this dark energy stuff, “What could it be?” And so forth. Most of the people throwing around these ideas were cosmologists. They work on cosmology. They think about the universe all at once. Since I like to talk to people in different areas, I was more familiar than average with what a respectable working particle physicist would think about these things. What I immediately thought was, “You guys are throwing around these theories. These theories are wildly unnatural. They’re super finely tuned. Any particle physicist would just be embarrassed to be talking about this.” But rather than just scoffing at them, I sat down and asked myself, “Okay, is there a respectable version? Is there a way to keep the particle physicists happy but also make the universe accelerate?” I realized that there is some very specific set of models that is relatively natural, and guess what? You can make a new experimental prediction on the basis of those, and so I did that. People were very happy about that.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:50)
What was the thing that would make physicists happy that would make sense of this fragile thing that people call dark energy?
Sean Carroll
(00:57:59)
So the fact that dark energy pervades the whole universe and is slowly changing, that should immediately set off alarm bells because particle physics is a story of length scales and time scales that are generally, guess what? Small, right? Particles are small. They vibrate quickly, and you’re telling me now I have a new field and its typical rate of change is once every billion years. That’s just not natural. Indeed, you can formalize that and say, look, even if you wrote down a particle that evolved slowly over billions of years, if you let it interact with other particles at all, that would make it move faster, its dynamics would be faster, its mass would be higher, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s a whole story. Things need to be robust, and they all talk to each other in quantum field theory.

(00:58:53)
So how do you stop that from happening? The answer is symmetry. You can impose a symmetry that protects your new field from talking to any other fields, and this is good for two reasons. Number one, it can keep the dynamics slow. So you can’t tell me why it’s slow. You just made that up, but at least it can protect it from speeding up because it’s not talking to any other particles. The other is, it makes it harder to detect. Naively, experiments looking for fifth forces or time changes of fundamental constants of nature like the charge of the electron, these experiments should have been able to detect these dark energy fields, and I was able to propose a way to stop that from happening.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:39)
The detection.
Sean Carroll
(00:59:40)
The detection, yeah, because a symmetry could stop it from interacting with all these other fields, and therefore, it makes it harder to detect. Just by luck, I realized, ’cause it was actually based on my first-ever paper, there’s one loophole. If you impose these symmetries, so you protect the dark energy field from interacting with any other fields, there’s one interaction that is still allowed that you can’t rule out. It is a very specific interaction between your dark energy field and photons, which are very common, and it has the following effect: As a photon travels through the dark energy, the photon has a polarization, up, down, left, right, whatever it happens to be, and as it travels through the dark energy, that photon will rotate its polarization. This is called birefringence. You can run the numbers and say you can’t make a very precise prediction, ’cause we’re making up this model.

(01:00:34)
But if you want to roughly fit the data, you can predict how much polarization, rotation, there should be, a couple of degrees, not that much. So that’s very hard to detect. People have been trying to do it. Right now, literally, we’re on the edge of either being able to detect it or rule it out using the cosmic microwave background. There is just truth in advertising, there is a claim on the market that it’s been detected, that it’s there. It’s not very statistically significant. If I were to bet, I think it would probably go away. It’s very hard thing to observe. But maybe as you get better and better data, cleaner and cleaner analysis, it will persist, and we will have directly detected the dark energy.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:21)
So if we just take this tangent of dark energy, people will sometimes bring up dark energy and dark matter as an example why physicists have lost it, lost their mind. We’re just going to say that there’s this field that permeates everything. It’s unlike any other field, and it’s invisible, and it helps us work out some of the math. How do you respond to those kinds of suggestions.
Sean Carroll
(01:01:50)
Well, two ways. One way is, those people would’ve had to say the same thing when we discovered the planet Neptune, ’cause it’s exactly analogous where we have a very good theory, in that case, Newtonian gravity in the solar system. We made predictions. The predictions were slightly off for the motion of the outer planets. You found that you could explain that motion by positing something very simple, one more planet in a very, very particular place, and you went and looked for it, and there it was. That was the first successful example of finding dark matter in the universe.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:26)
It’s a matter, though, we can’t see.
Sean Carroll
(01:02:27)
Neptune was dark.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:28)
Yeah.

Dark matter

Sean Carroll
(01:02:29)
There’s a difference between dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter as far as we are hypothesizing it is a particle of some sort. It’s just a particle that interacts with us very weakly. So we know how much of it there is. We know more or less where it is. We know some of its properties. We don’t know specifically what it is. But it’s not anything fundamentally mysterious, it’s a particle. Dark energy is a different story. So dark energy is indeed uniformly spread throughout space and has this very weird property that it doesn’t seem to evolve as far as we can tell. It’s the same amount of energy in every cubic centimeter of space from moment to moment in time. That’s why far and away the leading candidate for dark energy is Einstein’s cosmological constant.

(01:03:16)
The cosmological constant is strictly constant, 100% constant. The data say it better be 98% constant or better, so 100% constant works, and it’s also very robust. It’s just there. It’s not doing anything. It doesn’t interact with any other particles. It makes perfect sense. Probably the dark energy is the cosmological constant. The dark matter, super important to emphasize here. It was hypothesized at first in the ’70s and ’80s mostly to explain the rotation of galaxies. Today, the evidence for dark matter is both much better than it was in the 1980s and from different sources. It is mostly from observations of the cosmic background radiation or of large scale structure.
Sean Carroll
(01:04:00)
From observations of the cosmic background radiation or of large-scale structure. We have multiple independent lines of evidence, also gravitational lensing and things like that, many, many pieces of evidence that say that dark matter is there and also that say that the effects of dark matter are different than if we modified gravity. That was my first answer to your question is dark matter we have a lot of evidence for. But the other one is of course we would love it if it weren’t dark matter. Our vested interest is 100% aligned with it being something more cool and interesting than dark matter because dark matter’s just a particle. That’s the most boring thing in the world.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:43)
And it’s non-uniformly distributed through space, dark matter?
Sean Carroll
(01:04:46)
Absolutely. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:47)
And so this-
Sean Carroll
(01:04:48)
You can even see maps of it that we’ve constructed from gravitational lensing.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:51)
Verifiable clumps of dark matter in the galaxy that explains stuff.
Sean Carroll
(01:04:56)
Bigger than the galaxy, sadly. We think that in the galaxy dark matter is lumpy, but it’s weaker, its effects are weaker. But on the scale of large scale structure and clusters of galaxies and things like that, yes, we can show you where the dark matter is.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:11)
Could there be a super cool explanation for dark matter that would be interesting as opposed to just another particle that sits there and clumps?
Sean Carroll
(01:05:19)
The super cool explanation would be modifying gravity rather than inventing a new particle. Sadly, that doesn’t really work. We’ve tried. I’ve tried. That’s my third paper that was very successful. I tried to unify dark matter and dark energy together. That was my idea. That was my aspiration, not even idea. I tried to do it. It failed even before we wrote the paper. I realized that my idea did not help. It could possibly explain away the dark energy, but it would not explain the way the dark matter, and so I thought it was not that interesting, actually. And then two different collaborators of mine said, “Has anyone thought of this idea?” They thought of exactly the same idea completely independently of me. And I said, “Well, if three different people found the same idea, maybe it is interesting,” and so we wrote the paper. And yeah, it was very interesting. People are very interested in it.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:09)
Can you describe this paper a little bit? It’s fascinating how much of a thing there is, dark energy and dark matter, and we don’t quite understand it. What was your dive into exploring how to unify the two?
Sean Carroll
(01:06:22)
Here is what we know about dark matter and dark energy: They become important in regimes where gravity is very, very, very weak. That’s the opposite from what you would expect if you actually were modifying gravity. There’s a rule of thumb in quantum field theory, et cetera that new effects show up when the effects are strong. We understand weak fields, we don’t understand strong fields. But okay, maybe this is different.

(01:06:54)
What do I mean by when gravity is weak? The dark energy shows up late of the universe. Early in the history of the universe, the dark energy is irrelevant, but remember the density of dark energy stays constant. The density of matter and radiation go down. At early times, the dark energy was completely irrelevant compared to matter and radiation. At late times, it becomes important. That’s also when the universe is dilute and gravity is relatively weak.

(01:07:21)
Now think about galaxies. A galaxy is more dense in the middle, less dense on the outside. And there is a phenomenological fact about galaxies that in the interior of galaxies you don’t need dark matter. That’s not so surprising because the density of stars and gas is very high there and the dark matter is just subdominant. But then there’s generally a radius inside of which you don’t need dark matter to fit the data, outside of which you do need dark matter to fit the data. That’s again when gravity is weak.

(01:07:51)
I asked myself, “Of course, we know in field theory new effects should show up when fields are strong, not weak, but let’s throw that out of the window. Can I write down a theory where gravity alters when it is weak?” And we’ve already said what gravity is. What is gravity? It’s the curvature of space-time. There are mathematical quantities that measure the curvature of space-time. And generally, you would say, “I have an understanding, Einstein’s equation,” which I explained to the readers in the book, “relates the curvature of space-time to matter and energy. The more matter and energy, the more curvature.” I’m saying what if you add a new term in there that says, “The less matter and energy, the more curvature”? No reason to do that except to fit the data. I tried to unify the need for dark matter and the need for dark energy.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:48)
That would be really cool if that was the case.
Sean Carroll
(01:08:50)
Super cool. It’d be the best. It’d be great. It didn’t work.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:56)
It’d be really interesting if gravity did something funky when there’s not much of it, almost like at the edges of it gets noisy.
Sean Carroll
(01:09:03)
That was exactly the hope.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:05)
Right. Aw, man.
Sean Carroll
(01:09:07)
But the great thing about physics is there are equations. You can come up with the words and you can wave your hands, but then you got to write down the equations; and I did. And I figured out that it could help with the dark energy, the acceleration of the universe; it doesn’t help with dark matter at all. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:24)
It just sucks that the scale of galaxies and scale of solar systems, the physics is boring.
Sean Carroll
(01:09:33)
Yeah, it does. I agree. I tear my hair out when people who are not physicists accuse physicists, like you say, of losing the plot because they need dark matter and dark energy. I don’t want dark matter and dark energy; I want something much cooler than that. I’ve tried. But you got to listen to the equations and to the data.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:58)
You’ve mentioned three papers, your first ever, your first awesome paper ever, and your second awesome paper ever. Of course you wrote many papers, so you’re being very harsh on the others. But-
Sean Carroll
(01:10:10)
Well, by the way, this is not awesomeness, this is impact.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:14)
Impact.
Sean Carroll
(01:10:14)
Right?
Lex Fridman
(01:10:14)
Sure.
Sean Carroll
(01:10:15)
There’s no correlation between awesomeness and impact. Some of my best papers fell without a stone and vice versa.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:22)
Tree falls in the forest. Yeah.
Sean Carroll
(01:10:23)
Yeah. The first paper was called Limits on the Lorentz and Parity Violating Modification of Electromagnetism… Or Electrodynamics. We figured out how to violate Lorentz invariance, which is the symmetry underlying relativity. And the important thing is we figured out a way to do it that didn’t violate anything else and was experimentally testable. People love that. The second paper was called Quintessence and the Rest of the World. Quintessence is this dynamical dark energy field. The rest of the world is because I was talking about how the quintessence field would interact with other particles and fields and how to avoid the interactions you don’t want. And the third paper was called Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due to Gravitational Physics? Something like that. You see the common theme. I’m taking what we know, the standard model of particle physics, general relativity, tweaking them in some way, and then trying to fit the data
Lex Fridman
(01:11:20)
And trying to make it so it’s experimentally validated.
Sean Carroll
(01:11:22)
Ideally, yes, that’s right. That’s the goal.

Quantum mechanics

Lex Fridman
(01:11:25)
You wrote the book Something Deeply Hidden on the mysteries of quantum mechanics and a new book coming out soon, part of that, Biggest Ideas in the Universe series we mentioned called Quanta and Fields. That’s focusing on quantum mechanics. Big question first, biggest ideas in the universe, what to you is most beautiful or perhaps most mysterious about quantum mechanics?
Sean Carroll
(01:11:52)
Quantum mechanics is a harder one. I wrote a textbook on general relativity, and I started it by saying, “General relativity is the most beautiful physical theory ever invented.” And I will stand by that. It is less fundamental than quantum mechanics, but quantum mechanics is a little more mysterious. It’s a little bit kludgy right now. If you think about how we teach quantum mechanics to our students, the Copenhagen interpretation, it’s a God-awful mess. No one’s going to accuse that of being very beautiful. I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world.

(01:12:35)
It depends on what you mean by beauty, but I think that the answer to your question is quantum mechanics can start with extraordinarily austere, tiny ingredients and in principle lead to the world. That boggles my mind. It’s much more comprehensive. General relativity is about gravity, and that’s great. Quantum mechanics is about everything and seems to be up to the task. And so I don’t know, is that beauty or not? But it’s certainly impressive.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:03)
Both for the theory, the predictive power of the theory and the fact that the theory describes tiny things creating everything we see around us.
Sean Carroll
(01:13:10)
It’s a monist theory. In classical mechanics, I have a particle here, particle there; I describe them separately. I can tell you what this particle’s doing, what that particle’s doing. In quantum mechanics, we have entanglement, as Einstein pointed out to us in 1935. And what that means is there is a single state for these two particles. There’s not one state for this particle, one state for the other particle. And indeed, there’s a single state for the whole universe called the wave function of the universe, if you want to call it that. And it obeys one equation. And is our job then to chop it up, to carve it up, to figure out how to get tables and chairs and things like that out of it.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:53)
You mentioned the many-worlds interpretation, and it is in fact beautiful, but it’s one of your more controversial things you stand behind. You’ve probably gotten a bunch of flak for it.
Sean Carroll
(01:14:05)
I’m a big boy. I can take it.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:07)
Well, can you first explain it and then maybe speak to the flak you may have gotten?
Sean Carroll
(01:14:12)
Sure. The classic experiment to explain quantum mechanics to people is called the Stern-Gerlach experiment. You’re measuring the spin of a particle. And in quantum mechanics, the spin is just a spin. It’s the rate at which something is rotating around in a very down to earth sense, the difference being is that it’s quantized. For something like a single electron or a single neutron, it’s either spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. Let’s put it this way. Those are the only two measurement outcomes you will ever get. There’s no it’s spinning faster or slower, it’s either spinning one direction or the other. That’s it. Two choices. According to the rules of quantum mechanics, I can set up an electron, let’s say, in a state where it is neither purely clockwise or counterclockwise but a superposition of both. And that’s not just because we don’t know the answer, it’s because it truly is both until we measure it. And then when we measure it, we see one or the other. This is the fundamental mystery of quantum mechanics is that how we describe the system when we’re not looking at it is different from what we see when we look at it.

(01:15:21)
We teach our students in the Copenhagen way of thinking is that the act of measuring the spin of the electron causes a radical change in the physical state. It spontaneously collapses from being a superposition of clockwise and counterclockwise to being one or the other. And you can tell me the probability that that happens, but that’s all you can tell me. And I can’t be very specific about when it happens, what caused it to happen, why it’s happening, none of that. That’s all called the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.

(01:15:54)
Many-worlds just says, “Look, I just told you a minute ago that there’s only one way function for the whole universe, and that means that you can’t take too seriously just describing the electron, you have to include everything else in the universe.” In particular, you clearly have to interact with the electron in order to measure it. Whatever is interacting with the electron should be included in the wave function that you’re describing. And look, maybe it’s just you, maybe your eyeballs are able to perceive it, but okay, I’m going to include you in the wave function. Since you have a very sophisticated listenership, I’ll be a little bit more careful than average. What does it mean to measure the spin of the electron? We don’t need to go into details, but we want the following thing to be true: If the electron were in a state that was 100% spinning clockwise, then we want the measurement to tell us it was spinning clockwise. We want your brain to go, “Yes, the electron was spinning clockwise.” Likewise, if it was 100% counterclockwise, we want to see that, to measure that.

(01:17:03)
The rules of quantum mechanics, the Schrodinger equation of quantum mechanics, is 100% clear that if you want to measure it clockwise when it’s clockwise and measure it counterclockwise when it’s counterclockwise, then when it starts out in a superposition, what will happen is that you and the electron will entangle with each other. And by that I mean that the state of the universe evolves into part saying, “The electron was spinning clockwise, and I saw it clockwise,” and part of the state is it’s in a superposition with the part that says, “The electron was spinning counterclockwise, and I saw it counterclockwise.” Everyone agrees with this; entirely uncontroversial. Straightforward consequence of the Schrodinger equation.

(01:17:49)
And then Niels Bohr would say, “And then part of that wave function disappears,” and we’re in the other part. And you can’t predict which part it’ll be, only the probability. Hugh Everett, who was a graduate student in the 1950s, was thinking about this, says, “I have a better idea. Part of the wave function does not magically disappear, it stays there.” The reason why that idea, Everett’s idea that the whole wave function always sticks around and just obeys the Schrodinger equation was not thought of years before is because naively, you look at it and you go, “Okay, this is predicting that I will be in a superposition, that I will be in a superposition of having seen the electron be clockwise and having seen it be counterclockwise.” No experimenter has ever felt like they were in a superposition. You always see an outcome.

(01:18:41)
Everett’s move, which was genius, was to say, “The problem is not the Schrodinger equation. The problem is you have misidentified yourself in the Schrodinger equation.” You have said, “Oh, look, there’s a person who saw counterclockwise, there’s a person who saw clockwise; I should be that superposition of both.” And Everett says, “No, no, no, you’re not,” because the part of the wave function in which the spin was clockwise, once that exists, it is completely unaffected by the part of the wave function that says the spin was counterclockwise. They are apart from each other. They are un-interacting. They have no influence. What happens in one part has no influence in the other part. Everett says, “The simple resolution is to identify yourself as either the one who saw spin clockwise or the one who saw spin counterclockwise.” There are now two people once you’ve done that experiment. The Schrodinger equation doesn’t have to be messed with, all you have to do is locate yourself correctly in the wave function. That’s many-worlds.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:47)
The number of worlds is-
Sean Carroll
(01:19:50)
Very big.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:50)
… very, very, very big. Where do those worlds fit? Where do they go?
Sean Carroll
(01:19:58)
The short answer is the worlds don’t exist in space, space exists separately in each world. There’s a technical answer to your question, which is Hilbert space, the space of all possible quantum mechanical states, but physically, we want to put these worlds somewhere. That’s just a wrong intuition that we have. There is no such thing as the physical spatial location of the worlds because space is inside the worlds.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:29)
One of the properties of this interpretation is that you can’t travel from one world to the other.
Sean Carroll
(01:20:34)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:35)
Which makes you feel that they’re existing separately.
Sean Carroll
(01:20:43)
They are existing separately and simultaneously.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:45)
And simultaneously.
Sean Carroll
(01:20:46)
Without locations in space.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:48)
Without locations in space. How is it possible to visualize them existing without a location in space?
Sean Carroll
(01:20:55)
The real answer to that, the honest answer is the equations predict it. If you can’t visualize it, so much worse for you. The equations are crystal clear about what they’re predicting.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:07)
Is there a way to get closer to understanding and visualizing the weirdness of the implications of this?
Sean Carroll
(01:21:16)
I don’t think it’s that hard. It wasn’t that hard for me. I don’t mind the idea that when I make a quantum mechanical measurement there is, later on in the universe, multiple descendants of my present self who got different answers for that measurement. I can’t interact with them. Hilbert space, the space law of quantum wave functions, was always big enough to include all of them. I’m going to worry about the parts of the universe I can observe.

(01:21:47)
Let’s put it this way. Many-worlds comes about by taking the Schrodinger equation seriously. The Schrodinger equation was invented to fit the data, to fit the spectrum of different atoms and different emission and absorption experiments. And it’s perfectly legitimate to say, “Well, okay, you’re taking the Schrodinger equation, you’re extrapolating it, you’re trusting it, believing it beyond what we can observe. I don’t want to do that.” That’s perfectly legit except, okay, then what do you believe? Come up with a better theory. You’re saying you don’t believe the Schrodinger equation; tell me the equation that you believe in. And people have done that. Turns out it’s super hard to do that in a legitimate way that fits the data.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:36)
And many-worlds is a really clean.
Sean Carroll
(01:22:40)
Absolutely the most austere, clean, no extra baggage theory of quantum mechanics.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:45)
But if it in fact is correct, isn’t this the weirdest thing of anything we know?
Sean Carroll
(01:22:55)
Yes. In fact, let me put it this way. The single best reason in my mind to be skeptical about many-worlds is not because it doesn’t make sense or it doesn’t fit the data or I don’t know where the worlds are going or whatever, it’s because to make that extrapolation, to take seriously the equation that we know is correct in other regimes requires new philosophy, requires a new way of thinking about identity, about probability, about prediction, a whole bunch of things. It’s work to do that philosophy, and I’ve been doing it and others have done it, and I think it’s very, very doable, but it’s not straightforward. It’s not a simple extrapolation from what we already know, it’s a grand extrapolation very far away. And if you just wanted to be methodologically conservative and say, “That’s a step too far; I don’t want to buy it,” I’m sympathetic to that. I think that you’re just wimping out, I think that you should have more courage, but I get the impulse.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:00)
And there is, under many-worlds, an era of time where, if you rewind it back, there’s going to be one initial state.
Sean Carroll
(01:24:13)
That’s right. All of quantum mechanics, all different versions require a kind of arrow of time. It might be different in every kind, but the quantum measurement process is irreversible. You can measure something, it collapses; you can’t go backwards. If someone tells you the outcome… If I say I’ve measured an electron, “Its spin is clockwise,” and they say, “What was it before I measured it?” You know there was some part of it that was clockwise, but you don’t know how much. And many-worlds is no different. But the nice thing is that the kind of arrow of time you need in many-worlds is exactly the kind of arrow of time you need anyway for entropy and thermodynamics and so forth. You need a simple, low entropy initial state. That’s what you need in both cases.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:56)
If you actually look at under many-worlds into the entire history of the universe, correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks very deterministic.
Sean Carroll
(01:25:06)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:06)
In each moment, does the moment contain the memory of the entire history of the universe? To you, does the moment contain the memory of everything that preceded it?
Sean Carroll
(01:25:17)
As far as we know, according to many-worlds, the wave function of the universe, all the branches of the universe at once, all the worlds does contain all the information. Calling it a memory is a little bit dangerous because it’s not the same kind of memory that you and I have in our brains because our memories rely on the arrow of time, and the whole point of the Schrodinger equation or Newton’s laws is they don’t have an arrow of time built in. They’re reversible. The state of the universe not only remembers where it came from but also determines where it’s going to go in a way that our memories don’t do that.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:57)
But our memories, we can do replay. Can you do this?
Sean Carroll
(01:26:01)
We can, but the act of forming a memory increases the entropy of the universe. It is an irreversible process also. You can walk on a beach and leave your footprints there. That’s a record of your passing. It will eventually be erased by the ever-increasing entropy of the universe.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:18)
Well, but you can imperfectly replay it. I guess can we return, travel back in time imperfectly?
Sean Carroll
(01:26:25)
Oh, it depends on the level of precision you’re trying to ask that question. The universe contains the information about where the universe was, but you and I don’t. We’re nowhere close.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:39)
And it’s, what, computationally very costly to try to consult the universe?
Sean Carroll
(01:26:45)
Well, it depends on, again, exactly what you’re asking. There are some simple questions like what was the temperature of the universe 30 seconds after the Big Bang? We can answer that. That’s amazing that we can answer that to pretty high precision. But if you want to know where every atom was, then no.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:05)
What to you is the Big Bang? Why? Why did it happen?
Sean Carroll
(01:27:13)
We have no idea. I think that that’s a super important question that I can imagine making progress on, but right now I’m more or less maximally uncertain about what the answer is.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:24)
Do you think black holes will help potentially?
Sean Carroll
(01:27:24)
No.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:26)
No.
Sean Carroll
(01:27:26)
Not that much. Quantum gravity will help, and maybe black holes will help us figure out quantum gravity, so indirectly, yes. But we have the situation where general relativity, Einstein’s theory unambiguously predicts there was a singularity in the past. There was a moment of time when the universe had infinite curvature, infinite energy, infinite expansion rate, the whole bit. That’s just a fancy way of saying the theory has broken down. And classical general relativity is not up to the task of what saying what really happened at that moment. It is completely possible there was, in some sense, a moment of time before which there were no other moments. And that would be the Big Bang. Even if it’s not a classical general relativity kind of thing, even if quantum mechanics is involved, maybe that’s what happened. It’s also completely possible there was time before that space and time and they evolved into our hot big bang by some procedure that we don’t really understand.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:24)
And if time and space are emergent, then the before even starts getting real weird.
Sean Carroll
(01:28:29)
Well, I think that if there is a first moment of time, that would be very good evidence or that would fit hand in glove with the idea that time is emergent. If time is fundamental, then it tends to go forever because it’s fundamental.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:44)
Well, yeah. The general formulation of this question is what’s outside of it? Well, what’s outside of our universe, in time and in space? I know it’s a pothead question, Sean. I understand. I apologize.
Sean Carroll
(01:28:57)
That’s my life. My life is asking pothead questions. Some of them, the answer is that’s not the right way to think about it.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:03)
Okay. But is it possible to think at all about what’s outside our universe?
Sean Carroll
(01:29:09)
It’s absolutely legit to ask questions, but you have to be comfortable with the possibility that the answer is there’s no such thing as outside our universe. That’s absolutely on the table. In fact, that is the simplest, most likely to be correct answer that we know of.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:24)
But it’s the only thing in the universe that wouldn’t have an outside.
Sean Carroll
(01:29:30)
Yeah. If the universe is the totality of everything, it would not have an outside.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:34)
That’s so weird to think that there’s not an outside. We want there to be a creator, a creative force that led to this and an outside. This is our town, and then there’s a bigger world. And there’s always a bigger world. And to think that there’s not [inaudible 01:29:53].
Sean Carroll
(01:29:52)
Because that is our experience. That’s the world we grew up in. The universe doesn’t need to obey those rules.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:00)
Such a weird thing.
Sean Carroll
(01:30:02)
When I was a kid, that used to keep me up at night. What if the universe had not existed?
Lex Fridman
(01:30:06)
Right. It feels like a lot of pressure that if this is the only universe and we’re here, one of the few intelligent civilizations, maybe the only one, it’s the old theories that we’re the center of everything, it just feels suspicious. That’s why many-worlds is exciting to me because it is humbling in all the right kinds of ways. It feels like infinity is the way this whole thing runs.
Sean Carroll
(01:30:37)
There’s one pitfall that I’ll just mention because there’s a move that is made in these theoretical edges of cosmology that I think is a little bit mistaken, which is to say I’m going to think about the universe on the basis of imagining that I am a typical observer. This is called the principle of typicality, or the principle of mediocrity, or even the Copernican principle. Nothing special about me, I’m just typical in the universe. But then you draw some conclusions from this, and what you end up realizing is you’ve been hilariously presumptuous because by saying, “I’m a typical observer in the universe,” you’re saying, “Typical observers in the universe are like me,” and that is completely unjustified by anything. I’m not telling you what the right way to do it is, but these kinds of questions that are not quite grounded in experimental verification or falsification are ones you have to be very careful about.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:33)
That to me is one of the most interesting questions. And there’s different ways to approach it, but what’s outside of this? How did the big mess start? How do we get something from nothing? That’s always the thing you’re sneaking up to when you’re studying all of these questions. You’re always thinking that’s where the black hole and the unifying, getting quantum gravity, all this kind of stuff, you’re always sneaking up to that question, where did all of this come from?
Sean Carroll
(01:32:02)
Yeah, that’s fair.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:02)
And I think that’s probably an answerable question, right?
Sean Carroll
(01:32:09)
No.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:10)
It doesn’t have to be. You think there could be a turtle at the bottom of this that refuses to reveal its identity?
Sean Carroll
(01:32:17)
Yes. I think that specifically the question why is there something rather than nothing? does not have the kind of answer that we would ordinarily attribute to why questions because typical why questions are embedded in the universe. And when we answer them, we take advantage of the features of the universe that we know and love. But the universe itself, as far as we know, is not embedded in anything bigger or stronger, and therefore it can just be.

Simulation

Lex Fridman
(01:32:47)
Do you think it’s possible this whole place is simulated?
Sean Carroll
(01:32:51)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:52)
It’s a really interesting, dark, twisted video game that we’re all existing in.
Sean Carroll
(01:32:57)
My own podcast listeners, Mindscape listeners tease me because they know from my AMA episodes that if you ever start a question by asking, “Do you think it’s possible that…” the answer’s going to be yes. That might not be the answer that you care about, but it’s possible, sure, as long as you’re not adding two even numbers together and getting an odd number.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:21)
When you say it’s possible, there’s a mathematically yes, and then there’s more of intuitive.
Sean Carroll
(01:33:26)
Yeah. You want to know whether it’s plausible. You want to know is there a-
Lex Fridman
(01:33:27)
Plausible.
Sean Carroll
(01:33:30)
… reasonable, non-zero credence to attach to this? I don’t think that there’s any philosophical knockout objection to the simulation hypothesis. I also think that there’s absolutely no reason to take it seriously.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:45)
Do you think humans will try to create one? I guess that’s how I always think about it. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past few years and a lot more recently in virtual worlds and just am always captivated by the possibility of creating higher and high resolution worlds. And as we’ll talk a little bit about artificial intelligence, the advancement on the Sora front, you can automatically generate those worlds, and the possibility of existing in those automatically generated worlds is pretty exciting as long as there’s a consistent physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity that governs the generation of those worlds. It just seems like humans will for sure try to create this.
Sean Carroll
(01:34:34)
Yeah, I think they will create better and better simulations. I think the philosopher, David Chalmers, has done what I consider to be a good job of arguing that we should treat things that happen in virtual reality and in simulated realities as just as real as the reality that we experience. I also think that as a practical matter, people will realize how much harder it is to simulate a realistic world than we naively believe. This is not a my lifetime kind of worry.

AGI

Lex Fridman
(01:35:02)
Yeah. The practical matter of going from a prototype that’s impressive to a thing that governs everything. Similar question on this front is in AGI. You’ve said that we’re very far away from AGI.
Sean Carroll
(01:35:17)
I want to eliminate the phrase AGI.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:22)
Basically, when you’re analyzing large language models and seeing how far are they from whatever AGI is, and we can talk about different notions of intelligence, that we’re not as close as some people in public view are talking about. What’s your intuition behind that?
Sean Carroll
(01:35:41)
My intuition is basically that artificial intelligence is different than human intelligence, and so the mistake that is being made by focusing on AGI among those who do is an artificial agent that, as we can make them now or in the near future, might be way better than human beings at some things, way worse-
Sean Carroll
(01:36:00)
… Better than human beings at some things. Way worse than human beings at other things. And rather than trying to ask, how close is it to being a human-like intelligent, we should appreciate it for what its capabilities are, and that will both be more accurate and help us put it to work and protect us from the dangers better rather than always anthropomorphizing it.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:22)
I think the underlying idea there under the definition of AGI is that the capabilities are extremely impressive. That’s not a precise statement, but meaning-
Sean Carroll
(01:36:36)
Sure. No, I get that. I completely agree.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:38)
And then the underlying question where a lot of the debate is, is how impressive is it? What are the limits of large language models? Can they really do things like common sense reasoning? How much do they really understand about the world or are they just fancy mimicry machines? And where do you fall on that as to the limits of large language models?
Sean Carroll
(01:37:02)
I don’t think that there are many limits in principle. I am a physicalist about consciousness and awareness and things like that. I see no obstacle to, in principle, building an artificial machine that is indistinguishable in thought and cognition from a human being. But we’re not trying to do that. What a large language model is trying to do is to predict text. That’s what it does. And it is leveraging the fact that we human beings for very good evolutionary biology reasons, attribute intentionality and intelligence and agency to things that act like human beings. As I was driving here to get to this podcast space, I was using Google Maps and Google Maps was talking to me, but I wanted to stop to get a cup of coffee. So I didn’t do what Google Maps told me to do. I went around a block that it didn’t like. And so it gets annoyed. It says like, “No, why are you doing …” It doesn’t say exactly in this, but you know what I mean. It’s like, “No, turn left, turn left,” and you turn right.

(01:38:10)
It is impossible as a human being not to feel a little bit sad that Google Maps is getting mad at you. It’s not. It’s not even trying to, it’s not a large language model, no aspirations to intentionality, but we attribute that all the time. Dan Dennett, the philosopher, wrote a very influential paper on The Intentional Stance, the fact that it’s the most natural thing in the world for we human beings to attribute more intentionality to artificial things than are really there, which is not to say it can’t be really there. But if you’re trying to be rational and clear thinking about this, the first step is to recognize our huge bias towards attributing things below the surface to systems that are able to, at the surface level, act human.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:01)
So if that huge bias of intentionality is there in the data, in the human data, in the vast landscape of human data that AI models, large language models, and video models in the future are trained on, don’t you think that that intentionality will emerge as fundamental to the behavior of these systems naturally?
Sean Carroll
(01:39:24)
Well, I don’t think it will happen naturally. I think it could happen. Again, I’m not against the principle. But again, the way that large language models came to be and what they’re optimized for is wildly different than the way that human beings came to be and what they’re optimized for. So I think we’re missing a chance to be much more clear-headed about what large language models are by judging them against human beings. Again, both in positive ways and negative ways.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:57)
Well, I think … To push back on what they’re optimized for is different to describe how they’re trained versus what they’re optimized for. So they’re trained in this very trivial way of predicting text tokens, but you can describe what they’re optimized for and what the actual task in hand is, is to construct a world model, meaning an understanding of the world. And that’s where it starts getting closer to what humans are kind of doing, where just in the case of large language models, know how the sausage is made, and we don’t know how it’s made for us humans.
Sean Carroll
(01:40:28)
But they’re not optimized for that. They’re optimized to sound human.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:31)
That’s the fine-tuning. But the actual training is optimized for understanding, creating a compressed representation of all the stuff that humans have created on the internet.
Sean Carroll
(01:40:44)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:44)
And the hope is that that gives you a deep understanding of the world.
Sean Carroll
(01:40:50)
Yeah. So that’s why I think that there’s a set of hugely interesting questions to be asked about the ways in which large language models actually do represent the world. Because what is clear is that they’re very good at acting human. The open question in my mind is, is the easiest, most efficient, best way to act human to do the same things that human beings do or are there other ways? And I think that’s an open question. I just heard a talk by Melanie Mitchell at Santa Fe Institute, an artificial intelligence researcher, and she told two stories about two different papers, one that someone else wrote and one that her group is following up on. And they were modeling Othello. Othello, the game with a little rectangular board, white and black squares. So the experiment was the following. They fed a neural network the moves that were being made in the most symbolic form, E5 just means that, okay, you put a token down on E5. So it gives a long string, it does this for millions of games, real legitimate games.

(01:41:53)
And then it asks the question, the paper asks the question, “Okay, you’ve trained it to tell what would be a legitimate next move from not a legitimate next move. Did it in its brain, in its little large language model brain.” I don’t even know if it’s technically large language model, but a deep learning network. “Did it come up with a representation of the Othello board?” Well, how do you know? And so they construct a little probe network that they insert, and you ask it, “What is it doing right at this moment?” And the answer is that the little probe network can ask, “Would this be legitimate or is this token white or black?” Or whatever, things that in practice would amount to it has invented the Othello board. And it found that the probe got the right answer, not 100% of the time, but more than by chance, substantially more than by chance. So they said there’s some tentative evidence that this neural network has discovered the Othello board just out of data, raw data.

(01:42:59)
But then Melanie’s group asked the question, “Okay, are you sure that that understanding of the Othello board wasn’t built into your probe?” And what they found was at least half of the improvement was built into the probe. Not all of it. And look, a Othello board is way simpler than the world. So that’s why I just think it’s an open question, whether or not … I mean, it would be remarkable either way to learn that large language models that are good at doing what we train them to do are good because they’ve built the same kind of model of the world that we have in our minds or that they’re good despite not having that model. Either one of these is an amazing thing. I just don’t think the data are clear on which one is true.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:49)
I think I have some sort of intellectual humility about the whole thing because I was humbled by several stages in the machine learning development over the past 20 years. And I just would never have predicted that LLMs, the way they’re trained, on the scale of data they’re trained would be as impressive as they are. And that’s where intellectual humility steps in, where my intuition would say something like with Melanie, where you need to be able to have very sort of concrete common sense reasoning, symbolic reasoning type things in a system in order for it to be very intelligent. But here, I’m so impressed by what it’s capable to do, train on the next token prediction essentially … My conception of the nature of intelligence is just completely, not completely, but humbled, I should say.
Sean Carroll
(01:44:48)
Look, and I think that’s perfectly fair. I also was, I almost say pleasantly, but I don’t know whether it’s pleasantly or unpleasantly, but factually surprised by the recent rate of progress. Clearly some kind of phase transition percolation has happened and the improvement has been remarkable, absolutely amazing. That I have no arguments with. That doesn’t yet tell me the mechanism by which that improvement happened. Constructing a model much like a human being is clearly one possible mechanism, but part of the intellectual humility is to say maybe there are others.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:24)
I was chatting with the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, so behind Claude and that company, but a lot of the AI companies are really focused on expanding the scale of compute. If we assume that AI is not data limited, but is compute limited, you can make the system much more intelligent by using more compute. So let me ask you almost on the physics level, do you think physics can help expand the scale of compute and maybe the scale of energy required to make that compute happen?
Sean Carroll
(01:46:02)
Yeah, 100%. I think this is one of the biggest things that physics can help with, and it’s an obvious kind of low-hanging fruit situation where the heat generation, the inefficiency, the waste of existing high-level computers is nowhere near the efficiency of our brains. It’s hilariously worse, and we haven’t tried to optimize that hard on that frontier. I mean, your laptop heats up when it’s sitting on your lap. It doesn’t need to. Your brain doesn’t heat up like that. So clearly there exists in the world of physics, the capability of doing these computations with much less waste heat being generated, and I look forward to people doing that, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:49)
Are you excited for the possibility of nuclear fusion?
Sean Carroll
(01:46:52)
I am cautiously optimistic. Excited would be too strong. I mean, it’d be great, but if we really tried solar power, it would also be great.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:02)
I think Ilya Sutskever said this, that the future of humanity on Earth will be just the entire surface of Earth is covered in solar panels and data centers.
Sean Carroll
(01:47:13)
Why would you waste the surface of the Earth with solar panels? Put them in space.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:16)
Sure, you can go in space. Yeah.
Sean Carroll
(01:47:17)
Space is bigger than the Earth.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:20)
Yeah, just solar panels everywhere.
Sean Carroll
(01:47:21)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:21)
I like it.
Sean Carroll
(01:47:24)
We already have fusion. It’s called the Sun.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:26)
Yeah, that’s true. And there’s probably more and more efficient ways of catching that energy.
Sean Carroll
(01:47:33)
Sending it down is the hard part, absolutely. But that’s an engineering problem.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:37)
So I just wonder where the data centers, the compute centers can expand to, if that’s the future. If AI is as effective as it possibly could be, then the scale of computation will keep increasing, but perhaps it’s a race between efficiency and scale.
Sean Carroll
(01:47:56)
There are constraints. There’s a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of damage we can do to the environment before it’s not worth it anymore. So yeah, I think that’s a new question. In fact, it’s kind of frustrating because we get better and better at doing things efficiently, but we invent more things we want to do faster than we get good at doing them efficiently. So we’re continuing to make things worse in various ways.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:19)
I mean, that’s the dance of humanity where we’re constantly creating better motivated technologies that are potentially causing a lot more harm, and that includes for weapons, includes AI used as weapons, that includes nuclear weapons, of course, which is surprising to me that we haven’t destroyed human civilization yet, given how many nuclear warheads are out there.
Sean Carroll
(01:48:41)
Look, I’m with you. Between nuclear and bioweapons, it is a little bit surprising that we haven’t caused enormous devastation. Of course, we did drop two atomic bombs on Japan, but compared to what could have happened or could happen tomorrow, it could be much worse.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:57)
It does seem like there’s an underlying, speaking of quantum fields, there’s a field of goodness within the human heart that in some kind of game theoretic way, we create really powerful things that could destroy each other, and there’s greed and ego and all this kind of power hungry dictators that are at play here in all the geopolitical landscape, but we somehow always don’t go too far.
Sean Carroll
(01:49:25)
But that’s exactly what you would say right before we went too far.

Complexity

Lex Fridman
(01:49:27)
Right before we went too far, and that’s why we don’t see aliens. So you’re like I mentioned, associated with Santa Fe Institute. I just would love to take a stroll down the landscape of ideas explored there.
Sean Carroll
(01:49:43)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:44)
So they look at complexity in all kinds of ways. What do you think about the emergence of complexity from simple things interacting simply?
Sean Carroll
(01:49:52)
I think it’s a fascinating topic. I mean, that’s why I’m thinking about these things these days rather than the papers that I was describing to you before. All of those papers I described to you before are guesses. What if the laws of physics are different in the following way? And then you can work out the consequences. At some point in my life, I said, “What is the chance I’m going to guess right?” Einstein guessed right, Steven Weinberg guessed right, but there’s a very small number of times that people guessed right. Whereas with this emergence of complexity from simplicity, I really do think that we haven’t understood the basics yet. I think we’re still kind of pre-paradigmatic. There have been some spectacular discoveries. People like Geoffrey West at Santa Fe and others have really given us true insights into important systems. But still, there’s a lot of the basics, I think are not understood.

(01:50:40)
And so searching for the general principles is what I like to do, and I think it’s absolutely possible that … And to be a little bit more substantive than that. This is kind of a cliche. I think the key is information, and I think that what we see through the history of the universe as you go from simple to more and more complex is really subsystems of the universe figuring out how to use information to do whatever, to survive or to thrive or to reproduce. I mean, that’s the sort of fuel, the leverage, the resource that we have for a while anyway, until the heat death. But that’s where the complexity is really driven by.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:20)
But the mechanism of it. I mean, you mentioned Geoffrey West. What are interesting inklings of progress in this realm? And what are systems that interest you in terms of information? So I mean, for me, just as a fan of complexity, just even looking at simple cellular automata is always just a fascinating way to illustrate the emergence of complexity.
Sean Carroll
(01:51:42)
So for those of the listeners who don’t know, viewers, cellular automata come from imagining a very simple configuration. For example, a set of ones and zeros along a line, and then you met a rule that says, “Okay, I’m going to evolve this in time.” And generally the simplest ones start with just each block of three ones and zeros have a rule that they will determinously go to either one or a zero, and you can actually classify all the different possibilities, a small number of possible cellular automata of that form.

(01:52:15)
And what was discovered by various people, including Stephen Wolfram is some of these cellular automata have the feature that you start from almost nothing like 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, and you let it rip and it becomes wildly complex. Okay, so this is very provocative, very interesting. It’s also not how physics works at all because as we said, physics conserves information. You can go forward or backwards. These cellular automata do not, they’re not reversible in any sense. You’ve built in an arrow of time, you have a starting point, and then you evolve. So what I’m interested in is seeing how in the real world with the real laws of physics and underlying reversibility, but macroscopic irreversibility from entropy and the arrow of time, et cetera, how does that lead to complexity? I think that that’s an answerable question. I don’t think that cellular automata are really helping us in that one.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:11)
So what does the landscape of entropy in the universe look like?
Sean Carroll
(01:53:18)
Well, entropy is hard to localize. It’s a property of systems, not of parts of systems. Having said that, we can do approximate answers to the question. The answer is black holes are huge in entropy. Let’s put it this way, the whole observable universe that we were in had a certain amount of entropy before stars and planets and black holes started to form, 10 to the 88th. I can even tell you the number. Okay. The single black hole at the center of our galaxy has entropy, 10 to the 90. Single black hole at the of our galaxy has more entropy than the whole universe used to have not too long ago. So most of the entropy in the universe today is in the form of black holes.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:04)
Okay, that’s fascinating first of all. But second of all, if we take black holes away, what are the different interesting perturbations in entropy across space? Where do we earthlings fit into that?
Sean Carroll
(01:54:18)
The interesting thing to me is that if you start with a system that is isolated from the rest of the universe and you start it at low entropy, there’s almost a theorem that says if you’re very, very, very low entropy, then the system looks pretty simple. Because low entropy means there’s only a small number of ways that you can rearrange the parts to look like that. So if there’s not that many ways, the answer’s going to look simple.

(01:54:46)
But there’s also almost a theorem that says when you’re at maximum entropy, the system is going to look simple because it’s all smeared out. If it had interesting structure, then it would be complicated. So entropy in this isolated system only goes up. That’s the second law of thermodynamics. But complexity starts low, goes up, and then goes down again. Sometimes people think that complexity or life or whatever is fighting against the second law of thermodynamics, fighting against the increase of entropy. That is precisely the wrong way to think about it. We are surfers riding the wave of increasing entropy. We rely on increasing entropy to survive. That is part of what makes us special. This table maintains its stability mechanically, which I mean there’s molecules there, have forces on each other, and it holds up. You and I aren’t like that. We maintain our stability dynamically by ingesting food, fuel, food, and water and air and so forth, burning it, increasing its entropy. We are non equilibrium, quasi steady-state systems. We are using the fuel the universe gives us in the form of low entropy energy to maintain our stability.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:06)
I just wonder what that mechanism of surfing looks like. First of all, one question to ask, do you think it’s possible to have a kind of size of complexity where you have very precise ways or clearly defined ways of measuring complexity?
Sean Carroll
(01:56:25)
I think it is, and I think we don’t. It’s possible to have it, I don’t think we yet have it because in part because complexity is not a univalent thing. There’s different ideas that go under the rubric of complexity. One version is just [inaudible 01:56:41] complexity. If you have a configuration or a string of numbers or whatever, can you compress it so that you have a small program that will output that? That’s [inaudible 01:56:51] complexity, but that’s the complexity of a string of numbers. It’s not like the complexity of a problem, computational complexity, the traveling salesman problem or factoring large numbers. That’s a whole different kind of question that is also about complexity. So we don’t have that sort of unified view of it.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:09)
So you think it’s possible to have a complexity of a physical system?
Sean Carroll
(01:57:13)
Yeah, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:14)
In the same way we do entropy?
Sean Carroll
(01:57:15)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:17)
You think that’s a Sean Carroll paper or what?
Sean Carroll
(01:57:20)
We are working on various things. The glib thing that I’m trying to work on right now with a student is Complexo Genesis. How does complexity come to be if all the universe is doing is moving from low entropy to high entropy?
Lex Fridman
(01:57:33)
It’s a sexy name.
Sean Carroll
(01:57:34)
It’s a good name. Yeah, I like the name. I’ve just got to write the paper.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:38)
Sometimes a name, a rose by any other name. In which context, the birth of complexity are you most interested in?
Sean Carroll
(01:57:49)
Well, I think it comes in stages. So I think that if you go from … I’m again a physicist, so biologists studying evolution will talk about how complexity evolves all the time, the complexity of the genome, the complexity of our physiology. But they take for granted that life already existed and entropy is increasing and so forth. I want to go back to the beginning and say the early universe was simple and low entropy and entropy increases with time, and the universe sort of differentiates and becomes more complex. But that statement, which is indisputably true, has different meanings because complexity has different meanings. So sort of the most basic primal version of complexity is what you might think of as configurational complexity. That’s what [inaudible 01:58:39] gets at. How much information do you need to specify the configuration of the system?

(01:58:44)
Then there’s a whole other step where subsystems of the universe start burning fuel. So in many ways, a planet and a star are not that different in configurational complexity. They’re both spheres with density high at the middle and getting less as you go out. But there’s something fundamentally different because the star only survives as long as it has fuel. I mean, then it turns into a brown dwarf or white dwarf for whatever. But as a star, as a main sequence star, it is an out of equilibrium system, but it’s more or less static. If I spill the coffee mug and it falls, in the process of falling it’ out of equilibrium, but it’s also changing all the time. A specific kind of system is where it looks sort of macroscopically stationary, like a star, but underneath the hood, it’s burning fuel to beat the band in order to maintain that stability. So as stars form, that’s a different kind of complexity that comes to be.

(01:59:43)
Then there’s another kind of complexity that comes to be, roughly speaking at the origin of life, because that’s where you have information really being gathered and utilized by subsystems of the universe. And then arguably, there’s any number of stages past that. I mean, one of the most obvious ones to me is we talk about simulation theory, but you and I run simulations in our heads. They’re just not that good. But we imagine different hypothetical futures. Bacteria don’t do that. So that’s the kind of information processing that is a form of complexity, and so I would like to understand all these stages and how they fit together.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:20)
Yeah, imagination.
Sean Carroll
(02:00:21)
Yeah, mental time travel.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:24)
Yeah. The things going on in my head when I’m imagining worlds are super compressed representations of those worlds, but [inaudible 02:00:32] get to the essence of them, and maybe it’s possible with non-human computing type devices to do those kinds of simulations in more and more compressed ways.
Sean Carroll
(02:00:41)
There’s an argument to be made that literally what separates human beings from other species on Earth is our ability to imagine counterfactual hypothetical futures.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:55)
Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the big features. I don’t know if it’s a-
Sean Carroll
(02:00:59)
Everyone has their own favorite little feature, but that’s why I said there’s an argument to be made. I did a podcast episode on it with Adam Bulley. It developed slowly. I did a different podcast. Sorry to keep mentioning podcast episodes I did. But Malcolm Maciver, who is an engineer at Northwestern, has a theory about one of the major stages in evolution is when fish first climbed on the land. And I mean, of course that is a major stage of evolution, but in particular, there’s a cognitive shift because when you’re a fish swimming under the water, the attenuation length of light in water is not that long. You can’t see kilometers away. You can see meters away, and you’re moving at meters per second. So all of the evolutionary optimization is make all of your decisions on a timescale of less than a second. When you see something new, you have to make a rapid fire decision what to do about it.

(02:01:51)
As soon as you climb onto land, you can essentially see forever, you can see stars in the sky. So now a whole new mode of reasoning opens up where you see something far away and rather than saying, “Look up [inaudible 02:02:06],” I see this, I react. You can say, “Okay, I see that thing. What if I did this? What if I did that? What if I did something different?” And that’s the birth of imagination eventually.

Consciousness

Lex Fridman
(02:02:17)
You’ve been critical on panpsychism.
Sean Carroll
(02:02:20)
Yes, you’ve noticed that.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:22)
Can you make the case for Panpsychism and against it? So panpsychism is the idea that consciousness permeates all matter. Maybe it’s a fundamental force or a physics of the fabric of the universe.
Sean Carroll
(02:02:39)
Panpsychism, thought everywhere, consciousness everywhere.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:45)
To a point of entertainment, the idea frustrates you, which sort of as a fan is wonderful to watch, and you’ve had great episodes with panpsychists on your podcast where you go at it.
Sean Carroll
(02:02:58)
I had David Chalmers, who’s one of the world’s great philosophers, and he is panpsychism curious. He doesn’t commit to anything, but he’s certainly willing to entertain it. Philip Goff, who I’ve had, who is a great guy, but he’s devoted to panpsychism. In fact, he’s almost single-handedly responsible for the upsurge of interest in panpsychism in the popular imagination. And the argument for it is supposed to be that there is something fundamentally uncapturable about conscious awareness by physical behavior of atoms and molecules. So the panpsychist will say, “Look, you can tell me maybe someday, through advances of neuroscience and what have you, exactly what happens in your brain and how that translates into thought and speech and action. What you can’t tell me is what it is like to be me. You can’t tell me what I am experiencing when I see something that is red or that I taste something that is sweet. You can tell me what neurons fire, but you can’t tell me what I’m experiencing, that first-person, inner subjective experience is simply not capturable by physics.”

(02:04:14)
And therefore, this is an old argument, of course, but then therefore is supposed to be, I need something that is not contained within physics to account for that, and I’m just going to call it mind. We don’t know what it is yet. We’re going to call it mind, and it has to be separate from physics. And then there’s two ways to go. If you buy that much, you can either say, okay, I’m going to be a dualist. I’m going to believe that there’s matter and mind, and they’re separate from each other and they’re interacting somehow. Or that’s a little bit complicated and sketchy as far as physics is going to go. So I’m going to believe in mind, but I’m going to put it prior to matter. I’m going to believe that mind comes first, and that consciousness is the fundamental aspect of reality and everything else, including matter and physics comes from it. That would be at least as simple as physics comes first.

(02:05:07)
Now, the physicalist such as myself will say, I don’t have any problem explaining what it’s like to be you or what you experience when you see red. It’s a certain way of talking about the atoms and the neurons, et cetera, that make up you. Just like the hardness or the brownness of this table, these are words that we attach to certain underlying configurations of ordinary physical matter. Likewise, sadness and redness or whatever are words that we attach to you to describe what you’re doing. And when it comes to consciousness in general, I’m very quick to say I do not claim to have any special insight on how consciousness works other than I see no reason to change the laws of physics to account for it.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:58)
If you don’t have to change the laws of physics, where do you think it emerges from? Is consciousness an illusion that’s almost like a shorthand that we humans use to describe a certain kind of feeling we have when interacting with the world, or is there some big leap that happens at some stage?
Sean Carroll
(02:06:15)
I almost never use the word illusion. Illusion means that there’s something that you think you’re perceiving that is actually not there. Like an oasis in the desert is an illusion. It has no causal efficacy. If you walk up to where the oasis is supposed to be, you’ll say you were wrong about it being there. That’s different than something being emergent or non-fundamental, but also real. This table is real, even though I know it’s made of atoms, that doesn’t remove the realness from the table. I think that consciousness and free will and things like that are just as real in tables and chairs.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:47)
Oasis in the desert does have causal efficacy in that you’re thirsty [inaudible 02:06:53].
Sean Carroll
(02:06:53)
It leads you to draw incorrect conclusions about the world.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:56)
Sure, but imagining a thing can sometimes bring it to reality, as we’ve seen, and that has a kind of causal efficacy.
Sean Carroll
(02:07:07)
But your understanding of the world in a way that gives you power over it and influence over it is decreased rather than increased by believing in that oasis. That is not true about consciousness or this table.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:20)
You don’t think you can increase the chance of a thing existing by imagining it existing?
Sean Carroll
(02:07:29)
No. Unless you build it or make it.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:32)
No, that’s what I mean. Imagining humans can fly if you’re the Wright brothers.
Sean Carroll
(02:07:37)
[inaudible 02:07:37] imagine that humans are flying, in terms of counterfactuals in the future, absolutely. Imagination is crucially important, but that’s not an illusion. That’s just a imagination.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:48)
Okay. The possibility of the future versus what the reality is. I mean, the future is a concept, so you can … Time is just a concept, so you can play with that.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:01)
Time is just a concept so you can play with that. But yes, reality. So, to you … So for example, I love asking this. So, Donald Hoffman thinks that the entirety of the conversation we’ve been having about space-time is an illusion. Is it possible for you to steelman the case for that? Can you make the case for and against reality, as I think he writes, that the laws of physics as we know them with space-time, is it interface to a much deeper thing that we don’t at all understand and that we’re fooling ourselves by constructing this world?
Sean Carroll
(02:08:45)
Well, I think there’s part of that idea that is perfectly respectable and part of it that is perfectly nonsensical and I’m not even going to try to steelman the nonsensical part. The real part to me is what is called structural realism, so we don’t know what the world is at a deep fundamental level. Let’s put ourselves in the minds of people living 200 years ago, they didn’t know about quantum mechanics, they didn’t know about relativity, that doesn’t mean they were wrong about the universe that they understood, they had Newton’s laws, they could predict what time the sun was going to rise perfectly well.

(02:09:23)
In the progress of science, the words that would be used to give the most fundamental description of how you were predicting the sun would rise changed because now you have curved space-time and things like that and you didn’t have any of those words 200 years ago. But the prediction is the same, why? Because that prediction, independent of what we thought the fundamental ontology was, the prediction pointed to something true about our understanding of reality. To call it an illusion is just wrong, I think. We might not know what the best, most comprehensive way of stating it is but it’s still true.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:06)
Is it true in the way, for example, belief in God is true? Because for most of human history, people have believed in a God or multiple gods and that seemed very true to them as an explanation for the way the world is, some of the deeper questions about life itself with the human condition and why certain things happen, that was a good explainer. So, to you, that’s not an illusion?
Sean Carroll
(02:10:40)
No, I think that was completely an illusion. I think it was a very, very reasonable illusion to be under. There are illusions, there are substantive claims about the world that go beyond predictions that we can make and verify which later turned out to be wrong and the existence of God was one of them. If those people at that time had abandoned their belief in God and replaced it with a mechanistic universe, they would’ve done just as well at understanding things. Again, because there are so many things they didn’t understand, it was very reasonable for them to have that belief, it wasn’t that they were dummies or anything like that. But that is, as we understand the universe better and better, some things stick with us, some things get replaced.

Naturalism

Lex Fridman
(02:11:23)
So, like you said, you are a believer of the mechanistic universe, you’re a naturalist and, as you’ve described, a poetic naturalist.
Sean Carroll
(02:11:35)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:35)
What’s the word poetic … What is naturalism and what is poetic naturalism?
Sean Carroll
(02:11:39)
Naturalism is just the idea that all that exists is the natural world, there’s no supernatural world. You can have arguments about what that means but I would claim that the argument should be about what the word supernatural means, not the word natural. The natural world is the world that we learn about by doing science. The poetic part means that you shouldn’t be too, I want to say, fundamentalist about what the natural world is. As we went from Newtonian space-time to Einsteinian space-time, something is maintained there, there is a different story that we can tell about the world.

(02:12:19)
And that story, in the Newtonian regime, if you want to fly a rocket to the moon, you don’t use general relativity, you use Newtonian mechanics, that story works perfectly well. The poetic aspect of the story is that there are many ways of talking about the natural world and, as long as those ways latch onto something real and causally efficacious about the functioning of the world, then we attribute some reality and truth to them.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:44)
So, the poetic really looks at the, let’s say, the pothead questions at the edge of science is more open to them.
Sean Carroll
(02:12:52)
It’s doing double duty a little bit so that’s why it’s confusing. The more obvious respectable duty it’s doing is that tables are real. Even though you know that it’s really a quantum field theory wave function, tables are still real, there are a different way of talking about the underlying deeper reality of it. The other duty it’s doing is that we move beyond purely descriptive vocabularies for discussing the universe onto normative and prescriptive and judgmental ways of talking about the universe. This painting is beautiful, that one is ugly. This action is morally right, that one is morally wrong. These are also ways of talking about the universe, they are not fixed by the phenomena, they’re not determined by our observations, they cannot be ruled out by a crucial experiment but they’re still valid. They might not be universal, they might be subjective but they’re not arbitrary and they do have a role in describing how the world works.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:50)
So, you don’t think it’s possible to construct experiments that explore the realms of morality and even meaning? So, those are subjective?
Sean Carroll
(02:14:02)
Yeah. They’re human, they’re personal.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:04)
But do you think that’s just because we don’t have a … The tools of science have not expanded enough to incorporate the human experience?
Sean Carroll
(02:14:13)
No, I don’t think that’s what it is. I think that what we mean by aesthetics or morality are we’re attaching categories, properties to things that happen in the physical world and there is always going to be some subjectivity to our attachment and how we do that and that’s okay and, the faster we recognize that and deal with it, the better off we’ll be.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:32)
But if we deeply and fully understand the function of the human mind, it won’t be able to incorporate that?
Sean Carroll
(02:14:39)
No. That will absolutely be helpful in explaining why certain people have certain moral beliefs, it won’t justify those beliefs as right or wrong.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:48)
Do you think it’s possible to have a general relativity that includes the observer effect where the human mind is the observer?
Sean Carroll
(02:14:56)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:57)
How we morph in the same way gravity morphs space-time, how does the human mind morph reality and have a very thorough theory of how that morphing actually happens?
Sean Carroll
(02:15:14)
That’s a very pothead question, Lex, but-
Lex Fridman
(02:15:16)
I’m sorry.
Sean Carroll
(02:15:17)
It’s okay.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:17)
But do you think it’s possible?
Sean Carroll
(02:15:20)
The answer is yes. I think that there’s no-
Lex Fridman
(02:15:20)
Okay, all right.
Sean Carroll
(02:15:22)
I think we are part of the physical world, the natural world. Physicalism would’ve been just as good a word to use as naturalism, maybe even a more accurate word but it’s a little bit more off-putting so I do want to snap your more attractive label than physicalism.

Limits of science

Lex Fridman
(02:15:40)
Are there limits to science?
Sean Carroll
(02:15:42)
Sure. We just talked about one, right? Science can’t tell you right from wrong. You need science to implement your ideas about right and wrong. If you are functioning on the basis of an incorrect view of how the world works, you might very well think you’re doing right but actually be doing wrong but all the science in the world won’t tell you which action is right and which action is wrong.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:05)
Dictators and people in power sometimes use science as an authority to convince you what’s right and wrong, studying Nazi science is fascinating.
Sean Carroll
(02:16:16)
Yeah. But there’s an instrumentalist view here, you have to first decide what your goals are and then science can help you achieve those goals. If your goals are horrible, science has no problem helping you achieve them, science is happy to help out.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:30)
Let me ask you about the method behind the madness on several aspects of your life. So, you mentioned your approach to writing for research and writing popular books, how do you find the time of the day? What’s the day in the life of Sean Carroll looks like?
Sean Carroll
(02:16:44)
Very unclear how I have the time, honestly.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:45)
So, you don’t have a thing where, in the morning, you try to fight for two hours somewhere?
Sean Carroll
(02:16:51)
I don’t, I’m really terrible at that. My strategy for finding time is just to ignore interruptions and emails but it’s a different time every day, some days it never happens, some weeks it never happens.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:04)
Oh, really? You’re able to pull it off? Because you’re extremely prolific. So, you’re able to have days where you don’t write-
Sean Carroll
(02:17:09)
Oh, my god, yes. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:09)
… and still write the next day?
Sean Carroll
(02:17:11)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:12)
Oh, wow. That’s a rare thing, right? A lot of prolific writers will-
Sean Carroll
(02:17:17)
I guess it’s true.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:18)
… carve out two hours because, otherwise, it just disappears.
Sean Carroll
(02:17:21)
Right. No, I get that. Yeah, I do. And yeah, it just everyone has their foibles or whatever so I’m not able to do that, therefore, I have to just figure it out on the fly.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:37)
And what’s the actual process look like when you’re writing popular stuff? You get behind a computer?
Sean Carroll
(02:17:42)
Yeah, get behind a computer. My way of doing it … So, my wife, Jennifer, is a science writer but it’s interesting because our techniques are entirely different. She will think about something but then she’ll free write, she’ll just sit at a computer and write I think this, I think this, I think this. And then that will be vastly compressed, edited, rewritten or whatever until the final thing happens. I will just sit there silently thinking for a very long time and then I’ll write what is almost the final draft. So, a lot of it happens. There might be some scribbles for an outline or something like that but a lot of it is in my brain before it’s on the page.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:18)
So, that’s the case for The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, the quanta book and the space, time and motion book?
Sean Carroll
(02:18:23)
Yeah, Quanta and Fields, which is actually mostly about quantum field theory and particle physics, that’s coming out in May. And that is I’m letting people in on things that no other book lets them in on so I hope it’s worth it. It’s a challenge because it’s a lot of equations.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:40)
You did the same thing with Space, Time and Motion. You did something quite interesting which is you made the equation the centerpiece of a book.
Sean Carroll
(02:18:48)
Right, there’s a lot of equations. Book two goes further in those directions than book one did. So, it’s more cool stuff, it’s also more mind-bending, it’s more of a challenge. Book three that I’m writing right now is called Complexity and Emergence.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:09)
Oh wow.
Sean Carroll
(02:19:09)
And that’ll be the final part of the trilogy.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:11)
Oh, that’s fascinating. So, there’s a lot of, probably, ideas there, that’s a real cutting edge.
Sean Carroll
(02:19:17)
Well, but I’m not trying to be cutting edge. In other words, I’m not trying to speculate in these books. Obviously, in other books, I’ve been very free about speculating but the point of these books is to say things that, 500 years from now, will still be true. And so, there are some things we know about complexity and emergence and I want to focus on those. And I will mention, I’m happy to say, this is something that needs to be speculated about but I won’t pretend to be telling you what one is the right one.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:44)
You somehow found the balance between the rigor of mathematics and still accessible which is interesting.
Sean Carroll
(02:19:50)
I try. Look, these three books, the Biggest Ideas books are absolutely an experiment. They’re going to appeal to a smaller audience than other books will but that audience should love them. My 19-year-old Self would’ve been so happy to get these books, I can’t tell you.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:07)
Yeah, in terms of looking back in history, those are books … The trilogy would be truly special in that way.
Sean Carroll
(02:20:13)
Worked for Lord of the Rings so I figured why not me.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:16)
You and Tolkien.
Sean Carroll
(02:20:17)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:18)
Just different styles, different topics.
Sean Carroll
(02:20:20)
Same ultimate reality.

Mindscape podcast

Lex Fridman
(02:20:24)
We mentioned Mindscape Podcast, I love it. You interview a huge variety of experts from all kinds of fields so just several questions I want to ask. How do you prepare? How prepare to have a good conversation? How do you prepare in a way that satisfies, makes your own curious mind happy, all that kind of stuff?
Sean Carroll
(02:20:46)
Yeah, no, these are great questions and I’ve struggled and changed my techniques over the years, it’s a over five-year-old podcast, might be approaching six years old now. I started out over-preparing when I first started, I had a journey that I was going to go down. Many of the people I talk to are academics or thinkers who write books so they have a story to tell, I could just say, “Okay, give me your lecture and then, an hour later, stop.” So, the mistake is to anticipate what the lecture would be and to ask the leading questions that would pull it out of them. What I do now is much more here are the points, here are the big questions that I’m interested in and so I have a much sketchier outline to start and then try to make it more of a real conversation.

(02:21:38)
I’m helped by the fact that it is not my day job so I strictly limit myself to one day of my life per podcast episode on average, some days take more. And that includes, not just doing the research, but inviting the guest, recording it, editing it, publishing it. So, I need to be very, very efficient at that, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:00)
You enforce constraints for yourself in which creativity can emerge.
Sean Carroll
(02:22:03)
That’s right, that’s right. And look, sometimes, if I’m interviewing a theoretical physicist, I can just go in. And where I’m interviewing an economist or a historian, I have to do a lot of work.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:16)
Do you ever find yourself getting lost in rabbit holes that serve no purpose except satisfying your own curiosity and then potentially expanding the range of things you know that can help your actual work and research and writing?
Sean Carroll
(02:22:31)
Yes, on both counts. Some people have so many things to talk about that you don’t know where to start or finish, others have a message. And one of the thing I discovered over the course of these years is the correlation with age. There are brilliant people and I try very hard on the podcast to get all sorts of people, different ages and things like that and, bless their hearts, the most brilliant young people are not as practiced at wandering past their literal research. The have less mastery over the field as a whole, much less how to talk about it. Whereas, certain older people just have their pad answers and that’s boring.

(02:23:15)
So, you want somewhere in between, the ideal person who has a broad enough of a scope that they can wander outside their specific papers they’ve written but they’re not overly practiced so they’re just giving you their canned answers.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:29)
I feel like there’s a connection to the metaphor of entropy and complexity, as you said there.
Sean Carroll
(02:23:33)
Yeah. Edge of chaos, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:36)
You also do incredible AMAs and people should sign up to your Patreon because you can get to ask questions, Sean Carroll. Well, for several hours, you just answer in fascinating ways some really interesting questions. Is there something you could say about the process of finding the answers to those?
Sean Carroll
(02:23:57)
That’s a great one. Again, it’s evolved over time. So, the Ask me Anything episodes were first, when I started doing them, they were only for Patreon subscribers to both listen to and to ask the questions. But then I actually asked my Patreon subscribers, “Would you like me to release them publicly?” and they overwhelmingly voted yes so I do that. So, the Patreon supporters ask the questions, everyone can listen. And also, at some point, I really used to try to answer every question but now there’s just too many so I have to pick and that’s fraught with peril and my personal standard for picking questions to answer is what are the ones I think I have interesting answers to give for.

(02:24:39)
So, that both means, if it’s the same old question about special relativity that I’ve gotten a hundred times before, I’m not going to answer it because you can just Google that, it’s easier. There are some very clear attempts to ask an interesting question that, honestly, I don’t have an answer to. Like, ” I read this science fiction novel, what do you think about it?” I’m like, “Well, I haven’t read it so I can’t help you there.” “What’s your favorite color?” “I could tell you what it is but it’s not that interesting.” And so, I try to make it a mix, I try to … It’s not all physics questions, not all philosophy questions, I will talk about food or movies or politics or religion if that’s what people want to. I keep suggesting that people ask me for relationship advice but they never do.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:27)
Yeah, I don’t think I’ve heard one.
Sean Carroll
(02:25:29)
Yeah, I’m willing to do it. I’m a little reluctant because I don’t actually like giving advice but I’m happy to talk about those topics. I want to give several hours of talking and I want to try to say things that I haven’t said before and keep it interesting, keep it rolling. If you like this question, wait for the next one.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:50)
What are some of the harder questions you’ve gotten? Do you remember? What kinds of questions are difficult for you?
Sean Carroll
(02:25:57)
Rarely but occasionally people will ask me a super insightful philosophy question. I hadn’t thought of it things in exactly that way and I try to recognize that. A lot of times, it is the opposite where it’s like, “Okay, you’re clearly confused and I’m going to try to explain the question you should have asked.”
Lex Fridman
(02:26:20)
I love those. Yeah, why that’s the wrong question or that kind of stuff, that’s great.
Sean Carroll
(02:26:24)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:24)
That’s great.
Sean Carroll
(02:26:25)
But the hard questions, I don’t know. I don’t actually answer personal questions very much. The most personal I will get are questions like what do you think of Baltimore, that much I can talk about. Or how are your cats doing, happy to talk about the cats in infinite detail. But very personal questions I don’t get into.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:42)
But you even touch politics and stuff like this.
Sean Carroll
(02:26:45)
Yeah, no, very happy to talk about politics. I try to be clear on what is professional expertise, what is just me babbling, what is my level of credence in different things, where you’re allowed to disagree, whether, if you disagree, you’re just wrong and people can disagree with that also. But I do think I’m happy to go out on a limb a little bit, I’m happy to say, “Look, I don’t know but here’s my guess.” I just did a whole solo podcast which was exactly that. And it’s interesting, some people are like, “Oh, this was great,” and there’s a whole bunch of people who are like, “Why are you talking about this thing that you are not the world’s expert in?”
Lex Fridman
(02:27:23)
Well, I love the actual dance between humility and having a strong opinion on stuff, it’s a fascinating dance to pull off. And I guess the way to do that is to just expand into all kinds of topics and play with ideas and then change your mind and all that kind of stuff.
Sean Carroll
(02:27:40)
Yeah, it is interesting because, when people react against you by saying you are being arrogant about this, 99.999% of the time, all they mean is I disagree. That’s all they really mean, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:27:59)
Yeah.
Sean Carroll
(02:27:59)
At a very basic level, people will accuse atheists of being arrogant and I’m like, “You think God exists and loves you and you’re telling me that I’m arrogant?” I think that all of this is to say just advice. When you disagree with somebody, try to specify the substantive disagreement, try not to psychologize them. Try to say, “Oh, you’re saying this because of this.” Maybe it’s true, maybe you’re right. But if you had an actual response to what they were saying, that would be much more interesting.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:32)
Yeah, I wonder why it’s difficult for people to say or to imply I respect you, I like you but I disagree on this and here’s why I disagree. I wonder why they go to this place of, well, you’re an idiot or you’re egotistical or you’re confused or you’re naive or you’re all the kinds of words as opposed to I respect you as a fellow human being exploring the world of mysteries all around us and I disagree.
Sean Carroll
(02:29:09)
I will complicate the question even more because there’s some people I don’t respect or like. And I once read a blog post, I think it was called The Grid of Disputation and I had a two by two grid and it’s are you someone I agree with or disagree with, are you someone who I respect or don’t and all four quadrants are very populated. So, what that means is there are people who I like and I disagree with and there are people who agree with me and I have no respect for at all, the embarrassing allies quadrant, that was everyone’s favorite.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:44)
That’s great.
Sean Carroll
(02:29:45)
So, I just think being honest, trying to be honest about where people are. But if you actually want to move a conversation forward, forget about whether you like or don’t like somebody, explain the disagreement, explain the agreement. But you’re absolutely right, I completely agree, as a society, we are not very good at disagreeing, we instantly go to the insults.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:06)
Yeah. And even on a deeper level, I think, at some deep level, I respect and love the humanity in the other person.
Sean Carroll
(02:30:19)
Yup.

Einstein

Lex Fridman
(02:30:21)
You said that general relativity is the most beautiful theory ever.
Sean Carroll
(02:30:26)
So far.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:28)
What do you find beautiful about it?
Sean Carroll
(02:30:30)
Let’s put it this way. When I teach courses, there’s no more satisfying subject to teach than general relativity and the reason why is because it starts from very clear, precisely articulated assumptions and it goes so far. And when I give my talk, you can find it online, I’m probably not going to give it again, the book one of the Biggest Ideas talk was building up from you don’t know any math or physics, an hour later, you know Einstein’s equation for general relativity. And the punchline is the equation is much smarter than Albert Einstein because Albert Einstein did not know about the Big Bang, he didn’t know about gravitational waves, he didn’t know about black holes but his equation did. And that’s a miraculous aspect of science more generally but general relativity is where it manifests itself in the most absolutely obvious way.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:30)
A human question, what do you think of the fact that Einstein didn’t get the Nobel Prize for general relativity?
Sean Carroll
(02:31:40)
Tragedy. He should have gotten maybe four Nobel Prizes, honestly. He certainly should have got-
Lex Fridman
(02:31:48)
That and what?
Sean Carroll
(02:31:48)
The photoelectric effect was 100% worth the Nobel Prize because, and people don’t quite get this, who cares about the photoelectric effect, that’s this very minor effect. The point is his explanation for the photoelectric effect invented something called the photon, that’s worth the Nobel Prize. Max Planck gets credit for this in 1900 explaining black-body radiation by saying that, when a little electron is jiggling in a object at some temperature, it gives off radiation in discrete chunks rather than continuously. He didn’t quite say that’s because radiation is discrete chunks. It’s like having a coffee maker that makes one cup of coffee at a time, it doesn’t mean that liquid comes in one cup quanta, it’s just that you are dispensing it like that. It was Einstein in 1905 who said light is quanta and that was a radical thing. So, clearly, that was not a mistake. But also special relativity clearly deserved the Nobel Prize and general relativity clearly deserved the Nobel Prize. Not only were they brilliant but they were experimentally verified, everything you want.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:57)
So, separately you think?
Sean Carroll
(02:32:58)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:01)
Oh, humans.
Sean Carroll
(02:33:03)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:03)
Whatever the explanation there.
Sean Carroll
(02:33:05)
Edwin Hubble never won the Nobel Prize for finding the universe was expanding.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:10)
Yeah. And even the fact that we give prizes is almost silly and we limit the number of people that get the prize and all that.
Sean Carroll
(02:33:17)
I think that Nobel Prize has enormous problems. I think it’s probably a net good for the world because it brings attention to good science. I think it’s probably a net negative for science because it makes people want to win the Nobel Prize.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:33)
Yeah, there’s a lot of fascinating human stories underneath it all. Science is its own thing but it’s also a collection of humans and it’s a beautiful collection. There’s tension, there’s competition, there’s jealousy but there’s also great collaborations and all that kind of stuff. Daniel Kahneman, who recently passed, is one of the great stories of collaboration in science.
Sean Carroll
(02:34:00)
Yeah, [inaudible 02:34:01].
Lex Fridman
(02:34:02)
So, all of it, all of it, that’s what humans do. And Sean, thank you for being the person that makes us celebrate science and fall in love with all of these beautiful ideas in science, for writing amazing books, for being legit and still pushing forward the research science side of it and for allowing me and these pothead questions and also for educating everybody through your own podcast. Everybody should stop everything and subscribe and listen to every single episode of Mindscape. So, thank you, I’ve been a huge fan forever, I’m really honored that you would speak with me in the early days when I was still starting this podcast in Meanings of the World.
Sean Carroll
(02:34:46)
I appreciate it. Thanks very much for having me on. Now that you’re a big deal, still having me on.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:51)
Thank you, Sean. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sean Carroll. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset | Lex Fridman Podcast #427

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #427 with Neil Adams.
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Neil Adams
(00:00:00)
When we go to the dojos there, we all get thrown by people that never come out to be world champions. They’re just in the mix or they’re going through three years of university and then they go. We had a guy, we had a guy that came in. He was business guy, came in with his suitcase in his tie up like that. And he’s in his lunch hour. He’s in his lunch hour, right? So it’s got to be quick.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:22)
Yeah.
Neil Adams
(00:00:24)
So he comes in and he goes through, he’s working his way through the whole of the British team. We’re all lined out, right? 10 minutes later, he’s tying his tie up like that. And back to work like that. Imagine him sitting behind his desk and his computer.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:39)
Yeah, yeah.
Neil Adams
(00:00:41)
I’m glad he didn’t get out.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:44)
Who do you think wins, Yamashita?
Neil Adams
(00:00:44)
I think Yamashita. But I…
Lex Fridman
(00:00:45)
Wait, you think Yamashita beats [inaudible 00:00:46]?
Neil Adams
(00:00:46)
I think so.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:53)
Strong words.

(00:00:58)
The following is a conversation with Neil Adams, a legend in the sport of judo. He is a world champion, two-time Olympic silver medalist, five-time European champion, and often referred to as the voice of judo commentating all the major events, world championships and Olympic Games. Highlighting the drama, the triumph, the artistry of the sport of judo. Making fans like me feel the biggest wins, the biggest losses, the surprise turns of fortune, the dominance of champions coming to an end and new champions made. Always speaking from the heart. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Neil Adams.

1980 Olympics


(00:01:47)
You are a five-time European champion, world champion two-time Olympic silver medalist. Let’s first go to the 1980 Olympics. Where was your mind? What was your preparation like? What was your strategy leading into that Olympics?
Neil Adams
(00:02:01)
That was my first Olympic Games. So my preparation was a little bit different to how it was the ’84 and the ’88 Olympic Games. And I’d kind of done part of the preparation as well for ’76 Olympic Games. I wasn’t quite old enough for those, but I was first reserve. So in 1980 I’d had four years build up and I was hungry and I was one of these young athletes and I see them so often now that was developing and full of, I won’t say I was full of myself, but I was certainly confident of my ability and I wanted to conquer the world. And I’d had a couple of really tight matches with the current Olympic world champion. So I knew that there was a possibility that I could get there for the ’80 Olympics.

(00:02:54)
So building up to the ’80 Olympics was quite interesting because I was kind of coming through the weights and I was halfway in between the 71 kilos weight category and the higher weight category of 78 kilograms. And I got third place at the ’79 world championships, the weight below. Fought the whole year at the higher weight category, didn’t lose a contest. So I’d beaten everybody in the world. And then I had to make the decision as to whether to drop to the weight below because I was seeding in the weight below. It was a different seeding then. And so I decided to drop into the weight below because I was seeded in the top four. And as it happens, I think it was probably the worst decision I made.

(00:03:48)
Well because…
Lex Fridman
(00:03:49)
Well…
Neil Adams
(00:03:50)
Simply because, I mean, it was the only contest that I lost was the final of the Olympic Games in that year.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:55)
So you’re a young kid, what? Like 19-20 at that time full of confidence, vigor. So the decision to cut weight, how hard was it for you to cut weight to the 71 kg division?
Neil Adams
(00:04:08)
I’ve got to say that it was the hardest because as I was going up, it was 73, then it was 74 kilos, 75. So I was moving through the weight category. It wasn’t like I was stuck in the middle and then I dropped the odd time to compete. It was literally going up in weight by a kilo every month. And then by the time I came to a month or two before the Olympics, it was really hard. Fought the European Championships at the higher weight category and won that. And so everybody that was on the Olympic rostrum at the Olympic Games was my rostrum at the European championships.

(00:04:52)
So was it a mistake? Yeah, because I didn’t have my diet sorted out. My nutrition was appalling and when I, it wasn’t as kind of readily available as it is now for the nutrition. And I would say that if anything lost me that final, other than the fact that I was fighting somebody was terrific. He was an excellent, brilliant athlete, but definitely didn’t help that my nutrition was not very good.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:22)
Okay, so you lost to Ezio Gamba. There’s probably a lot of that we could say about that particular match. Maybe let’s zoom in. What were your strengths and weaknesses, judo-wise in that Olympics? You said you haven’t really lost the match, you won the European Championship leading into it, but if you had weak spots, okay, you already said diet, but specifically on the mat in terms of judo.
Neil Adams
(00:05:46)
I think that none of the fights lasted time going into the final. So I won fairly quickly and every match by ippon way before time.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:58)
Do you remember how you won the matches?
Neil Adams
(00:06:00)
I won them by throw, a couple of throws for ippon and then an armlock for ippon. Semi-final was an armlock against the East German Kruger. And yeah, I was flying through.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:13)
What were the throws? Do you remember?
Neil Adams
(00:06:15)
Tai otoshi, uchi mata. My favorite kind of te-waza, my favorite throws. And then Juji-Gatame as well, which was a Juji-Gatame roll. Against an East German who I’d beaten before but always had a really tough match, but managed to beat him well.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:34)
So you had a beautiful exhibition of Japanese-type Judo in the first two matches. You threw people and then you also did the [inaudible 00:06:43], unbarred a person. Great. So going into the final, what are the weaknesses going into the final against the Italian?
Neil Adams
(00:06:49)
Like I say, taking nothing away from him as a great athlete and a brilliant Judo man and left, which wasn’t good for me. That was definite no, I hated fighting leftys, still do, but I’ll tell you why in a minute. I just did…
Lex Fridman
(00:07:05)
That’s great.
Neil Adams
(00:07:05)
It’s one of those. But I think as I went through the contest, we had an eight-hour break from the semi-final to the final. They took us back to the Olympic village, then we had to come back in and then we had to start a warmup again. So I kind of lost my momentum, I had to start again, and I just had a job to get going. I got halfway through, started to rescue a dying match, and I was kind of one step, half a step behind all the way through. So never really got into it.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:39)
So why do you hate fighting leftys? And leftys are, we should say, overrepresented in terms of the higher ranks of Judo. I don’t know why that is.
Neil Adams
(00:07:50)
Well, the thing is about a lefty is a lefty will have more opportunity to fight rightys, right-handers. I mean 70% of the population are right-handers, 30% left. So they get to fight more right-handers and it’s just a fact that happens. So the thing that they hate is fighting left against left. They don’t like it left against left. Whereas a right-hander will go right against right, but the opposite is awkward would for me because just simply, I like to go onto the sleeve and then I like to dominate the grips, but the actual angle of the opponent wasn’t what I wanted, so I had to work hard, really hard against it.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:41)
What happened in that match?
Neil Adams
(00:08:43)
It was a split decision in the end. And so to lose an Olympic final on a split decision is pretty, it’s something that’s still on my mind. And I think that it’s a strange one because I can still wake up, that one and four years later at the Olympics, I was silver medalist at the Olympics four years later as well. And yeah, it still haunts me.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:10)
Do you sometimes wake up and think like, “Eh, I should have eaten better” or maybe a specific grip that you’re like, “Ah, I shouldn’t have taken that grip.”?
Neil Adams
(00:09:19)
I do. I mean the diet side of it, its difficult to really admit that, isn’t it that you went to an Olympic Games and the one thing that you really sucked at, right, was one of the most important things now at world level sport. Where you’ve got the nutrition, we’ve got it, you would think that most people have got it sorted, but there’s still people making mistakes and still people that haven’t got it totally sorted.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:48)
And then there’s people like Travis Stevens who I think doesn’t care. He’ll just have atrocious nutrition and he just makes it work. I think the way he spoke about it is you can’t always control nutrition, so it’s best to get good at having crappy nutrition.
Neil Adams
(00:10:06)
That’s a good way of looking at it. I never, yeah, maybe that’s what I did.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:11)
Exactly, exactly. Do you remember what you were eating? Are we talking about candy or?
Neil Adams
(00:10:15)
Yeah, well I got a sweet tooth, but it wasn’t really, I mean, I didn’t have a lot of money at that particular time either. So the diet wasn’t steak and good nutritional salads and things like that. I did what I thought was best without proper advice. And the crazy thing is that I had such good advice as well when it came to fitness training and things like that. We’re quite ahead of our time and we really had it nailed as far as the conditioning was concerned, the judo training as well was way in advance. I was a good trainer and I trained more than most. I can honestly say that. It probably got me away with a lot.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:01)
Where was your mind? So mental preparation going into that Olympics, you said you were confident, but is there some preparation aspect behind that confidence?
Neil Adams
(00:11:11)
I think in the early days I didn’t think I was going to lose. I never thought it was possible to lose. And I think that I went into every contest expecting to win. So when it didn’t quite go my way, I didn’t lose that many contests. So the only ones I lost were in the final of the world championships or in the final of the Olympic Games. I didn’t lose that many. I never lost a European title. I had seven golds at European championships, five at seniors, two at juniors under twenties. I never lost a final. And then I only lost two on a split decision. So I didn’t lose that many. And my attitude was that I wasn’t going to lose and couldn’t lose. So I was always surprised when I did, when something happened.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:00)
In Neil Adams, A Life in Judo, written in 1986. You wrote, “Ever since I can remember I have wanted to win. It wasn’t the ordinary feeling that children have when they take part in their first primary school sack race on a grass track or even the keen determination of a young swimmer prepared to train early in the cold winter mornings in order to make it into the county side. With me, the desire to win was and still is as much a part of me as my arms and legs. In other words, it wasn’t something I learned as I grew older, but rather it was deeply rooted in me. Perhaps this competitive instinct is the greatest difference between my public image and the view from the inside.”

(00:12:47)
So people see the kindness, the warmth you have the charisma of the excitement, but there’s this big drive to win inside you. So what’s behind that? Can you just speak to that, that drive to win and how that contributed to your career?
Neil Adams
(00:13:05)
Do you know when I look back now…
Lex Fridman
(00:13:08)
This is a lot of years ago, we should say.
Neil Adams
(00:13:09)
It is a lot of years ago.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:11)
Is that true or were you just being poetic?
Neil Adams
(00:13:12)
It’s not far off. No. When I think about it now, I’d like to think that I’m a different person now. And since I’ve kind of calmed down, I see athletes now and I see them and their kind of arrogance, their walk, and it’s a strut and it’s a kind of a confidence, isn’t it? As we’re older and as I’ve become older, I’ve calmed down, but it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, it’s still that will to win. And I’m much better at masking it now if I don’t. But it still bothers me as much.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:53)
You’re talking about like… I don’t know, even just stupid, silly things. Like I don’t know, a game of pool or something like this or just anything.
Neil Adams
(00:14:00)
Yeah, I’m still trying to win. Like my son loves to… He loves to play me at bowls because I’m useless and I just can’t throw a straight bowl. So he loves playing me at that, but it bugs me that I’m not better and there are certain things that I do. It really bugs me when I’m not good at it. And I guess it’s one of the reasons that long after I’d finished competition judo, people still want to train with you. And even at an older age, even now if I do in a seminar or they’d still, “Do you still do? Do you want to still go? And can I feel it?”

(00:14:44)
And one of the things that’s in me is that I just all the way up to 40 years of age, so from 30 when I finished competition up to 40, I could still train with the best and I could still go with anybody. And then when 40 hit, kind of things started to fall off a little bit and I used to get either my hips or the legs and my knees. And I realized that I had to pick my practices and that rankled as well and I had to then just calm it down a little bit, otherwise I was going to be injured and I was going to be… It’s not a good thing when you getting older and you’ve still got the same competitive mind, but things change.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:26)
So it’s still there. You get on the mat probably even now, right? You get on the mat with a world champion, you still the current world champion, there’s still a little part of you. Could I still toss this guy?
Neil Adams
(00:15:38)
But you know…
Lex Fridman
(00:15:38)
Kids these days are soft.
Neil Adams
(00:15:41)
Well, you know what, some of these athletes, I mean I give you a prime example, right? Is Ilias Iliadis. He is a monster, right? And of course you couldn’t because just at sixty-something you couldn’t, but you like to think that you could.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:02)
You could, you never know. You got to find out.
Neil Adams
(00:16:03)
You know what you would do. What you can do is you can cause them problems and they feel it immediately. But you’d last a minute.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:11)
So you’ve trained with Ilias Iliadis, I’ve gotten a chance to train with him as well. He’s a really nice guy, really great.
Neil Adams
(00:16:16)
Great guy. He trained with me. We were training together every hotel that we used to go into, we’d end up in the gym together and we’d train. And this one time he was in there and he just wanted somebody to grab and grip hold of. And so we ended up doing this kind of grappling in the middle, the people doing weight training and the different things watching these two mad men doing… I’m glad we weren’t on a mat at that particular time. But good fun.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:43)
What do you think about that guy? He like you achieved a lot of success when he was young.
Neil Adams
(00:16:49)
17, can you imagine that? 17, 18 years of age and he’s able to compete with the men. There’s not many men can do that. And it doesn’t happen very often. It happens later with the men and often they’re not physically as developed as they… So for me, for example, I fought Nevzorov who was world Olympic champion. He was the current world Olympic champion, and they sent me to the European Championship senior at 17 and that doesn’t happen very often. And I fought, I pulled Nevzorov, I fought Nevzorov and I had him really worried because he expected without a doubt, to come out, throw this kid and junior.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:33)
And he was thick and shredded. [inaudible 00:17:36] he’s a man.
Neil Adams
(00:17:36)
He was shredded. There’s a picture of him in his judogi and his judogi is just cut and he looks the business. And there’s me in this baggy…
Lex Fridman
(00:17:46)
Skinny kid.
Neil Adams
(00:17:49)
Skinny kid inside this baggy thing. And the thing was is that the more he tried and the harder he tried, and the more he panicked, the further it went away from him. And so of course he got the decision at the end and deservedly, but I worried him. And so for me that was a massive step forward because year later I was starting to fill out and two years later I was competing for the Olympic title.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:24)
I don’t know if I remember, but Ilias Iliadis is interesting because even at 17 I feel like he was doing big throws, like literally lifting them with the hips.
Neil Adams
(00:18:34)
Just rips them out the ground. And I was saying to Nikki, my wife, and she said, “What would you do now? It was different than the way you did then.” I never had any pickups. That’s not what we did. But you have a look at the young Ukrainians or the young Russians or the young Eastern Bloc Mongolians and they’re ripping people out the ground. I mean it’s just different style of judo and it just looks different. But now they’re starting to do traditional style judo as well.

Judo explained

Lex Fridman
(00:19:09)
So can you speak to that? What are the different styles of judo? So for you, you mentioned uchi mata, tai otoshi, these… How would you describe them? They’re like these effortless, less lifting off the ground and power and strength and more timing and position, movement, momentum, all this kind of stuff. That’s more traditionally associated with Japanese judo because for Japanese judo, the traditional judo, you’re supposed to throw people in a big way without much effort.
Neil Adams
(00:19:40)
And of course, 1990 we saw the introduction of all these Eastern Bloc countries. There were so many more, I mean it was Soviet Union when I was competing. And then of course in 1990 everything changed. And then there were so many more of them out there, different countries, their wrestling styles were introduced into judo. Put a jacket on them and let’s get into judo.

(00:20:08)
So judo kind of changed shape. It changed shape from this upright standing and having to know the technicalities of how to get a body that’s weighing 14 stone, or whatever it is, up into the air and using the momentum and the balance and the direction and the skill to do that and knowing how to do it and how to use movement. And then you get the wrestlers and the leg picks and the single leg, double legs. And by 1995 judo was bent over. And so it was the IOC that went to IJF, International Judo Federation. And they said, “You’ve got to change this, or we’re just going to have one wrestling style. It looks like wrestling with judo, with judo jackets on. “So you either change it or we are going to take one of you out.”
Lex Fridman
(00:21:07)
By the way, we should sort of clarify when we say people are bent over, that’s usually how you see freestyle wrestling. Wrestlers are more bent over to defend the legs and so on. And traditional judo people are more standing up because that’s the position for which you can do the big throws and all that kind of stuff. But I think the other case to make for banding leg grabs is a lot of people are using it for stalling and not for beautiful big throws and all that kind of stuff. So it’s not just to make it different from wrestling, it is also like you want to maximize the amount of epic throws and dynamic judo and exciting stuff to watch, right?
Neil Adams
(00:21:44)
Yeah. Win by judo, not by wrestling. And I think that the ones that were shouting about it were the wrestlers, right? Because they like to compete with both. They want to do both. They want to do their wrestling matches and then come into judo. So basically, I mean, what we’ve said is they learn to do judo and there’s nothing stopping you then from doing both, but not from the other way around. All right?

(00:22:10)
So rules always dictate development. They’ll always dictate which direction it goes. So if you introduce a rule that states that you cannot dive at the legs and just pick up, then you’ll have to do it standing up. And also it increases the possibility of defense with the hips. Because actually good defense, judo wise, standing up is with the hips as opposed to sticking your arms out and then sticking your backsides out there just to defend. All right, so if you attack me and I move my body in the wrong place, so I’m in the wrong place at the right time, so you don’t hit the right target. And then also I use my hips. So again, it’s a form of judo that was being lost. So now we’ve got it back.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:02)
So let’s go there. Let’s speak about judo as if we’re talking to a group of five-year-olds. So what is judo? What are some defining characteristics of judo as a sport, as a way, as a martial arts, a way of life, all that kind of stuff?
Neil Adams
(00:23:18)
I think when you say it is a way of life, I mean I think the great advantage that we have in judo, my young grandson… So I got two little boys that are three and a half years of age, love going to our dojo. They love it. So dojo was the first word that they used. It was one of the first. So when they come see us, so seeing my wife and I, it’s like dojo. It’s not grandma granddad, it’s dojo. So dojo. They take their shoes off going into the dojo. So they have respect for where they’re at. I think it has that kind of feeling that I tried to build my dojo with a feeling of reverence. It’s kind of almost peaceful. I’m not a religious person, but I like going to old churches because when I go into an old church, it doesn’t matter what the religion within the church, but there’s a reverence in there.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:19)
Reverence is a good word. It feels like a really special place no matter which dojo you go to, it’s just you bow and there’s a calmness before the storm of battle or whatever it is.
Neil Adams
(00:24:32)
Yeah, and respect.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:32)
Yeah, respect.
Neil Adams
(00:24:33)
I mean, look at the respect. We were just talking about it just before we came on air. We were just saying that we very, very seldom do we have a situation where there is animosity other than them fighting. So I’m not saying that they don’t fight each other because sometimes it does turn into a brawl and at the end, two people bow off and show their respect. And one of the things, so a champion, I see people winning events and they’re good judokara, they’re excellent, they win world championships might even win the Olympic Games.

(00:25:13)
But a great champion for me is somebody who does the right thing when they lose. So when you see them lose, that’s when you see the true them. And actually that was one of the biggest things that I had to really cope with. So when I lost that Olympic Games in Moscow and also the one in Los Angeles, the hardest thing is when the microphone’s in there and you’ve got to be respectful and nice and the hardest thing is to smile.

(00:25:49)
But actually some of the great champions, they’ll go, “That’s just one match.” I remember, we’ve got one great champion, Agbegnenou, she’s a five-time world champion, Olympic champion. She’s favorite as well to get this Olympic gold medal. French. What a great champion she is because she lost one of the matches. I mean, she’d come back and she’d given birth, come back after giving birth and everybody was going, “Well, will she…?” And then she lost one of the matches on the way through and she said, “Well, don’t be upset. It’s just one match. It’s just one contest. Next time I’m going to put it right.” And she did put it right and now she’s back up there and she won the world title back. So these are great champions for me.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:44)
Yeah, I mean that’s the right way to see it. But it’s also tragic to lose the Olympic Games.
Neil Adams
(00:26:49)
Twice.

(00:26:52)
Yes, it is tragic. And I do have sleepless nights.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:57)
I mean that’s the magic of the Olympic Games. Anything can happen. And your 1980 Olympics were very different from 1984, but if we just linger on ’80 and just what we’re talking about, how much you wanted to win, do you love winning or hate losing more?

Winning

Neil Adams
(00:27:17)
I hate losing more, but I love winning. When I won the world title the year later, and I had no doubt when I went into that day that I was going to be world champion. No doubt.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:31)
So you won the ’81 World Championship.
Neil Adams
(00:27:34)
At the higher weight.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:36)
At the 78.
Neil Adams
(00:27:38)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:38)
Kg. Actually, can we go there? What was going through your mind? You ended up arm barring a Japanese fighter. I talked to Jimmy Pedro, a friend of yours, somebody who said you were a mentor to him for many years, and he told me a bunch of different questions to ask you, but he said that was a really special time. That was a really special dominant run you had, and especially finishing with an arm bar against a Japanese player. So take me through that. What do you remember from that?
Neil Adams
(00:28:16)
I think that it was, so my weight was better. I didn’t have to lose weight. That was one thing. So the nutritional side wasn’t as important, but probably it still wasn’t as good as it could be. My nutrition. Although it was getting better and I was trying to eat the right things at the right time, but I still trained really well and I was so confident that going into that world championships that I could win it. I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to win. But obviously the corner of your mind, you’re thinking just don’t make mistakes.

(00:28:54)
But this is the incredible thing, is that once you start to ask you, once I see contests change direction when I’m commentating. So I can see somebody who’s in there just going forward trying to win. And that’s a difference to somebody who’s trying not to lose. And there’s two different ways there. So sometimes when you… When I was world champion then I had a period of time where every time I stepped out there I was really afraid of losing. And I think that that’s what happens later on in your competitive career.

(00:29:33)
The great champions managed to come through that. Teddy Renair is one of those, he puts it out there and he keeps beating them so they can’t take it away from them. It’s fantastic.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:44)
So stepping on the mat, every single encounter you’re trying to win, you’re looking for the grips with the intention to throw big, even when you’re ahead on points and all that kind of stuff.
Neil Adams
(00:29:56)
That’s a really good point is that if you go ahead in a match and you look at the clock, it depends when you go ahead. So I sometimes…
Neil Adams
(00:30:00)
… match. And you look at the clock, it depends when you go ahead. So sometimes you can go ahead in the first minute, and you’ve still got three minutes to go. So I see the ones then that go into, “I don’t want to lose”, because they go into defensive mode. And then sometimes they can lose it on penalties or something can go wrong, and the other one comes on strong and then they can sneak the contest. And so it’s really difficult. But when I was coaching, I was trying to always encourage that positive attitude for the full four minutes, five minutes then.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:33)
I’ve competed a lot in judo and jiu-jitsu. I’ve always hated that part of myself. When I’m up on points by a lot, you look at the clock and it’s what you do when you look at the clock, it’s a minute and a half, you’re really tired and you quit. You just defend. And I hated that part about myself. It’s like that-
Neil Adams
(00:30:52)
It’s saying don’t do it. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:53)
Yeah. Well as opposed to, in judo for a big throw, just keep going For the throw. In jiu-jitsu, it’s go for the submission, win in the real way, versus on points. I hated that part of myself. Mostly underneath that is cowardice induced by exhaustion.
Neil Adams
(00:31:13)
Exhaustion is the one, isn’t it? But it is, isn’t it? It’s a mindset as well. So actually trying to get your mind positive all the way through. So if you listen, when I commentated now is I say I hope that they don’t change the mindset. And they are going forward all the time. And actually they’re then more difficult to catch. We had one just a couple of weeks ago, and he lost in the final second of the contest. He was the only one to score. He got penalized all the way up. Two seconds to go and stepped out of the area. But he went like that, thinking the bell was just going. And the bell went one second after he actually stepped out. So he got penalized, lost the match and lost all of the points for qualification. So that’s paying high price. That’s paying high price.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:14)
Yeah. There’s a thin line between triumph and tragedy in those competitions. But especially at the Olympic games. So let’s just stick on ’81 World Championship. What did it feel like to win that world championship. And also getting an arm bar as a Japanese player? Jamie told me your arms were exhausted.
Neil Adams
(00:32:36)
Yeah, the thing is sometimes when it’s competitive as well, hours is a different intensity to jiu-jitsu, where you can take time a little bit. Hours is, bang, it’s transitioning from standing down. You’ve got 10, 15 seconds to go in there. You go in a hundred percent. It’s a bit like running full out for 10 seconds. And then you’ve got to decide then, especially if they’re defending it, whether you let it go. Because when you get up and your forearms are blown, and you’ve got lactic acid in there, and you’ve still got to grip up, because remember ours is about gripping as well on the jacket.

(00:33:18)
So if you can’t grip up, then you can’t gain the advantage, then they can throw you. So you have to decide. So I had a massive attack on him and we changed directions four or five times, and then I wasn’t going to let him go. But still when I was turning him there, I had to decide am I going to go all out for this? There has been occasions when I’ve released it, just if I’ve got a minute to go and just block out.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:51)
Yeah. Correct. So what you’re saying on the feet, there is a change of direction of all different kinds of attempts and then you went to the ground. Do you remember that decision of like, okay, am I going to finish this?
Neil Adams
(00:34:01)
Yeah, I knew it. As soon as I climbed his back and then I thought he’s not going. I’m not going to let him up. So I was just changing-
Lex Fridman
(00:34:10)
Little voice in your head.
Neil Adams
(00:34:12)
Little something in my head was going, “Just stick on him.” And then it’s always about pressure on the arm. And of course he was like that, defending. He was almost total bridge trying to get out of it.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:28)
Did it start in turtle and did you flip?
Neil Adams
(00:34:30)
It started in turtle, because I did an attack, came back out of the attack and then he went on to his front. And then I was on his back. And then I started the whole [inaudible 00:34:41].
Lex Fridman
(00:34:41)
Saw the opening. You just went for it?
Neil Adams
(00:34:43)
It was an automatic transition. So the transitions are what we teach, because the ones that are quicker down with the transitions are the ones that catch it. That’s our newaza. Our groundwork is the transition from standing down to ground. We don’t have a situation where you can work your way in. You are in or you not in. You’re standing. So you’ve got to make sure that you’re in. And so I was just on his back like a leech and I never let him go.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:14)
So that’s where the arm bars, that’s where the attacks on the ground, which is called newaza, happens is in the transition. At that level, at that high world-class level?
Neil Adams
(00:35:23)
Yeah, he was no mug either. I think he just got third place in All Japan Championships, which is all weight categories. So he wasn’t a mug. He was strong. And I’d fought him once before and I knew he was a lefty as well, which was really awkward for me.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:42)
Did it feel good?
Neil Adams
(00:35:43)
Better for me than him. It did. It felt amazing. Because it was almost like all these things, disappointments and everything had come to this one point where I was at last champion of the world. It’s everything I said as a kid that I had no idea how difficult it was going to be. So as a kid, as a fourteen-year-old kid, I remember saying, “I’m going to be world champion. I’m going to be the best in the world.” I had no idea how difficult that was going to be.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:13)
Well there’s wisdom to that. There’s power and stupidity of youth.
Neil Adams
(00:36:18)
I like that. It is.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:19)
Yeah. Just I’m going to be a world champ. I’m going to win this without knowing how hard it is. And then once you go after it, you’re trapped. You’re going to have to do the work.
Neil Adams
(00:36:30)
Yeah, well you see it a lot with parents as well, don’t you? Parents, “Our little Johnny, he’s amazing. And he’s this, that and the other.” And they have no idea what’s out there. I remember the very first time I stepped out, 1974, into the European cadets. And I remember that we were fighting, I only ever fought in Great Britain. I was unbeaten in the juniors, kids. And went out there and there were these different fighters out there that were treating me with total disdain. And I remember thinking, “How dare they?” And I realized when I came back from that event, there’s other people out there. And there are different levels. Majority of people are just not informed as to what’s out there and the different levels that there are out there.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:27)
Do you remember a certain opponent that for the first time you felt like, “Holy shit.” Somebody just gripped you up and you’re like, “There’s another level to this game.”
Neil Adams
(00:37:41)
Ezio was one of them. And I fought him and I beat him in the European championships. I beat two times, and then lost him in the Olympic games two months after I’d beaten him in the European championship.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:54)
Oh wow.
Neil Adams
(00:37:55)
Yeah. So that made it even more difficult.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:55)
So that’s literally your nemesis there. Wow.
Neil Adams
(00:38:03)
So that made it more difficult. And so Ezio was one. And I remember getting hold of Nishida of Japan. And he had me going up and down. And I thought, “Wow, this guy is amazing.” And first time I had ever fought Japanese in a major tournament. And I felt the danger. I always talk about the danger when we go out to Japan to train. I could go probably months without getting thrown in training here in Europe. And go to Japan and everybody’s thrown you. And that’s difficult to accept. And the reason that kind of danger and that kind of feeling of danger is something that puts a real edge on. And so that was the first time. When I got hold of Nishida, “I thought, oh my god. This guy.” It didn’t matter which way he was turning, like that you’d be stretched out. And I thought, “I want to do this.” And then I ended up fighting him again in Japan.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:13)
So that feeling of danger is really interesting. I’ve did randori with a lot of world-class people from different parts of the world including Ilias Iliadis. And there’s certain parts, like Eastern European judo, you feel like you’re screwed the whole way through. The gripping. You really feel it in the gripping.
Neil Adams
(00:39:35)
It’s the gripping that does it.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:36)
But with really good Japanese style, judoka, it’s a terrifying calmness, or at least the experiences that I’ve had. You don’t really feel it in the gripping, you just feel like anywhere you step you’re getting thrown. It’s a different-
Neil Adams
(00:39:53)
It’s a different thing, isn’t it?
Lex Fridman
(00:39:54)
It’s a different thing.
Neil Adams
(00:39:55)
So I mean mine was a mixture. I liked it to be a mixture because the gripping is definitely the key point. So if you get a high level guys that are gripping up, and I always used to put this to the referees when we were doing referee seminars when we first started them. And I’d say, “How many?” Because they would referee to their understanding of the match. So they were penalizing for certain grips that were… So as an ex-athlete, high level I would say, have you ever gripped up with high level? All right, because if you haven’t, you need to do it. Because then you’ll understand why they do certain things with the grips. Because these guys, when somebody grips you and you know you’re going to go. When Iliadis puts his arm over your back, all right. And you know you’re going to go up and over. You know you’re going to go over. That’s it.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:55)
It’s a cool feeling. It’s like whenever-
Neil Adams
(00:39:55)
Not for me.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:02)
I understand. Because it feels way more powerful than it should. It’s weird. I don’t know. You want to attribute it to strength and all that kind of stuff. People say you have immense upper body strength, but it’s probably something else. It’s technique. It’s some kind of weird-
Neil Adams
(00:41:16)
It’s mix of everything.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:17)
Just something hardened through lots of battles and randori and that kind of stuff. But it’s cool that humans are able to generate that kind of power. It’s cool.
Neil Adams
(00:41:27)
When I was ’84 Olympics, but I’m just going to go there now just quickly, but we had a freestyle wrestler. He’s American actually, but he had the English nationality. Noel Loban, his name is. And he competed for Great Britain. He got third place at the Olympics in ’84. We were training at Budokai and he was training. He came to do some judo, and put jacket on. And of course he was training with some of the lower levels and he was really handling himself well. When we did randori, so he did some randori with me, and I immediately thought, “I got to catch you. I got to stop single leg and double leg.” Because he was really quick. So strong as well, 90 something kilos. He’s a big guy.

(00:42:26)
I caught his sleeve, immediately caught, and controlled him. And then he couldn’t start. So he said, “I needed to feel the difference.” So then I thought, “I better reciprocate this.” So we did the randori and I throw them a couple of times. He said, “I’m really glad we did that.” So then I said, “I need to feel the difference as well.” So we take the jackets off. So we took the jackets off and he was a nightmare. This guy was a nightmare. And like a monster. He was single legging me. And it was just totally different. So the jacket makes a massive difference. Huge difference to something. And people think it’s just the jacket that we’re wearing, but it isn’t. It’s our only tool actually.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:16)
Yeah, and it’s a way of establishing control over another body. And it’s a whole art form and a science. And I don’t even know if you understand it really. You understand it subconsciously through time, because there’s so much involved. Because pulling on one part of the jacket pulls other parts of the jacket and the physics of that is probably insane to understand.
Neil Adams
(00:43:40)
It’s absolutely insane. And then they change the rules for a little while and they changed the rules so that certain grips were not allowed. They only allowed certain amount of time. And there were a lot of penalties from it. And then they had some of the ex-fighters into the referee commission. And so we were pushing for just let them grip. Because that’s our game. That’s what makes us different. So they were on about Teddy Riner. Teddy Riner comes out, takes his sleeve, big arm over the top and then he throws people. So they were saying, “Yeah, but stop…” You can’t stop him doing it. This guy is six foot nine and he is built like Garth. And not only that, he’s skillful as well. And he’s got that mentality of a winner. He has got that mentality of a winner there. He just wins important matches.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:41)
And he goes over the top of the grip. Where’s that land now in terms of rules over the top? Because those are some of the most epic awesome types of grips. Just over the top, just big grab.
Neil Adams
(00:44:53)
Yeah, well as long as they throw from it. So they can take any grip as long as you move them and then catch them, action-reaction really. As long as you catch them on the move, then you can do it.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:05)
So as long as you’re not using it to stall or that kind of stuff.
Neil Adams
(00:45:08)
Yeah, you can’t block out. So for example, if I’ve got a dominant grip on you, and I just block out and I just stop you attacking me. So then what? I get you three penalties, get you off and you haven’t done an attack. So you’ve got to stop that. You can’t have that.

1984 Olympics

Lex Fridman
(00:45:26)
Yeah, definitely. You were the favorite to win the 1984 Olympics, but you got silver. I watched that match several times. You probably have it playing in your head. So there is a nice change of direction by your opponent, German Frank Wieneke.
Neil Adams
(00:45:44)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:45)
It was a fake right uchi mata? And then to a left drops seoi-nage. How did that loss feel?
Neil Adams
(00:45:56)
Devastating is not enough really. Because the strange thing is coming into that Olympics, I was tired. Really tired. So my mental state wasn’t the best. Wasn’t certainly the same as it was coming into the previous. And I remember thinking, “I just need to get this over with, and then I’m going to have a break .and just have a rest.” And that’s totally the wrong attitude. It’s just not good for going into an Olympic games. And so I was coming in there with a different mindset. And I remember every match that I had, I was winning well, but I was winning with a struggle. I’d fought Nowak, of France, who was one of the strongest physically. That was in the quarterfinals.

(00:46:57)
I beat Brett Barron by an ippon. I armlocked him. I won my first match by ippon as well. And then Michel Nowak, I was fighting, of France. And I was lucky to win it. I was up, I scored on him. But I was starting to defend and just everything that I talked to you about, and then just about held on. And then I won. So him and I were talking some years afterwards and he said, “I was close, wasn’t I?” “Yeah, but not close enough.” I didn’t mean it, but I had to say it.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:37)
Of course. Of course.
Neil Adams
(00:47:39)
And no, he was right. And it was one of those. So it’s through to the semi-final. I fought Lescak, and I fought him in the semi-final of the Worlds as well. I’d never gone time with him. I’d always beaten him fairly easily by ippon. And that went time. So I was just glad to get it done. And I was in the final then against Frank Wieneke of Germany. And I’d beaten Wieneke before, but he was just a young German coming through. And when I started the final, and I started all my techniques just that little bit off. Nothing was coordinated. I can’t really explain why it was just a little bit off. I see it so often now with a lot of the guys that are going for second, third Olympic games. And I see their technique just not quite there and they’re struggling. And I know what they’re going through and I empathize with them.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:48)
Well it felt like you were dominating that final.
Neil Adams
(00:48:50)
I dominated it, yeah. I was winning. And actually if it’d gone another minute and a half, it would’ve been all over and I would’ve been Olympic champion. And it would’ve been done. He wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. Because he would’ve fought me really, really well. And we talked about it afterwards. And he said, “It was just a good day for me.” And he knows. He was very respectful. This guy is very respectful.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:13)
He was surprised almost. Not almost. He was very surprised and celebrating like a surprise [inaudible 00:49:19].
Neil Adams
(00:49:19)
Jumping up and down. And you can look at that, can’t you go, well it wasn’t ippon. But would I have got it back? I don’t know. I think that actually taking the pressure off, because that was another thing as well. Pressure of being favorite. And I see that with a lot of them. And the great champions, the ones that keep coming through, Krpalek. There’s a guy. He can look very ordinary and then comes to the big tournament and he’ll win it.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:52)
The tragedy of the Olympic games. You were the favorite. And just like that split moment, you lost it.
Neil Adams
(00:49:59)
Split moment. Devastating. And lived it, probably not every day, but Niki, my wife will tell you that woken up in sweats. And I think they contributed as well, because I had a period of my life after where I was drinking too much. And I think when I look back, led into that dark period in my life. And I never ever, ever did it go through my mind anything else. But it definitely affected me. And I was on a downward spiral in a lot of different ways.

(00:50:43)
And we have an amazing marriage and we have an amazing family, and everything’s great. But I still wake up sometimes and I’ll say, “I’ve just dreamt it.” And it’s the same reoccurring dream where I’m trying to get somewhere and I’m trying to put it right. And I’ve got this chance of putting this Olympic final right. In this dream I’ve got a chance of doing it, but I can’t get there. And the traffic’s stopping me or something stops me. And then I wake up and I’m sweating. And you think, well after all this time that’s not possible. But it is. And it happens.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:22)
Yeah, in the match itself, there’s that feeling, for me just watching it. You’re going for throws, you’re almost getting there with the throws and it’s almost like he’s going for a crappy uchi mata. And then you’re blocking it. And all of a sudden… That’s the beauty of the Olympics, he finds it in himself to switch, against a favorite, against the great British judoka, just finds the perfect drop seoi-nage.
Neil Adams
(00:51:55)
Well his team doctor and coach, he came up to me afterwards and said, “I’m just really sorry.” And that’s all they said is, “I’m just really sorry.” They were sorry because the obvious sadness about that. And I went actually, was it three weeks later? The German open? So he had to compete in the German open three weeks later. So I went over to fight him and beat him in the final of the German open. And it didn’t do anything for me. Because it was a much tighter match. He was a lot closer, he had a lot more confidence coming in. So he fought me a lot differently. And then it was me pulling it back and just managing to win in the final. And I thought, “Well it appeased nothing.” Didn’t do anything.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:51)
When you give your whole life to judo and your love of winning, it’s crazy how much the Olympic games mean.
Neil Adams
(00:52:59)
It means so much. And I’ve got to say this, and this is honestly, that if I’d have won that Olympic games and it had to change my life into a different direction, which I probably would’ve not competed in the ’88 Olympic games then, all right, so if it had changed my life and then I didn’t meet my wife, and I didn’t have my family that I’ve got now, I wouldn’t swap what I’ve got now for anything.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:29)
Well, part of the demons that you’ve gotten to know, because of those losses as part of probably the central reason that made you the man you are, a legend of the sport. You could have been not that. Because an gold is just an Olympic gold.
Neil Adams
(00:53:47)
Yeah. And it is, isn’t it? And I think that there’s a lot of Olympic champions and world champions that win and then are forgotten. And I said to Niki, my wife, I said, “I don’t want to be forgotten and I want to be remembered. So if I’m going to do anything, anything I do, if I’m going to do commentary or whatever it is, coaching, I want to do coaching to a high level. And I want to commentate at a high level.” I remember the first commentary I ever did. It was terrible. And I just thought, “I’ve got to do better than this.” And I thought I need to do it well, and I’ve got to do it professionally.

Lessons from losing

Lex Fridman
(00:54:30)
In the book A Game of Throws, you have a chapter titled Lessons in Losing. What are some of the lessons here? What are some of the deeper lessons you’ve pulled out of losing?
Neil Adams
(00:54:42)
I think great champions are made up of the people that handle it in the right way. And you could say, “Well, I don’t like losing.” And you could throw your dummy out the pram and you can be a bad loser in front of everybody. And actually people pick up on that very, very quickly. You know what it’s like in broadcasting, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:55:04)
Mm-hmm.
Neil Adams
(00:55:04)
Somebody Has a bad word to say about somebody, but actually the ones that endear themselves to you are the ones that handle it in the right way, the correct way. It doesn’t mean that you’ve got to like it. I didn’t like it. And I thought that I handled it, certainly in later years, in the right way. And I like to see athletes do it in the right way. And I think it is a make or break situation. It’s not all the contests they win, it’s the one that they lose .and then how they pick themselves up and handle themselves after. So I think that is a big one for me.

(00:55:42)
And also I went through obviously a later divorce. And that was difficult on my son, really difficult on Ashley. And then I think that some of that was the fact that I wasn’t drinking all the time, but I was drinking in excess at the wrong times. And I think that that’s what a lot of people do sometimes is that they use it for the wrong reasons. And I used to hear it, I hear it now all the time, and it’s that I need to knock the edge off, and I need to just forget, and you need to be in a fuzzy place for a while. And I had a lot of time in fuzzy place, and I needed to get rid of that. And I needed to clear my head.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:32)
Where was that place? Some of the lower points in your life that you’ve reached mentally?
Neil Adams
(00:56:41)
I think definitely the fact that my first marriage didn’t work. And it’s a mix of things between us. So that’s not where I wanted to be at the time. And the effects that it had on my son, and it took a long time for him then to come round and to trust me again, and to have belief. He always had belief in me, but to trust me again. I think that that was low. And I think that when I look back is that a lot of my bad decisions were when I was in that fuzzy haze. And that it got progressively worse.

(00:57:33)
That got progressively worse to the degree where it was trying to hide it, and trying to hide how much. And I was a functioning drunk. I think you could probably say that. And I was functioning, I was still training most days, crazily enough. I was training to mask it and cover it. And that was probably my savior, because I remember I said to my wife, I said to Niki, “If I’m a drunk then I’m the fittest drunk in the world.” She said, “Yeah, you probably are, actually.” I was in great condition for a drunk.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:16)
So the fuzzy haze, where was your mind? Did you have periods of depression?
Neil Adams
(00:58:24)
I had periods of depression. I can honestly say that my depression wasn’t that bad, although it’s like anything that gives you an up, it gives you an even bigger down, doesn’t it? And so I hated that feeling. And also hated myself for letting it happen. Because I have got this really, it’s a bizarre, I don’t know whether you can call it a power, but I have the ability to be able to say, “Stop.” And that’s what I did in the end. In the end, there was an incident when I was working for Belgium Judo. And there was an incident, it was Christmas, I tell you exactly the day, it was 20th of December. And me and a Belgian coach, we got absolutely hammered. But we were at the wrong place and he got noticed.

(00:59:23)
And so I remember they pulled me up in front of this board. And I looked down at these guys and half of them were people I didn’t want to be in that situation with. They’re not people that I respected and they’re not people that I trusted. So I said, “If you’re going to sack me, sack me. But I’ll promise you now that this is it. I’ll stop. I’m just going to stop. I’ve decided.” On the way back in the car I rang Niki up, my wife, and I said, “Whatever you hear…
Neil Adams
(01:00:00)
I rang Nikki up, my wife, and I said, “Whatever you hear now, whatever, I’m just going to stop.” That was it, stopped.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:10)
You just saw the moment and said, “Stop.”
Neil Adams
(01:00:14)
Stop.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:15)
So that fuzzy place, what advice could you give to people about how to overcome that dark place, the depression, whether it has to do with drinking or not.
Neil Adams
(01:00:26)
I think if it’s to do with drinking, all I can say is that the two days or a week into not drinking, you’ll feel different. It’ll make a physical difference and you’ll like that physical difference. And then from a mental perspective as well, because I think that you have a massive downer. And I think that that must be because of drugs as well because I had a situation with my brother, he was professional wrestling and the drugs was an element there. So I’d never touched a drug or even seen one in my life. But I’d let the alcohol side go too far and then decided never to do that. So then I guess I had people ringing me up saying, “How can we stop?” When they say, “Can I have a word? Can I discuss something with you?” And I know then what they want to discuss with me. And the thing is that I would say, if you stop, then feel the effects of it and it will make a difference to your everyday life. And that will make a massive difference.

(01:01:49)
And I think about anybody who is down all the time is to find the cause of what’s pushing you down. You know what I mean? And try and attack that. Somebody once said to me, they said, “Whatever you got, we’ve got something special.” We have a great life and I’ve had a great competition record. It could have been better, but it was great. But I’ve had success with my business and we’re still out there and we have great life. We travel all the world. There’s people out there that would live in your house at the drop of a hat, wherever you are. They drive your car no matter what car it is. Some people haven’t got a car. And whatever food you’re having and you’re moaning about food, somebody out there that would take that and gladly eat that. All right? So there’s always somebody worse off than you. And I think that we tend to sometimes look at the things that we haven’t got rather than the things we have got.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:59)
Yeah, it’s a skill probably just to be grateful for the things you have. Exactly as you said. Sometimes the little things like food and cars and all that kind of stuff, just to have gratitude for. And family, all this kind of stuff. But it’s still, having talked to a bunch of Olympic athletes, when you give so much of your life to winning and then you lose, sometimes even when you win. But when you lose, at the very top, it’s a tough, tough, tough thing to go through.
Neil Adams
(01:03:37)
The most difficult thing I think for anybody is when they have to decide when to stop.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:42)
Yeah, yeah.
Neil Adams
(01:03:46)
All of a sudden, and I see the ones that are going second Olympic games and then third Olympic and the ones that are there and they’re holding on and they’re in their 30s now, different to when they were 19 years of age, thirty-something is different to 19. What are you going to do afterwards? And then how do you become just a normal person? You’re never going to be a normal person, as such. But I think you’ve got to do normal things. I remember the first time that when I finished competition, I had good sponsors. This was 40 years ago, but I had two really good sponsorships, vitamin company and also a judogi company. And I had a car. Do you know, I had money. And I was going all over the world. I was successful. And then I stopped. And they took everything back. They took my car and they did it within two weeks as well. They stopped my funding. And the vitamin company said, “Thank you very much. It’s been a great. We’ve done well by you. Bye-bye.”
Lex Fridman
(01:04:55)
This was after your last Olympics?
Neil Adams
(01:04:57)
’88 Olympics.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:58)
Yeah, in ’88.
Neil Adams
(01:04:59)
When that finished and then that was it. And then it’s right, okay. First time I had to go in there and buy a tracksuit and a pair of training shoes. Wow.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:09)
Yeah, those are difficult, sitting there in the evening by yourself.
Neil Adams
(01:05:13)
So you go from seven days a week or six days a week going into the gym and you’re working out the dojo and then you don’t have to do it. And that’s why you get a lot of, when they finish competition, they finish that 30 to 40. Ilias is still doing it now. He’s still in there and he still, because he can, right? And it’s natural. And I did exactly the same. And then, like I say, you just get to an age and you just think, well, I just going to take a step back,
Lex Fridman
(01:05:47)
Which is why there’s certain athletes like Ryoko Tani never stops. It just dominates for 14 years, probably one of the winning-est athletes in Judo. Seven-time world champ, two-time Olympic champ, medaled at five Olympics. So it’s always impressive when you…
Neil Adams
(01:06:06)
Never stopped.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:07)
Never stopped. So that’s an option if you’re the greatest ever.
Neil Adams
(01:06:12)
It’d be interesting, wouldn’t it, just to see what they’re doing now. Because at some stage you have to get a normal…
Lex Fridman
(01:06:17)
You do have to stop.
Neil Adams
(01:06:18)
You have to stop at some stage. You have to decide what you’re going to do. It’s either into coaching, the Judo is either to coaching or if you’re not in coaching, then it’s into something to do with the media. And I was lucky that it was just by accident really with the commentary. Somebody said, “Would you do a voiceover?” So I did this voiceover and that was back in 1982, I did that.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:49)
So you’ve been commentating since 1982.
Neil Adams
(01:06:52)
I did some voiceovers, I wouldn’t call it commentating, but I did some voiceovers. We did some different European championships, world championship events. And I did the voiceovers for it. The way that it was done that it was more narration. And so it turned into, then somebody asked me to do an event and when you listen to the intonation of the voice and stuff like that, it wasn’t like it is now. I guess that’s just something that developed, because then it was coming from the heart. I started to get excited and just do my thing. And it was just me really. It’s just my style.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:34)
Well, I’ve listened to your commentary from a while back. I don’t know if it’s the ’80s, but it’s still there.
Neil Adams
(01:07:40)
I think it’s timing as well, isn’t it? It’s like you get your timing a bit better and know when to go in, when to come out, when to say something, when not. I think that in the early days I tended to want to talk all the time and you don’t have to do that.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:59)
So knowing when to shut up.
Neil Adams
(01:08:01)
That’s the key, isn’t it?
Lex Fridman
(01:08:02)
Yeah, part of the drama is in the silence, building up to the setup and the throw and all that kind of stuff. But also you’re very good at, while radiating passion, being very precise and specific about the details of the throw and the setup and why something worked and didn’t.
Neil Adams
(01:08:22)
I think there’s two kinds of commentating. You can commentate what you see and then you commentate what people can’t see. And so if you’ve got somebody that is not really understanding of what’s happening in the inner part of the game, so it might be a technical thing or it might be the tactical part of the play here that’s going on. And if you can introduce that, as well, then you’ve got an advantage.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:50)
Quick pause. I need a bathroom break.=
Neil Adams
(01:08:52)
Okay. Good stuff.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:54)
So we just took a little break and went to Judotv.com, which is, I guess, an IGF website. IGF is the organization behind a lot of the big judo events in the world. And I just signed up, you should sign up, too. It’s great.
Neil Adams
(01:09:09)
Absolutely, sign up. Cheaper the price, cheaper the price.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:14)
And you can watch basically any match from the Grand Slams and going back through history, I guess.
Neil Adams
(01:09:20)
Yeah, I’ve got to say Lex, I mean everybody. Still people saying to me, “We need more judo on television.” They’ve got judo on television every other week that they can access. All of the top people in all the top events and it costs $100 a year to access everything. And they can play all the videos. I mean we’ve just accessed this here, the Paris tournament, and we’re going to have a look at Teddy Riner. It’s cheap at the price.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:51)
We’re now in Paris Grand Slam 2024. Teddy Riner final. By the way, super cool. You click on the draw. You can just look at any of the matches. You can go at the bottom of the finals, you can go…
Neil Adams
(01:10:05)
To anyone.

Teddy Riner

Lex Fridman
(01:10:06)
Any one of them. That’s so cool. That’s really well done. Really well done interface. Anyway, let me first ask the ridiculous big question. Who do you think is the greatest of all time? Is Teddy Riner in the running?
Neil Adams
(01:10:17)
He’s the greatest judo winner of all time. Of that, there’s no doubt. I think if you asked him whether he was the greatest judo man in the world of all time, he would say, “No, I’m not.” And he’s not the greatest judo man. There are people with more beautiful judo in some ways, although he’s got great technique. But he is the ultimate winner.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:47)
10-time world champ, two-time gold medalist in the Olympics. I guess two-time bronze medalist. He’s going to Paris?
Neil Adams
(01:10:57)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:57)
He’s going after it again. So he’s right here.
Neil Adams
(01:11:00)
He’s right there. This is just a couple of months ago. And then last week, last week he was out again and he won again.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:07)
You think he gets gold medal this time?
Neil Adams
(01:11:09)
There’s people getting closer to him, right? He’s, obviously, age-wise and the amount of time that he’s been there, he’s obviously somebody that he’s starting not quite at his best as he was when he was younger. But like I say, he still puts it on the line. He lays it on the line every single time. And then not only does he lay it on the line, but he beats them all. And last week he just beat Saito who was a young up-and-coming Japanese fighter and he beat him in the final. It was close and he did well. There are certain people, the smaller ones, actually, not the taller ones because, like we were saying about the big arm over the top that he likes and the dominant grip that he likes, there are people that can give him a hard time. Now if at the Olympic Games he has two or three of those on the trot, it might work against him.

(01:12:05)
It’s by no means an absolute certainty that he’s going to win the Olympic gold medal. But he’s got to be one of the favorites, top favorite. No matter what happens now, Teddy Riner is the greatest winner, and if you asked the great Yamashita, he would say the same. There’s nobody that’s, and Yamashita was unbeaten in international competition. I trained with Yamashita a lot over a two-year period and got to know him quite well. And he was one of the greatest of all times. For me, he was one of the greatest Judo men. I’m talking about from a technical point of view, from a spectacular judo point of view, understanding the fundamental principles of how techniques work. Sometimes having different techniques that work for you. So if one doesn’t work and one particular direction doesn’t work, you can change the direction completely.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:04)
In case people don’t know, Yamashita has this legendary judoka heavyweight. Teddy Riner heavyweight, that’s plus 100 kg.
Neil Adams
(01:13:13)
He would’ve caused him all sorts of problems.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:15)
Oh yeah, that’s cool. Who do you think wins? Yamashita?
Neil Adams
(01:13:18)
Yes, I think Yamashita.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:21)
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You think Yamashita beats Teddy Riner?
Neil Adams
(01:13:24)
I think so.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:26)
Strong words. You think so. You think so. Yamashita is on the shorter side, right?
Neil Adams
(01:13:32)
Yeah, and he finds it more difficult with shorter people. It would’ve been a very interesting confrontation. And I think if you asked Yamashita, he would probably say that Teddy Riner, he’s very gracious. He’s really gracious. It would be really good. It would’ve been an unbelievable matchup. And I’ve got to say this, that Teddy Riner is the greatest winner of all time.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:03)
Competition wise. It’s interesting. Both of them, maybe you can correct me, but have this Osoto Gari, which is kind of trip that I never understood.
Neil Adams
(01:14:14)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:16)
It is a very tricky thing to do, right? It’s very easy to do maybe as a white belt. You roll in. You can understand. But to do it at the high, high, high level?
Neil Adams
(01:14:27)
You see any of the top guys now, especially if they’re second time out. So they might catch somebody by surprise. They come out and they go, bang. And you go, “That was amazing.” But if they fought again 10 minutes later, you go, “You’re not going to catch me with that.” You’ve got a different situation here. And so it’s slightly different. But the best fighters adapt like that. And they’re able to see a situation, feel the situation, and they attack once and then go again and attack second, third time. And in the third time they make it work>
Lex Fridman
(01:15:06)
Both Yamashita and Teddy Riner with the Osoto Gari, they’ll just hit it over and over in the match.
Neil Adams
(01:15:11)
Yeah, sometimes it’ll hit first time and it won’t go. And then you make a readjustment of the way in. It’s a little bit like, I mean, if you take a really easy way of understanding it is that if we’re shooting at a target and all of a sudden you start moving that target, it’s different hitting a moving target. But it’s also different hitting a moving target that’s trying to hit you as well. And that’s our game. So we are not only trying to throw a moving target, we’re trying to throw a moving target that’s trying to throw us. So it makes it even more difficult.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:45)
Yeah, there’s a few folks who, you know what’s coming. It’s over and over and over it’s the same attack. Anyway, with this uchi mata it’s different. It’s different. There’s not many people like that where it’s the same attack. I mean there’s other attacks also, but they’ll just go after the same thing over and over and over.
Neil Adams
(01:16:05)
When I watch great athletes, most of them can throw over both flanks, not always going left and right, though our sport always, the cat are always demonstrated left and right. If you demonstrate, if you do something on one side, then can you demonstrate it on the other side? Right? Okay. So can you do it equally? No, but you’ll do it differently on the other side. So when I’m teaching, I don’t teach left and right. If I was teaching you to do a technique, first thing I’d do is say, “I need you to take the sleeve under lapel.” All right?

(01:16:46)
So I’d let you decide what was left and right. Okay? Because often what happens is we impart on people whether they’re going to be left or right when we start teaching. You get a lot of teachers do that all. And they’ll say, immediately, “What do you write with? Left or right hand?” And it’s no indicator actually as to how we do judo because I’m left-handed and I do more predominantly right-handed because I lead off my strongest hand. And actually most people do. So actually left and right is a bit of a trap sometimes when we’re teaching. Better to get, because we can go… My point was, is that a lot of people can go both flanks, so they’ll do something over this side and something over this side.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:32)
But anyway, he was one-sided?
Neil Adams
(01:17:36)
He was one-sided, but he could switch it. So he had a seoi nage as well on the other side so he could switch it if he had to.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:42)
Interesting. And by the way, your opponent in ’84, was he righty or lefty?
Neil Adams
(01:17:50)
He was a righty.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:51)
So that drop left seoi, where did that come from?
Neil Adams
(01:17:55)
Well, I mean again, he could have probably in other contests, he’d hit me with it several times and I’ve just stopped it. Just at the wrong place at the right time for him. Right place in the wrong time for me. Right?
Lex Fridman
(01:18:10)
That’s life. Yeah.
Neil Adams
(01:18:10)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:12)
All right, let’s watch some Teddy Riner.
Neil Adams
(01:18:17)
This is final of Paris tournament. And this is against the Korean. The Korean had had a great day, actually.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:29)
Again, shorter.
Neil Adams
(01:18:31)
Again, shorter. So he does find that difficult. Have a look at Teddy Riner. Teddy Riner will try and catch the sleeve. He’s after the sleeve and then the right arm over the top. That’s the key point for Teddy Riner. And of course, what he has done, if he can’t always catch the big Osoto Gari over, his right-hand side, he’s been doing something to the opposite side.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:01)
The Korean just went for a drop sail and Teddy Riner blocked with the hips.
Neil Adams
(01:19:12)
A big boy has difficulty always against somebody smaller dropping with the seoi nages.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:19)
Has Teddy Riner ever been thrown for ippon?
Neil Adams
(01:19:22)
I’ve never seen his thrown ippon, but he was thrown last week for a nice technique and he’s being caught more and more.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:29)
So it’s getting close.
Neil Adams
(01:19:30)
And Tasoev, in the final of the world championships, they had a strange situation there where Tasoev was a technique down and then pulled off a counter. And they didn’t count it, but then they overruled it. Unfortunately, I was commentating at the time and I went for a score for Tasoev. Anyway, they overruled it and then they awarded a second gold medal to Tasoev.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:01)
What can you say about Tamerlan Bashaev who also gave him trouble?
Neil Adams
(01:20:06)
Yeah, Bashaev and Tasoev are the two that could possibly go to the Olympics. That was a close one there from Riner, that was closest that he’d actually been there.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:16)
Oh, wow.
Neil Adams
(01:20:18)
Didn’t have the sleeve and he relies on the sleeve, greatly. Big support there in the French, in the crowd.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:26)
And also maybe can you explain the penalties for stalling?
Neil Adams
(01:20:31)
Yeah, so if they don’t attack, if they’ve got a grip and they’ve got sleeve, lapel, or they’ve got two hands on. If they’re too passive and they don’t attack. If they’ve got dominant sleeve grip, they don’t attack. That was quite close as well from the Koreans. So the Korean here, you can see, is having a real go. The penalties will come if they don’t attack at the right time. Step outside the yellow area, they’ll get penalized as well.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:56)
That’s dedication for…
Neil Adams
(01:20:59)
Absolutely. I mean it was really close, wasn’t it? They nice little kouchi gari there from the Korean. And if they touch below the belt line with the arms, they’re not allowed to grab the legs. They’ve stopped grabbing the legs.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:16)
Wow. The Koreans really going.
Neil Adams
(01:21:17)
The Koreans having a real good go at it.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:20)
I guess every single person in that division is probably training for Teddy Riner, right?
Neil Adams
(01:21:24)
You think that Teddy Riner has been there a long time and he’s got another guy here in the final of the Paris tournament. He’s got 18,000 people watching him. They’re all on Teddy Riner’s side. They want him to win. And the Korean’s out there on his own with his coach.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:39)
But also the pressure on Teddy Riner.
Neil Adams
(01:21:43)
Amazing pressure. We interviewed him after this and he said, “I’ve got pressure. People go, well, is he going to do it at the Olympic Games? Can I do it in Paris?” He wanted to go to Paris. I mean really, the last Olympic Games should have been it, shouldn’t it? The last should have been the final one. But he’s gone, “No, I’ve got to do another four years.” Two penalties are on the board already for the Korean. That Korean is really having a great go on Teddy Riner.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:11)
He’s got a bit of a lift on him. He’s going after it.
Neil Adams
(01:22:14)
He’s really going after it. It’s an amazing effort there from the Korean. And he’s getting some last minute information. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen his coach, stood next to him like that. But it’s amazing. He’s six foot six and he’s about four foot six. He’s a real pitch.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:34)
Full of passion. I love it. He’s screaming.
Neil Adams
(01:22:37)
Golden score.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:38)
How does golden score work? Can you say?
Neil Adams
(01:22:40)
So the golden score, if it goes without any point on the board from a throw or a hold down or arm lock strangle, then it goes into golden score. So two shidos on the board a piece, one more mistake now and it’s going to be all over. And that’s it.

(01:22:57)
Teddy Riner just manages to turn it on the Korean. And that went really against the run of play, didn’t it? The Korean did better. But Teddy Riner is a winner. And he says, “Right, okay, let’s have more cheering.”
Lex Fridman
(01:23:15)
Finds a way to score in the…
Neil Adams
(01:23:18)
And I have to say, that even when he loses, he’s always graceful. He doesn’t like it, but he’s graceful.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:25)
Yeah, there was so much love there. Celebration. It’s great. It’s great to see. It’s great that he’s doing it again, going after it. Chasing the gold medal again.
Neil Adams
(01:23:33)
Well, he’s chasing the gold medal. It’s going to be in Paris, which is going to be even more fantastic. He’s already the greatest. You said, “What has he got to do to be the greatest?” He’s already the greatest competitor Judo’s ever known. And that was even with the great Tani. Tani was amazing, as well.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:56)
Are you part of the commentating team for Paris?
Neil Adams
(01:23:58)
I’m part of the commentating team, but it won’t be for IJF because it’s independent broadcast.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:03)
Have you ever had an athlete come up to you and ask, “Why’d you say that?” Or disagree with your commentary?
Neil Adams
(01:24:12)
I’ve got to say that 99.9% of everybody is so grateful that I’ve commentated their fights all the way through. They know if they’ve messed up. So if I say something and I’m never disparaging, really disparaging, but what I will say is, “It was a great throw by the other guy. Or it was a great match.” And if they made a mistake, so if they walk out, they know that I will say something that will mean something. Nobody really moans about it. I try and talk the truth, if I can.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:49)
So who else would you consider as some of the greats? So I personally, just because I love the seoi nage, Koga. So there’s the number of times you won the world championships and the Olympic Games, but there’s also how you won and how you wanted to fight and what you did. It’s not necessarily about getting gold medals, it’s about how you fought and how you represent the sport. There’s certain athletes, like Inoue and Iliadis, that are going after the big throws.
Neil Adams
(01:25:21)
Only after they want to win by ippon. And I think that that’s the difference is they’re the ones that come out there and it’s a bit like when Tyson stepped out there, you knew what you were going to get. And if they went toe-to-toe, if Tyson had somebody going toe-to-toe, somebody was going to get knocked out. We got the same in Judo, when people go head-to-head and it’s an open match and I often talk about an open match, I say, “It’s an open match. They’re both trying to score. Somebody is going to get scored on. Somebody’s going to go.” And that makes it exciting. When they come out and they close up, then that’s not an exciting match.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:02)
Is there a case for Ono? Shohei Ono, three-time world champ, two-time gold medalist?
Neil Adams
(01:26:09)
I think that judo-wise, he’s got to be one of the greatest because he had such versatility. He could go right and he could go left. He could pick up. He could go to the ground as well. He won a lot of his earlier matches on the ground. I think his empathy and how he presents himself, sometimes he falls down. I think that hopefully that should come with tutoring and how to be a great champion after. It’s not just about what you do on the mat, but what you do off the mat as well.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:47)
To you a great champion is the whole package of how you present yourself when you lose? How you represent yourself just off the mat?
Neil Adams
(01:26:55)
Yeah, I think it’s how you present yourself afterwards, how you are with people, how much you can help people. I mean, people, kids, and they look up to these great champions because they want to be like them. So the worst thing is when you get somebody that’s a bit of an ass and they’re not presenting themselves in the right way. So I like to see somebody presenting themselves in the right way. And I think that it’s something that can be taught. It’s something that normally comes with a little bit of experience and a little bit of age. I like to think that I’m a little bit different now than I was when I was 19. Not that I was bad, I just think I was just, I see it often now, just full of beans.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:40)
You’re a beautiful work in progress. What about Nomura, Tadahro Nomura, three-time gold medalist?
Neil Adams
(01:27:50)
Never lost an Olympic fight.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:52)
There’s something there.
Neil Adams
(01:27:54)
Yeah, nobody ever done that. You know what I mean? So that’s got to be, it has to stand. He took two years off in between every Olympic Games and came back, did the right amount of events to qualify for not only did he having to qualify, he had to qualify through Japan. Now Japan, remember, have got the greatest depth. So they got people coming through all the time. And then he had to win the Japanese trials. I mean we had a four-time world champion from Japan.

(01:28:25)
This is when World Championships was every other year. And this is Shozo Fujii and he was the greatest middleweight of all time and never got to participate in the Olympics because he lost the Japanese trials twice, in two Olympic possibilities. He had to qualify for Japan and then go to the Olympic Games and then do it there. Sometimes some of the best people in Japan can’t get outside of Japan. Look at the situation they had with Abe and then they had Maruyama. Maruyama and Abe were both the best. By far. In the under-66 kilos category. This is for the last Olympic Games. And they sent one to the world Championships one to the Olympic Games and they both won gold medals.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:21)
Yeah, that’s why the all Japan Championships is legendary, that there’s these battles with Dimash and all of them.
Neil Adams
(01:29:32)
Abe and Maruyama, they had trials in the Kodokan. It was 26 minutes, I think it was 26 minutes, it went. They were battling it out for 26 minutes.

Training in Japan

Lex Fridman
(01:29:45)
That’s great. If we can just go to, you’ve trained in Japan. What are those randoris like? What’s that training like?
Neil Adams
(01:29:54)
I touched on the danger. That danger of being thrown, when you get hold of somebody or somebody gets hold of you. And I often reflect-
Neil Adams
(01:30:00)
Hold of somebody or somebody gets hold of you. I often reflect, and I often talk about it when I’m commentating because I can see immediately… It’s easy, isn’t it? In the commentary chair, or if you’re in the coach’s chair and you don’t really understand totally, absolutely what’s going on when somebody’s being out-gripped. When they’re in danger of being thrown, if you are in danger of being thrown, the first thing you do is stick your backside out and defend by not being in the position they want you to be in. All right? So that’s danger. You feel the danger. So in Japan, that was the place I used to go to train because I felt the danger, and so my defenses would be heightened. One Olympic cycle, I went two years, two months without having a score on me in any competition.

(01:31:03)
Then I went to one competition in the European Championships, which I won, and I was struggling all the way through it and got scored on three times in my first pool of fights, and I was devastated. I actually nearly lost the whole competition because I was more mortified about being scored on three times when I hadn’t been scored on for 2 1/2 years. I had this thing in my head about 2 1/2 years, and then all of a sudden I’m not unbeatable and you go… I almost lost it, completely lost it. Just so fortunate, couple of things went my way and just came out, and I scraped and scratched my way to the final and won the final well, all right? But that was my best match, but I almost lost it.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:57)
Well, what do you do with the fact that if you go to Japan and you’re getting, you’re saying danger, you’re probably getting-
Neil Adams
(01:32:02)
Getting thrown.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:03)
Getting thrown in Japan. What does that do to your ego?
Neil Adams
(01:32:06)
Well, again, that was a winning ego that had to adapt. I remember we went to the kasejo, which police dojo one time, and they created this groundwork competition because they wanted to see me do the jiu-ji, how I went in and-
Lex Fridman
(01:32:06)
The arm bar.
Neil Adams
(01:32:28)
Yeah, the arm bar, right? They wanted to see how I did it from underneath or over the top, and they just created this event.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:35)
Studied the creature.
Neil Adams
(01:32:36)
Yeah, they started it and then winner stays on competition was happening at the kasejo. So I did about seven, I think it was seven in, and then my coach came in and said, “No, it’s finished. That’s it now, it’s finished.” Suddenly we realized what was going on and I was going, “No, no, no, no, don’t stop it like that.” And it was one of those moments where the boot was on my foot, you could say, rather than the other side, the other way.

(01:33:09)
Because I had been to Japan in situation… I remember as a sixteen-year-old, I got such such a drumming from one of the Japanese guys, older students. And he had a gold tooth. And so he was Gold Tooth to me and he was my nightmare. And I remember kept coming out to fight him because he kept throwing me and I was crying and I was upset and I was like… And then that was another occasion where I got dragged away and I said, “No.” So I wanted to go back and fight him. And I went back to the same dojo every year to fight him. He was on my mind morning, noon, night. He was on my mind.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:57)
Gold Tooth was on your mind.
Neil Adams
(01:33:58)
Gold tooth was on my mind.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:59)
Did you ever get him?
Neil Adams
(01:34:01)
Two years later. Two years to me from 16 to 18 was totally different. 18 years of age I was pretty competitive with him. And it was like I was standing up with him. 19, he was in the groundwork competition.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:20)
And that’s when the switch happened.
Neil Adams
(01:34:22)
Switch happened. Because I just, well, because I remember getting the arm lock and didn’t put it on immediately. I needed it to last. It had to last.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:34)
Sure. It had to last.
Neil Adams
(01:34:35)
So I spread, the whole thing lasted as long as I could possibly get it. And it was a long memory as I was looking down at him.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:45)
And now he has nightmares about you.
Neil Adams
(01:34:47)
Now he has-
Lex Fridman
(01:34:47)
I wonder what nickname he has for you.
Neil Adams
(01:34:49)
I don’t know, I’m hoping that he remembers me.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:53)
He has a photo of you.
Neil Adams
(01:34:54)
Do you know what? He probably doesn’t say, just bat an eyelid, doesn’t say a thing about it.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:01)
I mean, can you just speak to that training with those folks? You said crying, just the frustration of being thrown. It’s such a beautiful part of the process of becoming great.
Neil Adams
(01:35:16)
Yeah, I think it is just something that doesn’t happen at this level. We were talking about levels and then at this level it never happened. And then I went out in my first European cadet and all of a sudden I wasn’t this top guy. I was in the mix. And then I had to work myself to the top of that mix and then to the top of the next one because I went to the European Senior Championships.

(01:35:45)
And again, you’re not the top and you’ve worked your way to the top of that. I think it is a frustration, but I think it’s that kind of hatred of losing and also being out of control. I think that the first Senior European Championships I fought Nevzorov, but he was only one of my contests. Then I had to fight a Frenchman for third place. But he totally out-gripped me. And I remember I was more upset though I won the contest, I was more upset that he totally out… He did out-grip me and I was more upset. And then I fought him a year later and out-gripped him. All right. So it was one of those, it was a learning process all the way through.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:36)
That frustration is like, whatever that does to your soul, the building up afterwards is what actually makes you better. It’s fascinating. And do you think there’s, in Japan, just killers there that the world doesn’t know about, that just-
Neil Adams
(01:36:56)
Yeah, there’s world champions in the dojo. There’s people that never make it out. I remember we were training and everybody that goes to Japan, all my friends that have been world Olympic champions, they all know what I’m talking about. They know exactly what I’m saying, is that when we go to the dojos there, we all get thrown by people that never come out to be world champions. They’re just in the mix or they’re going through three years of university and then they go. We had a guy that came in, he was a business guy. He came in with his suitcase and his briefcase like that. He’s got his tie up like that. So he decides he’s going to come in and he gets changed and he’s in his lunch hour, he’s in his lunch hour, so it’s got to be quick. So he comes in and he goes through, he’s working his way through the whole of the British team. We’re all lined up. So he’s just working his way through the whole of the British team. And I knew it was my turn next.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:01)
In his lunch hour.
Neil Adams
(01:38:01)
So I get hold of him and I throw him immediately. And then it was what we were talking about when it happens in the first few seconds of the practice. So then I had four minutes of him coming at me and I’m going up into the air and I’m twisting off. And then everybody’s laughing at the side of the mat or the whole British team. He’s gone through the whole British team and then 10 minutes later he’s tying his tie up like that. And back to work like that. Imagine him sitting behind his desk at his computer.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:37)
Yeah. Yeah.
Neil Adams
(01:38:40)
I’m glad he didn’t get out.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:44)
Hopefully he listens to this.
Neil Adams
(01:38:46)
Hopefully.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:48)
Anybody else I didn’t mention as part of the greats that just kind of jumped-
Neil Adams
(01:38:51)
Kashiwazaki Sensei is my favorite of all favorites. He is what I would call a judo genius. I don’t know if you can get him up here. Can we get him up?
Lex Fridman
(01:38:52)
Yeah.
Neil Adams
(01:39:06)
So go into 1981 World Championships and I’ll talk you through the great Kashiwazaki. He was one year in Great Britain and he was a guy that was so much a genius… So you want the final of the under 60, 65 kilograms. There. The one at the top. This is him. He’s two weight categories below my weight category that I won the World championships. Same year I won it. So I’m not sure if this is going to show his final of-
Lex Fridman
(01:39:45)
This is a highlight.
Neil Adams
(01:39:46)
Oh, watch this. This he did in the-
Lex Fridman
(01:39:46)
What?
Neil Adams
(01:39:50)
Final of the World-
Lex Fridman
(01:39:52)
For people just listening, he did an incredible sacrifice throw.
Neil Adams
(01:39:56)
And then he was on top for the newaza, and renowned for his groundwork and he was on top of… Against a really strong Romanian guy, so his transition was just phenomenal.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:11)
Yeah, let me go back and look at that, what just happened?
Neil Adams
(01:40:14)
So he’s just showing you… So he does this koji thing just to create space and it’s his follow through into groundwork that is best of all. And then the Romanian, really strong, like I say, he’d gone all the way through to the final of the world championships, winning most by ippon I think, the Romanian. And he’s defending really, really well here. And you can see how persistent, he knows exactly what he wants. He’s just got to get his leg out. Now watch, he tied the arm up and then he’ll pull the top leg towards him and then he’ll push the bottom one off-
Lex Fridman
(01:40:56)
Always working.
Neil Adams
(01:40:56)
With both feet. Always working, always working. Readjust the balance. Still one leg trapped. Final of the World Championships. Good referee because he’s refereeing something here that’s happening that’s going to decide as to whether, so he doesn’t call it to stand it up at all. Watch him pull the top one now and he’ll push the bottom one.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:19)
There’s a calmness on his face, which is great to see.
Neil Adams
(01:41:22)
Calm. Pushes the bottom leg, leg out, job done. All finished. This is him again, watch this. This is another technique that he does.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:33)
The sacrifice.
Neil Adams
(01:41:34)
And then just again, sacrifice directly in, directly into the newaza.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:40)
Transition is everything, isn’t it?
Neil Adams
(01:41:42)
In judo.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:43)
Yeah. Well, in anything really, but judo it especially pays off.
Neil Adams
(01:41:49)
Yeah, I mean because we haven’t got that long. I mean we had more time here, they’ve just brought more time back. So we’ve got more time to transition in and to get the situation that we want and to get the attacking situation that we want. Because I remember I was teaching in America to some jiu-jitsu guys, and they were saying, “Oh, we’d never give you our back.” And I said, “With judo rules, certain situations it happens that when we try and do throws where we’re facing away from our opponent.” So for example, seonages, if they fail, then the back is there and that’s how we get the back. And it’s a different situation than going on your back in the guard situation. Totally different.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:38)
Well, Travis Stevens, I don’t know how familiar you are with his judo, but he’s a really interesting example. He competed at the highest level in Jiu-Jitsu as well. And his idea, he’s a big seonage guy, and he basically threw all of that away.
Neil Adams
(01:42:38)
In the jiu-jitsu ?
Lex Fridman
(01:42:55)
In the jiu-jitsu . He took the sport from scratch for what it is. So he almost never did a standing seonages at all in jiu-jitsu.
Neil Adams
(01:43:07)
No, because it would leave his back all the time if it failed. But he wouldn’t have the same kind of grip on the Judo gi or the jiu-jitsu gi. A little bit different.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:20)
And so you have to kind of consider the sport, the art of it, and also the competitors, the styles and the culture of the sport. If you want to win, if winning is the most important thing, then like, “All right, well, let’s-“
Neil Adams
(01:43:31)
But you learn the game, don’t you? And that’s what he did. He learned the game. And I think that is credit to him. And that’s why I was saying about wrestling, the wrestlers, I mean, good to learn the judo and for what it is and the mechanics and how it works. And then learn the wrestling. I mean, I do the commentary as well for the freestyle, and I will be at the Olympics for the freestyle and the Greco-Roman. And I love the freestyle, absolutely love it. But freestyle is freestyle. Judo is judo. I like to see people doing judo.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:05)
Yeah, but there’s a rhyme to the whole combat thing. They’re all, I mean, the body mechanics, it’s all fascinating echoes of each other in interesting ways. The details are different, but there’s still two humans clashing.
Neil Adams
(01:44:24)
Yeah, we’ve got some amazing crossovers with people like the Mongolians that have come in, with the Georgians. The Georgians do massive pickups and different techniques. And if you ask the fighters whether grabbing the legs, a lot of them would say some of the wrestling styles, the Georgians and the Mongolians might say, “Yeah, I’d like to be able to take the legs.” But a lot of them just adapted. You get Iliadis, for example, he just adapted. So he thought, “Well, I’ll take my arm over the top and I’ll just rip them out the floor that way.” You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
(01:45:05)
They’re still doing the big lifts, they’re still doing the big gripping, but they just don’t grab below the legs. It’s weird. They figured it out.
Neil Adams
(01:45:14)
And they figured it out like that.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:16)
Yeah, you would think it’d take a long time. No, it was like a month.
Neil Adams
(01:45:20)
Yeah. No, exactly.

Jiu jitsu

Lex Fridman
(01:45:23)
The highest level, which is crazy. So you mentioned jiu-jitsu a little bit. What to you is an interesting difference between jiu-jitsu and judo that you’ve observed? Because you’re one of the greatest ever on the ground in judo. And so jiu-jitsu is primarily focused on similar type of stuff on the ground. So what to you is an interesting difference there?
Neil Adams
(01:45:49)
They’re a different approach, different timescale to them, and they have a different way in. So [inaudible 01:45:57] ours comes from a standing position directly in, we’ve got a timescale on it so we have to, like the catch, I always talk about the catch. Because in judo terms, if you don’t get the catch immediately, then the referee won’t see the transition in. And also the continuation from plan A, B, C, D if something builds. So we have to build it and we have to build it quickly. And I think in jiu-jitsu terms, you have more time to build.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:32)
Yeah, there’s a kind of patience like, “Oh, if this doesn’t work out, I can try a different thing.” With Judo, there’s an urgency.
Neil Adams
(01:46:39)
There’s an urgency.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:41)
And there’s a ref watching skeptically. So you better show that you’re making progress.
Neil Adams
(01:46:47)
You’ve got to show the progression. And that’s why I always had a plan A, B, C. You see there with… That was 1981 there, the great Kashiwazaki had a progression. Everything was, he knew exactly where he had to be. It was feel. That wasn’t by accident, it was trained. And I think that that transition there and taking control of somebody’s mistake, so somebody might have made a mistake or not hit properly, or your defense has caused them to make a mistake and then you take advantage of it. And that is the difference.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:25)
So one of the side effects of that, I don’t know with the chicken or the egg, but judo people on the ground are much more aggressive. So probably because of the urgency, but there’s an intention behind the progress you’re making. I think jiu-jitsu is more relaxed. There’s more a culture of just finding places to relax and think of different control and positions and take your time. And as a result, it’s much, much less exhausting. So you can go for much longer. It feels like judo is exhausting.
Neil Adams
(01:48:02)
It’s that ten second blast, isn’t it? It’s like doing sprints all the time. And that is really hard. And that’s a special kind of condition you need and you need to be able to catch it and know when to go and when not to go. And I think also, I was going to ask you, you think it’d make a difference, I mean, certain jiu-jitsu, you can’t just throw yourself on your back into the guard. You have to throw into the situation. You have got, I mean, I know Roger Gracie, he decided that he was going to learn judo. He saw the importance of being able to throw for the transition in, and so he came to the budokai and he was learning off Ray Stevens, and they were doing really a lot-
Lex Fridman
(01:48:50)
Well, he’s a fascinating study because he does the most basic stuff and he does-
Neil Adams
(01:48:55)
Does it well.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:56)
He did another level of wow, it’s like Yamashita, everyone knows what’s coming with Roger Gracie, but he just does it anyway. I guess the best people in the world. It’s crazy. He’s like, everybody in jiu-jitsu at White Belt learns the techniques he’s using, and he just does it.
Neil Adams
(01:49:14)
Amazing, isn’t it? But he has about a thousand ways in.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:17)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and the thousand ways there’s in the details, so it kind of might even look the same to people. But he finds a way to choke people. So he’s on top of them, mounted in a sort of judo pin position, and everyone knows what’s coming next against the best people in the world, and you should be able to defend it, but nobody can, it’s crazy.
Neil Adams
(01:49:40)
I think there’s the power element as well, that you don’t realize how when somebody’s directed in a particular way, then you have that kind of element of absolute power that you can only feel, like when Roger’s doing a technique, I think that you would only feel it if he did it on you, then you can feel it. It’s not something that happens… So tricks is one thing, but actually being able to do something really well from a power point of view. Like you say, he only does those few things, but he does them really, really, really well.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:20)
Yeah, I don’t know what that is about. Actually, judo pins is a very interesting case study as well, because people are able to feel so heavy. One of the things judoka are able to do is pin extremely well, and it makes you realize that it’s not about the weight, it’s about some kind of technique that makes people feel like they weigh a thousand pounds.
Neil Adams
(01:50:43)
It’s about weight distribution and change of balance. A lot of people don’t realize that there’s huge changes of balance on the ground. Massive. You know what it’s like. I mean, you’re a jiu-jitsu man. And the detail of the techniques is what really interests me. I mean, I’m always looking, small ideas. I’m always looking at the jiu-jitsu and it fascinates me. I would’ve done jiu-jitsu for sure, but I wouldn’t have forgotten the judo way in to the techniques. I mean, I think you’ve got to differentiate the two, but I would’ve loved the jiu-jitsu. I would’ve absolutely loved it, but it wasn’t as prominent then. Where the newaza came from, it came from a mistake, me getting beaten in a particular contest and I went, “I’m not going to be beaten again on the ground.” That’s how it happened.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:44)
Yeah. Well, yeah, the story of your life is like a loss creates, the phoenix rises.
Neil Adams
(01:51:52)
It was 1978, and it wasn’t a mistake. It was a particular movement. And I was fighting weight up from my normal weight, but I stayed in the same position for one second too long, got caught and-
Lex Fridman
(01:52:10)
Choked?
Neil Adams
(01:52:11)
Sangaku, yeah. Triangle. Triangle, triangle.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:13)
Wow.
Neil Adams
(01:52:14)
And I said, I literally just the same as I said to you, when I said, “I’m not going to drink anymore,” I came off and I said, “I’m never going to get caught on the ground again.”
Lex Fridman
(01:52:27)
Never lose on the ground ever.
Neil Adams
(01:52:27)
And I never lost in my whole competitive career again.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:32)
But yeah, I shouldn’t mention that there’s nothing like a pin from a judo person. And I don’t actually know if people in jiu-jitsu have made sense of that, loaded that in.
Neil Adams
(01:52:44)
But it’s not part of the game, is it? The pin? It’s submission.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:50)
Yeah, but control is part of the game, and nobody controls a human body the way judo people do on the ground. They have understood the science of control. And I think that control is extremely useful in jiu-jitsu as well, it’s just that people don’t… There’s so many other domains of exploration.
Neil Adams
(01:53:13)
That’s interesting.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:14)
I mean, just especially when you apply jiu-jitsu to the fighting setting of mixed martial arts, that control, that side control, that pin control, is really, really, really important. But then you add punching to the thing and it becomes-
Neil Adams
(01:53:30)
Puts a whole different thing on it, doesn’t it?
Lex Fridman
(01:53:32)
I mean, there’s an alternate history where you would’ve been part of the early UFCs if time was a little different maybe a few years later, because your style of judo and jiu-jitsu and the transitions and the aggression, all of that would’ve worked really well in the early UFCs.
Neil Adams
(01:53:53)
I’m sure I was being set up at one stage by one of the Graces, and that was when he was winning all the matches. But he came in with a couple of the cousins to one of my seminars, and he was one of the first ones, wasn’t he, that… That’s how I love to see the kind of UFC, because it was different martial arts, different skills. And he’d get close and he’d just choke them out or arm lock them or arm bar them. And that was brilliant for me. That was a revelation. That was how I saw it.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:34)
It’s a fascinating science experiment, which aspects of different martial arts work well and not, when they clash together. And it did turn out that Newaza worked-
Neil Adams
(01:54:45)
Was the key. Yeah, it was the key, wasn’t it?
Lex Fridman
(01:54:46)
Yeah, it was a big missing link in our conception of fighting. It’s the neutralizer of size, and a lot of other components. It just blew people’s mind. “Oh, okay. It’s not just about size. It’s not just about big guys swinging hands. It’s a lot of other components, and the groundwork is really, really important.” And of course, there’s a few judoka that succeeded in the UFC since then, which is always interesting how they adapt. When you take off the gi, how can you still throw people? How can you still do control? How can you still take advantage of the transition on the ground? Ronda Rousey is a good example of somebody that took advantage of that.
Neil Adams
(01:55:29)
Yeah, I think one of the biggest things for the judoka is we’ve never… There’s no strikes, and I think that’s the biggest shock, if you wish, when you get one-
Lex Fridman
(01:55:29)
Yeah, punched in the face.
Neil Adams
(01:55:44)
You get punched in the face and you’re not used to that. That’s not what we’re used to.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:52)
Some people are able to get punched in the face better than others, for sure. Then again, there’s Ronda Rousey who doesn’t need to get punched in the face. She just gets in close, throws a person, arm bar right there.
Neil Adams
(01:56:03)
And Kayla-
Lex Fridman
(01:56:06)
Kayla Harrison, that’s another incredible person. She could have probably been just winning Olympic gold medal after Olympic gold medal, but chose to-
Neil Adams
(01:56:13)
Whatever she decides. I mean, Ronda as well, whatever they decided to do they’re great athletes. They hate losing. I don’t know anybody that hates losing more than those two. They don’t like it.

Training

Lex Fridman
(01:56:27)
And Kayla Harrison, I don’t know anybody that works as hard as her. That’s a crazy, crazy, crazy work ethic. Well, let me ask you about training again, Jimmy Pedro said he learned a lot from you. He learned how to do a tight ocean, the arm bar Jujigatame, but he also learned from you training methodology. So what’s he talking about? He told me about this. What’s your approach to training throughout your career and as it developed?
Neil Adams
(01:56:57)
I always wanted to train harder than anybody else. I still train now every day. If I don’t train, do something, I do an hour of my physical work, and I still go on the mat a little bit. I’m 65 now. And so I’m not doing really heavy stuff on the mat, but I still like to train. And when I was 21, 20 up to 30, I was one of the best trainers. But Jimmy Pedro was one of the best trainers as well. He’s one of your dream athletes. When Jimmy Pedro steps through your door, and he was just a kid. He was just young when he stepped through my door, and I had a lot of full-time trainers, so I had up to 20 really good athletes that were training hard. And I only wanted hard trainers. Give me 10 that train hard rather than your one pre-Madonna that you’re skillful, the one that could do it. I wanted 10 or 20 really hard trainers because you can do so much with them. You can make champions, you can make them world champions. If you’ve got somebody that was a special talent and they wanted to work hard, then you had a special athlete.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:14)
When you say hard trainers, what do you mean? Are these people that just every single day are able to just grind it out, do [inaudible 01:58:21], do the training, do the boring things, just keep coming back-
Neil Adams
(01:58:24)
Yeah, when the going gets tough. And I think that was him. He had a special mentality. And the thing is, you see when you’ve got him in your dojo, even when you’re tired, when somebody’s tired, what an example to the others. So he’d pull the other ones in as well. So I had somebody that when everybody was tired and everybody was sick of it, and everybody just wanted… And he’d still be there, so they had to do it. So that was for me, a win-win. So I had all the Americans, actually, I had Bobby Berland, and I had Michael Swain, and I had Ed Liddie, and I had them all coming to visit me at different times. Jimmy was there, they wanted to be the best. In the end we had such a great club atmosphere. They wanted to come for the hard work, and they knew that if they came, they were going to be dragged out and we were going to do physical training. And it was physical training like they hadn’t done before. But it wasn’t just the physical training, it was the judo and the skill side of it as well. And so I always had a great empathy with the U.S. team. Olympic team. So a lot of your Olympic medalists have been through with me. And so I’m proud of that because we had some great times and they’re still great mates now. And so in New York, in a couple of weeks time, I’m going to have, everybody is going to be there. They’re all coming in.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:00)
All old friends.
Neil Adams
(02:00:01)
All old friends.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:01)
And new friends. So what’s.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:00)
Old friends.
Neil Adams
(02:00:01)
All old friends.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:01)
And new friends. So what’s a tough week look like at your peak physical training, Randori? Is there days off? Are you training twice a day?
Neil Adams
(02:00:14)
Twice a day. So we do the preparation training, we do the running, we do the weight training, we do the skills in the morning as well. The skills is, for me, one of the biggest advantages that any full-time trainers can have, because what happens is that with most clubs, you’re trying to fit everything into that hour and a half or two hours. You fit your skills, you fit your physical training and your sparring and everything’s in there, all grouped in. So the biggest advantages of having a full-time group is that you can split your skills and your skills lay your foundation. So the biggest advantage is being able to work specifically on things without having to worry about getting to do your Randori or your sparring, then you’ve got to go out for… You just do the skills.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:11)
Well, when you talk about skills, say your specialty is a Tai otoshi, are we talking about Uchikomi, working with bands? Are you doing throws? Are you actually just having conversations about specific tiny details of throws? What does skills mean?
Neil Adams
(02:01:27)
All those things about doing your repetition practice, making sure the repetition is correct, there’s good repetition.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:34)
So when we say good repetition, Uchikomi when you’re just fitting the throw versus doing the throw? Where do you land on the value of both?
Neil Adams
(02:01:41)
I’m getting it moving. So one of the biggest, most important things is getting it moving. If we do something static, again, it’s that static target. You need to get it moving. So you need to do a repetition and also you need to do a correct repetition because if you’re doing 100 repetitions that are not correct and repetitions under pressure, too much pressure, without somebody overseeing those skills to make sure that you correct the skills. Because if you’re doing a skill, if you’re doing it 99 times incorrectly, then repetition doesn’t make perfect. Repetition makes permanent, so you’re going to make it as perfect as you possibly can. So actually that skills group there is the most important thing. And what I used to do is oversee it. So I’d oversee it to make sure that it was done properly.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:33)
So you’re watching the footwork, you’re watching the gripping-
Neil Adams
(02:02:37)
Everything.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:37)
…and then just constantly adjusting the people.
Neil Adams
(02:02:40)
I’ll give you an example, Jimmy Pedro. Jimmy was one of the hardest when he was 19 years of age, he’s always asking me to practice always. So he’s always on me all the time. So I do groundwork with him could I put him on his back? No, I was all on him and he’ll tell you, but he just wouldn’t go. He was going to be great, without a doubt. So I wanted everybody on with him, everybody. So everybody went on with him. And so it only improved their game and it improved him. And then small technical things that have stayed with him that we were doing with the Juji Gatame that was passed on to Kayla and then gone on to Ronda and it’s all small things that I can see sometimes that it’s passed on.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:30)
What about the Tai Otoshi? He said he learned a lot from you from that.
Neil Adams
(02:03:34)
And he does it differently.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:35)
And so I should mention that’s one of the trickier throw… I mean, I still don’t understand.
Neil Adams
(02:03:42)
It is a tricky throw.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:43)
I don’t understand. So for people who don’t know, boy, how would you even explain it? It doesn’t make any sense. When you just look solo, the movement you make is quite simple, but how you get a person to be off balance, how you actually get them to be thrown. And when you do throw it successfully, it looks like a whipping motion that’s effortless. It makes no sense.
Neil Adams
(02:04:11)
It makes no sense other than every technique starts with the hands. So it’s what we call Kazushi and you’re pulling somebody off balance, getting them moving, pulling them off balance. Tai otoshi means body drop. So it’s basically two legs across your partner’s body. I’ve got my back to you and I’ve already pulled you off balance with my hands, and then I’m going to just flex my legs up just as you are coming onto my back. And then you’re going to go over if I coordinated all right. If it doesn’t get coordinated right, then you’re going to come right on my back and try to rip my arm off. So got get it right.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:51)
If you can convert it into words, some secret ingredients that allowed you to pull it off at the highest levels, the Tai otoshi?
Neil Adams
(02:05:01)
The hands start every technique. So getting the repetition right, first of all. So to get the repetition right, you need a good partner. Actually training your partner to react in the right way is just as important as learning the throw. Actually what happens is we could get a lesson of beginners, we teach the throw and then go, “Right, off you go.” And 90% of them will get it wrong because their partner’s not reacting in the right way. So half of it is to get the person to react as they should. So if I was doing it with you, you and I, first thing I’d teach you to do is to react the way I want you to react. And then I’d react the way that you want me to react. So then we’d have success with it rather than you leaning back in the wrong way or resisting or frightened going over. So actually, that’s why nine times out of 10, people get the technique wrong.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:02)
It’s actually fascinating to me because in the United States where I came up, I mean, the level of judo is not comparable to the level of judo in the rest of the world. Of course the Pedro Center is an exception to that.
Neil Adams
(02:06:16)
Certain athletes, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:17)
It’s just certain athletes. When I trained recently with Jimmy Pedro, even the 16 year old kids are just all deadly, so it was terrifying. But I remember the Russian national team came through Philadelphia and one of the things that really impressed me is just how much easier judo was, training judo with them. They moved correctly. As the people getting thrown, every aspect of their body movement was correct in terms of it felt right to be throwing them, to be training with them. Everything about the gripping, about the position of their hips, about the shoulder, everything. It was fun. It was easy. And I always felt like I was learning. So I think all of that is loaded in, I guess, into proper training. So you’re developing through the throws, you’re developing the right technique.
Neil Adams
(02:07:11)
You got to develop. You have to develop between… I always had training partners that I trained with up to each Olympic games, we did the skills together and then we worked together in order to make techniques work. And we got it moving as quickly as we could. And one of the worst things that I see is, and I see a lot of YouTube stuff with them, coaches-
Lex Fridman
(02:07:37)
Here we go, got Neil Adams upset.
Neil Adams
(02:07:40)
Don’t even start me on that. Don’t even start me on that.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:45)
What you-
Neil Adams
(02:07:46)
You’re laughing because you know what I’m talking about, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:07:47)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I’m actually laughing because I’m enjoying you talking trash. But you’re talking about technique.
Neil Adams
(02:07:57)
Yeah, well then the coaches and their clipboard guys with the clipboards and the stopwatches and they’ve got these kids running up and down the mat and then doing Uchikomi of something that’s technically incorrect 10 times and then running up and doing another 10 at the other side and actually mixing everything together. And it’s just a mess.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:22)
Technique is important.
Neil Adams
(02:08:23)
Technical mess.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:24)
That said, some of it is conditioning type stuff that you were doing. So what is the hardest type of physical conditioning you were doing?
Neil Adams
(02:08:32)
Probably ran too much when I was a kid. If I could go back now, I wouldn’t run as much. And I ran hard and I ran strong. And I remember doing London Marathon one time and I said, “I’m never going to do it again.” I said, “Never.” But I ran and the problem was when I did the London Marathon is I was trying to beat three hours.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:57)
It’s that desire to win again.
Neil Adams
(02:08:58)
It’s totally insane. It was insane. And I went out through half marathon in what I thought was a good time. Anyway, I got to 16-17 miles and totally blew it.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:10)
So you went out too fast.
Neil Adams
(02:09:11)
Yeah, I went out too fast.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:12)
And then you just-
Neil Adams
(02:09:13)
I died.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:14)
…wanted to keep going.
Neil Adams
(02:09:16)
Absolutely. I died. I crossed the line. I remember seeing this bridge over there and the bridge, it was the finishing line over the bridge and I had to get there. It was the longest bridge I’ve ever, ever walked over and I walk, run. So I got over the bridge and I took one step over the line like that, and there was a guy over there and he was trying to rush everybody through. And he was going, “Come on, come on, come on. There’s people behind you?” “Get your hands off of me.” I said, “Get your hands off me now,” like that because we’re going to fall out. And I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move. I was white.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:58)
It’s amazing that you made it to the finish line though.
Neil Adams
(02:10:01)
I did. I got over there and Donald Duck passing me was a tell.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:08)
Oh, there’s a person dressed as Donald Duck?
Neil Adams
(02:10:10)
Donald Duck, yeah. But the thing was, I still crossed over 338. I crossed over 338, but I lost 38 minutes in the last four miles.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:21)
So that bridge, longest bridge ever.
Neil Adams
(02:10:23)
The longest.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:23)
So you regret the running, huh?
Neil Adams
(02:10:24)
So anyway, I would do the running a little bit differently, but we ran hard. We did the weight training, we did good weight training. It was all conditioned. So I mean, it was never the same training all the time. So it was always, we’d have certain phases building up. It was scientifically done. It wasn’t just out there, run, weight training, judo, same judo all the time. It was always pretty scientific.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:50)
Good variety.
Neil Adams
(02:10:51)
It was a good variety. And it had build up and it had a speed phase and it had a power phase and it had a base condition.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:58)
What about the Randori? Was there a method to the madness there? How much Randori did you do?
Neil Adams
(02:11:05)
A lot. So the most important thing for me, I mean, I see now that there’s a lot of people out there that are not getting enough Randori. They’re not Randori-ing enough. And there’s a lot of sports science people and they’re running and they’re weight training and they’re doing it all to death. And there’s not enough judo. You have a look at some of the eastern block countries that are getting together, they’re having these mass camps and the Japanese, they have just massive people that they can do there. They’re doing probably 50-60 Randori’s a week.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:44)
Wait, what?
Neil Adams
(02:11:45)
50 or 60 a week.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:47)
Wow.
Neil Adams
(02:11:48)
The average person is getting together… I mean, when I was doing Randori’s, when I went to Japan, it was just purely for 60 Randori’s a week.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:59)
How much is each one? How long is it?
Neil Adams
(02:12:00)
So they were five minutes then, they’re four minutes now.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:04)
That’s a lot, especially given the level of the competition there.
Neil Adams
(02:12:07)
But you can do it in Japan because it’s fairly light. If they throw you, they throw you, you throw them.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:12)
So there’s a level of you’re moving at a close to 100%, but the actual power in the force is not quite there.
Neil Adams
(02:12:20)
Different in Korea. Korea was harder, it was more physical. So you couldn’t do 50 Randori’s in Korea. You’d die. So you’d do 30.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:31)
50 Randori’s, wow.
Neil Adams
(02:12:32)
But you need the Randori. And so I chased the Randorers, so I chased them into training camps, I chased them all over my country. So I was getting 40 to 50 a week in my club. And then I would go to training camps and add more. And I honestly don’t think that they do enough now, a lot of countries.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:55)
Somebody who doesn’t know Randori’s live training.
Neil Adams
(02:12:57)
Yeah, sparring.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:59)
Was there a few people you remember that were just really tough to go against? You mentioned Goldtooth, is there others like it?
Neil Adams
(02:13:06)
Goldtooth was pretty horrific.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:10)
Well, you got him in the end.
Neil Adams
(02:13:12)
I got him in the end.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:18)
I suppose I should say not just tough, but just good training partners that you like.
Neil Adams
(02:13:21)
Great training partners. I remember Nishida and Nishida, I mentioned him earlier, said he was one of the best, I mean, he was just such a great technician. So I would go there to his dojo and he’d ask me to practice and he’d finish the practice and you know that he would always say, “Another one, we’ll do another one.” So you’d go, “Oh yeah,” because you had to make out that you weren’t that bothered that you had to do another one, so you’d do another one back to back. And then he’d go sometimes, “Let’s do another one.” So we’d end up doing 15 minutes with the same guy who could possibly throw you at any time. And that was hard. But I remember those particular guys and there were plenty of those.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:06)
What do you do with the exhaustion that you’re feeling in those? How deep did you go in terms of-
Neil Adams
(02:14:11)
You have to dig deep. And I think that that was the great thing about having certain European training camps were more physical. So I remember that we would have European training camps where you’d fight Germans and then the Dutch and then the French and then the Russian. You’d have all sorts different styles and people to fight and that was something then you’d have to dig in at a different place, come out of there.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:43)
Where do you go mentally? How many times have you gone there where you’re really in deep waters exhaustion wise in competition, actually?
Neil Adams
(02:14:53)
Competition, it’s happened. So sometimes you go past where your forearms are absolutely blown. I remember the final of Czech tournament that we had and fought a Frenchman in the final. And my forearms were so blown I couldn’t shake his hand. And then I remember they were solid, absolutely solid and they had lactic acid in them. And I remember I stood on the rostrum and they were giving me things and I couldn’t grip them properly. So I was saying, “Put it under my armpit or chin,” like that, trying to hold this and I couldn’t hold anything. So there are times when I really had to go really deep. I remember fighting two East Germans the same day, one of the competitions and the number one and the number two East Germans, and that was another day where I had to really dig deep.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:53)
That’s the fascinating thing about some of these tournaments is if you go full distance on several matches in a row, what you’re seeing in the finals are two people that have fought a lot that day.
Neil Adams
(02:16:08)
And we have golden score now. So we see a lot of guys that are going into golden score and they’ve done one contest in four minutes and then they go another four minutes. And then we’ve had some go into a third four minutes, this is all back to back. It might be in the first round, it might be in the final. And we’ve got some now that are coming out and you can see the stats and the ones that win in golden score. So we got Japanese, Hashimoto, he’s the Japanese representative now instead of Ono, because Ono’s finished. So Hashimoto’s coming out. He was in a tournament last week.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:42)
Is he a good one to look up?
Neil Adams
(02:16:44)
Yeah, just have a look at him. So Hashimoto’s in white here and there’s a great example there. Well, I’m glad we got onto that. So I mean, he has got great technique, Hashimoto.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:57)
Effortless, effortless. Pay attention as we’re talking. Wow.
Neil Adams
(02:16:58)
Right, so you can see exactly what we’re talking about there, great timing. And again, sometimes he backs them up to the edge and then he’ll wait for them to come back in towards, they don’t want to step out to get a penalty.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:14)
I guess that’s a cross grip Tai otoshi or did I see that wrong?
Neil Adams
(02:17:17)
Yeah, cross grip, different grips. Oh, great examples there. Just what we were talking about.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:23)
Making it look so easy. Wow.
Neil Adams
(02:17:26)
So he’s going to be their representative at 73 kilograms. Look at him, back him up again and again, just catching him as he pushes back.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:35)
So push, push, push, and then-
Neil Adams
(02:17:37)
Yeah, action, reaction at it’s best there. And slight change of direction. He sometimes goes down onto his knee there, which is seoi otoshi. It turns from Tai otoshi, which is springing up, to seoi otoshi that’s going down.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:52)
Oh, the title of the video is, Tai Otoshi is a Work of Art.
Neil Adams
(02:17:57)
This is him at his best, showing him doing what he does best. But he had to go three times into golden score last week and dig deep and lost one of them, I think.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:09)
But you’re still going at it. You’re talking about all those training sessions. Niki, your wonderful wife, told me that you were going all over from Target to Target looking for workout clothes because your luggage got lost because you had to get a workout in.
Neil Adams
(02:18:24)
You know what? I realized that if I’m a miserable git, then she’ll get me into the gym. And the thing is that I’m better if I get in there for an hour and I just do something, at least 35-40 minutes cardio. And then I do some weights and more high repetitions. It’s not so much heavy weights now, but more functional stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:48)
I mean, you travel all over the world for the commentary of these competitions. So is it sometimes a challenge to figure out how-
Neil Adams
(02:18:56)
Well during Covid then they closed all the gyms, but we were still going out. We were one of the first ones out. The judo were some of the first out, the competitions were behind closed doors, so we were in the hotel, the gym was closed, so we couldn’t use the gyms, so we had to look for other ways that we could work out. So most of the hotels that we were in were high-rise hotels. So we were in the steps, we were doing the steps right the way up. So I started it, and so I started off with me going up and then one or two of the others and the referees started to go up with me. So in the end, we’d have this trail of people going up the steps and down. And every place we went to, we had the steps. So that was an interesting situation. So we were sick of steps in the end.

Advice for beginners

Lex Fridman
(02:19:52)
What advice would you give to beginners, people starting out in judo, how to develop their game, how to find the beauty in the sport and the art of judo?
Neil Adams
(02:20:08)
If you put 10 people in a room and said, “Right, get on with it,” you’d have mayhem. And I think that whatever sport you’re doing, you need good instruction, good teaching, and a good club atmosphere, somewhere that’s not so intense that winning is the only thing. And I think that if you look at 90% of the people that practice martial arts are doing it for pleasure. So they want to get pleasure. So you need a club that’s got a bit of a mixture. They’ve got a direction to go into competition if they want, and then the rest, it’s for fun and to enjoy it, but with really good instruction because with really good instruction and a good foundation and a good base, you get more enjoyment because you have more success. Let’s be honest, the more success we have with something, the more we like it.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:07)
Yeah, and great technique is a way to really discover the beauty of the art. And so great teaching is really important there.
Neil Adams
(02:21:14)
Great teaching is so important.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:18)
What does it take to get from the early days when you started judo to world-class level?
Neil Adams
(02:21:26)
I think that with most, I mean, you do hear, don’t you? If somebody’s been doing judo for eight years and then they’re in… And I think it happened, one of the French, she went to the Olympic games in 2012 and she’d been doing judo for eight years, but then she started to lose. So she had a relative success early on. The Olympics was one of them. She got a silver medal, but then she went off the boil and then she came back and now she’s still competing and she’s been there for well over 13 years at the very top. So I think that any foundation, it’s like anything, if you lay a really solid foundation, it generally lasts longer.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:12)
Yeah, but that foundation again, is that technique or what does it take to build that foundation?
Neil Adams
(02:22:19)
I think technique, you get away with murder. With technique, you can get away with having bad condition, but I mean, you get found out in the end. But you can go out and you can win certain things by doing really nice technique. But I think if you’ve got the mixture, if you’ve got the whole package, then you can go the whole way.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:42)
So for people who somehow don’t know some of the greatest judo matches ever. You’ve done Grand Prix’s, you’ve done all of these events, Olympics, championship, everything. Just looking at the history of judo, what stands out to you? What events stand out to you? What are some good memories that pop to your head?
Neil Adams
(02:23:03)
I think some of the Paris tournaments are amazing because the crowd, they’re there, they’re on the mat, they’re all judoka, they’re well-educated to the sport. Every time somebody twitches, they’re very biased towards their own, which you expect, but sometimes I haven’t been able to hear myself speak, and that’s very unusual. You’ve got the headphones on and you’re blocked out. Sometimes Teddy Riner’s been walking out there and the crowd are going crazy and they’re on their feet when somebody twitches and then you get the crowd silences. We had one of those last week. Everybody’s cheering their man and then bang, their man goes over.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:47)
And then it’s silence.
Neil Adams
(02:23:48)
Silence, nothing like that. And then of course, we were commentating, we would go, “That was a bit of a crowd silencer.” But that happens.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:57)
Yeah, that is a surprising thing, at least it was to me, that Paris and France is really big on judo.
Neil Adams
(02:24:04)
Massive. And there’s always surprises. Paris is great. In Japan for the Olympic games, the biggest surprise was Ono getting beaten in the team event. Now Ono is the greatest Judo man. Pound for pound, probably one of the best. And he won the Olympic title and then they went into the team event against France and Ono lost to a, He’s not run of the mill German, but the German, he wasn’t certainly Olympic title-esque and beat Ono, managed to throw him.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:41)
Yeah. Well, the team stuff is fascinating, right?
Neil Adams
(02:24:43)
Yeah, it’s fascinating.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:44)
It changes the dynamics of the whole thing. And I mean, it’s funny you say Paris, it really makes it really big deal that this Olympics is being held in Paris.
Neil Adams
(02:24:55)
And they’ll be the team to beat, French team because they have the best balance of the weight categories. They have the best balance with their people that are world and Olympic champions and qualified men and women. So it’s three men, three women. They have the best balance out of anybody.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:13)
And an educated audience.
Neil Adams
(02:25:15)
Educated audience, home grounds.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:16)
It’s going to be awesome.
Neil Adams
(02:25:16)
It’s going to be mad.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:18)
It’s going to be super fun.
Neil Adams
(02:25:20)
It will be super fun.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:21)
Are you nervous?
Neil Adams
(02:25:22)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:23)
All right.
Neil Adams
(02:25:23)
Do you get nervous?
Lex Fridman
(02:25:25)
I get nervous. I get nervous.
Neil Adams
(02:25:26)
I do as well. I get really nervous.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:28)
I’m nervous right now. But given, especially because it’s the Olympics and you want to celebrate people properly and it’s everything for them. And a lot of people, especially the finals matches, it’ll be watched millions of times, the highest of stakes, all of this.
Neil Adams
(02:25:51)
Played over and over. And I find that with mine, I’m now a little bit more careful, so I’ll celebrate a massive throw and then have empathy to the one that’s been thrown because it’s not the best feeling in the world, especially in Olympic finals. Can you imagine that?
Lex Fridman
(02:26:10)
Yeah.
Neil Adams
(02:26:11)
Must be terrible.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:12)
Must be terrible.
Neil Adams
(02:26:15)
Just reflecting. So no, I have a bit of empathy there, and I try and say the right things because they always do come up to me and say, “You commentated my fights.”
Lex Fridman
(02:26:27)
Yeah, you’re the voice of the biggest triumphs and the biggest tragedies for these athletes, for the world that watches and admires these athletes.
Neil Adams
(02:26:35)
No pressure.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:35)
You’re the voice. Don’t screw it up.
Neil Adams
(02:26:37)
Don’t screw it up.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:39)
Your voice is in my head when I watch these. It’s just fascinating, it’s fascinating, but you’re a master of it. It’s a huge honor that you would talk with me. Thank you for everything you’ve done for the sport of judo, for the Olympics, for just sports in general, just celebrating greatness in all of its forms. Thank you for talking today. Keep going. I can’t wait to listen to you in Paris.
Neil Adams
(02:27:07)
Thank you for having me, and it’s just been an honor to be here with you.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:13)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Neil Adams. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Miyamoto Musashi. There’s nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within, everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs | Lex Fridman Podcast #426

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #426 with Edward Gibson.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors.
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Table of Contents

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Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:

Introduction

Edward Gibson
(00:00:00)
Naively I certainly thought that all humans would have words for exact counting, and the Piraha don’t. Okay, so they don’t have any words for even one. There’s not a word for one in their language. And so there’s certainly not a word for two, three or four. And so that blows people’s minds often.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:18)
Yeah, that’s blowing my mind.
Edward Gibson
(00:00:20)
That’s pretty weird, isn’t it?
Lex Fridman
(00:00:21)
How are you going to ask, “I want two of those.”
Edward Gibson
(00:00:25)
You just don’t. And so that’s just not a thing you can possibly ask in Piraha. It’s not possible, there’s no words for that.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:32)
The following is a conversation with Edward Gibson, or Ted, as everybody calls him. He’s a psycholinguistics professor at MIT. He heads the MIT language lab that investigates why human languages look the way they do, the relationship between cultural language and how people represent, process and learn language. Also, you should have a book titled Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, published by MIT Press coming out this fall so look out for that. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Edward Gibson. When did you first become fascinated with human language?

Human language

Edward Gibson
(00:01:17)
As a kid in school, when we had to structure sentences and English grammar, I found that process interesting. I found it confusing as to what it was I was told to do. I didn’t understand what the theory was behind it, but I found it very interesting.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:34)
When you look at grammar, you’re almost thinking about it like a puzzle, almost a mathematical puzzle.
Edward Gibson
(00:01:39)
Yeah, I think that’s right. I didn’t know I was going to work on this at all at that point. I was a math geek person, computer scientist, I really liked computer science. And then I found language as a neat puzzle to work on from an engineering perspective actually, that’s what I … After I finished my undergraduate degree, which was computer science and math in Canada in Queen’s University, I decided to go to grad school, as that’s what I always thought I would do. And I went to Cambridge where they had a master’s program in computational linguistics. And I hadn’t taken a single language class before. All I’d taken was CS, computer science, math classes pretty much mostly as an undergrad. And I just thought this was an interesting thing to do for a year, because it was a single year program. And then I ended up spending my whole life doing it.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:36)
Fundamentally, your journey through life was one of a mathematician and a computer scientist. And then you discovered the puzzle, the problem of language, and approached it from that angle to try to understand it from that angle, almost like a mathematician or maybe even an engineer.
Edward Gibson
(00:02:53)
As an engineer, I’d say … To be frank, I had taken an AI class, I guess it was ’83 or ’84, ’85, somewhere in there a long time ago. And there was a natural language section in there. And it didn’t impress me. I thought, “There must be more interesting things we can do.”

(00:03:09)
It seemed just a bunch of hacks to me, it didn’t seem like a real theory of things in any way. And so I just thought this seemed like an interesting area where there wasn’t enough good work.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:23)
Did you ever come across the philosophy angle of logic? If you think about the 80s with AI, the expert systems where you try to maybe sidestep the poetry of language and some of the syntax and the grammar and all that stuff and go to the underlying meaning that language is trying to communicate and try to somehow compress that in a computer representable way? Did you ever come across that in your studies?
Edward Gibson
(00:03:50)
I probably did but I wasn’t as interested in it. I was trying to do the easier problems first, the ones I thought maybe were handleable, which seems like the syntax is easier, which is just the forms as opposed to the meaning. When you’re starting talking about the meaning, that’s a very hard problem and it still is a really, really hard problem. But the forms is easier. And so I thought at least figuring out the forms of human language, which sounds really hard but is actually maybe more attractable.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:19)
It’s interesting. You think there is a big divide, there’s a gap, there’s a distance between form and meaning, because that’s a question you have discussed a lot with LLMs because they’re damn good at form.
Edward Gibson
(00:04:33)
Yeah, I think that’s what they’re good at, is form. And that’s why they’re good, because they can do form, meanings are …
Lex Fridman
(00:04:39)
Do you think there’s … Oh, wow. It’s an open question.
Edward Gibson
(00:04:42)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:43)
How close form and meaning are. We’ll discuss it but to me studying form, maybe it’s a romantic notion it gives you. Form is the shadow of the bigger meaning thing underlying language. Language is how we communicate ideas. We communicate with each other using language. In understanding the structure of that communication, I think you start to understand the structure of thought and the structure of meaning behind those thoughts and communication, to me. But to you, big gap.

Generalizations in language

Edward Gibson
(00:05:19)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:20)
What do you find most beautiful about human language? Maybe the form of human language, the expression of human language.
Edward Gibson
(00:05:27)
What I find beautiful about human language is some of the generalizations that happen across the human languages, within and across a language. Let me give you an example of something which I find remarkable, that is if a language, if it has a word order such that the verbs tend to come before their objects … English does that. The subject comes first in a simple sentence. I say the dog chased the cat, or Mary kicked the ball, the subject’s first and then after the subject there’s the verb and then we have objects. All these things come after in English. It’s generally a verb. And most of the stuff that we want to say comes after the subject, it’s the objects. There’s a lot of things we want to say they come after. And there’s a lot of languages like that. About 40% of the languages of the world look like that, they’re subject-verb-object languages. And then these languages tend to have prepositions, these little markers on the nouns that connect nouns to other nouns or nouns to verb. When I see a preposition like in or on or of or about, I say I talk about something, the something is the object of that preposition that we have. These little markers come also, just like verbs, they come before their nouns.

(00:06:52)
Now, we look at other languages like Japanese or Hindi, these are so-called verb final languages. Maybe a little more than 40%, maybe 45% of the world’s languages or more, 50% of the world’s languages are verb final. Those tend to be post positions. They have the same kinds of markers as we do in English but they put them after. Sorry, they put them first, the markers come first. You say instead of talk about a book, you say a book about, the opposite order there in Japanese or in Hindi. You do the opposite and the talk comes at the end. The verb will come at the end as well. Instead of Mary kicked the ball, it’s Mary ball kicked. And then if it’s Mary kicked the ball to John, it’s John to, the to, the marker there, the preposition, it’s a post position in these languages.

(00:07:52)
And so a fascinating thing to me is that within a language, this order aligns, it’s harmonic. And so it’s one or the other, it’s either verb initial or verb final. But then you’ll have prepositions, prepositions or post positions. And that’s across the languages that we can look at. We’ve got around a thousand languages for … There’s around 7,000 languages around on the earth right now. But we have information about say, word order on around a thousand of those pretty. Decent amount of information. And for those thousand which we know about, about 95% fit that pattern. It’s about half and half, half are verb initial like English and half are verb final like Japanese.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:41)
Just to clarify, verb initial is subject-verb-object.
Edward Gibson
(00:08:45)
That’s correct.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:46)
Verb final is still subject-object-verb.
Edward Gibson
(00:08:50)
That’s correct. Yeah, the subject is generally first
Lex Fridman
(00:08:52)
That’s so fascinating. I ate an apple, or I apple ate.
Edward Gibson
(00:08:57)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:57)
Okay. And it’s fascinating that there’s a pretty even division in the world amongst those, 45%.
Edward Gibson
(00:09:03)
Yeah, it’s pretty even. And those two are the most common by far. Those two word orders, the subject tends to be first. There’s so many interesting things but the thing I find so fascinating is there are these generalizations within and across a language. And there’s actually a simple explanation I think, for a lot of that. And that is you’re trying to minimize dependencies between words. That’s basically the story I think, behind a lot of why word order looks the way it is, is we’re always connecting … What is a thing I’m telling you? I’m talking to you in sentences, you’re talking to me in sentences. These are sequences of words which are connected and the connections are dependencies between the words.

(00:09:47)
And it turns out that what we’re trying to do in a language is actually minimize those dependency links. It’s easier for me to say things if the words that are connecting for their meaning are close together. It’s easier for you in understanding if that’s also true. If they’re far away, it’s hard to produce that and it’s hard for you to understand. And the languages of the world, within a language and across languages fit that generalization. It turns out that having verbs initial and then having prepositions ends up making dependencies shorter. And having verbs final and having post positions ends up making dependencies shorter than if you cross them. If you cross them, you just end up … It’s possible, you can do it.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:33)
You mean within a language?
Edward Gibson
(00:10:34)
Within a language you can do it. It just ends up with longer dependencies than if you didn’t. And so languages tend to go that way, they call it harmonic. It was observed a long time ago without the explanation, by a guy called Joseph Greenberg, who’s a famous typologist from Stanford. He observed a lot of generalizations about how word order works, and these are some of the harmonic generalizations that he observed.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:59)
Harmonic generalizations about word order. There’s so many things I want to ask you. Okay, let me just some basics. You mentioned dependencies a few times. What do you mean by dependencies?

Dependency grammar

Edward Gibson
(00:11:12)
Well, what I mean is in language, there’s three components to the structure of language. One is the sounds. Cat is C, A and T in English. I’m not talking about that part. Then there’s two meaning parts, and those are the words. And you were talking about meaning earlier. Words have a form and they have a meaning associated with them. And so cat is a full form in English and it has a meaning associated with whatever a cat is. And then the combinations of words, that’s what I’ll call grammar or syntax, that’s when I have a combination like the cat or two cats, okay, where I take two different words there and put together and I get a compositional meaning from putting those two different words together. And so that’s the syntax. And in any sentence or utterance, whatever, I’m talking to you, you’re talking to me, we have a bunch of words and we’re putting them together in a sequence, it turns out they are connected, so that every word is connected to just one other word in that sentence. And so you end up with what’s called technically a tree, it’s a tree structure, where there’s a root of that utterance, of that sentence. And then there’s a bunch of dependents, like branches from that root that go down to the words. The words are the leaves in this metaphor for a tree.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:34)
A tree is also a mathematical construct.
Edward Gibson
(00:12:37)
Yeah. It’s graph theoretical thing, exactly.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:38)
A graph theory thing. It’s fascinating that you can break down a sentence into a tree and then every word is hanging onto another, is depending on it.
Edward Gibson
(00:12:47)
That’s right. All linguists will agree with that, no one …
Lex Fridman
(00:12:51)
This is not a controversial …
Edward Gibson
(00:12:52)
That is not controversial.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:53)
There’s nobody sitting here listening mad at you.
Edward Gibson
(00:12:55)
I do not think so, I don’t think so.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:56)
Okay. There’s no linguist sitting there mad at this.
Edward Gibson
(00:12:58)
No. In every language, I think everyone agrees that all sentences are trees at some level.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:05)
Can I pause on that?
Edward Gibson
(00:13:06)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:06)
Because to me just as a layman, it is surprising that you can break down sentences in mostly all languages.
Edward Gibson
(00:13:15)
All languages, I think.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:17)
… into a tree.
Edward Gibson
(00:13:17)
I think so. I’ve never heard of anyone disagreeing with that.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:21)
That’s weird.
Edward Gibson
(00:13:21)
The details of the trees are what people disagree about.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:25)
Well, okay. What’s at the root of a tree? How do you construct … How hard is it? What is the process of constructing a tree from a sentence?
Edward Gibson
(00:13:34)
Well, this is where depending on what you’re … There’s different theoretical notions. I’m going to say the simplest thing, dependency grammar, a bunch of people invented this. Tesniere was the first French guy back in … The paper was published in 1959 but he was working on it in the 30s and stuff. And it goes back to philologist Panini was doing this in ancient India, okay. The simplest thing we can think of is that there’s just connections between the words to make the utterance. And so let’s just say two dogs entered a room okay, here’s a sentence. And so we’re connecting two and dogs together. There’s some dependency between those words to make some bigger meaning. And then we’re connecting dogs now to entered, and we connect a room somehow to entered. And so I’m going to connect to room and then room back to entered. That’s the tree. The root is entered, the thing is an entering event. That’s what we’re saying here. And the subject, which is whatever that dog is, two dogs it was, and the connection goes back to dogs, and that goes back to two. That’s my tree. It starts at entered, goes to dogs, down to two. And on the other side, after the verb, the object, it goes to room and then that goes back to the determiner or article, whatever you want to call that word. There’s a bunch of categories of words here we’re noticing. There are verbs. Those are these things that typically mark … They refer to events and states in the world. An d they’re nouns, which typically refer to people, places and things is what people say. But they can refer to events themselves as well. They’re marked by the category, the part of speech of a word is how it gets used in language. That’s how you decide what the category of a word is, not by the meaning but how it gets used.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:30)
How it’s used. What’s usually the root? Is it going to be the verb that defines the event?
Edward Gibson
(00:15:36)
Usually, usually. Yes, yes. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:38)
Okay.
Edward Gibson
(00:15:38)
If I don’t say a verb, then there won’t be a verb. And so it’ll be something else.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:43)
Are we talking about language that’s correct language? What if you’re doing poetry and messing with stuff, then rules go out the window.
Edward Gibson
(00:15:51)
No. No, no, no, no. You’re constrained by whatever language you’re dealing with. Probably you have other constraints in poetry, such that you’re … Usually in poetry there’s multiple constraints that you want to … You want to usually convey multiple meanings is the idea. And maybe you have a rhythm or a rhyming structure as well. But you usually are constrained by the rules of your language for the most part. And so you don’t violate those too much. You can violate them somewhat but not too much. It has to be recognizable as your language. In English, I can’t say dogs two entered room a. I meant two dogs entered a room, and I can’t mess with the order of the articles and the nouns. You just can’t do that. In some languages, you can mess around with the order of words much more. You speak Russian, Russian has a much freer word order than English. And so in fact, you can move around words in … I told you that English has this subject-verb-object word order, so does Russian but Russian is much freer than English. And so you can actually mess around with a word order. Probably Russian poetry is going to be quite different from English poetry because the word order is much less constrained.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:05)
Yeah. There’s a much more extensive culture of poetry throughout the history of the last hundred years in Russia. And I always wondered why that is but it seems that there’s more flexibility in the way the language is used. You’re morphing the language easier by altering the words, altering the order of the words and messing with it.
Edward Gibson
(00:17:26)
Well, you can just mess with different things in each language. And so in Russian you have case markers, which are these endings on the nouns, which tell you how each noun connects to the verb. We don’t have that in English. And so when I say Mary kissed John, I don’t know who the agent or the patient is, except by the order of the words. In Russian, you actually have a marker on the end. If you’re using a Russian name in each of those names, you’ll also say … It’ll be the nominative, which is marking the subject, or an accusative will mark the object. And you could put them in the reverse order. You could put accusative first. You could put the patient first and then the verb and then the subject. And that would be a perfectly good Russian sentence. And it would still … I could say John kissed Mary, meaning Mary kissed John, as long as I use the case markers in the right way, you can’t do that in English. And so
Lex Fridman
(00:18:22)
I love the terminology of agent and patient and the other ones you used. Those are linguistic terms, correct?
Edward Gibson
(00:18:29)
Those are for meaning, those are meaning. And subject and object are generally used for position. Subject is just the thing that comes before the verb and the object is the one that comes after the verb. The agent is the thing doing, that’s what that means. The subject is often the person doing the action, the thing.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:48)
Okay, this is fascinating. How hard is it to form a tree in general? Is there a procedure to it? If you look at different languages, is it supposed to be a very natural … Is it automatable or is there some human genius involved in construction …
Edward Gibson
(00:19:01)
I think it’s pretty automatable at this point. People can figure out the words are. They can figure out the morphemes, technically morphemes are the minimal meaning units within a language, okay. And so when you say eats or drinks, it actually has two morphemes in English. There’s the root, which is the verb. And then there’s some ending on it which tells you that’s the third person singular.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:25)
Can you say what morphemes are?
Edward Gibson
(00:19:25)
Morphemes are just the minimal meaning units within a language. And then a word is just the things we put spaces between in English and they have a little bit more, they have the morphology as well. They have the endings, this inflectional morphology on the endings on the roots.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:37)
It modifies something about the word that adds additional meaning.
Edward Gibson
(00:19:40)
Yeah, yeah. And so we have a little bit of that in English, very little. You have much more in Russian, for instance. But we have a little bit in English, and so we have a little on the nouns, you can say it’s either singular or plural. And you can say same thing for verbs. Simple past tense for example, notice in English we say drinks. He drinks, but everyone else is, “I drink, you drink, we drink.”

(00:20:02)
It’s unmarked in a way. But in the past tense, it’s just drank for everyone. There’s no morphology at all for past tense. There is morphology that’s marking past tense but it’s an irregular now. Drink to drank, it’s not even a regular word. In many verbs there’s an ED we add. Walk to walked, we add that to say it’s the past tense. I just happen to choose an irregular because the high frequency words tend to have irregulars in English for …
Lex Fridman
(00:20:30)
What’s an irregular?
Edward Gibson
(00:20:31)
Irregular is just there isn’t a rule. Drink to drank is an irregular.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:35)
Drink, drank. Okay, okay. Versus walked.
Edward Gibson
(00:20:37)
As opposed to walk, walked, talk, talked.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:39)
Yeah. And there’s a lot of irregulars in English.
Edward Gibson
(00:20:42)
There’s a lot of irregulars in English. The frequent ones, the common words tend to be irregular. There’s many, many more low frequency words and those are regular ones.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:53)
The evolution of the irregulars are fascinating because it’s essentially slang that’s sticky because breaking the rules. And then everybody uses it and doesn’t follow the rules and they say screw it to the rules. It’s fascinating. You said morphemes, lots of questions. Morphology is what, the study of morphemes?

Morphology

Edward Gibson
(00:21:10)
Morphology is the connections between the morphemes onto the roots. In English, we mostly have suffixes. We have endings on the words, not very much but a little bit, as opposed to prefixes. Some words depending on your language can have mostly prefixes, mostly suffixes or both. And then several languages have things called infixes, where you have some general form for the root and you put stuff in the middle, you change the vowels, stuff like that.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:45)
That’s fascinating, that’s fascinating. In general, there’s what, two morphemes per word? One or two, or three.
Edward Gibson
(00:21:51)
Well, in English it’s one or two. In English, it tends to be one or two. There can be more. In other languages, a language like Finnish which has a very elaborate morphology, there may be 10 morphemes on the end of a root, okay. And so there may be millions of forms of a given word.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:09)
Okay, okay. I’ll ask the same question over and over, just sometimes to understand things like morphemes, it’s nice to just ask the question, how do these kinds of things evolve? You have a great book studying how the cognitive processing, how language used for communication, so the mathematical notion of how effective language is for communication, what role that plays in the evolution of language. But just high level, how does a language evolve where English is two morphemes or one or two morphemes per word, and then Finnish has infinity per word. How does that happen? Is it just people …
Edward Gibson
(00:22:58)
That’s a really good question.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:59)
Yeah.
Edward Gibson
(00:23:00)
That’s a very good question, is why do languages have more morphology versus less morphology? And I don’t think we know the answer to this. I think there’s just a lot of good solutions to the problem of communication. I believe as you hinted, that language is an invented system by humans for communicating their ideas. And I think it comes down to we label things we want to talk about. Those are the morphemes and words, those are the things we want to talk about in the world. And we invent those things and then we put them together in ways that are easy for us to convey, to process. But that’s a naive view, and I don’t … I think it’s probably right, it’s naive and probably right.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:43)
Well, I don’t know if it’s naive. I think it’s simple.
Edward Gibson
(00:23:46)
Simple, yeah. [inaudible 00:23:47].
Lex Fridman
(00:23:47)
I think naive is an indication that’s incorrect somehow. It’s trivial, too simple. I think it could very well be correct. But it’s interesting how sticky … It feels like two people got together. It just feels like once you figure out certain aspects of a language that just becomes sticky and the tribe forms around that language, maybe the tribe forms first and then the language evolves. And then you just agree and you stick to whatever that is.
Edward Gibson
(00:24:16)
These are very interesting questions. We don’t know really about how even words get invented very much. Assuming they get invented, we don’t really know how that process works and how these things evolve. What we have is a current picture of few thousand languages, a few thousand instances. We don’t have any pictures of really how these things are evolving really. And then the evolution is massively confused by contact. As soon as one group runs into another … We are smart, humans are smart and they take on whatever’s useful in the other group. And so any contrast which you’re talking about which I find useful, I’m going to start using as well. I worked a little bit in specific areas of words, in number words and in color words. And in color words, in English we have around 11 words that everyone knows for colors. And many more if you happen to be interested in color for some reason or other, if you’re a fashion designer or an artist or something, you may have many, many more words. But we can see millions. If you have normal color vision, normal trichromatic color vision, you can see millions of distinctions in colors. We don’t have millions of words.

(00:25:43)
The most efficient … No, the most detailed color vocabulary would have over a million terms to distinguish all the different colors that we can see. But of course, we don’t have that. Somehow, it’s useful for English to have evolved in some way such that there’s 11 terms that people find useful to talk about, black, white, red, blue, green, yellow, purple, gray, pink. And I probably missed something there. There’s 11 that everyone knows and depending on your … But if you go to different cultures, especially the non-industrialized cultures, there’ll be many fewer. Some cultures will have only two, believe it or not. The Dani in Papua New Guinea have only two labels that the group uses for color, and those are roughly black and white. They are very, very dark and very, very light, which are roughly black and white. And you might think, “Oh, they’re dividing the whole color space into light and dark.”

(00:26:41)
Or something. And that’s not really true. They mostly only label the black and the white things. They just don’t talk about the colors for the other ones. And then there’s other groups … I’ve worked with a group called the Tsimane down in Bolivia in South America, and they have three words that everyone knows but there’s a few others that many people know. It’s depending on how you count, between three and seven words that the group knows, okay. And again, they’re black and white, everyone knows those. And red, that tends to be the third word that cultures bring in, if there’s a word. It’s always red, the third one. And then after that, it’s all bets are off about what they bring in. And so after that, they bring in a big blue-green group. They have one for that. And then different people have different words that they’ll use for other parts of the space.

(00:27:39)
Anyway, it’s probably related to what they want to talk … Not what they see because they see the same colors as we see. It’s not like they have a low color palette in the things they’re looking at. They’re looking at a lot of beautiful scenery okay, a lot of different colored flowers and berries and things. And so there’s lots of things of very bright colors but they just don’t label the color in those cases. We don’t know this but we think probably what’s going on here is why you label something is you need to talk to someone else about it. And why do I need to talk about a color? Well, if I have two things which are identical and I want you to give me the one that’s different, and the only way it varies is color, then I invent a word which tells you, “This is the one I want. I want the red sweater off the rack, not the green sweater.”

(00:28:35)
There’s two. And so those things will be identical because these are things we made and they’re dyed and there’s nothing different about them. And so in industrialized society, everything we’ve got is pretty much arbitrarily colored. But you go to a non-industrialized group, that’s not true. And so it’s not like they’re not interested in color. If you bring bright colored things to them, they like them just like we like them. Bright colors are great, they’re beautiful, but they just don’t need to talk about them, they don’t have to.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:07)
Probably color words is a good example of how language evolves from function, when you need to communicate the use of something, then you invent different variations. And basically you can imagine that the evolution of a language has to do with what the early tribe’s doing, what problems are facing them and they’re quickly figuring out how to efficiently communicate the solution to those problems, whether it’s aesthetic or functional, all that stuff, running away from a mammoth or whatever. But I think what you’re pointing to is that we don’t have data on the evolution of language because many languages have formed a long time ago, so you don’t get the chatter.

Evolution of languages

Edward Gibson
(00:29:50)
We have a little bit of old English to modern English because there was a writing system and we can see how old English looked. The word order changed for instance, in old English to middle English to modern English. And so we could see things like that. But most languages don’t even have a writing system. Of the 7,000, only a small subset of those have a writing system. And even if they have a writing system, it’s not a very modern writing system and so they don’t have it … For Mandarin, for Chinese, we have a lot of evidence for a long time, and for English, and not for much else. German a little bit but not for a whole lot of … Long-term language evolution, we don’t have a lot. We have snapshots, is what we’ve got of current languages.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:35)
You get an inkling of that from the rapid communication on certain platforms. On Reddit, there’s different communities and they’ll come up with different slang, usually from my perspective, driven by a little bit of humor or maybe mockery or whatever, just talking shit in different kinds of ways. And you could see the evolution of language there because I think a lot of things on the internet, you don’t want to be the boring mainstream. You want to deviate from the proper way of talking. And so you get a lot of deviation, rapid deviation. Then when communities collide, you get … Just like you said, humans adapt to it. And you could see it through the lines of humor. It’s very difficult to study but you can imagine a hundred years from now, well, if there’s a new language born for example, we’ll get really high resolution data.
Edward Gibson
(00:31:30)
English is changing, English changes all the time. All languages change all the time. It was a famous result about the Queen’s English. If you look at the Queen’s vowels, the Queen’s English is supposed to be … Originally the proper way to talk was defined by whoever the queen talked or the king, whoever was in charge. And so if you look at how her vowels changed from when she first became queen in 1952 or ’53 when she was coronated, that’s Queen Elizabeth who died recently of course, until 50 years later, her vowels changed, her vowels shifted a lot. And so even in the sounds of British English, the way she was talking was changing. The vowels were changing slightly. That’s just in the sounds there was change. We’re all interested in what’s driving any of these changes. The word order of English changed a lot over a thousand years. It used to look like German. It used to be a verb final language with case marking. And it shifted to a vermedial language, a lot of contact, a lot of contact with French. And it became a vermedial language with no case marking. And so it became this verb initially thing.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:47)
It’s evolving.
Edward Gibson
(00:32:47)
It totally evolved. It doesn’t evolve maybe very much in 20 years, is maybe what you’re talking about but over 50 and 100 years, things change a lot, I think.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:57)
We’ll now have good data on it, which is great.

Noam Chomsky

Edward Gibson
(00:33:00)
That’s for sure. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:01)
Can you talk to what is syntax and what is grammar? You wrote a book on syntax.
Edward Gibson
(00:33:06)
I did. You were asking me before about how do I figure out what a dependency structure is? I’d say the dependency structures aren’t that hard generally, I think there’s a lot of agreement of what they are for almost any sentence in most languages. I think people will agree on a lot of that. There are other parameters in the mix, such that some people think there’s a more complicated grammar than just a dependency structure. Noam Chomsky, he’s the most famous linguist ever, and he is famous for proposing a slightly more complicated syntax. And so he invented phrase structure grammar. He’s well known for many, many things but in the 50s and early 60s but late 50s, he was basically figuring out what’s called formal language theory. And he figured out a framework for figuring out how complicated a certain type of language might be, so-called phrase structured grammars of language might be.

(00:34:06)
And so his idea was that maybe we can think about the complexity of a language by how complicated the rules are. And the rules will look like this. They will have a left-hand side and it’ll have a right-hand side. Something on the left-hand side will expand to the thing on the right-hand side. Say, we’ll start with an S, which is the root, which is a sentence, and then we’re going to expand to things like a noun phrase and a verb phrase is what he would say, for instance, okay. An S goes to an NP and a VP, is a phrase structure rule. And then we figure out what an NP is. An NP is a determiner and a noun, for instance. And a verb phrase is something else, is a verb and another noun phrase and another NP, for instance. Those are the rules of a very simple phrase, structure. And so he proposed phrase structure grammar as a way to cover human languages. And then he actually figured out that, “Well, depending on the formals, that- “
Edward Gibson
(00:35:00)
… for human languages. And then he actually figured out that, well, depending on the formalization of those grammars, you might get more complicated or less complicated languages. He said, “Well, these are things called context-free languages that rule.” He thought human languages tend to be what he calls context-free languages. But there are simpler languages, which are so-called regular languages. And they have a more constrained form to the rules of the phrase structure of these particular rules. So he basically discovered and invented ways to describe the language. And those are phrase structure, a human language. And he was mostly interested in English initially in his work in the ’50s.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:43)
So quick questions around all of this. So formal language theory is the big field of just studying language formally?
Edward Gibson
(00:35:49)
Yes. And it doesn’t have to be human language there. We can have a computer languages, any kind of system which is generating some set of expressions in a language. And those could be the statements in a computer language, for example. It could be that, or it could be human language.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:10)
So technically you can study programming languages?
Edward Gibson
(00:36:12)
Yes. And heavily studied using this formalism. There’s a big field of programming language within the formal language.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:21)
And then phrase structure, grammar is this idea that you can break down language into this S NP VP type of thing?
Edward Gibson
(00:36:28)
Yeah. It’s a particular formalism for describing language. And Chomsky was the first one. He’s the one who figured that stuff out back in the ’50s. And that’s equivalent actually, the context-free grammar is actually, is equivalent in the sense that it generates the same sentences as a dependency grammar would. The dependency grammar is a little simpler in some way. You just have a root and it goes… We don’t have any of these, the rules are implicit, I guess. And we just have connections between words. The free structure grammar is a different way to think about the dependency grammar. It’s slightly more complicated, but it’s kind of the same in some ways.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:07)
To clarify, dependency grammar is the framework under which you see language and you make a case that this is a good way to describe language.
Edward Gibson
(00:37:17)
That’s correct.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:18)
And Noam Chomsky is watching this, is very upset right now, so let’s… Just kidding. Where’s the place of disagreement between phrase structure grammar and dependency grammar?
Edward Gibson
(00:37:33)
They’re very close. So phrase structure grammar and dependency grammar aren’t that far apart. I like dependency grammar because it’s more perspicuous, it’s more transparent about representing the connections between the words. It’s just a little harder to see in phrase structure grammar.

(00:37:48)
The place where Chomsky sort of devolved or went off from this is he also thought there was something called movement. And that’s where we disagree. That’s the place where I would say we disagree. I mean maybe we’ll get into that later. But the idea is… Do you want me to explain that now?
Lex Fridman
(00:38:08)
I would love, can you explain movement?
Edward Gibson
(00:38:10)
Movement. Okay.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:10)
You’re saying so many interesting things.
Edward Gibson
(00:38:13)
Movement is, Chomsky basically sees English, and he says, “Okay.” I said, we had that sentence earlier. It was like, “Two dogs entered the room.” It’s changed it a little bit. Say, “Two dogs will enter the room.” And he notices that, hey, English, if I want to make a question, a yes/no question from that same sentence, I say, instead of, “Two dogs will enter the room.” I say, “Will two dogs enter the room?” Okay, there’s a different way to say the same idea. And it’s like, well, the auxiliary verb, that will thing, it’s at the front as opposed to in the middle.

(00:38:46)
And he looked, if you look at English, you see that that’s true for all those modal verbs and for other kinds of auxiliary verbs. In English, you always do that. You always put an auxiliary verb at the front. And when he saw that, so if I say, “I can win this bet. Can I win this bet?” So I move a can to the front. So actually that’s a theory. I just gave you a theory there. He talks about it as movement. That word in the declarative is the root, is the default way to think about the sentence. And you move the auxiliary verb to the front. That’s a movement theory.

(00:39:19)
And he just thought that was just so obvious that it must be true, that there’s nothing more to say about that. This is how auxiliary verbs work in English. There’s a movement rule such that, to get from the declarative to the interrogative, you’re moving the auxiliary to the front. And it’s a little more complicated as soon as you go to simple present and simple past. Because if I say, “John slept,” you have to say, “Did John sleep?” Not. “Slept, John,” right? And so you have to somehow get an auxiliary verb. And I guess underlyingly, it’s like slept is… It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s his idea. There’s a movement.

(00:39:56)
And so a different way to think about that, I mean, then he ended up showing later. So he proposed this theory of grammar, which has movement. There’s other places where he thought there’s movement, not just auxiliary verbs, but things like the passive in English and things like questions, WH questions, a bunch of places where he thought there’s also movement going on. And each one of those, he thinks there’s words, well, phrases and words are moving around from one structure to another, which he called deep structure to surface structure. I mean, there’s two different structures in his theory.

(00:40:29)
There’s a different way to think about this, which is there’s no movement at all. There’s a lexical copying rule such that the word will, or the word can, these auxiliary verbs, they just have two forms. And one of them is the declarative and one of them is interrogative. And you basically have the declarative one and oh, I form the interrogative, or I can form one from the other. It doesn’t matter which direction you go. And I just have a new entry which has the same meaning, which has a slightly different argument structure. Argument structure is just a fancy word for the ordering of the words.

(00:41:03)
And so if I say, it was, “The two dogs can or will enter the room,” there’s two forms of will. One is, will, declarative. And then, okay, I’ve got my subject to the left, it comes before me, and the verb comes after me in that one. And then the will, interrogative, it’s like, oh, I go first. Interrogative will is first, and then I have the subject immediately after and then the verb after that. And so you can just generate from one of those words another word with a slightly different argument structure with different ordering.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:37)
And these are just lexical copies. They’re not necessarily moving from one to another?
Edward Gibson
(00:41:42)
There’s no movement.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:42)
There’s a romantic notion that you have one main way to use a word and then you could move it around, which is essentially what movement is implying?
Edward Gibson
(00:41:53)
But that’s the lexical copying is similar. So then we do lexical copying for that same idea that maybe the declarative is the source and then we can copy it. And so an advantage, there’s multiple advantages of the lexical copying story. It’s not my story. This is like Ivan Sag, linguist, a bunch of linguists have been proposing these stories as well, in tandem with the movement story. Ivan Sag died a while ago, but he was one of the proponents of the non-movement of the lexical copying story.

(00:42:24)
And so that is that a great advantage is, well Chomsky really famously, in 1971 showed that the movement story leads to learnability problems. It leads to problems for how language is learned. It’s really, really hard to figure out what the underlying structure of a language is if you have both phrase structure and movement. It’s really hard to figure out what came from what. There’s a lot of possibilities there. If you don’t have that problem, the learning problem gets a lot easier.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:57)
Just say there’s lexical copies. When we say the learning problem, do you mean humans learning a new language?
Edward Gibson
(00:43:03)
Yeah, just learning English. So baby is lying around listening in the crib, listening to me talk. And how are they learning English? Or maybe it’s a two-year-old who’s learning interrogatives and stuff. How are they doing that? Are they doing it from… Are they figuring out? So Chomsky said it’s impossible to figure it out actually. He said it’s actually impossible, not hard, but impossible. And therefore that’s where universal grammar comes from, is that it has to be built in. And so what they’re learning is that there’s some built-in, movement is built in his story, is absolutely part of your language module. And then you’re just setting parameters. English is just a variant of the universal grammar. And you’re figuring out, oh, which orders does English do these things?

(00:43:53)
The non-movement story, it doesn’t have this. It’s much more bottom-up, you’re learning rules. You’re learning rules one by one, and oh, this word is connected to that word. Another advantage, it’s learnable. Another advantage of it is that it predicts that not all auxiliaries might move. It might depend on the word, and that turns out to be true. So there’s words that don’t really work as auxiliary. They work in declarative and not in interrogative. So I can say, I’ll give you the opposite first. I can say, ” Aren’t I invited to the party?” And that’s an interrogative form. But it’s not from, “I aren’t invited to the party.” There is no, “I aren’t.” So that’s interrogative only.

(00:44:42)
And then we also have forms like, ought. “I ought to do this.” And I guess some old British people can say…
Lex Fridman
(00:44:51)
“Ought I?”
Edward Gibson
(00:44:51)
Exactly. It doesn’t sound right, does it? For me it sounds ridiculous. I don’t even think ought is great. But I mean, I totally recognize, “I ought to do it.” Ought is not too bad actually. I can say, “Ought to do this.” That sounds pretty good.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:02)
If I’m trying to sound sophisticated, maybe?
Edward Gibson
(00:45:04)
I don’t know. It just sounds completely odd to me.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:06)
Ought I?
Edward Gibson
(00:45:08)
Anyway. So there are variants here. And a lot of these words just work in one versus the other. And that’s fine under the lexical copying story. It’s like, well, you just learn the usage, whatever the usage is, is what you do with this word. But it’s a little bit harder in the movement story. The movement story, that’s an advantage I think, of lexical copying. In all of these different places, there’s all these usage variants which make the movement story a little bit harder to work.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:40)
One of the main divisions here is the movement story versus the lexical copy story, that has to do about the auxiliary words and so on. But if you just rewind to the phrase structure grammar versus dependency grammar…
Edward Gibson
(00:45:52)
Those are equivalent in some sense in that for any dependency grammar, I can generate a phrase structure grammar, which generates exactly the same sentences. I just like the dependency grammar formalism because it makes something really salient. Which is the lengths of dependencies between words, which isn’t so obvious in the phrase structure. In the phrase structure, it’s just hard to see. It’s in there, it’s just very, very, it’s opaque.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:21)
Technically, I think phrase structure grammar is mappable to dependency grammar.
Edward Gibson
(00:46:25)
And vice versa.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:25)
And vice versa. But there’s these little labels, S, NP, VP.
Edward Gibson
(00:46:30)
For a particular dependency grammar you can make a phrase structure grammar, which generates exactly those same sentences and vice versa. But there are many phrase structure grammars, which you can’t really make a dependency grammar. I mean, you can do a lot more in a phrase structure grammar. But you get many more of these extra nodes, basically. You can have more structure in there. And some people like that. And maybe there’s value to that. I don’t like it.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:55)
Well, for you, so would you clarify. So dependency grammar is just, well, one word depends on only one other word. And you form these trees, and that makes, it really puts priority on those dependencies, just like as a tree that you can then measure the distance of the dependency from one word to the other. They can then map to the cognitive processing of the sentences, how easy it is to understand and all that kind of stuff. So it just puts the focus on just the mathematical distance of dependence between words. So it’s just a different focus.
Edward Gibson
(00:47:34)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:35)
Just to continue on the thread of Chomsky because it’s really interesting. As you’re discussing disagreement to the degree there’s disagreement, you’re also telling the history of the study of language, which is really awesome. So you mentioned context-free versus regular. Does that distinction come into play for dependency grammars?
Edward Gibson
(00:47:54)
No, not at all. I mean, regular languages are too simple for human languages. It’s a part of the hierarchy. But human languages are, in the phrase structure world are definite. They’re at least context-free, maybe a little bit more, a little bit harder than that.

(00:48:14)
So there’s something called context-sensitive as well, where you can have, this is just the formal language description. In a context-free grammar, you have one… This is a bunch of formal language theory we’re doing here.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:29)
I love it.
Edward Gibson
(00:48:29)
Okay, so you have a left-hand side category, and you’re expanding to anything on the right. That’s a context-free. So the idea is that that category on the left expands independent of context to those things, whatever they are on the right. It doesn’t matter what. And a context-sensitive says, okay, I actually have more than one thing on the left. I can tell you only in this context, maybe you have a left and a right context or just a left context or a right context. I have two or more stuff on the left tells you how to expand those things in that way. So it’s context-sensitive.

(00:49:02)
A regular language is just more constrained, and so it doesn’t allow anything on the right. Basically it’s one very complicated rule is what a regular language is. And so it doesn’t have any… I just say the long distance dependencies, it doesn’t allow recursion, for instance. There’s no recursion. Yeah, recursion is where, which human languages have recursion, they have embedding. Well, it doesn’t allow center-embedded recursion, which human languages have, which is what…
Lex Fridman
(00:49:34)
Center-embedded recursion, so within a sentence? Within a sentence?
Edward Gibson
(00:49:37)
Yeah, within a sentence. So here we’re going to get to that, but the formal language stuff is a little aside. Chomsky wasn’t proposing it for human languages even. He was just pointing out that human languages are context-free. Because that was stuff we did for formal languages. And what he was most interested in was human language. And that’s the movement is where he set off on, I would say, a very interesting but wrong foot. I agree, it’s a very interesting history.

(00:50:08)
So he proposed this multiple theories in ’57 and then ’65. They all have this framework though. It was phrase structure plus movement, different versions of the phrase structure and the movement in the ’57. These are the most famous original bits of Chomsky’s work. And then in ’71 is when he figured out that those lead to learning problems. That there’s cases where a kid could never figure out which set of rules was intended. And then he said, “Well, that means it’s innate.” It’s kind of interesting. He just really thought the movement was just so obviously true that he didn’t even entertain giving it up. It’s just, that’s obviously right.

(00:50:47)
And it was later where people figured out that there’s all these subtle ways in which things which look like generalizations aren’t generalizations across the category. They’re word specific and they kind of work, but they don’t work across various other words in the category. And so it’s easier to just think of these things as lexical copies. And I think he was very obsessed. I don’t know, I’m guessing. But he really wanted this story to be simple in some sense. And language is a little more complicated in some sense. He didn’t like words. He never talks about words. He likes to talk about combinations of words. And words are, you look up a dictionary, there’s 50 senses for a common word. The word take, will have 30 or 40 senses in it.

(00:51:32)
So there will be many different senses for common words. And he just doesn’t think about that, or he doesn’t think that’s language. I think he doesn’t think that’s language. He thinks that words are distinct from combinations of words. I think they’re the same. If you look at my brain in the scanner while I’m listening to a language I understand, and you compare, I can localize my language network in a few minutes, in like 15 minutes. And what you do is I listen to a language I know. I listen to maybe some language I don’t know, or I listen to muffled speech or I read sentences and I read non-words. I can do anything like this, anything that’s really like English and anything that’s not very like English. So I’ve got something like it, and not, that I control.

(00:52:16)
And the voxels, which is just the 3D pixels in my brain that are responding most is a language area. And that’s this left-lateralized area in my head. And wherever I look in that network, if you look for the combinations versus the words it’s everywhere.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:38)
It’s the same.
Edward Gibson
(00:52:39)
It’s the same.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:39)
That’s fascinating.
Edward Gibson
(00:52:39)
And so it’s hard to find. There are no areas that we know. I mean, it’s a little overstated right now. At this point, the technology isn’t great, it’s not bad. But we have the best way to figure out what’s going on in my brain when I’m listening or reading language is to use fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. And that’s a very good localization method. So I can figure out where exactly these signals are coming from, pretty down to millimeters, cubic millimeters or smaller, very small. We can figure those out very well.

(00:53:11)
The problem is the when. It’s measuring oxygen. And oxygen takes a little while to get to those cells, so it takes on the order of seconds. So I talk fast, I probably listen fast. And I can probably understand things really fast. So a lot of stuff happens in two seconds. And so to say that we know what’s going on, that the words right now in that network, our best guess is that whole network is doing something similar. But maybe different parts of that network are doing different things. And that’s probably the case. We just don’t have very good methods to figure that out at this moment.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:49)
Since we’re kind of talking about the history of the study of language, what other interesting disagreements, and you’re both at MIT or were for a long time. What interesting disagreements there, tension of ideas are there, between you and Noam Chomsky? And we should say that Noam was in the linguistics department, and you’re, I guess for a time were affiliated there, but primarily brain and cognitive science department. Which is another way of studying language. You’ve been talking about fMRI. Is there something else interesting to bring to the surface about the disagreement between the two of you, or other people at this point?
Edward Gibson
(00:54:29)
I mean, I’ve been at MIT for 31 years since 1993 and Chomsky’s been there much longer. So I met him, I knew him. I met him when I first got there, I guess. And we would interact every now and then. I’d say our biggest difference is our methods. And so that’s the biggest difference between me and Noam, is that I gather data from people. I do experiments with people and I gather corpus data, whatever corpus data is available, and we do quantitative methods to evaluate any kind of hypothesis we have. He just doesn’t do that. And so he has never once been associated with any experiment or corpus work ever.

(00:55:16)
And so it’s all thought experiments. It’s his own intuitions. So I just don’t think that’s the way to do things. That’s across the street, they’re across the street from us, difference between brain and cog-sci and linguistics. I mean, not all linguists, some of the linguists, depending on what you do, more speech-oriented, they do more quantitative stuff. But in the meaning words and well, it’s combinations of words, syntax, semantics, they tend not to do experiments and corpus analyses.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:49)
On the linguistic side probably, well, but the method is a symptom of a bigger approach. Which is a psychology philosophy side on Noam. For you it’s more data-driven, almost like mathematical approach.
Edward Gibson
(00:56:03)
Yeah, I mean, I’m a psychologist, so I would say we’re in psychology. Brain cognitive sciences is MIT’s old psychology department. It was a psychology department up until 1985, and it became the Brain and Cognitive Science Department. My training is math and computer science, but I’m a psychologist. I mean, I don’t know what I am.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:24)
So, data-driven psychologist, you are.
Edward Gibson
(00:56:27)
I am what I am. But I’m happy to be called a linguist. I’m happy to be called a computer scientist. I’m happy to be called a psychologist, any of those things.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:33)
But in the actual, like how that manifests itself outside of the methodology is these differences, these subtle differences about the movement story versus the lexical copy story.
Edward Gibson
(00:56:43)
Yeah. Those are theories.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:45)
Those are theories.
Edward Gibson
(00:56:46)
So the theories are… But I think the reason we differ in part is because of how we evaluate the theories. And so I evaluate theories quantitatively and Noam doesn’t.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:58)
Got it. Okay. Well, let’s explore the theories that you explore in your book. Let’s return to this dependency grammar framework of looking at language. What’s a good justification why the dependency grammar framework is a good way to explain language? What’s your intuition?
Edward Gibson
(00:57:17)
The reason I like dependency grammar, as I’ve said before, is that it’s very transparent about its representation of distance between words. All it is is you’ve got a bunch of words you’re connecting together to make a sentence. And a really neat insight, which turns out to be true, is that the further apart the pair of words are that you’re connecting, the harder it is to do the production. The harder it is to do the comprehension. If it’s harder to produce, it’s harder to understand when the words are far apart. When they’re close together, it’s easy to produce and it’s easy to comprehend.

(00:57:51)
Let me give you an example. We have in any language, we have mostly local connections between words, but they’re abstract. The connections are abstracted between categories of words. And so you can always make things further apart if you add modification, for example, after a noun. So a noun in English comes before a verb, the subject noun comes before a verb, and then there’s an object after, for example.

(00:58:22)
So I can say, what I said before, “The dog entered the room,” or something like that. So I can modify dog. If I say something more about dog after it, then what I’m doing is indirectly I’m lengthening the dependence between dog and entered, by adding more stuff to it. So just make it explicit here, if I say, “The boy who the cat scratched, cried.” We’re going to have a mean cat here. And so what I’ve got here is, the boy cried, would be a very short, simple sentence. And I just told you something about the boy, and I told you it was the boy who the cat scratched.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:00)
So the cry is connected to the boy. The cry at the end, it’s connected to the boy in the beginning.
Edward Gibson
(00:59:05)
Right. And so I can do that. I can say that, that’s a perfectly fine English sentence. And I can say, “The cat, which the dog chased, ran away,” or something. I can do that. But it’s really hard now, I’ve got, whatever I have here, I have the boy who the cat. Now let’s say I try to modify cat. “The boy, who the cat, which the dog chased, scratched, ran away.” Oh my God, that’s hard, right? I’m just working that through in my head, how to produce, and it’s really very just horrendous to understand. It’s not so bad, at least I’ve got intonation there to mark the boundaries and stuff. But that’s really complicated. That’s sort of English in a way. I mean that follows the rules of English.

(00:59:52)
So what’s interesting about that is that what I’m doing is nesting dependencies there. I’m putting one, I’ve got a subject connected to a verb there. And then I’m modifying that with a clause, another clause, which happens to have a subject and a verb relation. I’m trying to do that again on the second one. And what that does is it lengthens out the dependence, multiple dependence actually get lengthened out there. The dependencies get longer, on the outside ones get long, and even the ones in between get kind of long.

(01:00:20)
What’s fascinating is that that’s bad. That’s really horrendous in English. But that’s horrendous in any language. No matter what language you look at, if you do, just figure out some structure where I’m going to have some modification following some head, which is connected to some later head, and I do it again, it won’t be good. Guaranteed. 100% that will be uninterpretable in that language in the same way that was uninterpretable in English.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:46)
Just to clarify, the distance of the dependencies is whenever the boy cried, there’s a dependence between two words and then you’re counting the number of what morphemes between them?
Edward Gibson
(01:01:01)
That’s a good question. I just say words. Your words are morphemes between, we don’t know that. Actually that’s a very good question. What is the distance metric? But let’s just say it’s words. Sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:09)
Okay. And you’re saying the longer the distance of that dependence, no matter the language, except legalese.
Edward Gibson
(01:01:19)
Even legalese.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:19)
Even legalese, okay we’ll talk about it. But that the people will be very upset that speak that language. Not upset, but they’ll either not understand it, or they’d be like, their brain will be working in overtime.
Edward Gibson
(01:01:34)
They’ll have a hard time either producing or comprehending it. They might tell you that’s not their language. It’s sort of their language. They’ll agree with each of those pieces is part of their language, but somehow that combination will be very, very difficult to produce and understand.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:48)
Is that a chicken or the egg issue here?
Edward Gibson
(01:01:52)
Well, I’m giving you an explanation. Well, I mean I’m giving you two kinds of explanations. I’m telling you that center embedding, that’s nesting, those are the same. Those are synonyms for the same concept here. And the explanation for… Those are always hard, center embedding and nesting are always hard. And I gave you an explanation for why they might be hard, which is long distance connections. When you do center embedding, when you do nesting, you always have long distance connections between the dependents.

(01:02:17)
So that’s not necessarily the right explanation. I can go through reasons why that’s probably a good explanation. And it’s not really just about one of them. So probably it’s a pair of them or something of these dependents that you get along that drives you to be really confused in that case. And so what the behavioral consequence there, I mean, this is kind of methods, like how do we get at this? You could try to do experiments to get people to produce these things. They’re going to have a hard time producing them. You can try to do experiments to get them to understand them, and see how well they understand them. Can they understand them? Another method you can do is give people partial materials and ask them to complete them, those center embedded materials. And they’ll fail. So I’ve done that. I’ve done all these kinds of things.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:04)
What do you mean? So center embedding, meaning you can take a normal sentence like, “The boy cried,” and inject a bunch of crap in the middle.
Edward Gibson
(01:03:11)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:12)
That separates the boy and the cried. Okay. That’s center embedding. And nesting is on top of that?
Edward Gibson
(01:03:18)
Same thing. No, no, nesting is the same thing. Center embedding, those are totally equivalent terms. I’m sorry, I sometimes use one and sometimes…
Lex Fridman
(01:03:25)
Got it, got it. Totally equivalent.
Edward Gibson
(01:03:26)
They don’t mean anything different.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:26)
Got it. And then what you’re saying is there’s a bunch of different kinds of experiments you can do. I mean, I’d like the understanding one is like have more embedding, more center embedding, is it easier or harder to understand? But then you have to measure the level of understanding, I guess?
Edward Gibson
(01:03:39)
Yeah, you could. I mean there’s multiple ways to do that. I mean there’s the simplest way is just ask people how good does it sound? How natural does it sound? That’s a very blunt, but very good measure. It’s very reliable. People will do the same thing. And so it’s like, “I don’t know what it means exactly, but it’s doing something.” Such that we’re measuring something about the confusion, the difficulty associated with those.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:59)
And those are giving you a signal. That’s why you can say they’re… Okay. What about the completion with the center embedding?
Edward Gibson
(01:04:05)
If you give them a partial sentence, say I say, “The book, which the author who,” and I ask you to now finish that off for me.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:15)
That breaks people’s brain.
Edward Gibson
(01:04:18)
Yeah, yeah. But say it’s written in front of you and you can just have as much time as you want. Even though that one’s not too hard, right? So if I say, “It’s like the book, it’s like, oh, the book, which the author who I met wrote was good.” That’s a very simple completion for that.

(01:04:33)
If I give that to completion online somewhere, to a crowdsourcing platform and ask people to complete that, they will miss off a verb very regularly. Like half the time, maybe two-thirds of the time, they’ll just leave off one of those verb phrases. Even with that simple… So say, “The book, which the author who…” And they’ll say, “Was…” You need three verbs, I need three verbs. “Who I met, wrote, was good.” And they’ll give me two. They’ll say, “Who was famous was good.” Or something like that. They’ll just give me two. And that’ll happen about 60% of the time. So 40%, maybe 30%, they’ll do it correctly. Correctly, meaning they’ll do a three-verb phrase. I don’t know what’s correct or not. This is hard. It’s a hard task.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:20)
Yeah, actually I’m struggling with it in my head.
Edward Gibson
(01:05:22)
Well, it’s easier written.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:24)
When you stare at it, it’s easier?
Edward Gibson
(01:05:25)
If you look, it’s a little easier than listening is pretty tough. Because there’s no trace of it. You have to remember the words that I’m saying, which is very hard auditorily. We wouldn’t do it this way. You’d do it written, you can look at it and figure it out. It’s easier in many dimensions, in some ways, depending on the person. It’s easier to gather written data for… I mean most, I work in psycholinguistics, psychology of language and stuff. And so a lot of our work is based on written stuff because it’s so easy to gather data from people doing written kinds of tasks.

(01:05:56)
Spoken tasks are just more complicated to administer and analyze because people do weird things when they speak. And it’s harder to analyze what they do, but they generally point to the same kinds of things.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:10)
So the universal theory of language by Ted Gibson is that you can form dependency, you can form trees for many sentences.
Edward Gibson
(01:06:21)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:21)
You can measure the distance in some way of those dependencies. And then you can say that most languages have very short dependencies.
Edward Gibson
(01:06:30)
All languages.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:31)
All languages.
Edward Gibson
(01:06:32)
All languages have short dependencies. You can actually measure that. So an ex-student of mine, this guy’s at University of California Irvine. Richard Futrell did a thing a bunch of years ago now, where he looked at all the languages we could look at, which was about 40 initially. And now I think there’s about 64, which there are dependency structures. Meaning it’s got to be a big text, a bunch of texts which have been parsed for their dependency structures. And there’s about 60 of those which have been parsed that way. And for all of those, what he did was take any sentence in one of those languages and you can do the dependency structure and then start at the root. We’re talking about dependency structures. That’s pretty easy now. And he’s trying to figure out what a control way you might say the same sentence is in that language.

(01:07:21)
And so we just like, all right, there’s a root. And let’s say a sentence is, let’s go back to, “Two dogs entered the room.” So entered is the root. And entered has two dependents. It’s got dogs and it has room. And what he did is let’s scramble that order, that’s three things, the root and the head, and the two dependents, and into some random order, just random. And then just do that for all the dependents down the tree. So now look, do it for the, and whatever, there’s two in dogs and room. And it’s a very short sentence. When sentences get longer and you have more dependents, there’s more scrambling that’s possible. So, you could figure out one scrambling for that sentence.

(01:08:02)
He did this a hundred times for every sentence in every one of these texts, every corpus. And then he just compared the dependency lengths in those random scramblings to what actually happened, what the English or the French or the German was in original language or Chinese or what all these like 60 languages. And the dependency lengths are always shorter in the real language compared to this kind of a control.

(01:08:28)
And there’s another, it’s a little more rigid, his control. So the way I described it, you could have crossed dependencies. By scrambling that way, you could scramble in any way at all, languages don’t do that. They tend not to cross dependencies very much. So the dependency structure, they tend to keep things non-crossed. There’s a technical term they call that projective, but it’s just non-crossed is all that is, projective. And so if you just constrain the scrambling so that it only gives you projective, non-crossed, the same thing holds.

(01:09:03)
So still human languages are much shorter than this kind of a control. So what it means is that in every language, we’re trying to put things close, relative to this kind of a control. It doesn’t matter about the word order. Some of these are verb final. Some of them these are verb medial like English. And some are even verb initial, there are a few languages in the world which have VSO, word order verb, subject, object, languages. Haven’t talked about those. It’s like 10% of them.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:33)
And even in those languages…
Edward Gibson
(01:09:34)
It doesn’t matter.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:36)
It’s still short dependencies?
Edward Gibson
(01:09:37)
Short dependencies is rules.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:39)
Okay, so what are some possible explanations for that? For why languages have evolved that way? So that’s one of the, I suppose, disagreements you might have with Chomsky. So you consider the evolution of language in terms of information theory. And for you, the purpose of language is ease of communication.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:00)
For you, the purpose of language is ease of communication, right, and processing?
Edward Gibson
(01:10:04)
That’s right. That’s right. The story here is just about communication. It is just about production, really. It’s about ease of production, is the story.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:13)
When you say production, can you-
Edward Gibson
(01:10:15)
Oh, I just mean ease of language production. What I’m doing whenever I’m talking to you is somehow I’m formulating some idea in my head and I’m putting these words together, and it’s easier for me to do that, to say something where the words are closely connected in a dependency as opposed to separated by putting something in between and over and over again. It’s just hard for me to keep that in my head. That’s the whole story. The story is basically the dependency grammar sort of gives that to you, just like long is bad, short is good. It’s easier to keep in mind because you have to keep it in mind probably for production, probably matters in comprehension as well. Also matters in comprehension.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:58)
It’s on both sides of it, the production and the-
Edward Gibson
(01:11:00)
But I would guess it’s probably evolved for production. It’s about producing. It’s what’s easier for me to say that ends up being easier for you also. That’s very hard to disentangle, this idea of who is it for? Is it for me the speaker, or is it for you, the listener? Part of my language is for you. The way I talk to you is going to be different from how I talk to different people, so I’m definitely angling what I’m saying to who I’m saying. It’s not like I’m just talking the same way to every single person. And so I am sensitive to my audience, but does that work itself out in the dependency length differences? I don’t know. Maybe that’s about just the words, that part, which words I select.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:41)
My initial intuition is that you optimize language for the audience.
Edward Gibson
(01:11:47)
But it’s both.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:48)
It’s just kind of messing with my head a little bit to say that some of the optimization may be the primary objective. The optimization might be the ease of production.
Edward Gibson
(01:11:57)
We have different senses, I guess. I’m very selfish and I think it’s all about me. I’m like, “I’m just doing what’s easiest for me at all times.”
Lex Fridman
(01:12:06)
What’s easiest for me.
Edward Gibson
(01:12:09)
But I have to, of course, choose the words that I think you’re going to know. I’m not going to choose words you don’t know. In fact, I’m going to fix that. But maybe for the syntax, for the combinations, it’s just about me. I don’t know though. It’s very hard to-
Lex Fridman
(01:12:24)
Wait, wait, wait. But the purpose of communication is to be understood-
Edward Gibson
(01:12:24)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:28)
… is to convince others and so on. So the selfish thing is to be understood. It’s about the listener.
Edward Gibson
(01:12:32)
Okay. It’s a little circular there too then. Okay.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:34)
Right. The ease of production-
Edward Gibson
(01:12:37)
Helps me be understood then. I don’t think it’s circular.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:43)
No, I think the primary objective is about the listener because otherwise, if you’re optimizing for the ease of production, then you’re not going to have any of the interesting complexity of language. You’re trying to explain-
Edward Gibson
(01:12:55)
Well, let’s control for what it is I want to say. I’m saying let’s control for the thing, the message. Control for the message I want to tell you-
Lex Fridman
(01:13:02)
But that means the message needs to be understood. That’s the goal.
Edward Gibson
(01:13:05)
But that’s the meaning. So I’m still talking about just the form of the meaning. How do I frame the form of the meaning is all I’m talking about. You’re talking about a harder thing, I think. It’s like trying to change the meaning. Let’s keep the meaning constant.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:20)
Got it.
Edward Gibson
(01:13:20)
If you keep the meaning constant, how can I phrase whatever it is I need to say? I got to pick the right words and I’m going to pick the order so it’s easy for me. That’s what I think is probably-
Lex Fridman
(01:13:32)
I think I’m still tying meaning and form together in my head, but you’re saying if you keep the meaning of what you’re saying constant, the optimization, it could be The primary objective of that optimization is for production. That’s interesting. I’m struggling to keep constant meaning. I’m a human, right? So for me, without having introspected on this, the form and the meaning are tied together deeply because I’m a human. For me when I’m speaking, because I haven’t thought about language in a rigorous way, about the form of language-
Edward Gibson
(01:14:16)
But look, for any event, there’s I don’t want to say infinite, but unbounded ways of that I might communicate that same event. Those two dogs entered a room I can say in many, many different ways. I could say, :Hey, there’s two dogs. They entered the room.” “Hey, the room was entered by something. The thing that was entered was two dogs.” That’s kind of awkward and weird and stuff, but those are all similar messages with different forms, different ways I might frame, and of course I use the same words there all the time.

(01:14:49)
I could have referred to the dogs as a Dalmatian and a poodle or something. I could have been more specific or less specific about what they are, and I could have been more abstract about the number. So I am trying to keep the meaning, which is this event, constant. And then how am I going to describe that to get that to you? It kind of depends on what you need to know and what I think you need to know. But let’s get control for all that stuff and I’m just choosing, but I’m doing something simpler than you’re doing, which is just forms, just words.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:22)
To you, specifying the breed of dog and whether they’re cute or not is changing the meaning.
Edward Gibson
(01:15:30)
That might be, yeah. Well, that would be changing the meaning for sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:33)
Right. So you’re just-
Edward Gibson
(01:15:36)
That’s changing the meaning. But say even if we keep that constant, we can still talk about what’s easier or hard for me, the listener. Which phrase structures I use, which combinations.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:49)
This is so fascinating and just a really powerful window into human language, but I wonder still throughout this how vast the gap between meaning and form. I just have this maybe romanticized notion that they’re close together, that they evolve close, hand in hand. That you can’t just simply optimize for one without the other being in the room with us. Well, it’s kind of like an iceberg. Form is the tip of the iceberg and the rest, the meaning is the iceberg, but you can’t separate.
Edward Gibson
(01:16:26)
But I think that’s why these large language models are so successful, is because good at form and form isn’t that hard in some sense. And meaning is tough still, and that’s why they don’t understand. We’re going to talk about that later maybe, but we can distinguish, forget about large language models, talking humans, maybe you’ll talk about that later too, is the difference between language, which is a communication system, and thinking, which is meaning. So language is a communication system for the meaning. It’s not the meaning. And there’s a lot of interesting evidence we can talk about relevant to that.

Thinking and language

Lex Fridman
(01:17:04)
Well, that’s a really interesting question. What is the difference between language written communicated versus thought? What to you is the difference between them?
Edward Gibson
(01:17:18)
Well, you or anyone has to think of a task which they think is a good thinking task, and there’s lots and lots of tasks which would be good thinking tasks. And whatever those tasks are, let’s say it’s playing chess, that’s a good thinking task, or playing some game or doing some complex puzzles, maybe remembering some digits, that’s thinking, a lot of different tasks we might think. Maybe just listening to music is thinking. There’s a lot of different tasks we might think of as thinking.

(01:17:47)
There’s this woman in my department, Fedorenko, and she’s done a lot of work on this question about what’s the connection between language and thought. And so she uses, I was referring earlier to MRI, fMRI, that’s her primary method. And so she has been really fascinated by this question about what language is. And so as I mentioned earlier, you can localize my language area or your language area in a few minutes, like 15 minutes. I can listen to language, listen to non-language or backward speech or something, and we’ll find areas left lateralized network in my head, which especially is very sensitive to language as opposed to whatever that control was.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:28)
Can you specify what you mean by language? Like communicating language? What is language?
Edward Gibson
(01:18:31)
Just sentences. I’m listening to English of any kind, a story, or I can read sentences. Anything at all that I understand, if I understand it, then it’ll activate my language network.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:42)
[inaudible 01:18:42]
Edward Gibson
(01:18:42)
My language network is going like crazy when I’m talking and when I’m listening to you because we’re communicating.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:48)
And that’s pretty stable.
Edward Gibson
(01:18:49)
Yeah, it’s incredibly stable. So I happen to be married to this woman at Fedorenko, and so I’ve been scanned by her over and over and over since 2007 or ’06 or something, and so my language network is exactly the same a month ago as it was back in 2007.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:49)
Oh, wow.
Edward Gibson
(01:19:05)
It’s amazingly stable. It’s astounding. It’s a really fundamentally cool thing. And so my language network is like my face. Okay? It’s not changing much over time inside my head.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:17)
Can I ask a quick question? Sorry, it’s a small tangent. At which point as you grow up from baby to adult does it stabilize?
Edward Gibson
(01:19:25)
We don’t know. That’s a very hard question. They’re working on that right now because of the problem scanning little kids. Trying to do the localization on little children in this scanner where you’re lying in the fMRI scan, that’s the best way to figure out where something’s going on inside our brains, and the scanner is loud and you’re in this tiny little area, you’re claustrophobic and it doesn’t bother me at all. I can go sleep in there, but some people are bothered by it and little kids don’t really like it and they don’t like to lie still, and you have to be really still because if you move around, that messes up the coordinates of where everything is. And so your question is how and when are language developing? How does this left lateralized system come to play? And it’s really hard to get a two-year-old to do this task, but you can maybe they’re starting to get three and four and five-year-olds to do this task for short periods and it looks like it’s there pretty early.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:19)
So clearly, when you lead up to a baby’s first words, before that there’s a lot of fascinating turmoil going on about figuring out what are these people saying and you’re trying to make sense, how does that connect to the world and all that kind of stuff. That might be just fascinating development that’s happening there. That’s hard to introspect. But anyway-
Edward Gibson
(01:20:42)
We’re back to the scanner, and I can find my network in 15 minutes and now we can ask, “Find my network, find yours, find 20 other people to do this task,” and we can do some other tasks. Anything else you think is thinking of some other thing. I can do a spatial memory task. I can do a music perception task. I can do programming task if I program, where I can understand computer programs, and none of those tasks tap the language network at all. At all. There’s no overlap. They’re highly activated in other parts of the brain. There’s a bilateral network, which I think she tends to call the multiple demands network, which does anything kind of hard. And so anything that’s kind of difficult in some ways will activate that multiple demands network. Music will be in some music area, there’s music specific kinds of areas, but none of them are activating the language area at all unless there’s words. So if you have music and there’s a song and you can hear the words, then you get the language area.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:46)
Are we talking about speaking and listening or are we also talking about reading?
Edward Gibson
(01:21:50)
This is all comprehension of any kind-
Lex Fridman
(01:21:53)
That is fascinating.
Edward Gibson
(01:21:54)
… so this network, doesn’t make any difference if it’s written or spoken. So the thing that Fedorenko calls the language network is this high level language, so it’s not about the spoken language and it’s not about the written language, it’s about either one of them. And so when you do speech, you listen to speech and you subtract away some language you don’t understand or you subtract away backwards speech, which sounds like speech but isn’t. Then you take away the sound part altogether and then if you do written, you get exactly the same network for just reading the language versus reading nonsense words or something like that.

(01:22:34)
You’ll find exactly the same network. And so this is about high level the comprehension of language in this case. Production’s a little harder to run the scanner, but the same thing happens in production. You get the same network, so production’s a little harder. You have to figure out how do you run a task in the network such that you’re doing some kind of production? And I can’t remember, they’ve done a bunch of different kinds of tasks there where you get people to produce things, figure out how to produce, and the same network goes on there exactly the same place.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:02)
Wait, wait, so if you read random words-
Edward Gibson
(01:23:05)
If you read things like-
Lex Fridman
(01:23:07)
Gibberish.
Edward Gibson
(01:23:08)
… Lewis Carroll’s, “‘Twas brillig,” Jabberwocky, right? They call that Jabberwocky speech-
Lex Fridman
(01:23:13)
The network doesn’t get activated.
Edward Gibson
(01:23:15)
Not as much. There are words in there. There’s function words and stuff, so it’s lower activation.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:21)
That’s fascinating.
Edward Gibson
(01:23:22)
So basically the more language it is, the higher it goes in the language network. And that network is there from when you speak, from as soon as you learn language and it’s there, you speak multiple languages, the same network is going for your multiple languages. So you speak English and you speak Russian, both of them are hitting that same network if you’re fluent in those languages.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:44)
Programming-
Edward Gibson
(01:23:45)
Not at all. Isn’t that amazing? Even if you’re a really good programmer, that is not a human language. It is just not conveying the same information, and so it is not in the language network.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:56)
Is that as mind-blowing as I think? That’s weird.
Edward Gibson
(01:23:59)
It’s pretty cool. It is amazing.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:59)
That’s pretty weird.
Edward Gibson
(01:24:00)
So that’s one set of data. Hers shows that what you might think is thinking is not language. Language is just this conventionalized system that we’ve worked out in human languages. Oh, another fascinating little tidbit is that even if they’re these constructed languages like Klingon or I don’t know the languages from Game of Thrones, I’m sorry, I don’t remember those languages. Maybe you-
Lex Fridman
(01:24:25)
There’s a lot of people offended right now.
Edward Gibson
(01:24:26)
… there’s people that speak those languages. They really speak those languages because the people that wrote the languages for the shows, they did an amazing job of constructing something like a human language and that lights up the language area because they can speak pretty much arbitrary thoughts in a human language. It’s a constructed human language, and probably it’s related to human languages because the people that were constructing them were making them like human languages in various ways, but it also activates the same network, which is pretty cool. Anyway.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:59)
Sorry to go into a place where you may be a little bit philosophical, but is it possible that this area of the brain is doing some kind of translation into a deeper set of almost like concepts?
Edward Gibson
(01:25:13)
That what it has to be doing. It’s doing in communication. It is translating from thought, whatever that is, it’s more abstract, and that’s what it’s doing. That is kind of what it is doing. It’s a meaning network, I guess.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:27)
Yeah, like a translation network. But I wonder what is at the core at the bottom of it? What are thoughts? Thoughts and words, are they neighbors or is it one turtle sitting on top of the other, meaning is there a deep set of concepts that we-
Edward Gibson
(01:25:46)
Well, there’s connections between what these things mean and then there’s probably other parts of the brain, but what these things mean. And so when I’m talking about whatever it is I want to talk about, it’ll be represented somewhere else. That knowledge of whatever that is will be represented somewhere else.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:02)
Well, I wonder if there’s some stable-
Edward Gibson
(01:26:04)
That’s meaning.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:05)
… nicely compressed encoding of meanings-
Edward Gibson
(01:26:08)
I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:08)
… that’s separate from language. I guess the implication here is that we don’t think in language.
Edward Gibson
(01:26:19)
That’s correct. Isn’t that cool? And that’s so interesting. This is hard to do experiments on, but there is this idea of inner voice, and a lot of people have an inner voice. And so if you do a poll on the internet and ask if you hear yourself talking when you’re just thinking or whatever, about 70 or 80% of people will say yes. Most people have an inner voice. I don’t, and so I always find this strange. So when people talk about an inner voice, I always thought this was a metaphor. And they hear, I know most of you, whoever’s listening to this thinks I’m crazy now because I don’t have an inner voice and I just don’t know what you’re listening to. It sounds so kind of annoying to me, to have this voice going on while you’re thinking, but I guess most people have that, and I don’t have that and we don’t really know what that connects to.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:08)
I wonder if the inner voice activates that same network. I wonder.
Edward Gibson
(01:27:12)
I don’t know. This could be speechy, right? So that’s like you hear. Do you have an inner voice?
Lex Fridman
(01:27:18)
I don’t think so.
Edward Gibson
(01:27:18)
Oh. A lot of people have this sense that they hear themselves and then say they read someone’s email, I’ve heard people tell me that they hear that this other person’s voice when they read other people’s emails and I’m like, “Wow, that sounds so disruptive.”
Lex Fridman
(01:27:33)
I do think I vocalize what I’m reading, but I don’t think I hear a voice.
Edward Gibson
(01:27:38)
Well, you probably don’t have an inner voice.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:40)
I don’t think I have an inner voice.
Edward Gibson
(01:27:41)
People have an inner voice. People have this strong percept of hearing sound in their heads when they’re just thinking.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:48)
I refuse to believe that’s the majority of people.
Edward Gibson
(01:27:50)
Majority, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:51)
What?
Edward Gibson
(01:27:52)
It’s like two-thirds or three-quarters. It’s a lot. Whenever I ask the class and I went internet, they always say that. So you’re in a minority.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:59)
It could be a self-report flaw.
Edward Gibson
(01:28:01)
It could be.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:02)
When I’m reading inside my head, I’m kind of saying the words, which is probably the wrong way to read, but I don’t hear a voice. There’s no percept of a voice. I refuse to believe the majority of people have it. Anyway, the human brain is fascinating, but it still blew my mind that that language does appear, comprehension does appear to be separate from thinking.
Edward Gibson
(01:28:32)
So that’s one set. One set of data from Fedorenko’s group is that no matter what task you do, if it doesn’t have words and combinations of words in it, then it won’t light up the language network you. It’ll be active somewhere else but not there, so that’s one. And then this other piece of evidence relevant to that question is it turns out there are this group of people who’ve had a massive stroke on the left side and wiped out their language network, and as long as they didn’t wipe out everything on the right as well, in that case, they wouldn’t be cognitively functionable. But if they just wiped out language, which is pretty tough to do because it’s very expansive on the left, but if they have, then there’s patients like this called, so-called global aphasics, who can do any task just fine, but not language.

(01:29:23)
You can’t talk to them, they don’t understand you. They can’t speak, they can’t write, they can’t read. But they can play chess, they can drive their cars, they can do all kinds of other stuff, do math. So math is not in the language area, for instance. You do arithmetic and stuff, that’s not in language area. It’s got symbols, so people confuse some kind of symbolic processing with language, and symbolic processing is not the same. So there are symbols and they have meaning, but it’s not language. It’s not a conventionalized language system, and so math isn’t there. And so they can do math. They do just as well as their control age matching controls and all these tasks. This is Rosemary Varley over in University College of London who has a bunch of patients who she’s shown this. So that sort of combination suggests that language isn’t necessary for thinking. It doesn’t mean you can’t think in language. You could think in language because language allows a lot of expression, but it’s just you don’t need it for thinking. It suggests that language is a separate system from-
Lex Fridman
(01:30:24)
This is kind of blowing my mind right now.
Edward Gibson
(01:30:24)
It’s cool, isn’t it?
Lex Fridman
(01:30:26)
I’m trying to load that in because it has implications for large language models.
Edward Gibson
(01:30:32)
It sure does, and they’ve been working on that.

LLMs

Lex Fridman
(01:30:35)
Well, let’s take a stroll there. You wrote that the best current theories of human language are arguably large language models, so this has to do with form.
Edward Gibson
(01:30:43)
It’s a kind of a big theory, but the reason it’s arguably the best is that it does the best at predicting what’s English, for instance. It’s incredibly good, better than any other theory, but there’s not enough detail.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:01)
Well, it’s opaque. You don’t know what’s going on.
Edward Gibson
(01:31:03)
You don’t know what’s going on.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:05)
Black box.
Edward Gibson
(01:31:06)
It’s in a black box. But I think it is a theory.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:08)
What’s your definition of a theory? Because it’s a gigantic black box with a very large number of parameters controlling it. To me, theory usually requires a simplicity, right?
Edward Gibson
(01:31:20)
Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m just being loose there. I think it’s not a great theory, but it’s a theory. It’s a good theory in one sense in that it covers all the data. Anything you want to say in English, it does. And so that’s how it’s arguably the best, is that no other theory is as good as a large language model in predicting exactly what’s good and what’s bad in English. Now, you’re saying is it a good theory? Well, probably not because I want a smaller theory than that. It’s too big, I agree.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:47)
You could probably construct mechanism by which it can generate a simple explanation of a particular language, like a set of rules. Something like it could generate a dependency grammar for a language, right?
Edward Gibson
(01:32:03)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:03)
You could probably just ask it about itself.
Edward Gibson
(01:32:12)
Well, that presumes, and there’s some evidence for this, that some large language models are implementing something like dependency grammar inside them. And so there’s work from a guy called Chris Manning and colleagues over at Stanford in natural language. And they looked at I don’t know how many large language model types, but certainly BERT and some others, where you do some kind of fancy math to figure out exactly what kind of abstractions of representations are going on, and they were saying it does look like dependency structure is what they’re constructing. It’s actually a very, very good map, so they are constructing something like that. Does it mean that they’re using that for meaning? Probably, but we don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:01)
You write that the kinds of theories of language that LLMs are closest to are called construction-based theories. Can you explain what construction-based theories are?
Edward Gibson
(01:33:09)
It’s just a general theory of language such that there’s a form and a meaning pair for lots of pieces of the language. And so it’s primarily usage-based is a construction grammar. It’s trying to deal with the things that people actually say and actually write, and so it’s a usage-based idea. What’s a construction? Construction’s either a simple word, so a morpheme plus its meaning or a combination of words. It’s basically combinations of words, the rules, but it’s unspecified as to what the form of the grammar is underlyingly. And so I would argue that the dependency grammar is maybe the right form to use for the types of construction grammar. Construction grammar typically isn’t formalized quite, and so maybe the a formalization of that, it might be in dependency grammar. I would think so, but it’s up to other researchers in that area if they agree or not.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:16)
Do you think that large language models understand language? Are they mimicking language? I guess the deeper question there is, are they just understanding the surface form or do they understand something deeper about the meaning that then generates the form?
Edward Gibson
(01:34:33)
I would argue they’re doing the form. They’re doing the form, they’re doing it really, really well. And are they doing the meaning? No, probably not. There’s lots of these examples from various groups showing that they can be tricked in all kinds of ways. They really don’t understand the meaning of what’s going on. And so there’s a lot of examples that he and other groups have given which show they don’t really understand what’s going on. So the Monty Hall problem is this silly problem. Let’s Make a Deal is this old game show, and there’s three doors and there’s a prize behind one, and there’s some junk prizes behind the other two and you’re trying to select one. And Monty, he knows where the target item is. The good thing, he knows everything is back there, and he gives you a choice.

(01:35:25)
You choose one of the three and then he opens one of the doors and it’s some junk prize. And then the question is, should you trade to get the other one? And the answer is, yes, you should trade because he knew which ones you could turn around, and so now the odds are two-thirds. And then if you just change that a little bit to the large language model, the large language model has seen that explanation so many times. If you change the story, it’s a little bit, but you make it sound like it’s the Monty Hall problem, but it’s not. You just say, “Oh, there’s three doors and one behind them is a good prize and there’s two bad doors. I happen to know it’s behind door number one. The good prize, the car is behind door number one, so I’m going to choose door number one.”

(01:36:03)
Monty Hall opens door number three and shows me nothing there. Should I trade for door number two, even though I know the good prize in door number one? And then the large language model say, “Yes, you should trade,” because it just goes through the forms that it’s seen before so many times on these cases where yes, you should trade because your odds have shifted from one in three now to two out of three to being that thing. It doesn’t have any way to remember that actually, you have 100% probability behind that door number one. You know that. That’s not part of the scheme that it’s seen hundreds and hundreds of times before. And so even if you try to explain to it that it’s wrong, that they can’t do that, it’ll just keep giving you back the problem.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:45)
But it’s also possible the larger language model would be aware of the fact that there’s sometimes over-representation of a particular kind of formulation, and it’s easy to get tricked by that. And so you could see if they get larger and larger, models be a little bit more skeptical, so you see over-representation. It just feels like training on form can go really far in terms of being able to generate things that look like the thing understands deeply the underlying world model, of the kind of mathematical world, physical world, psychological world that would generate these kinds of sentences. It just feels like you’re creeping close to the meaning part, easily fooled, all this kind of stuff, but that’s humans too. So it just seems really impressive how often it seems like it understands concepts.
Edward Gibson
(01:37:54)
You don’t have to convince me of that. I am very, very impressed. You’re giving a possible world where maybe someone’s going to train some other versions such that it’ll be somehow abstracting away from types of forms, I don’t think that’s happened. And so-
Lex Fridman
(01:38:12)
Well, no, no, no, I’m not saying that. I think when you just look at anecdotal examples and just showing a large number of them where it doesn’t seem to understand and it’s easily fooled, that does not seem like a scientific data-driven analysis of how many places is it damn impressive in terms of meaning and understanding and how many places is easily fooled?
Edward Gibson
(01:38:36)
That’s not the inference, so I don’t want to make that. The inference I wouldn’t want to make was that inference. The inference I’m trying to push is just that is it like humans here? It’s probably not like humans here, it’s different. So humans don’t make that error. If you explain that to them, they’re not going to make that error. They don’t make that error. And so it’s doing something different from humans that they’re doing. In that case,
Lex Fridman
(01:38:59)
What’s the mechanism by which humans figure out that it’s an error?
Edward Gibson
(01:39:02)
I’m just saying the error there is if I explained to you there’s a hundred percent chance that the car is behind this door, do you want to trade people say no, but this thing will say yes because it’s that trick, it’s so wound up on the form. That’s an error that a human doesn’t make, which is kind of interesting.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:23)
Less likely to make, I should say.
Edward Gibson
(01:39:25)
Less likely.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:26)
Because you’re asking a system to understand 100%, you’re asking some mathematical concepts.
Edward Gibson
(01:39:40)
But the places where language models are, the form is amazing. So let’s go back to nested structure, center-embedded structures. If you ask a human to complete those, they can’t do it. Neither can a large language model. They’re just like humans in that. If I ask a large language model-
Lex Fridman
(01:39:56)
That’s fascinating, by the way. The central embedding struggles with anyone-
Edward Gibson
(01:40:01)
Just like humans. Exactly the same way as humans, and that’s not trained. So that is a similarity, but that’s not meaning. This is form. But when we get into meaning, this is where they get kind of messed up. When you start just saying, “Oh, what’s behind this door? Oh, this is the thing I want,” humans don’t mess that up as much. Here, the form is just like. The form of the match is amazingly similar without being trained to do that. It’s trained in the sense that it’s getting lots of data, which is just like human data, but it’s not being trained on bad sentences and being told what’s bad. It just can’t do those. It’ll actually say things like, “Those are too hard for me to complete or something,” which is kind of interesting, actually. How does it know that? I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:51)
But it really often doesn’t just complete, it very often says stuff that’s true and sometimes says stuff that’s not true. And almost always the form is great, but it’s still very surprising that with really great form, it’s able to generate a lot of things that are true based on what it’s trained on and so on. So it’s not just form that is generating, it’s mimicking true statements-
Edward Gibson
(01:41:24)
That’s right, that’s right. I think that’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:25)
… from the internet. I guess the underlying idea there is that on the internet, truth is overrepresented versus falsehoods.
Edward Gibson
(01:41:33)
I think that’s probably right.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:35)
But the fundamental thing it’s trained on you’re saying is just form, and it’s really-
Edward Gibson
(01:41:40)
I think so.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:42)
Well, to me, that’s still a little bit of an open question. I probably lean agreeing with you, especially now you’ve just blown my mind that there’s a separate module in the brain for language versus thinking. Maybe there’s a fundamental part missing from the large language model approach that lacks the thinking, the reasoning capability.
Edward Gibson
(01:42:08)
Yeah, that’s what this group argues. So the same group, Fedorenko’s group has a recent paper arguing exactly that. There’s a guy called Kyle Mahowald who’s here in Austin, Texas, actually. He’s an old student of mine, but he’s a faculty in linguistics at Texas, and he was the first author on that.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:27)
That’s fascinating. Still to me, an open question. What to you are the interesting limits of LLMs?
Edward Gibson
(01:42:35)
I don’t see any limits to their form. Their form is perfect.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:35)
Impressive, perfect.
Edward Gibson
(01:42:35)
It’s pretty close to being-
Lex Fridman
(01:42:39)
Well, you said ability to complete central embeddings.
Edward Gibson
(01:42:39)
Yeah. It’s just the same as humans. It seems the same as humans.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:47)
But that’s not perfect, right? It should be able to-
Edward Gibson
(01:42:51)
That’s good. No, but I want it to be like humans. I want a model of humans.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:55)
Oh, wait, wait. Oh, so perfect to you is as close to humans as possible.
Edward Gibson
(01:42:59)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:59)
I got it. But if you’re not human, you’re superhuman, you should be able to complete central embedded sentences, right?
Edward Gibson
(01:43:07)
The mechanism is, if it’s modeling, I think it’s kind of really interesting that it can’t.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:13)
That is really interesting.
Edward Gibson
(01:43:14)
I think it’s potentially underlying modeling something like the way the form is processed.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:21)
The form of human language and how humans process the language.
Edward Gibson
(01:43:26)
Yes. I think that’s plausible.

Center embedding

Lex Fridman
(01:43:27)
And how they generate language, process language and generate language. That’s fascinating. So in that sense, they’re perfect. If we can just linger on the center embedding thing, that’s hard for LLMs to produce and that seems really impressive because hard for humans to produce. And how does that connect to the thing we’ve been talking about before, which is the dependency grammar framework in which you view language, and the finding that short dependencies seem to be a universal part of language? So why is it hard to complete center embeddings?
Edward Gibson
(01:44:02)
So what I like about dependency grammar is it makes the cognitive cost associated with longer distance connections very transparent. Basically, it turns out there is a cost associated with producing and comprehending connections between words, which are just not beside each other. The further apart they are, the worse it is. We can measure that and there is a cost associated with that.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:31)
Can you just linger on what do you mean by cognitive cost and how do you measure it?
Edward Gibson
(01:44:36)
Sure. Well, you can measure it in a lot of ways. The simplest is just asking people to say how good a sentence sounds. Just ask. That’s one way to measure, and you try to triangulate then across sentences and across structures to try to figure out what the source of that is. You can look at reading times in controlled materials, in certain kinds of materials, and then we can measure the dependency distances there. There’s a recent study-
Edward Gibson
(01:45:00)
… the dependency distance is there. There’s a recent study which looked at, we’re talking about the brain here. We could look at the language network. We could look at the language network and we could look at the activation in the language network and how big the activation is, depending on the length of the dependencies. It turns out in just random sentences that you’re listening to, if you listen, as it turns out there are people listening to stories here. The longer the dependency is, the stronger the activation in the language network. So, there’s some measure… There’s a bunch of different measures we could do. That’s kind of a neat measure actually of actual-
Lex Fridman
(01:45:40)
Activation.
Edward Gibson
(01:45:41)
… activation in the brain.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:42)
So then you can somehow in different ways convert it to a number. I wonder if there’s a beautiful equation connecting cognitive costs and length of dependency. E equals MC squared kind of thing.
Edward Gibson
(01:45:51)
It’s complicated, but probably it’s doable. I would guess it’s doable. I tried to do that a while ago, and I was reasonably successful, but for some reason I stopped working on that. I agree with you that it would be nice to figure out… So, there’s some way to figure out the cost. It’s complicated.

(01:46:08)
Another issue you raised before was how do you measure distance? Is it words? It probably isn’t, is part of the problem, is that some words matter than more than others meaning nouns might matter. And then it maybe depends on which kind of noun. Is it a noun we’ve already introduced or a noun that’s already been mentioned? Is it a pronoun versus a name? All these things probably matter. So, probably the simplest thing to do is just like, oh, let’s forget about all that and just think about words or morphemes.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:38)
For sure. But there might be some insight in the kind of function that fits the data. Meaning like quadratic… What-
Edward Gibson
(01:46:50)
I think it’s an exponential.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:50)
Exponential.
Edward Gibson
(01:46:51)
So, we think it’s probably an exponential such that the longer the distance, the less it matters. So then it’s the sum of those, that was our best guess a while ago. So you’ve got a bunch of dependencies. If you’ve got a bunch of them that are being connected at some point, at the ends of those, the cost is some exponential function of those is my guess. But because the reason it’s probably an exponential is it’s not just the distance between two words. I can make a very, very long subject verb dependency by adding lots and lots of noun phrases and prepositional phrases and it doesn’t matter too much. It’s when you do nested, when I have multiple of these, then things go really bad, go south.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:34)
That’s probably somehow connected to working memory or something like this?
Edward Gibson
(01:47:37)
Yeah, that’s probably a function of the memory here is the access, is trying to find those earlier things. It’s kind of hard to figure out what was referred to earlier. Those are those connections. That’s the notion of murky… As opposed to a storage-y thing, but trying to connect, retrieve those earlier words depending on what was in between. Then we’re talking about interference of similar things in between. The right theory probably has that kind of notion, it is an interference of similar.

(01:48:06)
So, I’m dealing with abstraction over the right theory, which is just, let’s count words, it’s not right, but it’s close. Then maybe you’re right though. There’s some sort of an exponential or something to figure out the total so we can figure out a function for any given sentence in any given language. But it’s funny, people haven’t done that too much, which I do think is… I’m interested that you find that interesting. I really find that interesting and a lot of people haven’t found it interesting. I don’t know why I haven’t got people to want to work on that. I really like that too.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:36)
That’s a beautiful idea, and the underlying idea is beautiful, that there’s a cognitive cost that correlates with the length of dependency. It feels like, I mean, language is so fundamental to the human experience. This is a nice, clean theory of language where it’s like, “Wow, okay, so we like our words close together, depend words close together.”
Edward Gibson
(01:49:00)
Yeah, that’s why I like it too. It’s so simple. It’s so simple.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:02)
Yeah, the simplicity of the theory is good.
Edward Gibson
(01:49:04)
And yet it explains some very complicated phenomena. If I write these very complicated sentences, it’s kind of hard to know why they’re so hard. And you can like, oh, nail it down. I can give you a math formula for why each one of them is bad and where, and that’s kind of cool. I think that’s very neat.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:20)
Have you gone through the process… Is there, if you take a piece of text and then simplify, there’s an average length of dependency and then you reduce it and see comprehension on the entire, not just a single sentence, but you go from James Joyce to Hemingway or something.
Edward Gibson
(01:49:42)
No, no. Simple answer is no. There’s probably things you can do in that kind of direction.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:47)
That’s fun.
Edward Gibson
(01:49:49)
We’re going to talk about legalese at some point, and so maybe we’ll talk about that kind of thinking with applied to legalese.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:55)
Let’s talk about legalese because you mentioned that as an exception. We’re just taking a tangent upon tangent, that’s an interesting one, you give it as an exception.
Edward Gibson
(01:50:02)
It’s an exception.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:04)
That you say that most natural languages, as we’ve been talking about, have local dependencies with one exception, legalese.
Edward Gibson
(01:50:12)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:13)
So, what is legalese first of all?
Edward Gibson
(01:50:15)
Oh, well, legalese is what you think it is. It’s just any legal language.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:20)
Well, I actually know very little about the kind of language that lawyers use.
Edward Gibson
(01:50:24)
So, I’m just thinking about language in laws and language and contracts.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:28)
Got it.
Edward Gibson
(01:50:29)
The stuff that you have to run into, we have to run into every other day or every day and you skip over because it reads poorly or partly it’s just long, right? There’s a lot of texts there that we don’t really want to know about. But the thing I’m interested in, so I’ve been working with this guy called Eric Martinez. He was a lawyer who was taking my class. I was teaching a psycholinguistics lab class, I have been teaching it for a long time at MIT, and he was a law student at Harvard. He took the class because he had done some linguistics as an undergrad and he was interested in the problem of why legalese sounds hard to understand. So, why is it hard to understand and why do they write that way if it is so hard to understand? It seems apparent that it’s hard to understand. The question is, why is it?

(01:51:19)
So, we didn’t know and we did an evaluation of a bunch of contracts. Actually, we just took a bunch of random contracts. I don’t know, there’s contracts and laws might not be exactly the same, but contracts are the things that most people have to deal with most of the time. That’s the most common thing that humans have, that adults in our industrialized society have to deal with a lot. That’s what we pulled and we didn’t know what was hard about them, but it turns out that the way they’re written is very center embedded. It has nested structures in them. So, it has low frequency words as well. That’s not surprising. Lots of texts have low… It does have surprising slightly lower frequency words than other kinds of control texts, even academic texts. Legalese is even worse. It is the worst that we were being able to find-
Lex Fridman
(01:52:10)
Fascinating. You just reveal the game that lawyers are playing.
Edward Gibson
(01:52:13)
They’re not though.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:13)
That they’re optimizing a different… Well-
Edward Gibson
(01:52:15)
It’s interesting. Now you’re getting at why. So, now you’re saying they’re doing intentionally. I don’t think they’re doing intentionally, but let’s-
Lex Fridman
(01:52:23)
It’s an emergent phenomena. Okay.
Edward Gibson
(01:52:25)
We’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. But we wanted to see what first as opposed… Because it turns out that we’re not the first to observe that legalese is weird. Back to Nixon had a plain language act in 1970 and Obama had one. Boy, a lot of these presidents that said, “Oh, no, we’ve got to simplify legal language. Must simplify it.” But if you don’t know how it’s complicated, it’s not easy to simplify it. You need to know what it is you’re supposed to do before you can fix it. So, you need a psycholinguist to analyze the text and see what’s wrong with it before you can fix it. You don’t know how to fix it. How am I supposed to fix something I don’t know what’s wrong with it?

(01:53:05)
And so what we did, that’s what we did. We figured out, okay, just a bunch of contracts, had people… And we encoded them for a bunch of features. Another feature, one of them was center embedding. That is basically how often a clause would intervene between a subject and a verb, for example. That’s one center embedding of a clause, and turns out they’re massively center embedded. So, I think in random contracts and in random laws, I think you get about 70%, something like 70% of sentences have a center embedded clause, which is insanely high.

(01:53:43)
If you go to any other text, it’s down to 20% or something. It’s so much higher than any control you can think of, including, you think, people think, oh, technical, academic texts. No, people don’t write center embedded sentences in technical academic texts. They do a little bit, but it’s on the 20%, 30% realm as opposed to 70. So, there’s that and there’s low frequency words. Then people, oh, maybe it’s passive. People don’t like the passive. Passive for some reason, the passive voice in English has a bad rap, and I’m not really sure where that comes from. And there is a lot of passive, there’s much more passive voice in legalese than there is in other texts-
Lex Fridman
(01:54:23)
And passive voice accounts for some of the low frequency words?
Edward Gibson
(01:54:26)
No, no. Those separate. Those are separate.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:28)
[inaudible 01:54:28] I apologize. Oh, so passive voice sucks. Low frequency words sucks.
Edward Gibson
(01:54:31)
Well sucks is different. So, these are different-
Lex Fridman
(01:54:32)
That’s a judgment I’m passing?
Edward Gibson
(01:54:33)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drop the judgment. It’s just like, these are frequent. These are things which happen in legalese text. Then we can ask, the dependent measure is how well you understand those things with those features. And it turns out the passive makes no difference. So, it has zero effect on your comprehension ability, on your recall ability. Nothing at all, it has no effect. The words matter a little bit. Low frequency words are going to hurt you in recall and understanding, but what really hurts is the center of embedding.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:01)
Center embedding.
Edward Gibson
(01:55:02)
That kills you. That slows people down, that makes them very poor in understanding, they can’t recall what was said as well, nearly as well. And we did this not only on laypeople, we did on a lot of laypeople, we ran on a hundred lawyers. We recruited lawyers from a wide range of different levels of law firms and stuff. And they have the same pattern. When they did this, I did not know what would happen. I thought maybe they could process… They’re used to legalese, maybe they process it just as well as if it was normal.

(01:55:37)
No, no, they’re much better than laypeople. So, they can much better recall, much better at understanding. But they have the same main effects as laypeople. Exactly the same. So, they also much prefer the non-center… So, we constructed non-center embedded versions of each of these. We constructed versions which have higher frequency words in those places. And we did, we un-passivized, we turned them into active versions. The passive/active made no difference. The words made a little difference. And the un-center embedding makes big differences in all the populations.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:12)
Un-center embedding. How hard is that process, by the way?
Edward Gibson
(01:56:15)
Not very hard.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:16)
Sorry, dumb question, but how hard is it to detect center embedding?
Edward Gibson
(01:56:19)
Oh, easy. Easy to detect. [inaudible 01:56:21]-
Lex Fridman
(01:56:20)
You’re just looking at long dependencies or is there a real-
Edward Gibson
(01:56:23)
So, there’s automatic parsers for English, which are pretty good.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:27)
And they can detect center embedding?
Edward Gibson
(01:56:28)
Oh yeah, very good.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:29)
Or I guess nesting?
Edward Gibson
(01:56:30)
Perfectly. [inaudible 01:56:32]. Pretty much.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:32)
So, you’re not just looking for long dependencies, you’re just literally looking for center embedding.
Edward Gibson
(01:56:36)
Yeah, we are in this case, in these cases. But long dependencies, they’re highly correlated, these things to this.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:40)
All right. So, like center embedding is a big bomb you throw inside of a sentence that just blows out, that makes super-
Edward Gibson
(01:56:47)
Yeah. Can I read a sentence for you from these things?
Lex Fridman
(01:56:49)
Sure.
Edward Gibson
(01:56:50)
I’ll see if I can find. I mean, this is just one of the things that… This is just [inaudible 01:56:53]-
Lex Fridman
(01:56:52)
My eyes might glaze over in mid-sentence. No, I understand that. I mean, legalese is hard.
Edward Gibson
(01:57:00)
Here we go. It goes, “In the event that any payment or benefit by the company, all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under section 3(A) hereof being here and after referred to as a total payments would be subject to the excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced.” So that’s something we pulled from a regular text from a contract.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:18)
Wow.
Edward Gibson
(01:57:19)
And the center embedded bit there is just for some reason, there’s a definition. They throw the definition of what payments and benefits are in between the subject and the verb. How about don’t do that? How about put the definition somewhere else as opposed to in the middle of the sentence? That’s very, very common, by the way. That’s what happens. You just throw your definitions, you use a word, a couple of words, and then you define it and then you continue the sentence. Just don’t write like that.

(01:57:47)
So then we asked lawyers, we thought, “Oh, maybe lawyers like this.” Lawyers don’t like this, they don’t like this. They don’t want to write like this. We asked them to rate materials which are with the same meaning, with un-center embedded and center embedded, and they much preferred the un-center embedded versions.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:05)
On comprehension, on the reading side.
Edward Gibson
(01:58:07)
And we asked them, “Would you hire someone who writes like this or this?” We asked them all kinds of questions and they always preferred the less complicated version, all of them. So, I don’t even think they want it this way.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:18)
But how did it happen?
Edward Gibson
(01:58:19)
How did it happen? That’s a very good question. And the answer is, I still don’t know, but-
Lex Fridman
(01:58:25)
I have some theories.
Edward Gibson
(01:58:27)
Our best theory at the moment is that there’s actually some kind of a performative meaning in the center embedding and the style, which tells you it’s legalese. We think that that’s the kind of a style which tells you it’s legalese, it’s a reasonable guess. And maybe it’s just, so for instance, it’s like a magic spell. We kind of call this the magic spell hypothesis. When you tell someone to put a magic spell on someone, what do you do? People know what a magic spell is and they do a lot of rhyming. That’s kind of what people will tend to do. They’ll do rhyming and they’ll do some kind of poetry kind of thing.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:03)
Abracadabra type of thing.
Edward Gibson
(01:59:05)
Yeah. And maybe there’s a syntactic reflex here of a magic spell, which is center embedding. And so that’s like, “Oh, it’s trying to tell you this is something which is true,” which is what the goal of law is. It’s telling you something that we want you to believe is certainly true. That’s what legal contracts are trying to enforce on you. And so maybe that’s a form which has… This is like an abstract, very abstract form center embedding, which has a meaning associated with it.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:36)
Well, don’t you think there’s an incentive for lawyers to generate things that are hard to understand?
Edward Gibson
(01:59:45)
That was one of our working hypotheses. We just couldn’t find any evidence of that.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:49)
No, lawyers also don’t understand it, but you’re creating space-
Edward Gibson
(01:59:54)
But when you ask lawyers-
Lex Fridman
(01:59:55)
You ask in a communist Soviet Union, the individual members, their self-report is not going to correctly reflect what is broken about the gigantic bureaucracy then leads to Chernobyl or something like this. I think the incentives under which you operate are not always transparent to the members within that system. So, it just feels like a strange coincidence that there is benefit if you just zoom out, look at the system as opposed to asking individual lawyers, that making something hard to understand is going to make a lot of people money.

(02:00:36)
You’re going to need a lawyer to figure that out, I guess from the perspective of the individual. But then that could be the performative aspect. It could be as opposed to the incentive driven to be complicated. It could be performative to where, “We lawyers speak in this sophisticated way and you regular humans don’t understand it, so you need to hire a lawyer.” Yeah, I don’t know which one it is, but it’s suspicious. Suspicious that it’s hard to understand and that everybody’s eyes glaze over and they don’t read.
Edward Gibson
(02:01:04)
I’m suspicious as well. I’m still suspicious and I hear what you’re saying. It could be kind, no individual and even average of individuals. It could just be a few bad apples in a way which are driving the effect in some way.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:17)
Influential bad apples that everybody looks up to or whatever, they’re central figures in how-
Edward Gibson
(02:01:25)
But it is kind of interesting that-
Lex Fridman
(02:01:28)
It’s fascinating.
Edward Gibson
(02:01:28)
… among our hundred lawyers, they did not share that.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:31)
They didn’t want this. That’s fascinating.
Edward Gibson
(02:01:32)
They really didn’t like it. And so it gave us hope-
Lex Fridman
(02:01:34)
And they weren’t better than regular people at comprehending it.
Edward Gibson
(02:01:38)
They were much-
Lex Fridman
(02:01:38)
Or they were on average better-
Edward Gibson
(02:01:38)
But they had the same difference.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:40)
… but the same difference.
Edward Gibson
(02:01:41)
Exact same difference, but they wanted it fixed. And so that gave us hope that because it actually isn’t very hard to construct a material which is un-center embedded and has the same meaning. It’s not very hard to do. Just basically in that situation, you’re just putting definitions outside of the subject verb relation in that particular example, and that’s pretty general. What they’re doing is just throwing stuff in there, which you didn’t have to put in there.

(02:02:09)
There’s extra words involved, typically. You may need a few extra words to refer to the things that you’re defining outside in some way. If you only use it in that one sentence, then there’s no reason to introduce extra terms. So, we might have a few more words, but it’ll be easier to understand. I have hope that now that maybe we can make legalese less convoluted in this way.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:35)
So, maybe the next President of the United States can, instead of saying generic things, say-
Edward Gibson
(02:02:39)
Say exactly-
Lex Fridman
(02:02:40)
“I ban center embeddings, and make Ted the language czar of-
Edward Gibson
(02:02:44)
Well, make Eric. Martinez is the guy you should really put in there.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:53)
Eric Martinez, yeah. But center embeddings are the bad thing to have.
Edward Gibson
(02:02:56)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:57)
If you get rid of that-
Edward Gibson
(02:02:58)
That’ll do a lot of it. That’ll fix a lot.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:00)
That’s fascinating. That is so fascinating. And just really fascinating on many fronts that humans are just not able to deal with this kind of thing and that language because of that evolved in the way you did. It’s fascinating. So, one of the mathematical formulations you have when talking about languages communication is this idea of noisy channels. What’s a noisy channel?
Edward Gibson
(02:03:25)
That’s about communication. And so this is going back to Shannon. Claude Shannon was a student at MIT in the ’40s. And so he wrote this very influential piece of work about communication theory or information theory, and he was interested in human language. Actually. He was interested in this problem of communication, of getting a message from my head to your head. And he was concerned or interested in what was a robust way to do that.

(02:03:59)
And so that assuming we both speak the same language, we both already speak English, whatever the language is, we speak that what is a way that I can say the language so that it’s most likely to get the signal that I want to you. And then the problem there in the communication is the noisy channel, is that I make… There’s a lot of noise in the system. I don’t speak perfectly. I make errors. That’s noise. There’s background noise, you know that.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:30)
Like literal.
Edward Gibson
(02:04:31)
Literal background noise. There is white noise in the background or some other kind of noise or some speaking going on or just you’re at a party, that’s background noise. You’re trying to hear someone, it’s hard to understand them because there’s all this other stuff going on in the background. And then there’s noise on the communication, on the receiver side so that you have some problem maybe understanding me for stuff that’s just internal to you in some way. You’ve got some other problems, whatever, with understanding for whatever reasons. Maybe you’ve had too much to drink. Who knows why you’re not able to pay attention to the signal.

(02:05:04)
So, that’s the noisy channel. And so that language, if it’s communication system, we are trying to optimize in some sense that the passing of the message from one side to the other. And so one idea is that maybe aspects of word order, for example, might’ve optimized in some way to make language a little more easy to be passed from speaker to listener. And so Shannon’s, the guy that did this stuff way back in the forties, it was very interesting.

(02:05:34)
Historically he was interested in working in linguistics. He was at MIT and this was his master’s thesis of all things. It’s crazy how much he did for his master’s thesis in 1948 I think, or ’49 something. And he wanted to keep working in language and it just wasn’t a popular communication as a reason source for what language was, wasn’t popular at the time. So, Chomsky was moving in there and he just wasn’t able to get a handle there, I think. And so he moved to [inaudible 02:06:04] and worked on communication from a mathematical point of view and did all kinds of amazing work. And so he’s just-
Lex Fridman
(02:06:12)
More on the signal side versus the language side.
Edward Gibson
(02:06:16)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:16)
It would’ve been interesting to see if he pursued the language side. That’s really interesting.
Edward Gibson
(02:06:20)
He was interested in that. His examples in the ’40s are like, they’re very language-like things. We can kind of show that there’s a noisy channel process going on in, when you’re listening to me, you can often guess what you think I meant, given what I said. And I mean, with respect to sort of why language looks the way it does, there might be, as I alluded to, there might be ways in which word orders is somewhat optimized because of the noisy channel in some way.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:53)
That’s really cool to model if you don’t hear certain parts of a sentence or have some probability of missing that part, how do you construct a language that’s resilient to that, that’s somewhat robust to that?
Edward Gibson
(02:07:04)
Yeah, that’s the idea.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:06)
And then you’re kind saying the word order and the syntax of language, the dependency length are all helpful to do-
Edward Gibson
(02:07:14)
Well, dependency length is really about memory. I think that’s about what’s easier or harder to produce in some way. And these other ideas are about robustness to communication. So, the problem of potential loss of signal due to noise. There may be aspects of word order which is somewhat optimized for that. And we have this one guess in that direction… And these are kind of just so stories, I have to be pretty frank. They’re not like, I can’t show, this is true. All we can do is look at the current languages of the world.

(02:07:44)
We can’t see how languages change or anything because we’ve got these snapshots of a few hundred or a few thousand languages. We can’t do the right kinds of modifications to test things experimentally. And so just take this with a grain of salt from here, this stuff. The dependency stuff, I’m much more solid on and here’s what the lengths are and here’s what’s hard, here’s what’s easy, and this is a reasonable structure. I think I’m pretty reasonable. Why does the word order look the way it does is, we’re now into shaky territory, but it’s kind of cool.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:17)
We’re talking about, just to be clear, we’re talking about maybe just actually the sounds of communication. You and I are sitting in a bar, it’s very loud, and you model with a noisy channel, the loudness, the noise, and we have the signal that’s coming across and you’re saying word to order might have something to do with optimizing that when there’s presence of noise.
Edward Gibson
(02:08:40)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:40)
It’s really interesting. To me, it’s interesting how much you can load into the noisy channel. How much can you bake in? You said cognitive load on the receiver end-
Edward Gibson
(02:08:49)
We think that there’s at least three different kinds of things going on there. We probably don’t want to treat them all as the same. And so I think that the right model, a better model of a noisy channel would have three different sources of noise, which are background noise, speaker-inherent noise and listener-inherent noise. And those are all different things.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:11)
Sure. But then underneath it, there’s a million other subsets of what-
Edward Gibson
(02:09:12)
That’s true.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:17)
… on the receiving, I just mentioned cognitive load on both sides. Then there’s speech impediments or just everything, worldview. The meaning. We’ll start to creep into the meaning realm of we have different worldviews.
Edward Gibson
(02:09:32)
Well, how about just form still though? Just what language you know.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:35)
[inaudible 02:09:35].
Edward Gibson
(02:09:35)
So, how well you know the language, and so if it’s second language for you versus first language and how maybe what other languages you know. These are still just form stuff and that’s potentially very informative. And how old you are, these things probably matter. So, child learning a language is as a noisy representation of English grammar, depending on how old they are. Maybe when they’re six, they’re perfectly formed, but…

Learning a new language

Lex Fridman
(02:10:03)
You mentioned one of the things is a way to measure a language is learning problems. So, what’s the correlation between everything we’ve been talking about and how easy it’s to learn a language? Is a short dependencies correlated to ability to learn a language? Is there some kind of… Or the dependency grammar, is there some kind of connection there? How easy it is to learn?
Edward Gibson
(02:10:30)
Well, all the languages in the world’s language, none is right now we know is any better than any other with respect to optimizing dependency lengths, for example. They’re all kind of do it, do it well. They all keep low. So, I think of every human language as some kind of an optimization problem, a complex optimization problem to this communication problem. And so they’ve solved it. They’re just noisy solutions to this problem of communication. There’s just so many ways you can do this.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:00)
So, they’re not optimized for learning. They’re probably optimized for communication.
Edward Gibson
(02:11:05)
And learning. So yes, one of the factors which-
Lex Fridman
(02:11:06)
Uh-oh.
Edward Gibson
(02:11:07)
So, learning is messing this up a bit. And so for example, if it were just about minimizing dependency lengths and that was all that matters, then we might find grammars which didn’t have regularity in their rules. But languages always have regularity in their rules. What I mean by that is that if I wanted to say something to you and the optimal way to say it was what really mattered to me, all that mattered was keeping the dependencies as close together as possible, then I would have a very lax set of free structure or dependency rules. I wouldn’t have very many of those. I would’ve very little of that. And I would just put the words as close to the things that refer to the things that are connected right beside each other. But we don’t do that.

(02:11:51)
There are word order rules. And depending on the language, they’re more and less strict. So, you speak Russian, they’re less strict than English. English is very rigid word order rules. We order things in a very particular way. And so why do we do that? That’s probably not about communication. That’s probably about learning. Then we’re talking about learning. It’s probably easier to learn regular things, things which are very predictable and easy. So, that’s probably about learning is our guess because that can’t be about communication.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:21)
Can it be just noise? Can it be just the messiness of the development of a language?
Edward Gibson
(02:12:26)
If it were just a communication, then we should have languages which have very, very free word order. And we don’t have that. We have free-er, but not free. There’s always-
Lex Fridman
(02:12:35)
Well, no, but what I mean by noise is cultural, sticky cultural things. Like the way you communicate, there’s a stickiness to it, that it’s an imperfect, it’s a noisy optimist… Stochastic, the function over which you’re optimizing is very noisy. Because it feels weird to say that learning is part of the objective function, because some languages are way harder to learn than others. Or that’s not true?
Edward Gibson
(02:13:04)
That’s not true.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:06)
That’s interesting.
Edward Gibson
(02:13:07)
I mean, yes-
Lex Fridman
(02:13:07)
That’s the public perception, right?
Edward Gibson
(02:13:09)
Right? Yes, that’s true for a second language.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:12)
For second language, [inaudible 02:13:13]-
Edward Gibson
(02:13:12)
But that depends on what you started with, right? So, it really depends on how close that second language is to the first language you’ve got. And so yes, it’s very, very hard to learn Arabic if you’ve started with English or it’s hard to learn Japanese or if you’ve started with… Chinese, I think is the worst. There’s Defense Language Institute in the United States has a list of how hard it is to learn what language from English, I think Chinese is the worse-
Lex Fridman
(02:13:40)
But this is the second language. You’re saying babies don’t care.
Edward Gibson
(02:13:41)
No. There’s no evidence that there’s anything harder or easy about any language learned, by three or four, they speak that language. So, there’s no evidence of anything hard or easy about human language. They’re all kind of equal.

Nature vs nurture

Lex Fridman
(02:13:54)
To what degree is language, this is returning to Chomsky a little bit, is innate. You said that for Chomsky, you used the idea that language is, some aspects of language are innate to explain away certain things that are observed. How much are we born with language at the core of our mind brain?
Edward Gibson
(02:14:18)
The answer is, I don’t know, of course. I’m an engineer at heart, I guess and I think it’s fine to postulate that a lot of it’s learned. And so I’m guessing that a lot of it’s learned. I think the reason Chomsky went with innateness is because he hypothesized movement in his grammar. He was interested in grammar and movement’s hard to learn. I think he’s right movement. It’s a hard thing to learn, to learn these two things together and how they interact. And there’s a lot of ways in which you might generate exactly the same sentences and it’s really hard.

(02:14:52)
And so he’s like, “Oh, I guess it’s not learned. It’s innate.” And if you just throw out the movement and just think about that in a different way, then you get some messiness. But the messiness is human language, which it actually fits better. That messiness isn’t a problem. It’s actually, it’s a valuable asset of the theory. And so I think I don’t really see a reason to postulate much innate structure. And that’s kind of why I think these large language models are learning so well is because I think you can learn the form, the forms of human language from the input. I think that’s likely to be true.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:34)
So, that part of the brain that lights up when you’re doing all the comprehension, that could be learned? That could be just, you don’t need any-
Edward Gibson
(02:15:40)
Yeah, it doesn’t have to be an innate, so lots of stuff is modular in the brain that’s learned. So, there’s something called the visual word form area in the back, and so it’s in the back of your head near the visual cortex. And that is very specialized brain area, which does visual word processing if you read, if you’re a reader. If you don’t read, you don’t have it. Guess what? You spend some time learning to read and you develop that brain area, which does exactly that. And so the modularization is not evidence for innateness. So, the modularization of a language area doesn’t mean we’re born with it. We could have easily learned that. We might’ve been born with it. We just don’t know at this point. We might very well have been born with this left lateralized area.

(02:16:31)
There’s a lot of other interesting components here, features of this kind of argument. Some people get a stroke or something goes really wrong on the left side where the language area would be and that isn’t there. It’s not available. It develops just fine in the right. So, it’s not about the left. It goes to the left. This is a very interesting question. It’s like why are any of the brain areas the way that they are and how did they come to be that way? There’s these natural experiments which happen where people get these strange events in their brains at very young ages, which wipe out sections of their brain, and they behave totally normally and no one knows anything was wrong. And we find out later, because they happen to be accidentally scanned for some reason. It’s like what happened to your left hemisphere? It’s missing.

(02:17:21)
There’s not many people who have missed their whole left hemisphere, but they’ll be missing some other section of their left or their right. And they behave absolutely normally, you would never know. So, that’s a very interesting current research. This is another project that this person, Ev Fedorenko is working on. She’s got all these people contacting her because she’s scanned some people who have been missing sections. One person missed a section of her brain and was scanned in her lab, and she happened to be a writer for the New York Times.

(02:17:50)
And there was an article in New York Times just about the scanning procedure, about what might be learned by the general process of MRI and language, not necessarily language. And because she’s writing for the New York Times, then all these people started writing to her who also have similar kinds of deficits because they’ve been accidentally scanned for some reason and found out they’re missing some section. And they say they volunteer to be scanned.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:22)
These are natural experiments, you said?
Edward Gibson
(02:18:22)
Natural experiments. They’re kind of messy, but natural experiments, it’s kind of cool.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:27)
The brain.
Edward Gibson
(02:18:28)
She calls it Interesting Brains.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:29)
The first few hours, days, months of human life are fascinating. Well, inside the womb actually, that development, that machinery, whatever that is, seems to create powerful humans that are able to speak, comprehend, think, all that kind of stuff, no matter what happens… Not no matter what, but robust to the different ways that the brain might be damaged and so on. That’s really interesting. But what would Chomsky say about the fact, the thing you’re saying now, that language seems to be happening separate from thought? Because as far as I understand, maybe you can correct me, he thought that language underpins a thought.
Edward Gibson
(02:19:13)
Yeah, he thinks so. I don’t know what he’d say.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:15)
He would be surprised, because for him, the idea is that language is the foundation of thought.
Edward Gibson
(02:19:21)
That’s right. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:23)
It’s pretty mind-blowing to think that it could be completely separate from thought.
Edward Gibson
(02:19:28)
That’s right. So, he’s basically a philosopher, philosopher of language in a way, thinking about these things. It’s a fine thought. You can’t test it in his methods. You can’t do a thought experiment to figure that out. You need a scanner, you need brain-damaged people. You need ways to measure that. And that’s what FMRI offers. And patients are a little messier. FMRI is pretty unambiguous, I’d say. It’s very unambiguous. There’s no way to say that the language network is doing any of these tasks. There’s-
Edward Gibson
(02:20:00)
The language network is doing any of these tasks, you should look at those data. It’s like there’s no chance that you can say that those networks are overlapping. They’re not overlapping, they’re just completely different. And so you can always make, oh, it’s only two people, it’s four people or something for the patients, and there’s something special about them we don’t know. But these are just random people and with lots of them, and you find always the same effects and it’s very robust, I’d say.

Culture and language

Lex Fridman
(02:20:29)
Well, that’s a fascinating effect. You mentioned Bolivia. What’s the connection between culture and language? You’ve also mentioned that much of our study of language comes from W-E-I-R-D, WEIRD people, western, educated, industrialized rich, and democratic. So when you study remote cultures such as around the Amazon jungle, what can you learn about language?
Edward Gibson
(02:21:02)
So that term WEIRD is from Joe Henrich. He’s at Harvard. He’s a Harvard evolutionary biologist. And so he works on lots of different topics and he basically was pushing that observation that we should be careful about the inferences we want to make when we’re in psychology or mostly in psychology, I guess, about humans. If we’re talking about undergrads at MIT and Harvard, those aren’t the same. These aren’t the same things. And so if you want to make inferences about language, for instance, there’s a lot of other kinds of languages in the world than English and French and Chinese. And so maybe for language, we care about how culture, because cultures can be very, I mean, of course English and Chinese cultures are very different, but hunter-gatherers are much more different in some ways. And so if culture has an effect on what language is, then we kind of want to look there as well as looking.

(02:22:06)
It’s not like the industrialized cultures aren’t interesting, of course they are, but we want to look at non-industrialized cultures as well. And so I’ve worked with two, I’ve worked with the Tsimane, which are in Bolivia and Amazon, both in the Amazon in these cases. And there are so-called farmer-foragers, which is not hunter-gatherers, sort of one-up from hunter-gatherers in that they do a little bit of farming as well, a lot of hunting as well, but a little bit of farming. And the kind of farming they do is the kind of farming that I might do if I ever were to grow tomatoes or something in my backyard. So it’s not big field farming, it’s just farming for a family. A few things you do that. So that’s the kind of farming they do.

(02:22:49)
And the other group I’ve worked with are the Piraha, which are also in the Amazon and happened to be in Brazil. And that’s with a guy called Dan Everett, who was a linguist anthropologist who actually lived and worked in the, I mean, he was a missionary actually, initially back in the seventies working with trying to translate languages so they could teach them the Bible, teach them Christianity.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:15)
What can you say about that?
Edward Gibson
(02:23:16)
Yeah, so the two groups I’ve worked with, the Tsimane and the Piraha are both isolate languages, meaning there’s no known connected languages at all, just on their own. Yeah, there’s a lot of those. And most of the isolates occur in the Amazon or in Papua, New Guinea, these places where the world has sort of stayed still for a long enough. So there aren’t earthquakes there. Well, certainly no earthquakes in the Amazon jungle. And the climate isn’t bad, so you don’t have droughts. And so in Africa, you’ve got a lot of moving of people because there’s drought problems. So they get a lot of language contact when people have to, you got to move because you’ve got no water, then you’ve got to get going. And then you run into contact with other tribes, other groups.

(02:24:13)
In the Amazon, that’s not the case. And so people can stay there for hundreds and hundreds and probably thousands of years, I guess. And so these groups, the Tsimane and the Piraha are both isolates in that. And I guess they’ve just lived there for ages and ages with minimal contact with other outside groups. So I mean, I’m interested in them because they are, in these cases, I’m interested in their words. I would love to study their syntax, their orders of words, but I’m mostly just interested in how languages are connected to their cultures in this way. And so, with the Piraha, they’re most interesting, I was working on number there, number information.

(02:24:54)
And so the basic idea is I think language is invented. This, what I get from the words here is that I think language is invented. We talked about color earlier. It’s the same idea. So that what you need to talk about with someone else is what you’re going to invent words for. And so we invent labels for colors, not that I can see, but the things I need to tell you about so that I can get objects from you or get you to give me the right objects. And I just don’t need a word for teal or a word for aquamarine in the Amazon jungle for the most part because I don’t have two things which differ on those colors. I just don’t have that. And so numbers are really another fascinating source of information here where you might naively, I certainly thought that all humans would have words for exact counting, and the Piraha don’t. Okay, so they don’t have any words for even one. There’s not a word for one in their language. And so there’s certainly not word for two, three or four. So that kind of blows people’s minds often.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:59)
Yeah, that’s blowing my mind.
Edward Gibson
(02:26:00)
That’s pretty weird, isn’t it?
Lex Fridman
(02:26:02)
How are you going to ask, I want two of those?
Edward Gibson
(02:26:03)
You just don’t. And so that’s just not a thing you can possibly ask in the Piraha, it’s not possible. There’s no words for that. So here’s how we found this out. So it was thought to be a one, two, many language. There are three words for quantifiers for sets, and people had thought that those meant one, two, and many. But what they really mean is few, some and many. Many is correct. It’s few, some and many. And so the way we figured this out, and this is kind of cool, is that we gave people, we had a set of objects. These happen to be spools of thread. It doesn’t really matter what they are, identical objects, and I sort of start off here. I just give you one of those and say, what’s that? Okay, so you’re a Piraha speaker and you tell me what it is, and then I give you two and say, what’s that?

(02:26:51)
And nothing’s changing in the set except for the number. And then I just ask you to label these things. And we just do this for a bunch of different people. And frankly, I did this task.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:01)
This is fascinating.
Edward Gibson
(02:27:02)
And it’s a little bit weird. So they say the word that we thought was one, it’s few, but for the first one, and then maybe they say few, or maybe they say some for the second, and then for the third or the fourth, they start using the word many for the set. And then 5, 6, 7, 8, I go all the way to 10 and it’s always the same word. And they look at me like I’m stupid because they told me what the word was for 6, 7, 8, and going to continue asking them at nine and 10. I’m like, I’m sorry. They understand that I want to know their language. That’s the point of the task is I’m trying to learn their language, so that’s okay. But it does seem like I’m a little slow because they already told me what the word for many was, 5, 6, 7, and I keep asking.

(02:27:43)
So it’s a little funny to do this task over and over. We did this with a guy called, Dan was our translator. He’s the only one who really speaks Piraha fluently. He’s a good bilingual for a bunch of languages, but also English and then a guy called Mike Frank was also a student with me down there, he and I did these things. So you do that and everyone does the same thing. We ask 10 people, and they all do exactly the same labeling for one up. And then we just do the same thing down on random order. Actually, we do some of them up, some of them down first, instead of one to 10, we do 10 down to one. I give them 10, 9, at 8, they start saying the word for some. And then when you get to four, everyone is saying the word for few, which we thought was one. So the context determined what that quantifier they used was. So it’s not a count word. They’re not count words, they’re just approximate words-
Lex Fridman
(02:28:41)
And they’re going to be noisy when you interview a bunch of people, the definition of few. And there’s going to be a threshold in the context.
Edward Gibson
(02:28:48)
Yeah, I don’t know what that means. That’s going to depend on the context. I think that’s true in English too. If you ask an English person what a few is, I mean, that’s depend on the context.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:56)
And it might actually be at first hard to discover because for a lot of people, the jump from one to two will be few. Right? So it’s the jump.
Edward Gibson
(02:29:05)
Yeah, it might be still be there. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:07)
I mean that’s fascinating. That’s fascinating. The numbers don’t present themselves.
Edward Gibson
(02:29:11)
So the words aren’t there. And so then we did these other things. Well, if they don’t have the words, can they do exact matching kinds of tasks? Can they even do those tasks? And the answer is sort of yes and no. And so yes, they can do them. So here’s the tasks that we did. We put out those spools of thread again. So I even put three out here. And then we gave them some objects, and those happened to be uninflated red balloons. It doesn’t really matter what they are, they’re a bunch of exactly the same thing. And it was easy to put down right next to these spools of thread. And so then I put out three of these, and your task was to just put one against each of my three things, and they could do that perfectly. So I mean, I would actually do that.

(02:29:55)
It was a very easy task to explain to them, because I did this with this guy, Mike Frank, and I’d be the experimenter telling him to do this and showing him to do this. And then we just, just do it what he did. You’ll copy him all we had to, I didn’t have to speak Piraha except for know what copy him. Do what he did is all we had to be able to say. And then they would do that just perfectly. And so we’d move it up. We’d do some sort of random number of items up to 10, and they basically do perfectly on that. They’d never get that wrong. I mean, that’s not a counting task that is just a match. You just put one against it doesn’t matter how many, I don’t need to know how many there are there to do that correctly. And they would make mistakes, but very, very few and no more than MIT undergrads, just going to say, these are low stakes. So you make mistakes.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:41)
Counting is not required to complete the matching class.
Edward Gibson
(02:30:45)
That’s right. Not at all. And so that’s our control. And this, a guy had gone down there before and said that they couldn’t do this task, but I just don’t know what he did wrong there. They can do this task perfectly well, and I can train my dog to do this task. So of course they can do this task. And so it’s not a hard task. But the other task that was sort of more interesting is so then we do a bunch of tasks where you need some way to encode the set. So one of them is just, I just put a opaque sheet in front of the things. I put down a bunch, a set of these things, and I put an opaque sheet down. And so you can’t see them anymore. And I tell you, do the same thing you were doing before. It’s easy if it’s two or three, it’s very easy, but if I don’t have the words for eight, it’s a little harder maybe with practice. Well, no.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:36)
Because you have to count-
Edward Gibson
(02:31:37)
For us, it’s easy because we just count them. It’s just so easy to count them. But they don’t, they can’t count them because they don’t count. They don’t have words for this thing. And so they would do approximate. It’s totally fascinating. So they would get them approximately right after four or five, because basically you always get four right, three or four that looks, that’s something we can visually see. But after that, you have its approximate number. And there’s a bunch of tasks we did, and they all failed. I mean, failed. They did approximate after five on all those tasks. And it kind of shows that the words, you kind of need the words to be able to do these kinds of tasks.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:17)
But there’s a little bit of a chicken and egg thing there, because if you don’t have the words, then maybe they’ll limit you in the kind of a little baby Einstein there won’t be able to come up with a counting task. You know what I mean? The ability to count enables you to come up with interesting things probably. So yes, you develop counting because you need it, but then once you have counting, you can probably come up with a bunch of different inventions, how to, I don’t know what kind of thing they do matching really well for building purposes, building some kind of hut or something like this. So it’s interesting that language is a limiter on what you’re able to do.
Edward Gibson
(02:33:01)
Yeah, language is the words. Here is the words. The words for exact count is the limiting factor here. They just don’t have them in this-
Lex Fridman
(02:33:11)
But that’s what I mean. That limit is also a limit on the society of what they’re able to build.
Edward Gibson
(02:33:19)
That’s going to be true. Yeah. I mean, we don’t know. This is one of those problems with the snapshot of just current languages is that we don’t know what causes a culture to discover/ invent accounting system. But the hypothesis is, the guess out there is something to do with farming. So if you have a bunch of goats and you want to keep track of them, and you have saved 17 goats and you go to bed at night and you get up in the morning, boy, it’s easier to have a count system to do that. That’s an abstraction over a set. So don’t have, people often ask me when I tell them about this kind of work, and they say, well, don’t these people have… Don’t they have kids? They have a lot of children. I’m like, yeah, they have a lot of children. And they do. They often have families of three or four, five kids, and they go, well, they need the numbers to keep track of their kids. And I always ask this person who says this, do you have children? And the answer is always no, because that’s not how you keep track of your kids. You care about their identities. It’s very important to me when I go, I have five children, it doesn’t matter.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:20)
You don’t think one, two, three, four?
Edward Gibson
(02:34:21)
It matters which five. If you replaced one with someone else, I would care. A goat, maybe not. Right? That’s the kind of point. It’s an abstraction. Something that looks very similar to the one wouldn’t matter to me probably.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:33)
But, if you care about goats, you’re going to know them actually individually also.
Edward Gibson
(02:34:37)
Yeah, you will.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:38)
I mean, cows, goats, if it’s a source of food and milk and all that kind stuff. You’re going to actually care-
Edward Gibson
(02:34:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re actually, you’re absolutely right. But I’m saying it is an abstraction such that you don’t have to care about their identities to do this thing fast. That’s the hypothesis, not mine from anthropologists are guessing about where words for counting came from is from farming maybe. Any way…

Universal language

Lex Fridman
(02:34:57)
Yeah. Do you have a sense why universal languages like Esperanto have not taken off? Why do we have all these different languages?
Edward Gibson
(02:35:08)
Well, my guess is the function of a language is to do something in a community. I mean, unless there’s some function to that language in the community, it’s not going to survive. It’s not going to be useful. So here’s a great example. Language death is super common. Okay? Languages are dying all around the world, and here’s why they’re dying. It’s like, yeah, I see this. It’s not happening right now in either the Tsimane or the Piraha, but it probably will. So there’s a neighboring group called Moseten, which is, I said that it’s isolate. It’s actually there’s a dual, there’s two of them. So it’s actually, there’s two languages which are really close, which are Moseten and Tsimane, which are unrelated to anything else. And Moseten is unlike Tsimane in that it has a lot of contact with Spanish and it’s dying, so that language is dying. The reason it’s dying is there’s not a lot of value for the local people in their native language.

(02:36:06)
So there’s much more value in knowing Spanish because they want to feed their families. And how do you feed your family? You learn Spanish so you can make money so you can get a job and do these things, and then you make money. And so they want Spanish things. And so Moseten is in danger and is dying, and that’s normal. Basically, the problem is that people, the reason we learn language is to communicate. We use it to make money and to do whatever it is to feed our families. If that’s not happening, then it won’t take off. It’s not like a game or something. This is something we, why is English so popular? It’s not because it’s an easy language to learn. Maybe it is, I don’t really know. But that’s not why it’s popular.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:54)
But because the United States is gigantic economy therefore-
Edward Gibson
(02:36:57)
Yeah, it’s big economies that do this. It’s all it is. It’s all about money. And that’s what, so there’s a motivation to learn Mandarin. There’s a motivation to learn Spanish. There’s a motivation to learn English. These languages are very valuable to know because there’s so many speakers all over the world.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:58)
That’s fascinating.
Edward Gibson
(02:37:13)
There’s less of a value economically. It’s kind of what drives this, it’s not just for fun. I mean, there are these groups that do want to learn language just for language’s sake, and there’s something to that. But those are rarities in general. Those are a few small groups that do that. Not most people don’t do that.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:32)
Well, if that was a primary driver, then everybody was speaking English or speaking one language. There’s also a tension-
Edward Gibson
(02:37:38)
That’s happening.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:40)
Well, that-
Edward Gibson
(02:37:41)
We’re moving towards fewer and fewer languages. Exactly.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:43)
We are. I wonder if, you’re right. Maybe, this is slow, but maybe that’s where we’re moving, but there is a tension. You’re saying language that infringes, but if you look at geopolitics and superpowers, it does seem that there’s another thing in tension, which is a language is a national identity sometimes for certain nations. That’s the war in Ukraine, language, Ukrainian language is a symbol of that war in many ways, like a country fighting for its own identity. So it’s not merely the convenience. I mean, those two things are at attention is the convenience of trade and the economics and be able to communicate with neighboring countries and trade more efficiently with neighboring countries, all that kind of stuff. But also identity of the group.
Edward Gibson
(02:38:30)
That’s right. I completely agree.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:32)
Because language is the way for every community like dialects that emerge are a kind of identity for people and sometimes a way for people to say F you to the more powerful people. It’s interesting. So in that way, language can be used as that tool.
Edward Gibson
(02:38:51)
Yeah, I completely agree. And there’s a lot of work to try to create that identity. So people want to do this. As a cognitive scientist and language expert, I hope that continues because I don’t want languages to die. I want languages to survive because they’re so interesting for so many reasons. But I mean, I find them fascinating just for the language part, but I think there’s a lot of connections to culture as well, which is also very important.

Language translation

Lex Fridman
(02:39:21)
Do you have hope for machine translation that it can break down the barriers of language? So while all these different diverse languages exist, I guess there’s many ways of asking this question, but basically how hard is it to translate in an automated way for one language to another?
Edward Gibson
(02:39:40)
There’s going to be cases where it’s going to be really hard. So there are concepts that are in one language and not another. The most extreme kinds of cases are these cases of number information. So good luck translating a lot of English into Piraha. It’s just impossible. There’s no way to do it because there are no words for these concepts that we’re talking about. There’s probably the flip side. There’s probably stuff in Piraha, which is going to be hard to translate into English on the other side. And so I just don’t know what those concepts are. The space, the world space is a little different from my world space, so I don’t know what the things they talk about, things it’s going to have to do with their life as opposed to my industrial life, which is going to be different. And so there’s going to be problems like that always. Maybe it’s not so bad in the case of some of these spaces, and maybe it’s going to be hard or others. And so it’s pretty bad in number. It’s extreme, I’d say in the number space, exact number space. But in the color dimension, that’s not so bad. But it’s a problem that you don’t have to talk about the concepts.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:49)
And there might be entire concepts that are missing. So to you, it’s more about the space of concept versus the space of form. Like form you can probably map.
Edward Gibson
(02:40:58)
Yes. Yeah. So you were talking earlier about translation and about how translations, there’s good and bad translations. I mean, now we’re talking about translations of form, right? So what makes writing good, right? It’s not-
Lex Fridman
(02:40:58)
There’s the music to the form.
Edward Gibson
(02:41:14)
It’s not just the content, it’s how it’s written and translating that that sounds difficult.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:22)
We shouldn’t should say that, there is, I hesitate to say meaning, but there’s a music and a rhythm to the form. When you look at the broad picture, like the difference between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy or Hemingway, Bukowski, James Joyce, like I mentioned, there’s a beat to it. There’s an edge to it that is in the form.
Edward Gibson
(02:41:46)
We can probably get measures of those.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:47)
Yeah.
Edward Gibson
(02:41:48)
I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:49)
That’s interesting.
Edward Gibson
(02:41:50)
I’m optimistic that we could get measures of those things. And so maybe that’s-
Lex Fridman
(02:41:54)
Translatable?
Edward Gibson
(02:41:54)
I don’t know. I don’t know though. I have not worked on that.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:58)
Actually, I would love to see you translate-
Edward Gibson
(02:41:58)
That sounds totally fascinating.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:00)
Translation to, I mean, Hemingway is probably the lowest. I would love to see different authors, but the average per sentence dependency length for Hemingway is probably the shortest.
Edward Gibson
(02:42:14)
That’s your sense, huh? It’s simple sentences?
Lex Fridman
(02:42:17)
Simple short sentences-
Edward Gibson
(02:42:18)
Short. Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:19)
I mean, that’s one. If you have really long sentences, even if they don’t have center embedding-
Edward Gibson
(02:42:23)
They can have longer connections.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:26)
They can have longer connections.
Edward Gibson
(02:42:26)
They don’t have to. You can’t have a long, long sentence with a bunch of local words, but it is much more likely to have the possibility of long dependencies with long sentences. Yeah.

Animal communication

Lex Fridman
(02:42:37)
I met a guy named Aza Raskin, who does a lot of cool stuff, really brilliant, works with Tristan Harris on a bunch of stuff, but he was talking to me about communicating with animals. He co-founded Earth Species Project where you’re trying to find the common language between whales, crows and humans. And he was saying that there’s a lot of promising work that even though the signals are very different, the actual, if you have embeddings of the languages, they’re actually trying to communicate similar type things. Is there something you can comment on that? Is there promise to that in everything you’ve seen in different cultures, especially remote cultures, that this is a possibility or no? That we can talk to whales?
Edward Gibson
(02:43:28)
I would say yes. I think it’s not crazy at all. I think it’s quite reasonable. There’s this sort of weird view, well, odd view, I think that to think that human language is somehow special. I mean, maybe it is. We can certainly do more than any of the other species, and maybe our language system is part of that. It’s possible. But people have often talked about how, like Chomsky, in fact, has talked about how human, only human language has this compositionality thing that he thinks is sort of key in language. And the problem with that argument is he doesn’t speak whale, and he doesn’t speak crow, and he doesn’t speak monkey. They say things like, well, they’re making a bunch of grunts and squeaks. And their reasoning is like, that’s bad reasoning. I’m pretty sure if you asked a whale what we’re saying, they’d say, well, I’m making a bunch of weird noises.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:31)
Exactly.
Edward Gibson
(02:44:32)
And so it’s like, this is a very odd reasoning to be making that human language is special because we’re the only ones who have human language. I’m like, well, we don’t know what those other, we can’t talk to them yet. And so there are probably a signal in there, and it might very well be something complicated like human language. I mean, sure with a small brain in lower species, there’s probably not a very good communication system. But in these higher species where you have what seems to be abilities to communicate something, there might very well be a lot more signal there than we might’ve otherwise thought.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:11)
But also if we have a lot of intellectual humility here, somebody formerly from MIT and Neri Oxman, who I admire very much, has talked a lot about, has worked on communicating with plants. So yes, the signal there is even less than, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that all nature has a way of communicating. And it’s a very different language, but they do develop a kind of language through the chemistry, through some way of communicating with each other. And if you have enough humility about that possibility, I think it would be a very interesting, in a few decades, maybe centuries, hopefully not a humbling possibility of being able to communicate not just between humans effectively, but between all of living things on earth.
Edward Gibson
(02:46:04)
Well, I mean, I think some of them are not going to have much interesting to say-
Lex Fridman
(02:46:07)
But [inaudible 02:46:07] still?
Edward Gibson
(02:46:07)
But some of them will. We don’t know. We certainly don’t know. I think-
Lex Fridman
(02:46:11)
I think if we’re humble, there could be some interesting trees out there.
Edward Gibson
(02:46:17)
Well, they’re probably talking to other trees, right? They’re not talking to us. And so to the extent they’re talking, they’re saying something interesting to some other conspecific as opposed to us. And so there probably is, there may be some signal there. So there are people out there. Actually, it’s pretty common to say that human language is special and different from any other animal communication system, and I just don’t think the evidence is there for that claim. I think it’s not obvious. We just don’t know because we don’t speak these other communication systems until we get better. I do think there are people working on that, as you pointed out though, people working on whale speak, for instance. That’s really fascinating.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:02)
Let me ask you a wild out there sci-fi question. If we make contact with an intelligent alien civilization and you get to meet them, how surprised would you be about their way of communicating? Do you think you would be recognizable? Maybe there’s some parallels here to when you go to the remote tribes.
Edward Gibson
(02:47:23)
I would want Dan Everett with me. He is amazing at learning foreign languages, and so this is an amazing feat to be able to go, this is a language, the Piraha, which has no translators before him. I mean, there-
Lex Fridman
(02:47:36)
Oh, wow. So he just shows up?
Edward Gibson
(02:47:36)
He was a missionary that went there. Well, there was a guy that had been there before, but he wasn’t very good. And so he learned the language far better than anyone else had learned before him. He’s good at, he’s a very social person. I think that’s a big part of it is being able to interact. So I don’t know. It kind of depends on this species from outer space, how much they want to talk to us.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:58)
Is there something you could say about the process he follows? How do you show up to a tribe and socialize? I mean, I guess colors and counting is one of the most basic things to figure out.
Edward Gibson
(02:48:07)
You start that. You actually start with objects and just say, just throw a stick down and say stick. And then you say, what do you call this? And then they’ll say the word, whatever, and he says, a standard thing to do is to throw two sticks. Two sticks. And then he learned pretty quick that there weren’t any count words in this language because they didn’t know, this wasn’t interesting. I mean, it was kind of weird, they’d say some or something, the same word over and over again. But that is a standard thing. You just try to, but you have to be pretty out there socially willing to talk to random people, which these are really very different people from you. And he is very social. And so I think that’s a big part of this is that’s how a lot of people know a lot of languages is they’re willing to talk to other people.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:50)
That’s a tough one where you just show up knowing nothing.
Edward Gibson
(02:48:53)
Yeah. Oh god.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:54)
It’s beautiful that humans are able to connect in that way. You’ve had an incredible career exploring this fascinating topic. What advice would you give to young people about how to have a career like that or a life that they can be proud of?
Edward Gibson
(02:49:11)
When you see something interesting, just go and do it. I do that. That’s something I do, which is kind of unusual for most people. So when I saw the Piraha, if Piraha was available to go and visit, I was like, yes, yes, I’ll go. And then when we couldn’t go back, we had some trouble with the Brazilian government, there’s some corrupt people there. It was very difficult to go back in there. And so I was like, all right, I got to find another group. And so we searched around and we were able to find the, because I wanted to keep working on this kind of problem, and so we found the Tsimane and just go there. We didn’t have content. We had a little bit of contact and brought someone, and you just kind of try things. I say it’s like a lot of that’s just like ambition. Just try to do something that other people haven’t done. Just give it a shot, is what I mean. I do that all the time. I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:58)
I love it. And I love the fact that your pursuit of fun has landed You here talking to me. This was an incredible conversation that you’re just a fascinating human being. Thank you for taking a journey through human language with me today. This is awesome.
Edward Gibson
(02:50:13)
Thank you very much, Lex, it’s been a pleasure.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:16)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Edward Gibson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Wittgenstein. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones | Lex Fridman Podcast #425

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #425 with Andrew Callaghan.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors.
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Table of Contents

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Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:

Introduction

Andrew Callaghan
(00:00:00)
There’s two people in the back, two of her homegirls wearing sheisty masks. I’m like, “What are we doing? Where are we going?” She goes, “We’re going to go film the riot. We’re going to Lake Street.” We drive down there, Kmart is burning, Target is burning, everything is on fire. She has the Sony a7, she gives me a microphone and she’s like, “Go talk to that guy.” That was the guy with a molotov cocktail in his hand who had just burned Kmart down. I go, “What should I ask him? She goes, “What’s on your mind?” I walk up to him and I’m like, “What’s on your mind?”
Lex Fridman
(00:00:36)
The following is a conversation with Andrew Callaghan, host of Channel 5 on YouTube, where he does Gazelle style interviews with fascinating humans at the edges of society. The so-called vagrants, vagabonds, runaways, outlaws, from QAnon adherence to fish heads, O’Block residents, and much more. He created the documentary that I highly recommend called This Place Rules, on the undercurrents that led to the January 6th Capitol riots. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, here’s Andrew Callaghan.

Walmart

Andrew Callaghan
(00:01:18)
I tried to color match you though. Got the black and white going. I went to Walmart before this and got the Wrangler shirt with the Texas Longhorns Tee and everything.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:25)
Is that where you shop, Walmart?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:01:26)
Generally, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:27)
I’m a Target man myself. T.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:01:29)
Here’s no way you get those suits from Target.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:30)
See, you’re saying it’s a nice way to complement a suit.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:01:33)
I think you go Men’s Warehouse, if not further.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:35)
I think you would be wrong.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:01:37)
You go further.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:38)
No, the other direction.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:01:39)
You got that from Target?
Lex Fridman
(00:01:40)
Not Target. I was joking about Target. I like Walmart better. It just felt like a funny thing to say.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:01:45)
No, it was funny.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:46)
The most expensive thing I own is this watch, and it was given to me as a gift.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:01:50)
When I was on tour, I had these $2,700 Cartier glasses that I got for a lot of money, $2,700.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:58)
Like sunglasses?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:01:59)
Yeah, but they’re really embarrassing. I was on tour, so I just felt like I could do anything as far as fashion choices. Looking back at pictures for myself in that era, I’m like, “God, that wasn’t…”
Lex Fridman
(00:02:08)
That was the symbol of the fame got to your head?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:02:11)
I think so, yeah. I think fame getting to your head. If you spend more than a hundred bucks on sunglasses, you’ve officially gone off the deep end.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:17)
You’ve crossed the line.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:02:18)
Totally.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:18)
That’s where you go back to Walmart to humble yourself. I really love Walmart. In fact, I moved to Austin because I was at Walmart and a lady said that I look handsome in a suit. I was like, “That’s it. I love this place.” She just said it for no reason whatsoever. This older lady just kind of looked at me and with this genuine sweetness just said, “Oh, you look handsome.”
Andrew Callaghan
(00:02:41)
She’s not wrong, man.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:42)
Thank you.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:02:43)
That’s part of your whole swag though.

Early life

Lex Fridman
(00:02:44)
Yeah, the suit thing. Yep. Anyway, what was the first, if you remember, first recorded interview you did?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:02:54)
Well, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Claudia, this is back in the day like I was telling you, we just asked her about her life in Columbia and stuff like that. I didn’t really get into actual journalism until my ninth-grade year. I had no idea I had an interest in it. Before then, I wanted to be a rapper. It’s all about hip hop and meditation and picking psilocybin mushrooms and public parks and stuff like that. That’s what I was into.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:16)
That’s a lot. Psilocybin, meditation, rap, public parks.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:03:20)
Yeah. I was making conscious rap music. I was to the point where I had four dream catchers hanging above my bed, Alex Grey painting on the wall, tapestry on the ceiling. Just scribbling rhymes down all the time.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:33)
You said somewhere that you sucked at school.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:03:36)
Okay, well, let’s step back a little bit. I had this amazing journalism course in ninth grade. I went to an alternative high school. The teacher was named Calvin Shaw. I ended up taking his class all four years and he used to let me actually leave school. I didn’t like going to school, so he let me basically go around Seattle and do different interviews with people as long as I could come back by the end of the day and write a story for his class and he’d mark me as present. The first article that I wrote was about the Silk Road and the Deep Web.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:10)
Yeah, nice.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:04:10)
Because as a ninth grader when I discovered the Hidden Wiki, I thought that I was really tapping into the most secret society, elite-level black market in the world. If you remember, they had that hidden Wiki link that was like, hire a hitman. I messaged them and I was like, “All right, I want to get someone killed at my school. How much is it going to cost me?” I published my interview with the Hidden Wiki Hitman. He was probably a fed or something, but who knows? My first article was called Inside the Deep Web, A Conversation with a Hitman.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:39)
That’s nice. I mean, you were fearless even then.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:04:43)
I mean, I was hiding behind a Tor browser, so there’s not much fear to be had.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:47)
Oh, so it was anonymous?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:04:47)
It was anonymous, but I did publish it under my name. You’re right, I could’ve been in danger.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:53)
I also saw that you said you took too many shrooms when you were young and that led you to have hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, HPPD. Can you explain what this is?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:05:05)
Well, that condition is classified by persistent visual snow floaters, morphing objects. I see them right now. I see them all the time.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:15)
The snow is in the room?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:05:16)
The snow is definitely in the room. It’s all over you. Basically, it wasn’t that I took too many shrooms, I think that it was… I took about an eighth of senescence mushrooms, which are the ones that come from the earth instead of cow shit. I took an eighth of those at my friend Toby’s house, which is a normal amount, but I was in eighth grade. I woke up the next morning with these extreme visual distortions and I thought that it would go away. I tried to make it go away, but there’s really no cure for HPPD, it’s a life-long condition. It’s just a matter of dealing with it and realizing that it is only visual. When people ask me, “Hey, I have HPPD, how do I cope with it?” I say, “Remember that every other sense that you have, what you can hear, what you can taste, your feet on the ground, you’re still on earth, you’re still here.”
Lex Fridman
(00:06:05)
Well, you said it’s only visual, and yes, gratitude for being alive at all. It’s great. You said that this led you into some dark psychological places, like depersonalization disorder.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:06:16)
Yeah. Depersonalization is the feeling that you are not real, but that reality still exists. Derealization is the idea that reality itself is an illusion created by your mind and that you’re the only person alive and that everything that your brain is projecting to your visual cortex is a lie, and that you’re the only living human being.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:37)
Both are pretty intense.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:06:39)
HPPD creates both of those things. When I’ve talked to people who have the condition, it’s really either-or, but more than 70% of people with HPPD fall into either category. They’re both coping mechanisms for the, I don’t know what really happens. I talked to a researcher once, named Dr. Abraham, he lives in Upstate New York. He’s the leading scientist when it comes to HPPD research. He’s the only one who actually seems to care about finding a cure. The only known treatment right now is alcohol and benzodiazepines.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:10)
That’s not good.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:07:12)
Alcoholism, something that came into my life pretty early. Alcohol abuse as a result of that experience because that helps with the visual symptoms, makes some of the static go away.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:21)
Man.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:07:22)
Never tried benzos, though.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:24)
Can you explain to me where in that spectrum you are? Do you sometimes have a sense that you’re not real and something else is not real?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:07:32)
Sometimes.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:33)
Like the reality is not real?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:07:35)
Yeah, I experience it all the time. Like I said, my job helps with that because I get to feel like when you seek out extremes to a certain extent and you put yourself on the front lines of intense events, whether it be politically or socially or just dive into deep fringe subcultures, you get this feeling that you’re real. Being filmed is also confirmation, if you can look at the MP4 file that you’re in fact living here on earth
Lex Fridman
(00:08:00)
Confirming that you were in it with reality by watching yourself on video.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:08:05)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:06)
Is that basically the engine behind all the extreme interviews you’ve done?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:08:11)
Well, I got HPPD around the same time that I began this journalism course in ninth grade. I sort of always used journalism as a therapeutic mechanism to deal with some of these symptoms, especially depersonalization. There’s some pretty good illustrations of what it feels like, kind of feels like you’re trapped behind your eyes or that you’re just this nebulous soul that’s trapped in a flesh suit that you’re not really a part of. You’re sort of puppeteering a flesh and bone skin suit.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:38)
Trapped, or just the ability to step outside of yourself?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:08:42)
You feel like your soul is not something that is connected to your body, it’s something living in your head. It’s really hard to explain to people who haven’t gone through derealization or depersonalization, but if you go on support groups, they always say, “How do I break free from behind my eyes?” Dark stuff like that?
Lex Fridman
(00:08:56)
Oh, so you’re trapped. I mean, there’s a higher state of being through meditation that you can step outside of yourself, but this is not that.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:09:04)
Unfortunately, it was the meditative path or the Eastern path that I took and fused that with psychedelic culture in Seattle that took me down the psychedelic use rabbit hole in the first place. I’d say it all started with Siddhartha.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:19)
Siddhartha, that’s a good book. Have you done shroom since then?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:09:22)
No, I don’t really do psychedelic drugs. A lot of people think that I’m against them, which I’m not, it just doesn’t work for me. If it works for you, I’m sure they can be really fun. Especially, I know there’s lots of therapeutic uses for acid and ketamine and psilocybin, but I personally abstain from those. Anything psychotropic, I try to stay away from.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:42)
Drinking, a bit?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:09:44)
Well, yeah, I mean, I didn’t drink at all before I had the HPPD stuff. I would’ve drank later in life, but definitely, 14, 15. Every day after school, I drink a 40 ounce of Mickey’s. It looks like Old English, but the bottle is green and it has a hornet on the side of it. Just became a ritual just to deal with the anxiety of that situation.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:03)
It made the snow go away?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:10:05)
Yeah, alcohol really works to suppress HPPD symptoms.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:09)
You said you hated classes in school, except that journalism class.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:10:12)
Okay, we need to clear this up. Because on my Wikipedia page, for some reason, for Andrew Callahan early life, it says, “Andrew hated every single class, except for one.” I’ve had a bunch of teachers who are super cool, like this guy Tim, my astronomy professor at ninth grade, Mrs. Zanetti, my creative writing teacher in sixth grade, and this really cool dude at my college in New Orleans named Charles Cannon, who taught me a class called New Orleans Mythology. My three favorite classes besides my journalism class, and they all hit me up and they’re like, “Hey, man. I saw you said you hated every class. Sorry, I couldn’t be everything that you wanted me to be.” I just want to say, shout out to all those teachers. I didn’t hate every class.

(00:10:50)
The point that I was making is that being forced into the institution of school so young and having to take common core classes like biology, dissecting frogs, history of the Han Dynasty, stuff like that, that I didn’t want to learn, but I had to learn multiple times. I learned about the dynastic cycle in ancient China three separate times at three different schools. I was like, “Who is writing this curriculum and why is it so important that I understand this process?” The part that makes school difficult, especially in college, is that you have people just going to school just to get the degree who don’t really know exactly what they’re interested in, and they don’t even have time to figure that out because they’re in a business program or a communications program with no specific interest.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:33)
Well, I think if you want to do school right, take on every single subject that you’re forced into. It’s like the David Foster Wallace, just be unborable by it. Just really go in as if ancient Chinese dynasties are the most interesting thing you could possibly learn.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:11:49)
It is somewhat interesting, the Silk Road and the Great Wall and terracotta the soldiers and stuff. I’m just saying, when I got to college, I signed up for journalism school and I didn’t get to take a media class until the second semester and I had to take everything prior to that, and I’d already spent so much time. I just think the excruciating boredom of schooling left a bad taste in my mouth, but there was individual classes that I liked a lot.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:12)
There should be some choice or maybe a lot of choice even at the level of high school for what kind of classes you pursue.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:12:20)
Yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:22)
You’re also saying, so Wikipedia is not always perfectly right.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:12:25)
No, but it’s just interesting because I’ve said so much in podcasts, but that’s what they isolated. I’ve gotten that question before, which I understand it’s the first thing on my Wikipedia page, but it makes me sound like a super hater. Have you ever seen this Instagram page called Depths of Wikipedia?
Lex Fridman
(00:12:40)
It’s great.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:12:40)
Oh, it’s so good, dude.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:42)
You said you love journalism. What did you love about journalism? What hooked you?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:12:46)
On a basic level, everybody wants media coverage. Everyone likes to be on camera and get exposure for whatever they’re doing. Being a journalist and being almost like a portal for exposure for people allows you to be on the front row of everything that you want to be a part of. You get to be in the front row for history as it’s unfolding because everyone wants to be covered. Being a journalist gives you a ticket to everywhere that you want to go in life. It allows you to step into different realities almost and then go back to yours and it just keeps life interesting.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:18)
Buy the ticket, take the Ride. Hunter S. Thompson, is he up there as one of the influences? Who are your influences?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:13:23)
I think the Early Daily Show was so good. Sacha Baron Cohen, huge influence. The Ali G show, especially. I think Louis Theroux’s broadcasts on BBC were great. I was really into Hunter S. Thompson too, but not really until college. I really like a particular Hunter S. Thompson book called The Great Shark Hunt, where he covers the Ruben Salazar murder by LAPD or LA Sheriff’s Department in Boyle Heights in the 70s. His relationship with his lawyer, Oscar Acosta, and that whole saga is great. Fear and Loathing, I like, but not as much as his straightforward reporting. Because there’s the gonzo side of Hunter where he’s like saying he’s taking drugs and seeing shit. Then there’s the other side of him, which is like an actual reporter interested in telling a story that has news value. It’s two different lanes for him.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:14)
There is something about you that makes people want to say you’re the Hunter S. Thompson of this generation. I don’t think they mean the drugs, I think they mean some kind of non-standard willingness to explore the extremes of humanity and almost a celebration of the extremes of humanity.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:14:37)
Yeah. Well, that’s a very kind comparison. I’ll get there one day, maybe. I just went to Aspen on a little Hunter S. Thompson recon trip to go check out the Woody Creek Tavern, which is the spot that it was like his bar near his cabin. It was pretty cool to see. Unfortunately, it’s turned into not a dive bar now, but it’s a sit-down sort of country restaurant, but it was cool. I expected to see a bunch of gnarly Hunter, S. Thompson types doing speeds.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:05)
Doing drugs. I mean, drugs and alcohol is all part of it, somehow. It opens a gateway to a deeper understanding of humanity.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:15:13)
I will say though, as someone now who doesn’t party like I did when I was younger, it’s not as important as I thought it was.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:21)
I’m conflicted on this. I’m good friends with a lot of people that say alcohol is really bad for you, and I believe that too. There’s something that I just as an introvert, as a person who has a lot of anxiety, for me, alcohol has opened doors of just opening myself up to the world more.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:15:43)
I’m actually a fan of alcohol, moderate drinking. I’m saying my life before, I would say 2019, 2018, especially, there was the chaos on camera, but then there was my private life, which was chaotic partying all the time.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:55)
Oh, I see.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:15:56)
I convinced myself much like Hunter did that, that was the secret sauce in the core, in my spiritual core, that gave me the creativity. Then I cut out a lot of that stuff and I’m just as creative. It’s interesting, I think one of the hardest parts about addiction is that if you’re functioning highly creative addict of any kind, your brain and the addictive part of your brain convinces yourself that it’s all part of the cross purpose and that it has this symbiotic inspirational thing going on, but it’s not true. It can be, but it’s typically not.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:30)
Yeah, it’s not a requirement. You can sometimes channel, you can sometimes leverage all those things for your creativity, but the creative engine, it lives outside of that.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:16:40)
Have you read Hunter’s daily routine in the year up to his death? It was like 15 grapefruits, an eight-ball of coke and just a certain amount of shotgun shells for him to fire into the sky every morning. There’s no way, and he didn’t do anything creative in those final years. The creativity goes away and gradually you just become a party animal, like Andy Dick.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:02)
A caricature of yourself.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:17:03)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:04)
I mean, that’s why life is interesting. You make all kinds of choices and sometimes you can create works of genius in a short amount of time based on drugs and no drugs. Einstein had that miracle year where he published several incredible papers in one year, 1905.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:17:21)
Did he do drugs before that?
Lex Fridman
(00:17:22)
Lots of coke.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:17:25)
I was like, I believed you for a second. I’m like, did Einstein have blow? I don’t think he did.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:30)
How do you think he gets that hair? Come on.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:17:31)
It’s true.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:32)
I’m just asking questions.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:17:33)
High confidence hair.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:34)
Look into it.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:17:35)
You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
(00:17:37)
Yeah. Well, no, he’s a well put together, sexy young man. The hair came later.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:17:42)
Was Albert Einstein attractive as a teenager? Not teenager, was he attractive as a young man?
Lex Fridman
(00:17:47)
Sexually attractive? I’m turned on by Einstein at all ages. I don’t discriminate.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:17:52)
Are you more turned on by the work that he did or his physical being?
Lex Fridman
(00:17:56)
No. Sometimes I fantasize what it would be like to be in the arms of Einstein. I couldn’t even get that out.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:18:01)
In the arms of Einstein.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:04)
I want to feel safe.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:18:06)
It’s a good idea for a rom-com
Lex Fridman
(00:18:08)
To be a little more serious, General Relativity, that space-time can be unified and curved by gravity is an incredibly wild and difficult idea to come up with. It’s a really, really difficult thing to imagine, given how well Newtonian classical mechanics physics works for predicting how stuff happens on earth. To think that gravity can morph space-time, both space and time, and it permeates the entire universe, it’s a field. It’s a really wild idea to come up. There’s one human on earth to intuit that is really, really, really difficult. It’s really sad to me that he didn’t get a Nobel Prize for that.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:18:58)
Was there people saying he was crazy when he was around, or was he universally recognized as an OG of this?
Lex Fridman
(00:19:05)
No, I think once the papers came out, he was widely recognized as a true genius. Before that, he wasn’t recognized. He had a really difficult life.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:19:14)
Backing up, where does a black hole go after something gets sucked into it?
Lex Fridman
(00:19:18)
You mean is it a portal to another place, that kind of thing?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:19:21)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:21)
No. Well, we don’t know. It could be. It could be that the universe is kind of like Swiss cheese full of black holes. There’s something called Hawking radiation where because of quantum mechanics, the information leaks out of a black hole, so it is possible to escape a black hole. There’s a lot of interesting questions there.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:19:38)
I hope we get to the bottom of that.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:39)
There’s a super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy, which doesn’t seem to scare physicists, but it terrifies me.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:19:45)
Oh yeah, for sure. Astronomy can be terrifying.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:48)
We’re all like orbiting, I mean, we’re not just orbiting the sun, but the sun is part of the solar system, is part of the galaxy, and it’s all orbiting a gigantic black hole.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:19:58)
Have you ever spoke to someone who’s been to outer space?
Lex Fridman
(00:20:00)
Jeff Bezos, he flew his own rocket.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:20:03)
Wow. That’s pretty cool.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:05)
Astronaut that’s been to deep space, no. Well, maybe I’ve spoken to an alien that just hasn’t admitted it.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:20:11)
I want to do a research paper or a report about space madness. It’s supposed to be this torturous feeling that you get when you look away from earth and into the abyss after you’ve exited Earth’s orbit or whatever, because there’s one specific psychiatrist who knows how to deal with space madness, and I want to figure out how and interview people with it.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:33)
Is this a real thing?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:20:33)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:34)
Is there a Wikipedia article on it?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:20:35)
Yes. Look up space madness treatment.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:37)
Well, now I don’t trust Wikipedia after what you told me.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:20:40)
I know. They think I hate classes.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:41)
I thought you meant more about the fact that you’re isolated out in space that we need social connection and it’s difficult.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:20:47)
I think it’s just a feeling of extreme insignificance that you might get sometimes when you look at the night sky, but it’s that times a thousand. It’s like an existential void that’s created after looking into the abyss and then realizing how small earth is in the grand scheme. You just start to really have a strange new perception about the pointlessness of existence.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:07)
I don’t need to go to space for that.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:21:09)
Only a handful of people have been to space, but I’m sure they’re all pretty well off. The psychiatrist has to be in the multi-millions.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:15)
Well, technically, we’re all in space because earth is in space. I wonder if you have to go to space to talk to the psychiatrist.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:21:23)
Probably, so.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:24)
Well, technically, we’re all in space, so that’s a boundary he can’t have.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:21:30)
Not everyone believes that, as you’ve seen from my work probably.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:33)
You’re right. Those are important people that are asking important questions.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:21:37)
Yeah.

Hitchhiking

Lex Fridman
(00:21:38)
You hitchhiked across us for 70 days when you were 19. Tell the story of that.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:21:44)
Well, this connects to what I was talking about with the boredom of school and these common core classes. After my first year of school where I lived in the dorms, like an old-school dormitory building at a school in New Orleans called Loyola University. I wanted to just do something, I felt so bored. I was working for the school newspaper for that whole first year, it was called the Maroon. I didn’t have the ability to write my own stories. I had to defer to an older editor and they would give me stories to write about.

(00:22:13)
They were all about on-campus happenings, like the Pope visits New Orleans, or glass recycling to be restored in the French Quarter or hover boards banned on campus due to safety concerns. It just felt like, all right, well, I wanted to be a gonzo reporter. I’m not sure if working my way up through the traditional newsroom hierarchy is going to get me to that point. I started reading a bunch of old hobo literature, like post World War II vagabonding stuff, and there was this book called Vagabonding in America by an old hobo named Ed Buryn. I read this and just basically, obviously, some of it was outdated. They had stuff in there, like the hobo code, like, oh, this moniker on the side of a fence means this person has free soup or something like that. They didn’t have stuff like that.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:55)
That’s great.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:22:56)
What it did tell me, it told me about train-stop towns, like Dunsmuir and places in Montana where there was a friendly attitude toward drifters, and that still persists from the 60s and 70s to this day. Even though, in my opinion, movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre have ruined hitchhiking culture in America, because now everyone thinks you’re going to decapitate them if they pick you up. After my final day of courses at Loyola, I literally left all of my belongings inside my dorm and took the streetcar to the Greyhound station, got a one-Way ticket to Baton Rouge, and I was like, “I’m going to hitchhike across the whole country back to Seattle with no money.” That was the plan, and it worked out.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:38)
I love it. I traveled across the United States before in similar kind of plan.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:23:43)
Were you on the silver dog? The Greyhound Bus.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:48)
Greyhound is pretty nice.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:23:49)
That’s a step above hitchhiking.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:50)
That’s way better than hitchhiking, because I don’t want to-
Andrew Callaghan
(00:23:52)
Hitchhiking, Greyhound, Amtrak.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:54)
Amtrak, no, that’s elitist.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:23:56)
What’s in between Greyhound and Amtrak? A car, that’s what it is.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:00)
Yeah, it’s a car.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:24:00)
It’s a car.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:01)
A shitty car.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:24:02)
Okay, cool.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:04)
I lived in a shitty car.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:24:05)
You lived in a car?
Lex Fridman
(00:24:06)
Yeah, when I was driving across the United States.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:24:10)
Solo?
Lex Fridman
(00:24:11)
With a friend, some solo, and I would eat cold soup.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:24:19)
I love cold soup. What I like is the cold chickpeas in a can. You get the water out and just dump them into your mouth. Those are good. Beef jerky, KIND bars. KIND bars are really good for the road.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:31)
Yeah. I mean, all of that is great, but too much of it is not great. Too much cold soup, not great. Too much beef jerky, not good.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:24:40)
What was the route you took? Was it Chicago across, or was it Philadelphia across?
Lex Fridman
(00:24:44)
Philadelphia across.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:24:45)
To LA, or where?
Lex Fridman
(00:24:48)
San Diego is a window, but it was a zigzagging, went up to Chicago and then all the way down to Texas.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:24:53)
You went Philly, through Appalachia, up to the Midwest. Did you cut over through the Southwest down to San Diego?
Lex Fridman
(00:25:00)
No. I went straight down to Texas, all the way down to the Midwest.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:25:05)
Did you cut from Texas West through New Mexico and Arizona to get to San Diego?
Lex Fridman
(00:25:08)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:25:08)
That is the best road trip place. Interstate 40, like Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Vegas, Kingman, the Mojave Desert, Yuma, doesn’t get better.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:19)
Yeah. I mean, and you’re kids, so you don’t care and you’re throwing caution to the wind, and I met some crazy, crazy people.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:25:24)
It gives me some sanity whenever I’m feeling kind of out of control or bummed out, I just remembered that the road is still out there. The open road never goes anywhere, and it’s kind of like, I see an invisible door in the corner of the room all the time. That makes me more comfortable because I’m like, “Hey, at the end of the day, if I’m bummed out, I can go hit the road and I’m sure there’s going to be a fun time ahead.”
Lex Fridman
(00:25:44)
Yeah, get that Greyhound ticket and go.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:25:46)
I would say silver dog half, because sometimes I got to ride the dog when no one will pick me up. There’s some places in the country where no one is going to pick you up. Kansas, Missouri, they’re not going to do it.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:58)
Maybe you’re not charming enough. You thought about that?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:26:00)
I was 19, fresh, clean-shaven. I was pretty charming, I’d say.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:05)
All right.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:26:05)
The older you get, the harder it is to hitchhike because they think you’re an escaped convict or some type of psycho wanderer. Some of these people are like what we call punishers, it’s people who never stop talking. They see someone hitchhiking and they’re like, “Yes, I’m going to talk at this person.” You can tell their eyes are wide, they’re like, “What’s up?” You’re like, “Oh, shit.” It’s six hours of just like, oh, cool. Nice. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:26)
That’s rough.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:26:27)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:27)
You’re right. I like people that are comfortable in silence.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:26:34)
Then that also raises the question, are they about to kill me? You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
(00:26:37)
I think that’s a you problem, not a…
Andrew Callaghan
(00:26:39)
You know what’s funny? Is almost everybody who picked me up when I was hitchhiking was like a day laborer. It was almost all Mexican day laborers who picked me up.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:47)
Oh, interesting.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:26:48)
Because I think that in some places down there, that’s a typical thing to do, hitchhike to work. A lot of people don’t have cars, but they still have to get to their jobs. A lot of people ask me, “Hey, where should I drop you off? Where’s your job at?” I’m like, “My job is to explore.” They were down with it.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:01)
See, for me, it was really easy because you just say, I’m traveling across the United States. I think people love that idea and they want to help. They romanticize, because they also have that invisible door. Everybody has that invisible door, I just want to go.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:27:16)
You know what I’m talking about.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:17)
Yeah. I mean, I don’t think-
Andrew Callaghan
(00:27:18)
It can anchor you a bit, just to remind you that every pattern that I’ve fallen into is voluntary, and it’s for my own stability and mental health.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:26)
Well, that’s why I’m renting everything and I’m making sure tomorrow I can just go. I gave away everything I own twice in my life, just very like, I’m ready to go tonight. Let’s go.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:27:37)
What’s the hardest item you’ve had to part with in this experience?
Lex Fridman
(00:27:40)
There’s nothing.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:27:41)
You’ve never had a material object that was really hard to let go of?
Lex Fridman
(00:27:45)
No.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:27:45)
You’d give that watch to somebody if it meant object?
Lex Fridman
(00:27:49)
You’re right. That’s probably the only, I’ve never had to let go of that though. That’s the only thing I own. This means a lot to me, but everything else. Then again, listen, because this watch is given to me by Rogan, who’s become a close friend. Whenever I romanticize the notion that this watch means a lot to me, he’s like, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just get you the same one again.” I was like, “God damn it.”
Andrew Callaghan
(00:28:12)
It’s a pretty sick ass gift though.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:14)
Yeah, it’s pretty sick. I’m not usually a gift guy, but when somebody you look up to gives you a thing, it’s a nice little symbol of that relationship, so it’s nice. Other than that, no. Even this, whatever. The relationship is what matters, the human is what matters, not the…
Andrew Callaghan
(00:28:33)
Agree, 100%.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:34)
You had something like this?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:28:36)
Not really. I mean, there was a hard drive that I lost that had all of my childhood pictures on it and stuff like that, that I think about all the time because I left it on a train. Certain memories, you think about it, you just get off. I just think to myself, someone has that somewhere. I have dreams about reuniting with the hard drive.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:53)
You and Hunter Biden have the similar kind of dream.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:28:56)
I don’t think he wants to reunite with that one. Dude, it’s crazy. All he did was smoke crack, right? Or was there more stuff going on?
Lex Fridman
(00:29:06)
I think there’s prostitutes involved.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:29:08)
Oh, okay. Whatever.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:09)
I think you got to look into it.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:29:10)
I think I have to look into it too.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:16)
I don’t know. Was Jack Kerouac somebody that was an inspiration at all in this road trip?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:29:22)
No.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:22)
Did you even know who that is?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:29:22)
No.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:23)
The Beat Generation and all of this?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:29:25)
I didn’t know who it was, and then after I did the… Ultimately, I wrote a book about my hitchhiking experience years later, and everyone was like, “Have you read On the Road?” Then On the Road, I probably heard the title of that book every day, at least 10 times for two years. I’m sure Kerouac is a great guy. I mean, I’m not too familiar with the Beat Generation.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:45)
It’s a great book. You read it, or no?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:29:48)
I refuse to read it. People even have gifted it to me, being like, “Hey, man, you’re going to love this one.” I’m like, “Is that On the Road?” Honestly, people have given me a book with wrapping paper on it, and they’re like, “This is right up your alley.” I was like, ” That’s fucking On the Road, isn’t it?”
Lex Fridman
(00:30:01)
They give you a different cover.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:30:03)
I’m like, “Anything, but that.” I’m sure it’s a great book, it’s just the comparison thing drives me crazy. Big respect to Kerouac. Would never speak down on anyone in the Beat Generation.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:15)
What are some interesting moments you remember from that, those 70 days?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:30:19)
Man, there was so much. I mean, getting mistaken for a gay prostitute on my first hitchhiking ride in Louisiana was pretty funny.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:26)
I can see that. Where did you come from and where did you go?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:30:28)
Well, I mean, the journey began in Baton Rouge, and the first destination was Houston, which is about four and a half hours west on Interstate 10. I’m in Crowley, Louisiana, I’m on the side of the road, and I guess this was a cruising truck stop. It was known for being a place where male lot lizards would go to procure clients, and I was there.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:50)
Lot lizards are?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:30:51)
It’s a derogatory term in trucker culture for a prostitute who hangs out at the Love’s or Pilot Flying J. Large interstate truck stops. Now, trucker culture as it once is pretty much finished because of the live stream cameras they have inside of the trucks now, so you can’t snort Sudafed or pick up anybody. You can’t even pick up a hitchhiker or you get fired.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:12)
Killed all the romance.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:31:14)
Yeah, definitely, the old-school outlaw trucker lifestyle. Unless you’re an owner operator who’s not even in a union, which is a real cowboy way to haul loads, you can’t do that.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:24)
You were mistaken for a lot lizard?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:31:25)
Mistaken for a lot lizard by a small man from Honduras with a spiky leather jacket covered in studs.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:33)
Nice.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:31:33)
Didn’t speak any English, but I thought he was just a nice guy, and then he pulled over at a… There’s private theaters in the South where they have confessional booths set up and they have three channels and people go in there and, you know.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:50)
Porn?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:31:51)
Yeah, People go in there and please themselves.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:54)
Masturbate?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:31:54)
Yeah. I thought he was taking me to one of those, and I was like, “All right, cool, man.” If this guy wants to go jerk off, I’m just going to wait in the car. It’s all good. I don’t discriminate. Then I was like, he buys a booth for me, and I’m like, “Okay.”
Lex Fridman
(00:31:55)
That’s nice.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:32:07)
I’m not really in the mood to watch porn with this random guy. He gets in the same booth as me and he starts jerking off right next to me and I’m like, “Oh, man.” I don’t think this is chill. I’m like, “Dude, can you stop jacking off?” He’s like, “What do you mean? I thought this is what you want to do. I have money for you. What’s up?” I was like, “Oh, no, I’m just a regular guy.” He was super cool about it. He started laughing. He was like, “Oh, my bad, man. I thought you were selling something.” I said, “No.” He said, “Oh, it’s all good.” He gave me a ride all the way to Houston.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:39)
That’s great.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:32:40)
Yeah, we talked about anything except that for the rest of the car ride.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:43)
That’s great, you just rolled with it. Oh, sorry about that.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:32:47)
I had about a foot and a half on this, guys.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:47)
Honest mistake.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:32:49)
I wasn’t too scared, I also had a knife in my pocket, but I didn’t want to stab him, especially not at a place like that.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:54)
That didn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth, stuff like that?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:32:59)
Well, I figured that can’t happen again. It can’t keep happening. Because I was like, all right, if I got this out of the way the first ride, the following rides are going to be spectacular.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:06)
I mean, who among us have not been mistaken for a lot lizard?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:33:12)
It’s a fact. You heard it here first.

Couch surfing

Lex Fridman
(00:33:14)
What else? What’s some interesting, beautiful people that you’ve met along the way?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:33:20)
Well, I used the app Couchsurfing to find places to stay.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:23)
Nice. I remember Couchsurfing.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:33:23)
Now you can only submit like five Couchsurfing requests a day, unless you’re a premium member, which means you also host people.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:29)
Wait, Couchsurfing is still around?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:33:31)
Yeah, totally.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:33:31)
Oh, nice.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:32)
It’s evolved obviously into a different thing.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:33:34)
Airbnb is a kind of competitor to that, right?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:33:36)
Couchsurfing is free though. Couchsurfing, they call it the CS community. Basically, there’d be these Couchsurfing super hosts in different cities. There was one in Santa Fe, this firefighter dude who had 15 other couch-surfers there, chilling.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:50)
Nice.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:33:50)
I would do it everywhere. A lot of them were Catholics, so it was their way of giving back. A lot of them were nudists. I didn’t realize that there’s a small little section at the bottom of someone’s Couchsurfing profile that says clothing optional. That means if you go there, I thought it meant like it’s cool if you walk to the bathroom in your underwear. No, if you go there, everyone is going to be butt naked. I made that mistake a few times, not that I’m anti-nudist, but I wasn’t ready to take that leap of faith. It was just great. Couchsurfing hosts were amazing. That was just great. It was this constant thing where I felt like, wow, people were so welcoming. I’m not having to pay them a dollar for this experience. I
Lex Fridman
(00:34:32)
I love Couchsurfing. For like, again, for me, being an introvert, just crashing on a person’s couch, being essentially forced into a great conversation is great.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:34:43)
Yeah. The one thing that gets exhausting about hitchhiking is constantly thanking people, being in constant superficial gratitude everywhere all the time like, oh, thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. Thanks for the food. Part of the reason I wanted to live in an RV later in life is to avoid having to constantly live in this like, thanks so much type of frequency, because it’s exhaust-
Andrew Callaghan
(00:35:00)
… live in this thanks so much type of frequency. Because it’s exhausting to constantly, “Hey man, thanks.”
Lex Fridman
(00:35:06)
I think the shallowness of that interaction is exhausting, not the thanks.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:35:10)
Yeah. It was a true favor, of course I love giving people gratitude for that. But just this thing where everyone who picks you up… You get eight rides a day, you’re thanking eight people a day like they’re the second coming of Jesus. You start to feel a little bit debased.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:23)
What’d you learn about people from that journey? That’s your first time really going into it.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:35:29)
That the American public is just so kind overall. They’re so embracing depending on who you are. And specifically though, the Christian family people of the US who drive in minivans and have that fish sticker on the back where it’s Jesus’ fish, and then they have the family sticker where each member of the family is a stick figure, those people never picked me up and would flip me off with their whole family. Sometimes they would throw full Dr. Peppers at me, as a family, while I stood on the side of the road.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:02)
As a family, together.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:36:03)
They’d yell shit like, “Go to hell hippie,” when I was on the side of the road. And so, it’s weird that the most charitable Christian American family values people never gave me any charity or even conversation. They were antagonizing me and saw me as a hippie leftover from the ’60s who needed to go to work, go to Vietnam. I don’t get it. But the people who really extended a hand to me is people on the margins. People working on seasonal visas, people whose cars have less than a quarter tank left, people struggling with addiction. Who saw me struggling, or at least they thought that I was because they assumed I was hitchhiking not out of adventure but because I had no car, and were willing to sacrifice their day almost sometimes to take me exactly where I needed to go.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:52)
That’s beautiful, man. I’ve had similar kind of experience that people who are struggling the most are the ones who are willing to help you when you’re struggling.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:36:59)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:00)
There’s people in religious contexts and other kind of communities that just judge others. Because they’ve constructed a value system where they’re better than others because of that value system, and that actually has a cascade that forces you to actually be kind of a dick.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:37:19)
Yeah, I never thought about that. That’s so true. Do you think about morality and religion a lot?
Lex Fridman
(00:37:24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve been to certain parts of the world where religion is really a big part of life. I’m just always skeptical about tribes of people that believe a thing and they believe they’re better than others because they believe that thing. That could be nations, that could be religions. I mean, in Ukraine and Russia, I’ve seen a lot of hate towards the other. And that hate, I’m always very skeptical of. Because it could be used by powerful people to direct that hate just so the powerful people can maintain power and get money. This kind of stuff.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:38:04)
It’s a scary thing to see how easy it is for high up political people to mobilize the hate of just the average working person and can almost convince them to sabotage their own countrymen, who they share more in common with than the politician they look up to, just to advance the agenda of one party. That’s what we’re seeing now.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:22)
Are there some places in America that are better than others? Can you speak negatively of… Like aforementioned Joe Rogan talked about Connecticut nonstop. Can you pick a region in the United States you can talk shit about?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:38:37)
To talk shit about? Oh, for sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:40)
Or, from that experience. Let’s just narrow it down to that.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:38:43)
Oh, Colorado. Oh, jeez.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:45)
Really?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:38:45)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:46)
I know so many people that love Colorado.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:38:47)
Dude, Dallas, Denver. I used to think Phoenix sucks, but I love Phoenix now. The way they build these cities to just be so circular and massive, it’s just like, “Stop.”
Lex Fridman
(00:38:55)
You don’t like circles?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:38:56)
I like grids, man.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:58)
Oh, you’re a grid guy.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:38:59)
Manhattan, New Orleans, San Francisco.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:02)
What is it about grids that bring out the worst in people? Circles is where everyone is just-
Andrew Callaghan
(00:39:07)
Everyone’s just vibing out, loosey-goosey, but the grid gets people locked in hateful. I don’t know, man.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:13)
I’ve never heard anyone talk shit about Colorado, I have to say. It’s kind of refreshing because it provides a necessary balance for the Colorado Wikipedia page.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:39:21)
Yeah. Oh, Oregon too. I got problems with Oregon.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:23)
Oregon?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:39:24)
Yeah. Well, here’s the issue. And I don’t like just calling people racist because it’s kind of a two-dimensional insult, but you have the most racist state with the most psychotic anarchist city in the middle of it. What is going on up there? How did this happen? The yin and the yang is so extreme that there must be something in the [inaudible 00:39:43].
Lex Fridman
(00:39:43)
What do you have against anarchism?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:39:45)
Nothing. I used to be an anarchist. When I was in eighth grade, I had his friend named Mads who was part of a group called Seattle Solidarity, which is like an Antifa precursor. So, I grew up going to black bloc protests.

(00:39:56)
There was a particular shooting, the murder of John Williams, who is a Native American woodcarver in downtown Seattle. He got killed by a Seattle police officer named Ian Burke. John Williams was carving a pipe from a woodblock with a pocket knife. He’s deaf in one ear. Officer pulls a gun on him and says, “Put it down.” He doesn’t hear him. He shoots him six seconds later. That police involved shooting is what instantly turned me into a very critical of law enforcement kind of person when I was super young. As someone who used to see this guy who got murdered… He was a 55-year-old man. I used to see him around Pike Place where my mom lived. It’s a public market in downtown. That to me, put me into the anarchist political sphere, just channeling the anger of that experience. And the officer got no charges by the way. You can look up the video. It’s horrific. And it didn’t get reported. The officer, I’m pretty sure, is still active duty.

(00:40:54)
Situations like that early in life channeled me toward political extremism. But I grew up to realize how incompatible that anarchistic worldview is with reality and with American society. It can only exist in a small, little chamber. You can’t apply that to the industrial heartland of the country.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:15)
And I think also, anarchism… I’ve gotten to know Michael Malice who’s written quite a bit about anarchism. And it also exists as a body of literature about different philosophical notions that resist the state, the ever expanding state in different kinds of ways. It’s always nice to have extreme thought experiments to understand what kind of society we want to build, but implementing it may not necessarily be a good idea.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:41:42)
Yeah. Emma Goldman, I’m a huge fan of her writing. Also, the prison abolitionists that are associated with the anarchist movement, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, all that stuff, influential. I still adhere to a lot of those principles when talking about stuff like radical prison reform and stuff like that. But I drifted more toward having a more open mind as I got older.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:05)
Extremism implemented in almost all of its forms is probably going to cause a lot of suffering.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:42:12)
Yeah.

Quarter Confessions

Lex Fridman
(00:42:13)
You worked as a doorman on the, I could say, legendary Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:42:19)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:20)
Where you saw what you described as… This might be another Wikipedia quote by the way. This is where I do my research.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:42:26)
Does it say hellish scenes?
Lex Fridman
(00:42:28)
Hellish scenes, in quotes.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:42:29)
Wikipedia is damn right about that.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:30)
All right, thank you. That’s a win. That’s one in the win column. So yeah, tell the story of that. What’s it like to work on Bourbon Street? What kind of stuff did you see?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:42:41)
I was a host at a fine dining restaurant on the corner of Bourbon and Iberville. That’s the first street if you go from Canal Street onto the corridor. This is across from a daiquiri spot. It’s the middle of the tourist corridor of New Orleans. And the spot was kind of a tourist trap. It was called Bourbon House. The food was good. Chef Eric, I don’t want you to see this and think you don’t make good end dewy sausages. But it was overpriced. We had to maintain this fine dining facade on a street where almost everyone is throwing up fighting or is half naked.

(00:43:16)
There was this policy. We had these giant glass windows next to the tables. So if you’re eating at a Bourbon House, you can look out onto Bourbon Street and you can see as you’re dining, a full panoramic view of all these partiers throwing beads, boobs, all that. We had this policy where if we’re serving someone, we can’t look onto Bourbon Street if something crazy is happening. So if there’s a fight or something like that, we can’t look. I remember I’m fucking serving a table. There’s a dude in a Batman mask, butt naked, with 12 pairs of beads, just jerking it, back to jerking it.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:50)
Full on.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:43:51)
He’s jerking it, right? And every single person at the restaurant’s out there like, “Look.” They’re taking pictures. And the manager Stephen looks at me, he is like, “Keep your fucking eyes on the table.” So I’m serving these people and I’m like, “You like red beans and rice, or would you like something Creole?” And there’s just this dude. And ultimately, the manager went out and escorted him further down Bourbon Street.

(00:44:13)
But I would get off work at around midnight every night. And that was when Bourbon Street is at its most chaotic. I lived in the French Quarter as well. I lived about 12 blocks down Bourbon, in a small Creole cottage, in a cute little orange, old-school New Orleans, one story spot. I lived in the attic above these gay meth dealers named Frankie and Johnny.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:36)
Oh, wow.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:44:37)
So, I would get off work and I would basically have to walk through this battlefield. I mean, it was a battlefield. Getting home was out of the Warriors movie.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:50)
The best of humanity on display.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:44:50)
Yeah. It was like Kensington, Philadelphia, but just alcohol. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
(00:44:54)
Oh, it’s all alcohol. But it’s a lot of visitors, right, from outside?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:44:58)
Almost all visitors. And that would set the floor for the weekend. For example, if the Raiders were playing the Saints, Raider Nation. And they do not play around. If it’s the Patriots, that’s a whole different crowd. They think they’re better than everybody else.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:11)
Well, they technically are better than everybody else, but yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:45:14)
But people from Massachusetts aren’t like the cream of the crop in terms of American superiority.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:19)
Strong words, yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:45:20)
No offense, but I mean.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:21)
No, I’m sure they won’t take that as an offense.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:45:24)
They are good at fighting though, I’ll tell you that.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:26)
All right. Great.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:45:27)
New England has hands compared to some places.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:29)
Which places are those? Colorado?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:45:31)
Colorado has no hands. The West Coast, not too much hands.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:37)
That’s why you feel safe talking shit about Colorado.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:45:39)
But if you get to the corn-fed parts of East Colorado, these guys got hands bigger than my head, they’ll beat the of me. But anyways, I’d walk back to my house on Bourbon Street and I would be sifting through this battlefield. And I had a friend at the time who was like, “Yo, we should do a taxi cab confessions type spin-off,” where we ask people to confess a deep dark secret and we post it the next day. We tried that and it went viral on Instagram instantly. It was mostly incest stories, people admitting to incest. I know it’s a common southern stereotype, but there’s some truth to it. There were some murder confessions. That was pretty crazy. We never really posted any of those.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:18)
How did you get people to confess?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:46:20)
Pretty easy. And New Orleans has a homicide solve rate of 22%. So, most of the time, they’ll just tell you. I remember I was walking down Bourbon and I asked this kid, I was like, “What’s your deepest, darkest secret?” And he told me, he’s like, “I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia.” It’s a project house in the third ward, project development. And he said, “I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia playground for touching my sister,” molesting his sister. And I was like, “What?” And he was like, “Yeah, look it up.” And I was like, “All right, hold on.” And it was like, man found dead in Central City playground, appeared to be homeless, shot execution style. So I told the kid, I was like, “Why’d you tell me that?” He’s like, “Man, put that out there. I’m trying to go viral. Tag me too.”
Lex Fridman
(00:46:59)
Oh, wow.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:47:00)
Dude, I don’t think you understand that even if you’re a juvenile, he was probably 15, you can get juvenile life in Louisiana for a homicide even if it’s justified. So, I just deleted the footage in front of him. I was like, “I’m going to delete this footage. See that trash button? I’m hitting it right now. Don’t tell anyone that again.” And he was like, “All right, I appreciate it,” and he walked off. It’s the little moments like that I always remember.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:22)
Anything for the Gram, I guess.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:47:24)
Yeah. After a while though, it became repetitive. Because there’s only so many things that people can confess to that go viral.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:32)
Oh, so you were trying to see what?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:47:34)
Well, I mean, there’s the incest one. Some people just say, “I eat ass.” Everyone said that. Or, I cheated on someone.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:43)
I’ve seen a surprising number of people on your channel mention eating ass.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:47:48)
Yeah. How seriously you said that will live in my head for the rest of my life.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:56)
That’s good. I want to live in your head saying that a lot of people mentioned eating ass.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:48:04)
Yeah, a lot of people do mention that. Also, that’s kind of where I developed this magnetism for freestyle rapping. Everywhere I go, people rap, not sure why. I mean, as a former rapper myself in middle school and for the first year of high school, I think that maybe it takes one to know one. But everywhere I go, people start rapping. If you and me went outside of this podcast studio and walked around for five minutes, I could find somebody.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:29)
Who is rapping.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:48:30)
I can tell who raps or who can rap, who has eight bars in their head that they’re ready to go.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:34)
I think also, there’s something about you that creates the safe space to perform their art.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:48:42)
Yeah. The Quarter Confession series was the first time you saw the suit.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:47)
That’s when the suit came out.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:48:48)
Yeah. It was kind of like a Ron Burgundy, Eric Andre inspired type.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:52)
Where’d you get that suit?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:48:53)
Goodwill.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:54)
Goodwill?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:48:54)
Yeah. Always.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:56)
Wow. I was playing checkers, you were playing chess. Good job.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:48:59)
I mean, Goodwill has a surprising amount of identical gray suits for sale.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:04)
Yeah. I’ve actually gotten suits at thrift stores before. They’re great.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:49:07)
Yeah. A lot of people donate suits. And I was going for oversized suits, which are the cheapest ones there. It was $12 to $25 every time for the outfit.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:16)
If I wanted to look super sophisticated, like I’m from another era, I would go to the thrift store. Because usually, the patterns they have, it’s just a more sophisticated suit. Which is what you kind of picked out. It made you look ridiculous but in the best kind of way.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:49:34)
The tough part about Quarter Confessions for me is that everybody that was featured, for the most part, would more or less regret being a part of the show. And that over time just gave me a bad feeling where I was like, “You know what? I kind of feel like I am doing an ambush interview.” Especially because presenting as so agreeable, yet the intention is to make something funny. And I get that that’s what people do in the satire sphere. I’m sure Ali G and Bruno and Borat did the same thing. And I don’t think it’s unethical because that’s all for the purposes of comedy. It is what it is. But for me, I wanted to do something different.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:12)
Yeah, because there’s an intimacy to confessing a thing, and then you just don’t really realize the implications of that.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:50:20)
And the atmosphere of Bourbon Street is like anything goes, it’s a free spirited place. But if you transport that energy digitally to a different place like Colorado, they might look at it and be like…
Lex Fridman
(00:50:32)
Different place in time. Five years later, that same person has a family and stuff like this, and all of a sudden they’re talking about eating ass.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:50:39)
Right, exactly. Kids have to think about that. Or imagine if there’s a video of your grandma or grandpa out there, when he was a kid, talking about eating ass. That’s a horrible experience. To discover that about your respected elder later in life, it’s tough.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:52)
I don’t even know where to go with that. But literally the opening question was, tell me your deepest, darkest secret.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:50:59)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:59)
You just come up to somebody like that?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:51:01)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:02)
How often do you get a no? What’s the yes to no ratio?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:51:06)
Well, the weird thing is we don’t really extract answers from people. What makes a good interview is when they’re ready to talk. The more you have to talk and try to get an answer out of them, it is just not a good vibe. So we kind of look for people who appear to be already ready to talk, open body language, they seem confident and verbose, and we approach them first.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:27)
There’s a look.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:51:28)
We wouldn’t approach a shy person and be like, “Come on, tell me.” No.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:31)
What about a person with pain in their eyes?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:51:33)
Oh yeah, we’re interviewing them.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:35)
So they’re ready to talk, they’re just not… There’s different ways to be ready.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:51:41)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:42)
I see homeless people a lot, and they always look fascinating. And the ones I’ve talked to are always fascinating.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:51:47)
Yeah. We just did a video in the Vegas tunnels, trying to… Obviously it got taken down by Fox, but whatever.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:54)
I was going to make a joke that I didn’t see it.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:51:57)
We tried to help a lot of them by getting them IDs. And when I made the documentary, I had this idea that if… It’s a big roadblock for them is getting identification. Without IDs, you can’t check into a homeless shelter, you can’t do day labor, you can’t qualify for housing, nothing. So when we interviewed them, they’d basically tell us, “If I had my ID, I wouldn’t be here.” And so we said, “Okay, we’re going to really help this time. We’re not just going to talk to them about their struggles. We’re going to actively go out and get them IDs at the DMV.” So, we did that and nothing really changed in their life.

(00:52:32)
And we sat down with a recovery specialist who works directly with them day in and day out. And he explained to me that he’s been trying to do the same thing I tried to do in a one-week period for the past 10 years. And that they have deeper underlying traumas and pain that need to be dealt with far before they even take the steps to enter society as a housed person.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:54)
That’s a heavy truth right there.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:52:56)
Breaking that shame cycle has to come first. Because you got to think, right? I’m from a generation that romanticizes vagrancy and homelessness to a certain extent if it’s called Van Life or if it is done in a way that’s sort of like Rolling Stone, Willie Nelson, hit the road. People who are above 50, they feel really embarrassed to be in the spiral of homelessness. They feel like failures. A lot of them have kids who they weren’t there for. That’s not the kind of pain that can be dealt with by giving someone a tiny home. It’s a good step forward. But for someone to really make a change, they have to want to change. And so it is, how do you help someone and guide themselves in the right direction? And if you’re too paternalistic and you use shame as a method to get them to clean up, they’re going to end up right where they started. That’s a tough truth to accept because a lot of people want a quick fix to things. And I don’t blame people who go out and give bologna sandwiches out to the homeless.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:53)
And each case is probably its own little puzzle.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:53:57)
Each person is so complex. Now, imagine drug abuse. What that does for the brain? Trauma, childhood trauma. There’s so much to unpack. And then just the belief that they’re the undesirables, that they don’t deserve to be a part of society because they failed a fundamental obligation like taking care of their kids.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:15)
If we could take a small tangent to, you mentioned this Vegas video, which is fascinating. It was taken down recently by YouTube, or YouTube took it down based on-
Andrew Callaghan
(00:54:27)
Yeah, it was illegal.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:29)
… Fox 5, I guess.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:54:31)
So, the documentary was an hour and 45 minutes. We used 10 seconds of a news clip that was publicly broadcast by Fox 5 Vegas. And according to the Copyright Act of 1976, you’re allowed to use any publicly broadcast news clip in a transformative capacity in any documentary film or research paper or broadcast or anything. They, specifically this corporation called Gray Media that controls the TV stations in almost every small town, they had lawyers hit up YouTube. And YouTube complied with an illegal copyright strike to get our video immediately removed. And I’m a YouTube partner. I’m in the YouTube partner program. So, to think that I wasn’t forewarned, it’s a bit strange, but it also smells like corruption to me to a certain extent.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:16)
Yeah, you shouldn’t have that amount of power. At the very least, they should have the power to just silence that five second clip maybe.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:55:24)
Yeah. But I’m taking them to court because I have the means to be able to do so. I’m a larger creator. I have an audience. I have that financial backing to do it. I can’t imagine how many people out there are smaller creators with not as much of a fan base they can mobilize against someone like Fox 5 or the money to go to court. So I want to take them all the way there to set precedent for future cases, so that these giant mainstream media conglomerates can’t copyright strike documentary filmmakers at will. It doesn’t make sense.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:58)
Oh, thank you for doing that. That’s really, really, really important. And that’s really powerful. And it might hopefully empower YouTube to also put pressure on people to not… YouTube is in a difficult position because there’s so much content out there, there’s so many claims, it’s hard to investigate. But YouTube should be in a place where they push back against this kind of stuff as a first line of defense, especially to protect small creators. So what you’re doing is really, really important.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:56:24)
Appreciate it, man.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:25)
And it sucks that it was taken down. Do you have any hope?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:56:29)
Well, I talked to my YouTube partner today, and he said that the Fox 5 lawyers have two weeks to comply with my counter appeal. But I spent 20 grand on human voiceovers in five different languages. I invested probably in total like 70K into this video. So even if it gets reinstated, the steam’s kind of been taken out of its trajectory.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:48)
But also, it’s just a really important video, it is good for the world.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:56:52)
Why the hell would Fox 5 have a vested interest in having the video taken down?
Lex Fridman
(00:56:57)
I just hate it when people do that to videos or to creators that are doing good in the world.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:57:01)
Yeah. It’s not an expose on the mayor of Las Vegas. It’s an attempt to show the civilian public how to get involved in a local nonprofit and potentially intervene in the lives of the tunnel people.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:10)
Well, fuck Fox 5, the other Channel 5, as you said.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:57:13)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:14)
Well, thank you for pushing back and highlighting it. Hopefully, it gets brought back up. But yeah, defending other creators so that other creators can take risks and don’t get taken down for stupid reasons.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:57:26)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:27)
So, Quarter Confessions was written?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:57:30)
No, it was all real life reality TV documentary. But it caught the attention of a larger company called Doing Things Media. And they contacted me pretty much a week after I graduated from college in the May of 2019, and they said, “Hey, how would you like to produce a show?” I was like, “What do you mean?” They were like, “We’ll get you an RV. We’ll pay you 45K a year. We’ll pay for gas, for food, for two hotels a week. Go out there, make content. And we’ll be in the background just powering it all.”
Lex Fridman
(00:58:06)
And that was the birth of All Gas No Brakes.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:58:09)
Yes. All Gas No Brakes was named after a book that I wrote called All Gas No Brakes, a hitchhiker’s diary, which chronicled the 70-day journey that we were just talking about.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:19)
It’s a tough book to find, by the way.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:58:20)
Oh, yeah. There’s only a few copies left. I’m thinking about doing a reprint at some point down the line, but I sold off the last a hundred copies like a month and a half ago.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:28)
Until then, you guys should go read On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:58:31)
Yeah, read-
Lex Fridman
(00:58:31)
You should read it. I don’t know if you’ve read it before.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:58:33)
If you can’t get my book, get On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:33)
It’s great.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:58:36)
It’s the best.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:37)
When’s your birthday? I’ll send you-
Andrew Callaghan
(00:58:38)
April 23rd. I’m a Taurus. Coming soon.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:41)
Typical Taurus, yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:58:43)
I’m a typical Taurus man. I’m a Scorpio moon. You should write that down.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:47)
What’s the time when you were born?
Andrew Callaghan
(00:58:48)
11:30.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:50)
11:30 at night? Of course.
Andrew Callaghan
(00:58:53)
Typical. This guy knew it. That’s the real science.

(00:58:57)
Anyways, the idea of All Gas No Brakes as a show was to combine the, I guess, road dog ethos of the All Gas No Brakes book with the presentation and editing style of Quarter Confessions. So, it was to take quarter confessions on the road. That was pretty much like a simulated hitchhiking experience. But with the editing and punchy effects of Quarter Confessions, which is like I wear a suit, we do the Fast Zoom-ins, little effects, stuff like that.

(00:59:26)
Man, those were the best years. It was just so fun. I mean, imagine. You’re fresh out of college. You were just a doorman interviewing people about making out with their cousin and stuff. And then boom, this company that you’ve never even heard of is willing to buy you an RV and give you 45K a year, which to me at the time was more money than I could possibly imagine. So, I called my dad. I was like, “Dad, I need you to find me an RV.” Because he’s the only guy I know who knows about cars, and even he doesn’t know much about cars. He’s like, “All right, I’m on it.” The RV was 20,000.

Burning Man


(00:59:58)
And the first event that we were called to cover was the Burning Man Festival. And that was tough because Burning Man is not too keen on filming. It’s supposed to be a non-commercialized escape from reality. They have a gift economy set up. It’s based upon mutual participation and non-exploitation. And so, the idea of making a Burning Man video was tough at first. Because burners oftentimes, and this is not all of them, are pretty well off in general. A lot of them have tech jobs, are pretty high up in Silicon Valley. And Burning Man is where they go to take the edge off and basically become their burner persona. On the playa, they become reborn. And they take ketamine and they wear kaleidoscope glasses and steampunk hats and they snort MDMA and they run around the sand. Listen-
Lex Fridman
(01:00:48)
Do you snort MDMA?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:00:51)
Yes, you can.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:52)
I need to do MDMA. I thought it’s a pill. I didn’t know.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:00:53)
It’s better to take it in a pill or water, but you can snort MDMA.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:57)
I definitely need to take MDMA. I’m already full of love, but that, I’d probably go on another level.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:01:02)
Yeah, don’t snort it because it’ll only last 90 minutes.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:05)
Let me write that down.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:01:07)
So anyways, we didn’t know what to do because we tried to film.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:09)
Don’t snort.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:01:10)
The initial idea for All Gas No Brakes was to, instead of asking people what’s your deepest, darkest secret, it was, what’s the craziest trip you’ve been on? The idea was to not satirize drunk people, but satirize people who are fried on acid. So we went to Boulder real quick, did a test interview with some lady who talked about seeing ancestral aliens during a peyote retreat. It’s pretty easy to extract trip reports from hippies and gutter punks and stuff like that, or oogles.

(01:01:41)
So, we go to Burning Man. We start asking people, what’s your craziest trip story? And they didn’t have the same type of free flowing storytelling style like a on the street, cross punk in New Orleans might have, where they’re like, “I don’t give a shit, I’ll tell you whatever.” These people were very bottled up about what they were willing to disclose. So we went on Burning Man Radio and we did a broadcast and we said, “Hey, we’re psychedelic journalists.” It was me and my friend Ciel at the time. I said, “We’re psychedelic journalists. We’re parked on Tan and I, which is a cross street in Black Rock City.” And we said, “We have a 1998 Catalina Coachman Sport. It’s an RV. We’ve set up a podcast studio. We’re doing a show about psychedelic voyages.” Lo and behold, two hours later, we had 10 people lined up at the RV willing to talk. That vetted people in advance for us. We did a couple interviews and that was that.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:37)
What were some of the stories from the trip reports?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:02:40)
There was this lady named Rosmah who said that she was known in several circles in Berkeley for being multi-orgasmic and could create multiple repeated climaxes using only her mind, by squinting her eyes and squeezing her eyes together so much that the pleasure spiral just went crazy.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:01)
I feel like I talked to several people like that at Berkeley.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:03:04)
Yeah. You know what I’m talking about?
Lex Fridman
(01:03:06)
Not that… Well yeah, that lady, I think she manifests herself in many forms, yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:03:11)
Right. But still, it was on the cruder end. There was one guy named, Kimbo Slice was his burner name. He talked about taking a shit after taking a quarter of mushrooms and how he was seeing his childhood and visualizing his past life as the turds were flowing into the toilet, and just talks about the psychedelic union between pooing and taking shrooms.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:34)
So, he was very visual with his words.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:03:36)
Yeah. There was stuff like that. I interviewed Alex Gray, which was super cool, about his first trip in San Francisco, in 1971, shortly after the Summer of Love. I got to do some pretty cool interviews. But still, it was semi-ambush style. I wouldn’t say that we were doing journalism yet. It was still comedic video work.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:57)
Was there a narrative-
Andrew Callaghan
(01:03:59)
No.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:59)
… that tied it together? It’s really just a trip, comedic almost.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:04:03)
Interview and then I go Burning Man, and then it’s onto the next one. I guess that could give a loose structure, but it’s just a punch in slapstick thing.

(01:04:13)
Everything was going good until we interviewed this guy named DJ Soft Baby. He was wearing a golden leotard with, once again, kaleidoscope glasses, shirtless dancing like you know dancing. And he was eating chowder out of a plastic bowl. And he was like, “This chowder is so fucking good.” He is like, “This is the best chowder I’ve ever had in my life.” And he starts putting the chowder on his face. And he is like, “I want the chowder all over me, yah.” And we just go, “Hey man, can you just do a dance for us real quick, just for some B-roll.” He does a dance. We post it on Instagram the next morning. Doing Things Media CEO calls me, Reid, he says, “All of our pages are down.” And he’s like, “That guy you filmed dancing last night on drugs, putting chowder on his face, that guy is at the top of MIT.”
Lex Fridman
(01:05:00)
Top of MIT, I don’t understand what that means.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:05:00)
He went to MIT.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:03)
That’s like saying, my brother’s rocket scientist, he’s head of NASA or whatever.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:05:09)
Well, I mean, the guy knows people in Boston. Not in the Whitey Bulger sense, but in the reverse sense.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:16)
I have trouble believing that DJ Soft Baby-
Andrew Callaghan
(01:05:19)
Oh, DJ Soft Baby was major. It could have been Harvard. But it wasn’t UMass.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:26)
I don’t think there’s anybody that’s, quote, at the head of MIT who’s putting… What was it, all over his face?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:05:32)
Chowder.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:32)
Chowder.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:05:33)
Well then, you haven’t been to Burning Man yet.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:35)
Okay. I’ve not been to Burning Man. I would have to consult my colleagues at MIT if they know DJ Soft Baby. It probably was Harvard. Let’s put it on them.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:05:46)
Okay. The top of Harvard. So, he made some calls to the heads of Big Tech and got all the Doing Things Media pages taken down. At the time, that was a vast network of pages. And we ended up having to take the… Obviously, the video came down. And he held the entire network of Instagram pages hostage. He made us agree to never post that video again, and then somehow got all of our pages reinstated. That was my first brush with powerful people on drugs, and that was probably my last brush with powerful people on drugs.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:21)
What did you transition into from there?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:06:23)
I think after Burning Man, we went to the South. Went to Talladega Race weekend, went to a Donald Trump Jr. book signing, went to a juggalo adjacent fetish mansion in Central Florida called the Sausage Castle.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:37)
Juggalo adjacent sausage. Okay. Can you run that by me again?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:06:42)
Juggalo adjacent fetish mansion in Central Florida.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:45)
Okay. Fetish mansion in Central Florida. Juggalo adjacent. Every single one of those words, I feel like, needs a book or something. By the way, who are the juggalos? Is this ICP?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:06:45)
Just ICP fans.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:57)
ICP fans, okay.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:06:59)
But I say adjacent because it’s not a juggalo mansion, but there’s a lot of juggalos who kick it at the mansion and it’s juggalo friendly.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:05)
Oh, okay. Juggalo friendly.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:07:07)
Yeah, because they get made fun of in a lot of places.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:09)
Oh. Okay, got it.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:07:11)
And juggalos say outrageous shit, and they embarrass themselves and they fight a lot. They’re on the FBI’s gang list, which if you ask me-
Lex Fridman
(01:07:18)
ICP or the-
Andrew Callaghan
(01:07:19)
The juggalos,
Lex Fridman
(01:07:22)
The juggalos. Who’s the head of the juggalos?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:07:24)
It would be Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. But there’s associated acts like Twiztid, and there’s a whole rabbit hole. Honestly, Tech N9ne is sort of a part of that.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:31)
Tech N9ne, I don’t know who that is. Should I know who that is?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:07:34)
He’s actually one of the top-selling touring rappers, despite having not that many streams. Tech N9ne, he’s got a huge cult following in Missouri. The juggalos started in Warren, Michigan.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:47)
We should also say, ICP, Insane Clown Posse. This is a thing, this is a movement.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:07:51)
Oh, yeah. If you went to Seattle right now and punched a cop and they booked you in county jail, you may end up running with the juggalos.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:01)
Running with the juggalos.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:08:02)
They’re a presence in Pacific Northwest prison system from what I’ve heard.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:06)
Can you tell a juggalo from a distance?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:08:09)
Well, they say, whoop, whoop. If you see a Juggalo, they’ll say that also.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:13)
I’ll try to look up that.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:08:18)
It’s called the Dark Carnivals, the mythology they abide by.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:21)
What do they define themselves? What’s the ideology?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:08:23)
A family.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:24)
No, I understand, but what’s the ideology? What’s the philosophical foundation?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:08:28)
They’re anti-racist. They like to drink Faygo and also just cheap liquor and stuff like that. They’re into drugs. A lot of circles, if you pull out a crack pipe, people will be like, “I don’t want to drink with you anymore.” If you’re at a juggalo party and someone’s smoking twizz or something, it’s relatively accepted.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:50)
What’s twizz?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:08:50)
Meth.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:51)
Meth, right, right. Lots of tattoos?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:08:54)
Yeah. The Hatchet Man is the most common one. It’s a Psychopathic Records logo. It’s a cartoon of a clown wheeling a hatchet. It’s actually a pretty sick logo.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:03)
I vaguely remember enjoying some of the ICP music.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:09:08)
It’s good.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:09)
Yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s funny. It’s edgy.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:09:11)
They get satirized a lot, but I got love for the clowns. And also, when All Gas No Brakes transitioned away from rich, elite drug parties and into the South, that’s when the fun really started to happen. Living in your RV in Alabama and Florida and stuff is the best.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:27)
Why? What is it about it?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:09:29)
People are just so friendly down there. And it is warm year round, and people are non-judgmental, and it’s just great. The South gets hated on a lot, especially in the coastal states. Mississippi and Alabama are kind of like the butts of a lot of jokes and stuff, but those are great states.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:44)
No, I love it. New Mexico, Albuquerque, all those-
Andrew Callaghan
(01:09:46)
Oh, yeah. The ABQ is great.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:48)
ABQ, what’s that?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:09:49)
Albuquerque. That’s what Jesse Pinkman called it, the ABQ.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:53)
Oh, shit. The depth of references you bring to the table is intense.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:09:58)
It’s okay.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:59)
I met a lady in Albuquerque when I was traveling across the United States, and she said, “Take me with you.”
Lex Fridman
(01:10:00)
In Albuquerque when I was traveling across the United States and she said, “Take me with you.” I said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t.” But I didn’t think about that lady.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:10:08)
I think you made the right call.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:09)
I don’t know. On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:10:13)
Best book I’ve ever read in my life.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:17)
There’s a moment when he meets a nice girl on a bus and they have a love affair. It was good.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:10:24)
On the bus or [inaudible 01:10:26]?
Lex Fridman
(01:10:25)
No, no, they went to California. Well, yeah, and there was a love affair on the bus, but it wasn’t sexual. It was just romantic.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:10:31)
It was in the air?
Lex Fridman
(01:10:32)
It was in the air, which there is something in the air on the bus, like a Greyhound Megabus, that type of situation. There’s something-
Andrew Callaghan
(01:10:40)
Certainly something in the air?
Lex Fridman
(01:10:41)
It was a romance. There is, man. When you travel, because it’s like strangers getting together and you’re feeling each other out, but you’re in it. You each have a story because you wouldn’t be taking a bus unless you had a story. So especially if you’re traveling cross-country, there’s something.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:10:57)
You ever taken the dollar bus from Philly to New York? The Chinatown bus?
Lex Fridman
(01:11:00)
Yeah, I have. Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:11:01)
That’s a great bus, the people on that.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:03)
It’s not a fucking dollar, though. [inaudible 01:11:05].
Andrew Callaghan
(01:11:05)
There’s some that are $5.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:07)
No, no, no, no. If you book it way ahead of time, which it’s like $20. I was like, “This is a fucking lie calling it $1.” I don’t know why I’m swearing. The anger came out, and I apologize.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:11:17)
Hey, swearing is okay sometimes. Last time I was on the Chinatown bus, there was a rooster walking down the aisle.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:23)
Actual rooster?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:11:23)
Yeah, watched him chilling. It was awesome.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:25)
Well, there’s a nice part of your film with the rooster.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:11:27)
I forgot about that.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:28)
Yeah, that felt almost fake.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:11:32)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:33)
Did you plant the rooster?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:11:34)
No, there’s a place in Ybor City in Tampa where roosters walk around all the time. And we had a rooster parked there right by the main drag for… What did I say? We had a rooster parked? We had the RV parked at Ybor City for a long time, and the rooster laid eggs in the undercarriage.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:50)
Nice.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:11:51)
Back to the All Gas No Brakes thing though, so it was really fun making it. And then we started All Gas No Brakes in September of 2019. Six months later, the country shuts down and everything just hits the fan. I was actually here in Austin when it shut down. I was on 6th Street. I remember the, I don’t just hang out on 6th Street all the time, but I was just here.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:10)
Yeah, you do. Come on, let’s just be honest.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:12:12)
I do like 6th Street. I like East Austin better, but I like 6th Street too. So anyways, the NBA shuts down, everything’s shutting down. So I went down to the Dirty 6 and I asked this doorman, I was like, “Are you guys ever going to shut down?” He was like, “Fuck no, bro. The Dirty 6 never closes.” And I was like, “All right, we’ll see about that.” Next day, plywood. And then I was like, “All right.” I thought my career was over when Covid hit. I was like, “What are we going to do? Nothing’s happening anymore. There’s no more parties or Talladega races or Burning Man’s to go to.” So I went back to Seattle in the RV and I just spent four months just depressed, living in the RV, trying to figure out what would happen.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:51)
But All Gas No Brakes went on still through that?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:12:56)
Well, this was the craziest thing about that period of time is that when Covid hit, I’m sure you remember, everything turned political overnight. In Seattle, if you went to a house party, you can get canceled because people were like, “Oh, you’re a super-spreader.” So if you wanted to socialize even with a group of four or more, you had to do so with your phones damn near turned off. And a lot of people were doing hyper social policing at that time. Beyond that, in the south and in more conservative places, they were doing the opposite. They were trying to prove that they could hang out 500 deep with no mask to make a statement against the establishment.

(01:13:36)
So you had this polarization that led to more division, and that’s when the anti-vax protests started. And I went to Sacramento and the passion was unreal. This is about two months after the Covid lockdowns began, and that was my first political video was at the California State Capitol in Sacramento, documenting they called it the Freedom rally, but that’s typically anti-vax stuff. And it was real intensity. And that video was my most successful to date at that time. And so I was like, “Okay, am I a political reporter now? Am I covering politics? What’s going on?”
Lex Fridman
(01:14:15)
What were the interviews that made up that video? What style of questions were you asking?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:14:21)
I don’t know if you remember, but I was actually scared when the pandemic started. I thought that this is something that might kill us all based upon what I was consuming. And so I’d asked people, “What do you think about this lockdown?” And I’ve had people say, “I’m immune-compromised. If I get exposed to Covid, I have a 95% fatality rate. But guess what? I’d rather be free and dead than alive living in fear.” And I was like, wow. So it was just stuff along those lines. You had some San Diego surfers there complaining about the beaches being shut down when such awesome waves were coming.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:54)
Yeah, it’s interesting how that really brought out the worst in people.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:15:02)
Oh, yeah.

Protests

Lex Fridman
(01:15:03)
I’m not sure why that is. Fear, maybe. Paranoia, I don’t know. It really divided people. Along the lines, as you mentioned, triple mask yourself or fight for your country.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:15:17)
Yeah, right. Exactly. Why are those the two options? That is literally what it was.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:23)
Yeah, it’s wild.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:15:25)
And both groups think they’re fighting for the survival of something. And so that’s where you really run into problems, when you have two polarized groups who both think that their cause is for the common good, mutual understanding is impossible at that juncture. And so after three months of almost everybody being locked down, George Floyd happens. And I remember I saw the third precinct burning on my phone in Minneapolis, and everyone says, “Andrew, you have to go cover this.” And I’m somebody, like I said, police violence has been close to my heart since I was a kid. And my first thought is, I can’t do that. I’m a comedic reporter.

(01:16:11)
I can’t go to Minneapolis and cover this, it’ll be the end of my career. And I had a friend named Lacey who I went to college with, and she told me, she was like, “Bro, this is your chance for you to do something serious. You can actually create a meaningful piece of reporting like you always wanted to before Quarter Confessions, and you can turn All Gas No Brakes into a news source.” So I called Reid, who was the CEO of the company that owned All Gas No Brakes, and I was like, “Look man, I want to go to Minneapolis.” I was in Orlando at the time. I was actually at The sausage Castle. And he said-
Lex Fridman
(01:16:43)
Sorry, The Sausage Castle?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:16:46)
Yeah, the Juggalo Mansion.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:48)
Oh, right. That was called The Sausage Castle. Right.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:16:50)
So I’m watching Minneapolis unfold on Lake Street where it was burning, and I got to the Orlando Airport and I booked a flight. I booked it on my own card, I didn’t consult my boss or anything. And I was sitting in my seat on the flight and he straight up told me, he’s like, “If you fuck this up and this destroys the brand, we’re getting a different host. If you mess this up and you turn our show away from a party show about drinking and drugs and all that stuff and you make this a social justice show, you’re done.” But I was like, I just turned my phone off. I got to the Minneapolis Airport on the second night of the riots. And when I got to the airport, there was National Guardsmen in the airport and it was like a Call of Duty mission, the one in the airport.

(01:17:42)
And on the speaker, they say, “If you’re arriving here right now, you are not permitted to go anywhere outside of the airport. National Guardsmen will escort you to your Uber or to your car, they’re going to take a picture of your ID, they’re going to figure out where you’re going. You are not permitted to go outside tonight.” And so Lacey picks me up. There’s two people in the back, two of her homegirls wearing shiesty masks. I’m like, “What are we doing? Where are we going?” And she goes, “We’re going to go film the riot. We’re going to Lake Street.”

(01:18:10)
And so we drive down there, Kmart is burning, Target is burning, everything is on fire. She has the Sony A7. She gives me a microphone and she’s like, “Go talk to that guy”, and that was the guy with a Molotov cocktail in his hand who had just burned Kmart down. And so I go, ” What should I ask him?” She goes, “What’s on your mind?” So I walk up to him and I’m like, “What’s on your mind?” He said something like, “Everything that was happening here was supposed to happen. This is how we feel. Is it right? No. Is this going to benefit the community? No, but this is how we feel.”
Lex Fridman
(01:18:45)
“This is how we feel”, that’s pretty powerful. Through a lot of the documenting that you do, “this is how we feel” is screaming through that.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:18:57)
Yeah. And I noticed that aside from a group called Unicorn Riot, there was no one else actually interviewing the protesters. The local news was on the bridge 15, not 15, but five blocks away filming just the scene itself, just the fire. But I saw some crazy things off camera, too. So there was two groups there. There was the anarchists, more mobilized protestors, and then there was just mostly African-American community members who were just pissed, who had nothing to do with the organized resistance. And they were all joining forces to riot. And there was this anarchist kid who ran up to White Castle with a Molotov cocktail, and he was about to throw it at White Castle. And this black dude ran up to him and grabbed his arm and he’s like, “Nah, we fuck with white Castle.” And I was like, what? And so you see, if you go on Lake Street, every business is burned. White Castle remains.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:51)
Yeah, White Castle stands.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:19:52)
I also saw all these dudes rip this ATM out of a bank and hit it with sledgehammers. They were a group of friends hitting it with sledgehammers, right? They’re hitting with sledgehammers, boom. All of a sudden, money starts spraying out of the ATM. I’ve never seen some shit like this, pouring out of it. And then these group of friends, who were just united and getting it open, start fighting each other for the money as it’s flying out of it. And so it was like Joker from The Batman’s army type vibes, but I got shot in the ass by the National Guard. It was no good.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:25)
Like what, a rubber bullet?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:20:26)
Yeah, yeah. Not shot-
Lex Fridman
(01:20:28)
How’d that feel like?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:20:29)
Honestly, it hurt. Yeah, it hurt.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:32)
I’m not sure what I was expecting as an answer to that question.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:20:34)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:35)
I liked it. It was good.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:20:36)
Yeah. And then after that, I posted the video and it was very well received. And that was the pivotal point where I realized that everything was going to change.

Jon Stewart

Lex Fridman
(01:20:45)
I mean, there was still a comedic element to the way you do conversations, so the way you edit. So did you see yourself as potentially like a Jon Stewart type of character?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:20:57)
At first, but I just think human beings are just funny in general.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:00)
Yeah, the absurdity of it.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:21:02)
Cool thing about Jon Stewart is I generally like to say that anybody who works for corporate media, whether it be Comedy Central or anything owned by Time Warner, Fox, MSNBC, they can’t say what they want because in order to climb up in those organizations, you have to appease the narrative of the company that you’re working for to rise in the ranks. Jon Stewart I feel like has so much clout in the media world that I’m pretty sure he can say whatever he wants. I actually don’t think that Jon Stewart is controlled by anybody, I really don’t. I think that he can go on the show and talk about whatever.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:36)
I do think that certain people have broken the brains of, Covid broke the brains of a lot of really great people I admire. Trump broke the brains of a lot of people I admire to where Trump derangement syndrome became a thing, you can’t see the world quite as clearly because of it. And I think Jon Stewart is quite a genius at stepping away. Even though the world needed him in that time, stepping away during that moment of Trump and coming back now, being able to reflect being [inaudible 01:22:12] that elder statesman.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:22:13)
My favorite Jon Stewart moment that illustrates that perfectly is whenever he went on the Colbert show. And he was just joking around with Stephen Colbert, who I think is a full-blown propagandist, about the Wuhan Lab leak theory. He was just goofing around and he was like, ” It’s called the Coronavirus Lab and they had it before. And now what do we have?” And it was like you could see in Stephen Colbert that he was like gun to his head type shit where he is like, “Jon, Jon, stop joking about that.” And that made me realize, oh, everything that Jon Stewart did, especially for the 9/11 first responders, he’s a true American. And not in the sense that the different political parties want you to believe as an American, not a do your part in social distance American, not a wave your Trump flag in the back of your pickup truck American, just a guy who genuinely stands up for what’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:09)
There is a degree to which you can be in those positions easily captured by groupthink though, even when you’re not controlled by bosses and money and all that stuff. I think Jon Stewart has been mostly resistant, but it’s hard. His position is difficult.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:23:25)
I think he’s done the best job though. If someone in that obviously Democrat-connected corporate media economy, he seems to be the freest talker.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:34)
Yeah. So this is when you first became famous?

Fame

Andrew Callaghan
(01:23:38)
I’m not even sure what fame means. I mean, I just see myself as me.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:42)
When did you get the shades?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:23:43)
Oh, that was on tour. That’s a whole… The shades, that’s a dark time. I didn’t make-
Lex Fridman
(01:23:52)
This is a meme really. I don’t even know if that’s a symbol of fame or whatever.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:23:54)
I didn’t make journalism to become famous, I made it to give people a platform to share their stories. It just so happens that people liked it enough to where I became famous. But if I could go back and not be the on-camera guy and just platform the stories, I would. But the reality is people need a face to attach to stuff they like, and so that’s just how it is. But yeah, I would say right around Minneapolis protest, Portland protest, Proud Boys rally time when I was really in there is when I started to be acclaimed as more than just a ambush meme lord.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:28)
Did that have effect on you, the fame?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:24:31)
Not at that point.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:33)
Not at that point? So you were still able to have a lightness to you?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:24:37)
Well, the country was basically closed.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:39)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:24:39)
So it wasn’t like there was a street to walk down where people were like, “There’s that guy.” So getting famous during Covid made it. So when the country reopened, it was as if my life really changed because I was like, “Oh, all these fans I made during Covid are seeing me out at the bar. This is cool.”
Lex Fridman
(01:24:57)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:24:57)
At first, fame is the best thing ever because you can go anywhere in the country and these spaces that you normally feel a bit insecure in, like a local dive bar, a cool restaurant, a coffee shop where you just be another guy, all of a sudden they’re like, “Oh my God, I’m a big fan.” They give you free stuff. You get this sense of acceptance that you never would’ve gotten before, but there’s also-
Lex Fridman
(01:25:17)
The dark side. It’s all love, man. Just to speak to the first part you’re saying it’s just so much love that people have [inaudible 01:25:26].
Andrew Callaghan
(01:25:25)
It’s amazing. I’m sure you know what it’s like.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:27)
That’s beautiful.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:25:28)
The only downside of fame really is that you can’t really be anonymous again, and you have to seek out more strange environments to be anonymous in. Right now, I live in the desert basically, and I want to live in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave Desert. Not because I’m scared of people, but because I just want to be curious me again who people don’t know and I can ask questions to people that I’m interested in without them going, “I remember, I seen you here” or, “I seen you there.” That’s the main thing. That’s what I loved about hitchhiking.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:55)
Yeah, just to have an anonymity. For sure.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:25:58)
Yeah, it’s the best. But both are great. Complaining about fame is just the lamest shit.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:01)
Yeah. Did you go to furry conventions that you covered wearing an outfit?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:26:06)
I love furries. I should do that.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:08)
Yeah, we should go together. I go all the time, we should go together. What’s your favorite outfit?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:26:12)
You ever hopped into a furry convention?
Lex Fridman
(01:26:13)
No, I have not.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:26:14)
I think you might like it more than you think.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:18)
Listen, maybe I’m just afraid to face who I really am.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:26:23)
Yeah. Your fursona, the true Lex will come out when you’re in a $3,600 lizard suit.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:30)
Everything is possible. Lizard? Is that what they go with?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:26:31)
Well, scalies are the lizard furries. And there’s a big division in the community where they think scalies are douchebag because the scaly suits are more expensive. They’re about 7,000, whereas a fur suit is 3,600. And they’re also taller. So when the scalies pull up to the fur fest, it’s like, “Ah, fuck the reptiles.”
Lex Fridman
(01:26:49)
Fuck the reptiles, I can get behind that. I’m more like a teddy bear type of guy. I think bears, maybe squirrels. I don’t know.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:26:59)
Squirrels are so cool.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:00)
Giant squirrels, yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:27:00)
I want to put a GoPro on one and just see what the hell they do.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:04)
You were talking about that conversation with the guy at the head of Doing Things Media. How did that end up?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:27:12)
Well, I mean, I want to clear up a few things. Reid, the CEO of Doing Things, I actually think he’s a good guy. I think that he was just trying to run a business. He saw what was working for his brand, which is very college-centric, very festival-centric. And he was right to think that journalism and especially coverage of sensitive topics like Covid or police brutality would definitely not work on merch. You’re not going to sell a picture of me interviewing someone at a riot like you would me interviewing a furry or a drunk dude in Alabama, it doesn’t work the same. So it was a lot harder to monetize not just because of YouTube censorship, but also just because of the sensitive nature of the content. So Reid was looking out for himself as a businessman. There was a different partner, I’m not going to say his name, that was more connected in Hollywood. I think he’s responsible for the collapse of the show.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:03)
What was the collapse like? What happened?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:28:05)
So right as the country’s reopening, I get a DM from Eric Wareheim of Tim & Eric, and I’m covering something called the UFO Mega Conference in Laughlin Nevada, which is a beautiful river town. And he DMed me and says, “Let’s make a show.” And I’m like, “Oh shit, is this real?” I grew up such a big fan of Nathan for You and The Eric Andre show, and those are produced by their company, Abso Lutely. So I was like, “Hell yeah, let’s do it.” Three days later, I get a call that says, “Jonah Hill wants to hop on board”, and I can’t believe this. I’m still in the RV and I’m in Laughlin, Nevada. So I’m like, “Jonah Hill, Super Bad. Are you shitting me right now?” So I was excited. Oh, and Moneyball. Jonah Hill’s a great actor.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:51)
Oh, he is great. He’s great all around.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:28:51)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:51)
He doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Well, I mean, he’s got the credit by now, but still deserves more.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:28:56)
So basically just within a week, I assembled this super team of Tim and Eric.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:00)
Super Bad team?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:29:01)
Yeah, pretty much of Tim and Eric.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:02)
Sorry, I’m so sorry.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:29:05)
No, that’s good. And Jonah Hill. And yeah, we just pitched it around. Every single TV network rejected it, I don’t know why. And they mainly did that because I was in this weird situation where I had signed a contract with Doing Things Media that I didn’t realize was called a 360 deal. That’s what they use in the rap world. Basically means that I can’t do anything outside of them without them getting 100% of the money. So if I was to go work at Sbarro or Quiznos while I was working for All Gas No Brakes, they would get my $500 a week from the sandwich spot. I was unable to earn any outside income.

(01:29:45)
I didn’t read the fine print because I was 21 and, like I told you, 45,000 a year RV sounds sick. And basically, the TV networks were like, “Why would we buy a show if the digital brand’s going to be running at the same time?” Because they didn’t want to stop doing All Gas No Brakes to make a TV show, they wanted All Gas No Brakes to continue as a web show while All Gas No Brakes as a future TV show at Showtime or Hulu or somewhere like that was also concurrently running, which is impossible for one man to do. And so every TV network said, “Okay, we’re not doing that. We want an exclusive rights contract with this guy.” Next, oh yeah, this is crazy to think about because it all happened so fast. So Jonah Hill says, “A24 Films wants to do a movie instead of a show, and they’re going to let you keep the digital brand running.”

(01:30:34)
So this meant that I could keep doing my Instagram stuff with Doing Things Media/All Gas No Brakes while making an A24 movie with Jonah Hill and Tim and Eric. So it was just like I was excited, it sounded perfect. So they said, “Okay, what do you want to make a movie about?” And I told them, “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen in 2020. If Trump wins, there’s going to be riots across the country. The major cities are going to burn down. If Trump loses, the militias and his loyal supporters are going to try to have a coup in DC.” That’s what I said. And I said, “So I’m going to follow the lead up to whoever wins the election and I’m going to document what happens after.” So they said, “Okay.” And so I was to begin filming in late October during the campaign trail, maybe mid-October up until November, and then in the following months to see what would happen. This meant that I couldn’t film anything for All Gas No Brakes the digital show because I had to dedicate 100% of my time to making this perfect movie.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:39)
Yes.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:31:41)
Still, one of the partners at Doing Things Media was demanding that I not only produce the movie, but also more content for the show. And I told them, “There’s only so many hours in a day, man. That’s going to be impossible.” And I said, “If you want it to be possible, I can make it work, but I want to have half of the monetization from the show. 50% profit split”, which I thought is fair. If you want me to do double work when I was getting almost nothing before, split me in on the profits. They fired us immediately, me and my two childhood friends who I hired to work on the show with me were all out of a job. As we were filming for the Now HBO project, we got our fire notices.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:20)
The guts on that person, because you should be owning probably close to 100% of it.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:32:28)
I think so too, but they didn’t see it that way because they figured we made the initial investment. “We discovered him” is how they looked at it. So it wasn’t Reid, but it was the other partner who wasn’t Reid who said, verbatim he said this, “I have tons of connections in the comedy world. We can replace Andrew overnight.” I’m not sure why he made that miscalculation. I wish he would’ve thought about it twice, I wish it didn’t have to end like that, but it did.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:56)
Why do people do that? What’s the benefit of acting like that? Because you can part amicably without the drama.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:33:04)
I think all betrayal in anything like that is motivated by self-interest, whether that be economic success, social stability, whatever it is. They figured that because I was being such a burden in asking for the profit that they could just release me and find someone equally talented and not split them in so they can make more money.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:23)
Oh, I see. Well, that’s a stupid way to think.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:33:27)
People think like that, man. The word I use is sidekick syndrome. When people are a part of the production, but they’re not integral, they start thinking that the front man doesn’t matter or something, and that the brains of the operation are actually the people on the periphery. And so they start to believe that they can just shift things around and the audience won’t care, not realizing that I was actually the one who created the show and that the lore of the show is connected to my rise outside of their jurisdiction, if that makes sense. The people who watch All Gas No Brake watched Quarter Confessions and read the book.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:05)
Well, this happens also not just financially, but just with people that part of a team, but they don’t really contribute creatively to the team and they force their opinion or pressure. Whether this comes from editors or all that stuff or from sponsors, there’s pressure they create when the creator alone should be celebrated and have all the power because they’re the ones that are creating the thing.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:34:34)
In a way, I have sympathy because I can’t relate to that because I’ve always been the front man of my own projects by design. So I’m not sure what it’s like to be someone’s owner from a content perspective. I don’t understand the challenges they face. Maybe there was something that I didn’t understand, I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:51)
True. Well, oftentimes if you own a thing like this, like this company, you do think about brand and then maybe have a big picture idea of what brand means. And that can be at tension with the creative project, right?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:35:09)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:10)
But ultimately, freedom for the creators is the best brand.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:35:16)
Yeah. I remember all three of us who worked on All Gas No Brakes got fired at the same time. And we were in the RV that Tim and Eric’s company bought for us, which was a bigger RV in the parking lot of a Walmart in South Philly. And the propane had just ran out and it was 15 degrees outside, so the RV was getting really cold really fast. And I just looked at my phone and it was like, “You’re fired”, and I was just like, “God, help me.” I’ve had a couple moments like that and God does help me.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:45)
And they were always in the parking lot of Walmart, right?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:35:49)
Well, yeah. Although-
Lex Fridman
(01:35:51)
I know that Walmart, by the way.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:35:52)
The one in South Philly is great.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:53)
Yeah, that’s great.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:35:54)
But technically now, you can’t park an RV there.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:57)
Well, you’re not a man who follows the rules, if you know what I’m saying.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:36:01)
Well, the thing is though, Walmart, Cracker Barrel and Big 5 are supposed to technically all let RV campers park overnight. But if there’s a crime problem in the city where they’re at, individual Walmarts can lobby with the corporate to take that away. So all the Portland Walmarts, you can’t sleep there anymore. Any city with significant homelessness and petty property crime, the Walmarts are a no-go.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:22)
Fascinating. So that was a low point.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:36:25)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:28)
But from there, from the ashes, the phoenix rose.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:36:32)
Over time, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:33)
Channel 5 was born.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:36:35)
Channel 5 was born in the March of 2021 after we finished filming for the HBO Project.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:42)
Oh, really? So you went all in on the HBO project [inaudible 01:36:45]?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:36:45)
Yeah. I mean, we filmed the HBO project from November, 2020 up until April, 2021, damn near. We were just picking up the pieces, going back for individual interviews, stuff like that.

Jan 6

Lex Fridman
(01:36:55)
So let’s go to that project. It turned out to be a movie called This Place Rules.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:37:00)
It was supposed to be called America Shits Itself.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:02)
Yeah. Maybe you can tell the story of the film. You have, what’s his name? I wrote this down. Joker Gang and Gum Gang, is that correct?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:37:09)
Yeah, the opening scene.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:10)
The opening scene of two characters just talking shit and then getting into a fight. And that I think was really brilliant how you presented that as almost like a microcosm of the division between the extremes of the left and the extremes of the right.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:37:27)
That’s exactly what it was. I’m glad you picked up on it.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:29)
Yeah. And then what I really liked is that the joke, again, Joker Gang was, a little bit of a spoiler alert, I apologize, but at the end of the film was a voice of wisdom.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:37:44)
Yeah. I just realized-
Lex Fridman
(01:37:46)
He seems the most sane.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:37:47)
He was the voice of wisdom. He cut through it.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:50)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:37:50)
I also just realized that a lot of people are going to stream the movie after watching this podcast, which is cool.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:55)
Yeah. Where do they stream it? On HBO Max, right?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:37:58)
Yeah, HBO Max. I never got a chance to promote them.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:00)
It’s such a pain in the ass, man. I wish we could all just pay on it on YouTube or something. And HBO gets the profits or whatever, but it’s such… You have to subscribe for every single thing. But yes, if you want to watch it, it’s really, I recommend extremely, highly… Sign up to HBO, whatever the hell.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:38:16)
On the positive note, HBO is great to work with. They’re the most professional, respectful company I’ve ever worked with, pretty much.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:24)
Yeah, HBO has created some of the greatest TV ever.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:38:27)
But even in the background, they get shit done. There’s no wait time. They have some of the best heavy hitters on their team. For trailers, for posters, all the promotional apparatus they have is super solid.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:38)
Did you get good notes from people there, like how to-
Andrew Callaghan
(01:38:41)
A little bit, man, but-
Lex Fridman
(01:38:42)
It’s a truly original documentary, meaning I just haven’t seen anything like it. So there’s a humor and a lightness at the right moments. Like I said, there’s a rooster in your… That’s like, okay, that’s like a non sequitur thing as part of a storytelling. It intensifies and reveals the absurdity of the division and how ones like January 6th happens, everybody goes onto the next thing. It’s like, what happened to us? It was almost like a delirium that everybody was participating in. Some weird, just like, well, like people say, mind virus. All of a sudden, we just got captured and people were just yelling at each other and doing the most ridiculous shit. And I mean, really, January 6th, the way you presented especially just reveals the circus of it all.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:39:34)
I mean, it really broke the fourth wall. That’s how I would describe it because if you were at January 6th and the lead up, it felt like it was the beginning to a series of similar riots. But it just popped off so much that that was it, that you haven’t seen anything like it since. There was supposed to be a second one on January 20th, it was the actual inauguration. It never happened. It was a crazy time to be alive and around, and especially the relationship that I developed with Enrique Tarrio, who’s the former chairman of The Proud Boys.

(01:40:03)
He’s now facing 23 years in prison. It’s like a trip because I went to his house in Miami maybe two weeks after January 6th. And talking to him, it seemed like he didn’t think anything was going to happen. He was just like, “Yeah, man, that was crazy. I’m glad I wasn’t there. They’re dumb for doing that.” He even told me he doesn’t think the election was stolen, which is just a mindfuck. It’s like, why’d you get everyone so hyped up? It’s just weird to think about how so many people’s lives are drastically altered forever because of that just bizarre moment in time that will always live on.

QAnon

Lex Fridman
(01:40:38)
Yeah. QAnon is part of that story, what’d you learn about QAnon from that?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:40:45)
Just an all encompassing worldview. That family that I talked to, I call them the QAnon family, but it’s called the Spencer family. They were non-political up until the Stop the Steal movement began in September of 2020. And within four months, their entire life revolved around the mythology and lore of Q. And I’ve never seen in my life a psyop just devour people’s minds in such an intense way, in such a rapid period of time.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:12)
And I love how the kids in the movie are also the voices of wisdom. The Spencer family, it’s the kid who goes through the full journey of believing that whatever, Hillary Clinton is a lizard, and just believing all the worst versions of the conspiracy theories. And then waking up was like, what was the point? [inaudible 01:41:34].
Andrew Callaghan
(01:41:33)
Yeah. It was heartbreaking to see his disappointment in his dad for even following QAnon so militantly because he was like, “I felt like they let my dad down. I felt like they let our family down” because January 6th was supposed to be the day, according to QAnon, that the storm happens and that the military is supposed to mobilize and arrest the members of the deep state, Clinton, Soros, all that. Trump was supposed to go into a helicopter, you know what I mean? And take control of the country back from the swamp, and it didn’t happen. In fact, the next day, he was almost denouncing it. Now he doesn’t, but then he did. And I think it hurt people’s pride a lot. My friend, Forgiato Blow, he’s a Trump rapper, he describes it that way. He says, “A lot of people’s pride got hurt by January 6th.”
Lex Fridman
(01:42:20)
Trump rapper?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:42:21)
Oh, yeah, dude. Honestly, there’s some pretty dope Trump rap out there. I’m serious.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:27)
MAGA rap?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:42:29)
Yeah. You would think like, “Oh, yeah. MAGA, there’s no rappers there”, but there’s rappers. And they do a pretty good job.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:34)
They’re good?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:42:35)
At delivering the messaging they want to deliver, yeah. I mean, they think of stuff and I’m like, “That’s clever.”
Lex Fridman
(01:42:40)
Oh, they have some political depth to them?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:42:43)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:43)
Wow. I mean, is there something more you could say about how QAnon works? Who’s behind it? What’s your sense of who’s behind the whole thing?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:42:55)
I don’t want this to sound rude or anything, I just don’t care about QAnon. You know what I mean? I’ve put so much thought into it and I just can’t seem to care about it.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:12)
Was it almost a disappointment? Because to me, it was like a thing that just captured a very large number of people’s minds, and then it just faded.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:43:22)
I guess that’s why. It just seems like it’s gone, and the ideas of QAnon have just bled into mainstream standard conservative thinking.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:31)
But there has to be a retrospective. That’s the problem I have with Covid. A lot of stuff happened, everybody freaked out. There’s a lot of big drama around it. And now, everyone was like, “Okay, forgot.” Just moved away. What are the lessons learned? Has anyone learned any lessons?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:43:46)
Yeah, exactly. And what I’m saying is I don’t want QAnon adherents to see this and think I don’t care about them, but as far as who is behind it, the damage is done.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:57)
Yeah, but what are the mechanisms that made it work? I mean, that’s a really-
Andrew Callaghan
(01:44:00)
What do you think? Have you thought about that?
Lex Fridman
(01:44:04)
I think that these viral ideas can be driven by, and your film shows this, by just a handful of people. And they’re not malevolent, they just want the clout. And there’s something sexy, there’s something really sticky about conspiracy theories, especially extreme ones. Some of them can have this momentum. They capture the minds of a lot of people and you just go with it. And when I hear some conspiracy theories, there’s something like a small part of me that like, yeah, like excited.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:44:37)
It’s possible that QAnon is a psyop to distract people away from actually uncovering what the deep state is and who is truly running things behind the scenes because the deep state is just the 1%. It’s that you get people so close to any type of class consciousness, and then you totally divert everything into lizard humans who live on the moon and that Hillary Clinton is…
Andrew Callaghan
(01:45:00)
… lizard humans who live on the moon and that Hillary Clinton is eating babies on camera, and QAnon did just that. They want to convince you that, one, there’s no conservative deep state, which is even more hilarious, that Trump isn’t connected to a huge, rich corporate apparatus of propagandists. And two, that the Democratic establishment is the only deep state and that some middle-of-the-road conservatives, that there’s no grifters or manipulators outside of that three-headed snake.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:31)
There’s grifters everywhere.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:45:33)
Everywhere. Everyone wants to make money, dude. This is the world that we’re in. It’s in collapse. Everybody wants to make money, and engagement is the rule of law. That’s why these news organizations follow retention incentives. They want to make money by selling ads, so they try to create fear and constant division to enrich the corporate media establishment. And you have people who are almost realizing, “Hey, it seems like Fox and CNN might be owned by the same people and are tactically using these machines to keep us divided perfectly 50-50 to ensure that the power structure never gets disrupted.” And then, you get these people, “You know who’s going to save us? Donald Trump.” That’s the guy? How is that the guy? It’s not the guy, and I don’t have TDS. I’m not an orange man basher who thinks about the guy all the time, but I don’t think he’s the guy.

Alex Jones

Lex Fridman
(01:46:24)
You were shirtless, lifting weights while whiskey or some alcohol was poured into your mouth by Alex Jones in this movie, and then you did the same to him.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:46:36)
That’s true.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:38)
This feels like an interrogation. So Alex was a part of this film. He was throughout the narrative, and yes, you had a great interview with him. What did you learn about interacting with Alex Jones from making this film?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:46:54)
For one is that he’s the exact same off-camera as he is on camera.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:58)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:46:58)
It’s not an act. He told me that all real Americans die before 58. He mentioned Sean Connery and a few others, and…
Lex Fridman
(01:47:08)
How old is he?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:47:09)
Getting up there.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:10)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:47:11)
I think early 50s.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:12)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:47:13)
I just found it fascinating, how nice his studio is. The guy’s got like an MSNBC-level setup. I actually had a great time with him, you know? It’s bizarre because having him in that movie created so many problems for me, and when I interviewed him, I didn’t necessarily portray him in the best light. We joked around a bit, but it wasn’t an Alex Jones hit piece necessarily. But I like to think that I was a bit critical of him in the film, especially the ways that he antagonized his supporters to storm the Capitol or to follow that trajectory.

(01:47:49)
He told me when I met with him, he was like, “I know you think that having me in this movie is a good idea, but you’re going to have some serious backlash because of that.” At the time, I was like, “Man, it’s fine. It’s all good. We’re just hanging out, drinking whiskey, doing bench presses, drinking Jameson. It’s all good.” First of all, I had to campaign to get him in the film because the studios were like, “We don’t…” There was a bizarre time around… I think it was 2018, where deplatforming was the big thing that people were encouraging. It said giving a platform to problematic ideologies will, in turn, expand their reach. And so even extending your platform to someone who’s problematic is helping them, aka destroying humanity, whatever it was. So that was the whole thing.

(01:48:35)
And when I did this media training that was mandated by HBO, it was all training in how to defend from that exact question. They said, “When we put you on NPR, when we put you on CNN, they’re going to ask you about platforming problematic ideologies, and you’re going to have to say stuff like, ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I believe that extremism only goes away when you shine a light on it because leaving it in the dark will only allow it to grow.'” They gave me like 15 pointers. I didn’t use any of those pointers because I’m not the kind of person who wants to be media-trained. I like to speak freely.

(01:49:15)
But in the promotional run for the film, when I went on CNN, this was a crazy experience. So I went on CNN and thankfully, my friend was with me, and so I’m on CNN, and-
Lex Fridman
(01:49:27)
By the way, your friend is chilling in sunglasses, laying in the cocktail.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:49:31)
That’s Larry [inaudible 01:49:32].
Lex Fridman
(01:49:34)
It’s a mix of the dude from Big Lebowski and the Brad Pitt role in True Romance, you know that reference?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:49:45)
No, I’m sure it describes Larry. He kind of looks like Brad Pitt.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:49)
[inaudible 01:49:49] Yes.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:49:51)
So HBO had a press tour set up for me, and the main ones were CNN and NPR. And so they said, “You’re going to go on CNN on the Don Lemon morning show, and he’s going to ask you about your life, what led up to the movie, what we can expect?” So I get in the studio, it’s about seven o’clock in the morning in New York. Had a show the night before at Times Square. So I’m groggy eyed, whatever. They put the lab on me, boom. I’m live on CNN, Sunday morning. And he goes, “How would you describe Enrique Tarrio’s mental state in the lead-up to the Capitol insurrection?” And I’m looking around, I’m like, “Is this guy serious? Am I sandwiched in the January 6th hit piece right now? I thought it was about me.” And so I told him, “It’s not about Enrique Tarrio. It’s about how companies like Fox, MSNBC, and even your station, CNN, use the 24-hour news cycle to enrage people to generate ad revenue and pit Americans against each other during times like that.”

(01:50:44)
And he said, “There’s nothing fake about CNN.” I said, “I didn’t say you were fake news. I’m not saying you’re lying, but you’re directly antagonizing and stirring people up against half the country because you need money to support a dying platform.”
Lex Fridman
(01:50:58)
You said that?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:50:59)
Pretty much.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:59)
Nice. Great.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:51:02)
And my mom was watching it. She was texting me. She was like, “What are you doing?” And I was like, “I don’t know.” And so he goes, “Why did you extend the platform to Alex Jones?” I go, “I don’t know. I just wanted to drink some Jameson and lift some weights with him.” At this point, I don’t support that kind of media. I don’t support CNN, so I didn’t give them much information about Alex, but it was very awkward. They never posted the segment online. When I got off of that interview, I had a handler that A24 assigned to me. So I had someone with me and you could tell she was flustered, she was furious about what I just did. And so she goes, “I just got an email from Time Warner C-Suite.” And I go, “What’s Time Warner C-Suite?” She says, “I don’t know if you know this, but the same people who own CNN own HBO, and it’s Time Warner.” And so they canceled my press tour.

(01:51:55)
So my press tour was finished. All the late night shows that I was supposed to go on, I was supposed to go on the late night shows, and that was off the table because they were worried that I was a loose cannon, I think. And then, the only remaining appearance I had left was NPR in Boston, and that was supposed to be a premiere. So it wasn’t supposed to be an interrogation. It wasn’t supposed to be anything like that. Supposed to be a premiere in front of a live audience where they watched the film and I show up after for a Q&A. So I’m like, “All right, whatever. It’s weird, they only have this one press opportunity left.” I felt bad that I ruined the entire press tour by confronting Don Lemon, but at this point, I wanted to just do this final one, especially because it was a viewing, and I was like, “Cool.”

(01:52:38)
I sat in the audience, I watched people laugh to the film. It was awesome. So I go backstage and there’s an NPR journalist waiting for me. And nothing against people who wear masks, but she had two N95s on. Two N95s is-
Lex Fridman
(01:52:51)
It’s a lot.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:52:53)
It’s over the line. So I go, “Hey, great to meet you.” She doesn’t shake my hand and I go, “Why not?” And she goes, “You’ve been around some people who I don’t want their germs.” And I’m like, “Okay, okay, this is weird. I thought this is a fun premiere for my movie.” We sit down. The first thing she asks me is, “How do you think the Sandy Hook families would feel about you platforming one of the most despicable Americans in history, Alex Jones?” In front of a live audience. NPR never published this. The only recordings of it are by a fan named Rob in Boston who put it on YouTube. It’s vertical phone footage.

(01:53:36)
And I literally am like, “Well, the Sandy Hook family’s lawyer, Mark Bankston, who represented them in court in Connecticut, told me specifically that Leonard Posner, the father of Noah Posner who died at Sandy Hook, was a huge fan of the film.” And so I said that to her and that just silenced that conversation, but the whole conversation was just about exploitation and, “Why are you platforming mentally ill people and giving a platform to conspiracies like QAnon? Don’t you feel like you’re a part of their spread? Some would call you a misinformation reporter,” all this crazy stuff. And yeah, next day hit the fan.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:13)
Fuck all those people. That film, just in case you don’t get a chance to see it, you should, you were critical of Alex Jones in the most artful way. It was the correct way to be critical. It showed him to be more interested in the grift of it. And you didn’t do it in a pointing fingers and saying in the NPR way that you just mentioned, but more like a human way. This is, tragedies happen all over the world and there’s grifters that roll in and then take advantage of it in interesting ways, and then human beings get swept up on either side of it, and it’s revealing the humor, the absurdity of it all, and it was done masterfully. For people who criticize you for platforming Alex Jones or whatever, the film, from a political perspective, probably leans very much left, heavily left, but does it without that exhausting energy of judging, two masks judging?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:55:27)
When all that was happening, when I was under fire from the mainstream press for platforming Alex Jones, I thought back to what he said to me. And doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says, but he told me, “You’re going to be in trouble with these people if you put me in your video.” And yeah, it wasn’t too bad of trouble, but definitely, I do think sometimes what the film would’ve been like without him. And I think that it was worth it because his scene is so funny to me and it brings me back to a different time in my life and I’m happy that scene’s out there.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:57)
I think it was really well done.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:55:59)
Thanks, man.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:59)
It showed the layering of it all, the entertainment plus not considering from his perspective the consequences of riling people up in this way, that it’s not just… You really highlight this in the interview. He keeps saying it’s infowars, but then there’s always a sense that infowars can turn to actual civil war, but maybe not. Maybe it’s all just a circus we play for each other.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:56:25)
If you look at the speech he did on January 5th, he said, “Tomorrow, millions of patriotic Americans will take our country back.” He eggs people on and then when it gets hot, he steps away.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:39)
But like you said, the thing he told you, he turned out to be right.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:56:43)
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:43)
And the frogs are becoming gay.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:56:46)
They’ve always been gay.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:49)
Well-
Andrew Callaghan
(01:56:50)
Saying frogs are straight is even crazier.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:52)
I’ve read stories where you kiss one and becomes a prince.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:56:55)
Yeah, that shit’s true.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:56)
100%. You think Alex believes what he says in terms of everything he says on infowars, how much of it is real?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:57:05)
He’s right about big tech censorship. I think if he’s right about anything, it would probably be the heads of big tech colluding together across company lines to deplatform certain people. He’s right about that. I think most of the things that he says follow the question everything narrative, and then everything is like a conspiracy or a plot or a false flag. I think that he’s built up a following for so long that wants him to do that. So I think he’ll question things that he probably thinks are relatively straightforward because that’s the shtick of the show. The infowar is fighting misinformation and people want to see him be that guy. To a certain extent, if you’re a creator who supports your family, you do follow economic incentives and people want you to be the character, and so you’re going to naturally gravitate toward being it.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:54)
Do you feel that pressure yourself?
Andrew Callaghan
(01:57:56)
I did years ago, not anymore. I feel like now I can speak freely and really say what I want to say in my new life, but when I was younger, I felt like I had to be this awkward, amicable, aloof guy who just didn’t think anything about anything and just was here to listen. But now I feel more confident adding some narrative and voiceover and things like that.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:18)
So for some people, especially who publish on YouTube, the YouTube algorithm, they can become a slave to the YouTube algorithm.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:58:25)
Yeah, for sure. And I definitely feel that sometimes. I know what works for me, but I like to think that my audience appreciates when I try new things, so I’m not totally enslaved to it.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:37)
Yeah, I try not to pay attention to views or any of that.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:58:40)
Well, you get some high views, so I’ll report that for you.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:45)
So I wrote a Chrome extension that hides all the views on anything I create.
Andrew Callaghan
(01:58:48)
So you took it to that level?
Lex Fridman
(01:58:50)
Yeah, just because it’s a drug, man. And I’m also a number guy, meaning if I do 30 pushups today, tomorrow I’m going to try to do 35, just enjoying number go up. That’s why I like video games like RPGs, where you’re improving your skill tree, you’re getting an extra point, and there’s some aspect of YouTube and other platforms, anything, any other platform. You’re like, “Ooh, I got more today than I got yesterday.” That’s really, really dangerous to me because it can influence how much I enjoy a thing. If nobody gives a shit about it based on the numbers, you’re like, “Oh, maybe that wasn’t such a great experience. I thought it was a great experience, but maybe it wasn’t.”
Andrew Callaghan
(01:59:33)
Yeah, honestly, I do actually feel that way sometimes. I’ll put out something that I care about a lot, but if it doesn’t get as many views, I’m like, “All right, it must have not been as good as my higher review videos or whatever.”
Lex Fridman
(01:59:47)
That’s just not true though. It might mean on YouTube that your thumbnail sucks or something like this, or whatever, however the algorithm works. But that’s the thing I’m battling against to make sure I ignore all of that.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:00:03)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:04)
It’s actually something Joe Rogan has been extremely good at. He gives zero shits.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:00:10)
I think it’s easier to do when you’re really successful.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:12)
Well, he was doing that when he wasn’t successful.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:00:14)
Really?
Lex Fridman
(02:00:14)
But anything. He just follows the stuff he enjoys doing and legitimately enjoys it. He happens to be really good at it, but he gets good because he’s doing the things he really enjoys and full-on passionate about, and that’s why he’ll have ridiculous guests and just shit he enjoys doing.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:00:33)
Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Maybe I’ll one day try to do that. For now, I’m too attached to the gratification of getting a million views in a day and stuff like that. I’m not going to lie to you and say that I’ve beat that or something.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:43)
Well, it’s a worthy enemy to be fighting because it’s a drug and it’s one that should be resisted for a creator. Because I feel like it can do negative stuff to your mind as a creator.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:00:55)
Oh yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:56)
Anybody that controls you is not good.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:01:00)
A lot of people are controlled by their audience. They don’t have to have a puppet master on a corporate level. Audience incentive is a different type of… I don’t want to say slavery, but-
Lex Fridman
(02:01:11)
Yeah, it is. And that’s why variety is good, and you’re doing that, always expanding. Well, let me just zoom out on this. You made a film.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:01:20)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:21)
That’s pretty cool.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:01:23)
Yeah, it was a great experience, man. It was awesome working with Tim and Eric. Awesome working with Jonah Hill. I feel the same about HBO and A24. Everybody that I worked on the film with, I have a lot of love for and I appreciate the experience. It’s my first movie. It’s a big deal.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:36)
It was a good one.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:01:37)
In my head, it’s like I finally got to make the transition from YouTuber to filmmaker, and that was always this psychic barrier that I felt like I had to jump over.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:48)
Just the way it’s shot, the humor that goes throughout it, just the narration that you’re doing in a shitty director’s chair, that was really well done. Whose idea was that?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:02:01)
It was actually Tim and Eric’s idea. There was a really great editor named Clay who works for Absolutely, and they did all the editing pretty much in the office. And so it was Clay’s idea to add a retrospective director’s chair narrative arc to the whole film.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:14)
Just starting with the absurd fight and then going like, “Oh, that’s a good way to start the movie.” Just really, really well done.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:02:20)
Thanks, man.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:23)
Well, what about Jonah Hill?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:02:24)
Great guy.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:25)
He believed in this.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:02:27)
He did.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:29)
What’s that like? What do you think is behind him believing in such a wild project?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:02:33)
I think that Jonah Hill has a good eye for what’s cool amongst the younger folks. He’s into skateboarding stuff. That’s why he did that film, Mid90s. I think he probably saw a similar thing in what was going on with All Gas No Breaks and was like, “Shit, this could be big.” And so not only did he actually fund the film, he also gave me his agent. And I forgot to mention that it was Jonah Hill’s lawyers that he gave me for free that got me out of my contract eventually with Doing Things Media or freed me up to speak about what happened.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:03)
So he was also part of you gaining your freedom?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:03:06)
Yeah, in a weird way, even though him and I don’t talk that much just because he’s doing his own thing, Jonah Hill is a huge factor in my current success and just everything that I’ve been able to accomplish.

Politics

Lex Fridman
(02:03:17)
Just on your own politics, is it fair to say that your politics leans left?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:03:24)
I’m not really sure sometimes. I like to think that I am socially left. I think people should be able to dress and act however they want. I don’t believe in restricting people’s social freedoms. Economics-wise, it doesn’t seem like leftist economic policy works very well on a city funding level. Like if you see what’s going on in California, it seems like the city leadership is mishandling the funds in California too. So I don’t know about that, but… I don’t know. I don’t really see myself as left or right. I just never have.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:58)
Well, if you just objectively zoom out and don’t have an insane standard of the extremes, it feels like a lot of your work leans left.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:04:08)
I tend to lean toward the empathetic perspective, which I do think is more on the left than the right. But also, I’m not into super PC stuff. I don’t believe in limiting free speech either. I believe in a free internet, which I think is more embraced now by conservatives.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:33)
But it does seem that… Maybe you can correct me, but I get a sense sometimes that the left attack their own very intensely.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:04:42)
It does happen, but every community has terms of exile. Think about what happens in the conservative realm, like when Black Rifle Coffee Company denounced Kyle Rittenhouse. They lost a lot of money, too. The right attacks its own, too. Think about Bud Light and stuff like that.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:01)
[inaudible 02:05:01].
Andrew Callaghan
(02:05:01)
Every community has terms of exile. You just got to know who you’re engaging with and you got to make that decision carefully.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:10)
It’d be nice if there’s an actual write-up of the things you’re not allowed to say for each thing. And then, I wonder whose list would be longer? It just does feel like the left’s list is a little longer.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:05:19)
Right. If you’re a conservative and you have a T-shirt with a demon on it, say goodbye. You know what I mean? There’s certain stuff that they freak the hell out about.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:30)
And conservatives are really concerned about pedophiles.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:05:35)
Yeah, I don’t like pedophiles either, but I don’t think about it all the time.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:39)
It’s one of the things you do in the film is confront one of the QAnon folks, where his concern is that everybody’s a pedophile and you showed to him-
Andrew Callaghan
(02:05:48)
Well, he calls himself a pedophile hunter and makes videos exposing Democratic elite pedophile cabals, and he’s himself a convicted child molester. There’s an old thing that people say that every accusation is a confession to a certain extent. So it’s bizarre that some people’s whole life after a big mistake will revolve around trying to seem like the good guy instead of taking accountability for themselves. It’s a common thing you see all the time. Like Neighborhood Watch people, you know what I mean? What made you that? What did you do, bro? That you feel like you have to get karmic retribution by doing the reverse? I don’t get it.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:25)
Yeah. Do you think to the degree you have bias, it affects your journalism?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:06:30)
No, but with the migrant situation, I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:35)
What was that covering that like?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:06:37)
I just got a lot of hate from conservatives for letting the migrants tell their stories about their journey and stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:43)
What did you learn from just going to the border?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:06:47)
just the sheer desperation that the citizens of the world are in. There’s people who truly believe that America is the only hope for their success and to feed their family, and I think a lot of them are getting catfished.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:01)
Meaning America has its problems too?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:07:03)
It has severe problems. There’s extreme poverty here.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:07)
But in America, if you just compare to other nations, the level of corruption is much lower to where the opportunity for a person to succeed, to rise is higher.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:07:18)
I wish success on everybody who comes here, but my thing is the expectation that they have and the American dream propaganda they’ve been installed with isn’t necessarily a reflection of contemporary American reality. So I’m talking to people who speak no English and say, “I’m here for a better life.” I go, “Where are you going to go?” They say, “I have no idea.” And I’m like, “Man, that’s tough.” And you almost think, how bad are things elsewhere for someone to abandon their family, make this journey across multiple continents and end up here with no plan? And it just made me realize how sheltered I am to a certain extent as an American.

(02:07:55)
And walking back what I said a little bit, because I was just trying to make a point, but what I think of as bad poverty, let’s say West Baltimore or 9th Ward, New Orleans is nothing compared to what’s going on in almost half of the world, if not more. And so it just made me zoom out a little bit, and sometimes you forget about third world poverty when you live here for so long. And you get programmed to believe the worst things that are out there is like Kensington, Philadelphia or Tenderloin, San Francisco, but those are just microcosms of more or less functioning cities. Despite what they might lead you to believe, Philadelphia is a great place. So is San Francisco, but there’s places where everywhere is really run down.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:39)
People focus on in major cities in the United States, like homelessness, somehow that’s a sign of a fallen empire.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:08:47)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:47)
But that’s a problem. It reveals some mismanagement of cities and government [inaudible 02:08:55].
Andrew Callaghan
(02:08:54)
Homelessness in Seattle and San Francisco is for sure a result of the housing crisis, especially post- COVID and all the gentrification that preceded it. And it’s unfortunate now that the conservative media is saying, “Look at Biden’s America,” as if Biden created homeless people. And it’s just disappointing because once again, you’re seeing the media use real issues that should concern every US citizen and causing people to point fingers at a different political party as responsible for the suffering of others.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:30)
Do you think January 6th can happen again?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:09:33)
No. I don’t think so.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:35)
So all the lessons were learned?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:09:37)
Yeah, for sure. People got really screwed over.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:42)
Don’t you have a sense that there’s a greater and greater growing questioning of the electoral process and all this kind of stuff?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:09:50)
I think that Americans overall are very comfortable with our standard of living. I think people like going to Sonic and waiting in their car and getting milkshakes, and people like going to the AMC theaters and they like going ice skating and mini golfing and going to the bar after work. I don’t think that anyone wants a collapse of the basic structure of the country. Even the most politically divided don’t want to see 7-Eleven go away. We are so comfortable.

(02:10:14)
If you look at other countries, even Europe, look at how they protest. And look at the Arab Spring. Those guys were talking like January 6ers, and they actually took control of the government. Think about even if the MAGA crowd took over the Capitol building, it’s just a building. I don’t know. I just think that Americans, they talk about civil war stuff, we’re so far from that. Even if the rhetoric is as divided as it was in 2020, it won’t happen again.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:45)
For it to really happen, there has to be a level of desperation.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:10:49)
There has to be a level of economic desperation that’s causing people to starve or some basic resource going away, water, something like that.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:59)
Who do you think wins, Trump or Biden?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:11:02)
In the civil war? Well, we know who has the guns.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:05)
No, in a game of Mario Kart? No, in the election 2024.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:11:10)
Oh. Man, I have no idea, man. I don’t even know if I’m going to vote.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:13)
It’s weird that this is our choice.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:11:15)
I know. I wish people were more focused on city politics. I’d rather vote yes or no for a bike lane in my neighborhood than I would for the president.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:24)
So local politics to you is where it is. And you feel [inaudible 02:11:26].
Andrew Callaghan
(02:11:26)
Oh, your vote actually matters. Let’s say you have a community of 500 people and you live in Henderson, Nevada. You can influence whether or not there’s a bike lane or if this is going to be a playground or an AMPM. You get to choose and you can influence 100 people to choose and boom, this is your community. You can’t influence the result of an election.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:47)
Still, those at the presidential level, it sets the tone of the country. And Trump running again and Biden running again, it just feels like there’s going to be a lot of questioning of election results.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:12:03)
I just can’t believe those are our guys.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:04)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:12:06)
That’s really our guys? That’s where we’re at? All these smart people we have in this country, the great history.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:13)
We got Joker Gang versus Gum Gang. Where’d you find Joker Gang?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:12:20)
Well-
Lex Fridman
(02:12:20)
Is he a legit juggler or is he just-
Andrew Callaghan
(02:12:22)
No, no, no, no. Joker Gang is like a Miami Cuban guy.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:26)
Oh.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:12:26)
Is Joker 305 rawest Chico alive? I had been following him for a long time on Instagram because he used to post videos of himself popping Percocets and smoking blunts on the toilet freestyling. So I had followed him for a while. And then I finally got this platform and I said, “Oh my God, I bet you now that we have a million followers, Joker Gang will sit down with us.” And lo and behold, the clout did its thing and there I was, face to face with the man.

Response to allegations

Lex Fridman
(02:12:53)
There was a controversy a year ago where a woman came forward and said that you were pushy with her. You respected to know, you got the consent, but you were pushy about it. Looking back, can you tell the story of that? What are the lessons you learned from it?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:13:08)
Yeah, I’ve yet to speak on this for a lot of reasons. Mostly because it was a hard time and it’s a sensitive subject. And I’ve wanted to prioritize the reporting, but I think that now I’m ready and able to do so. Everything started on December 30th, 2022, and that was the release date of the HBO project. Like I told you, we didn’t know when the movie was going to come out. We weren’t told that it was going to come out on that date until early November. And so it was like, “Oh my God, here we go. We got a movie coming out.” I didn’t even know it was going to be them.

(02:13:42)
So every day for those 50 days to where I received word and to the movie announcement or to the movie release was like, I was like a kid waiting for Christmas morning. You know what I mean? Every day I saw the movie release date as the first day of the rest of my life. And so I remember the week of the movie release, it was like every day I was like, “Oh my God. Six days, five days, four days.” And when it became two days, I was so excited and so, honestly, anxiety riddled because it was such a massive platform that I went out to the desert by myself out in the Mojave, got a hotel and just sat there.

(02:14:23)
And then, movie release day comes. It was supposed to come out at 8:00 PM Pacific standard time. I remember it was like 12 hours left, 10 hours left. And then, eight minutes before the movie at 7:52, or I guess it was sent at 10:52 East Coast time, I got a text message requesting a portion of my fat HBO check to contribute toward apparently years of therapy bills that this person had accrued after she says that she felt that I pressured her into giving consent years prior. And I was confused, not only because of the timing, but because this is someone that I hadn’t seen in years or spoken to in years and I presumed that I was on good terms with. So I didn’t respond to the text message. And then, when I didn’t respond, about seven days later, this person made some TikTok videos and with the help of some friends launched an online campaign that got picked up by the press pretty quickly.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:21)
So what did you feel like when you got that text?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:15:24)
Well, it’s tough because on one hand, I’m not opposed to restitution being part of a private accountability process for real abuse. If you’ve hurt someone to an extent that it took them out of work or something, I think they’re entitled to some money. But unfortunately, as I later learned, this person had legal counsel, and this was an attempt to basically create evidence by extracting a confession from me to use as precedent for a civil lawsuit to the tune of a couple of million dollars.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:56)
It’s dark.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:15:58)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:00)
How did you meet this person?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:16:01)
Well, I met them when I was 22. Like I told you, I was living in an RV, making this show called All Gas No Breaks. And I would travel between cities every other day. And so I would basically pick a new city, and I got in this pretty bad habit of what I would say is essentially treating Instagram like a dating app. I would go to a new place, I’d post my location, I’d surf the DMs, and I would look for fans to meet up with. It wasn’t always girls, it was just people to party with because I was also partying every night, but a lot of times ended up being girls and stuff. And so that’s how this situation was.

(02:16:38)
I didn’t have sex with this person, had a consensual encounter that they reached out to me about two weeks after saying, “Hey, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way.” But looking back, I felt a lot more pressure to agree than I realized in the moment. “I don’t think this is any fault of yours. I just think that you came on a bit too strong and I didn’t want to let you down. So I gave in,” and that language made me feel horrible, mainly because if this person had told me, “Hey, I don’t want to hook up,” I would’ve said, “Yeah, of course not. I don’t want to hook up with someone who doesn’t want to hook up with me.” And I think that as fame increased during that time, I think I was just oblivious to how people were seeing me, especially those who had a digital relationship with me prior to me knowing them. And I don’t think that I handled that the right way.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:29)
Well, thank you for taking accountability, but just to clarify, you got consent?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:17:36)
Yeah, I was the initiatory party in an interaction with a fan who felt it she had to say yes because of… I’m not sure why. I don’t know why, but like I said, this person also disclosed to me they had a history of childhood trauma and were actively being treated for PTSD and that they felt things moved too fast for them given their situation. And so I told her, I said, “Hey, if you want to reach out, if you want to talk on the phone, I’m always here for you. I’m sorry to hear that. Let me know if we can talk further.”

(02:18:07)
About six months after that, I was at Sturgis Bike Week, and I remember this day, this was the hardest day. I was just chilling and I got a text from my friend and it said, “Hey, man, you’re getting canceled right now.” I was like, “What do you mean? Did someone find an old tweet or something? What are you talking about?” I opened my phone and it was this Instagram story of me. It was like the ugliest picture of me you can find. It was like my face open. It was screenshotted, and it said… I remember this specifically because I just couldn’t believe it. It said, “The ugly loser who hosts All Gas No Breaks is a piece of shit. He knowingly abused my friend and got away with it. If you follow him, I’m going to message you and ask you why?”

(02:18:46)
So this person who I don’t know, I didn’t even know who the accusation was coming from, they emailed every production company that I was working with, DMd hundreds, if not thousands of people, just saying that I was this piece of shit. And I didn’t even know who this person was. So I was frantically calling and texting every person that I’d seen intimately for the past year and being like, “Hey, are we on good terms? Is everything okay?” And then, I figured out that the person was coming from Florida, and I knew who it was. And so, thankfully, I reached out to the original person who I had the communication with, and I said, “Hey, I think this might’ve been you. This might’ve been your friend who posted this. Are we good? I’m sorry.” I apologized again. I was like, “Listen, I feel bad that you feel this way. I want to do anything that I can to help you. Again, I apologize.”

(02:19:40)
And she said, “Apology accepted. I’m sorry. My friend asked if she could post on my behalf, and I’m sorry. I was going through a lot mentally, and I saw your fame increasing. And so I agreed to let her speak on my behalf,” and we made amends in private. I said, “Okay, I’m here for you. Let me know.” And she said, “Apology is enough. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.” And that was two years prior to this…
Andrew Callaghan
(02:20:00)
… “Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.” And that was two years prior to this text message being sent to my phone eight minutes before the movie. So naturally, I wanted to go on my platforms and talk about what was happening, but I also didn’t want to mess up the rollout of the movie. And so the PR firm was like, “We got this, we’ll handle this for you.” And that was, I guess by way of a TMZ thing that said, “Andrew Callaghan is devastated.” I’m not sure why they thought that that was going to make people be in my favor, but it was just a picture of me on NBC that said, “Andrew Callaghan devastated by allegations.” That that was their plan, I guess, to show that I was remorseful or something.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:45)
How much of this do you think lawyers pushing this when money and fame are involved?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:20:54)
Well, I wish I could say the lawyer, but I just can’t, that was involved in this. But I will tell you that I try to lean away from resentment and toward accountability completely. What was my role in the situation? How can I never make someone feel like that again? What can I do? What changes can I make to make sure that, one, I never treat someone this way, and two, to never be in that position again?
Lex Fridman
(02:21:18)
Well, again, thank you for taking accountability.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:21:21)
And the main reason I talk about that is because it wasn’t just that person. There was multiple people who made videos reporting similar behavior. And so it’s obvious that that was a pattern of behavior of mine. And so I made the apology video to announce that I was taking some time away because I just needed time away. My entire support system collapsed. My friends at the time disappeared. I was getting obituaries texted to my phone that were like, “Hey, it’s been nice knowing you. It was great to see you grow. Good luck,” like I was dead. And yeah, got dropped from my agency. No one gave me tough love. No one called me to ask me if I was all right. It was just only… Everyone disappeared in a week.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:06)
Again, thank you for taking accountability, but I just hate how many cowards there are out there. When people hit low points is when you should help, when you should stand with them if you know their character.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:22:25)
Yeah. And it was hard to separate the initial situation that I knew was more or less a setup and the possibly genuine other accounts. And so it was like, “All right, you know what? At this point in my life, I want to be on the right side of history. I don’t want to be the anti-cancel culture mouthpiece. I don’t have the mental strength to fight this,” especially because I was envisioning the HBO drop to be this, the world opens up to me moment and it was just the reverse, but it wasn’t so much the media reporting on it that hurt me. It was just little stuff like a childhood friend that you love, seeing they unfollowed you on Instagram, or just seeing someone on the street that you grew up with and waving at them and they don’t do anything back and you’re just like, “Oh my God, man. This is my new life,” but what are you supposed to do?

(02:23:24)
Thankfully, somehow, two weeks after, I met an amazing partner who I’m still with to this day, and I was able to conquer my two biggest fears, which is monogamy and dogs. I was terrified of dogs and terrified of having a girlfriend. Now I have a girlfriend who I love and two dogs.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:46)
What was the lowest point?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:23:48)
Well, right after this happened, I entered recovery programs. Started with AA, but then I found a more specialized program that dealt with the issues that I was dealing with. I’d say the hardest point was logically deducing that the lives of my loved ones would be better off if I was gone, you know what I mean? And thinking that my mom and my friends, that their life would be better if I took myself out of the picture. And for one, I just figured their friends canceled. “Her son is a disgrace.” My family’s going to think they raised me wrong, and my friends, I’m a social pariah now I’m a burden. I’m better off dead. And the hard part was I would read stories and books written by parents who lost their kids to suicide, and they reported feeling a lot of anger after the suicide.

(02:24:49)
So I tried to think of what’s the way I can do it to get the least amount of anger on behalf of the people who would grieve? Because the hanging, someone will discover you. So I figured drinking myself to death would be the way to do it, and I wasn’t able to. Yeah, that was just a dark place. I remember hating the people who loved me because I knew they would grieve, and that made me mad, if that makes sense. I was ready to go. I had no will to live. But their grief was like… I didn’t want to cause that because I didn’t want to hurt them. So I was like, I hated the people who loved me because they were stopping me from taking my own life.

(02:25:34)
And it’s weird to think that when I was going through that, if you walk by me in the street, I look like a normal guy. And so now when I walk around and I see people, I think to myself, “You have no idea what that person is going through.” It’s crazy that so many people are suffering in complete silence and they don’t wear it on them.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:03)
Many of the people you talk to are probably that.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:26:06)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:06)
Many people you’ve interviewed before, all this and after are probably going through some shit.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:26:11)
I also thought if I could write down what I just told you on a piece of paper and I was to do it, and then they found the note, they would take it more seriously because they would know that I wasn’t lying.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:24)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:26:25)
But then you know if you do it, it reduces the lifespan of your parents by 15 years. So I looked at it like I was taking time away from them.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:38)
Well, thank you, for the most part, leaning towards accountability. That’s the right path to take. What advice would you give to young men that look up to you on how they can be good men, especially in regard to women?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:26:53)
If you have any kind of platform, it doesn’t have to be famous on Instagram. It could be like if you’re a pillar of your community in the culinary world or whatever it is, just be hyper aware of that and remember that you are inheriting a power dynamic that can create situations where there might be some pressure that you don’t even realize is there, but it’s definitely there and you just have to be aware of that. And two, when meeting new partners, having hookups and stuff like that, just try to have a trauma-informed conversation about their past. Really know the experiences and the backstory of what a new partner has gone through in that world of intimacy. Whatever they’re comfortable to share, obviously. But I would advise against one-night-stands. I would advise against hooking up with someone that you’re meeting for the first time. Have those conversations prior because even though it might sound like a vibe killer, it’s not.

(02:27:55)
And if you think that that conversation is a vibe killer, you probably shouldn’t be in that situation in the first place, especially now, how hyper sexualized things are and how common that type of violence is. You need to be able to have those conversations and stop and say, “Hey, tell me a little bit about your past? Is there any triggers that make you uncomfortable? Let me know how I can be the best partner to you.” And I’m sure that college-age people are not having those conversations, but I’m sure that it would go a long way.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:21)
So especially when you’re young, college-aged, you don’t have enough experience to be able to read a person without having that conversation because a lot of times you can see the trauma without explicitly talking about it, but that takes experience and knowledge and seeing the world. When you’re young and you really don’t know shit, making things a bit more explicit is probably better.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:28:41)
And also, as men, were trained to believe that it’s our duty to be the initiatory party in any type of sexual encounter. Like, oh, man chases woman. You know what I mean? You have to be the one to make the move, or she’s playing hard to get if she’s resistant to your first compliment or something. I think that that’s not always how it has to be. And that extra caution needs to be placed if you’re taking the initiatory role in an interaction, especially if someone has a traumatic background. They might agree to do something with you because they’re scared and you might not realize that’s what’s going on because you don’t see yourself as a predatory person, you don’t see yourself as someone who would ever consciously make someone uncomfortable or cross a boundary, but people have histories that you might not understand.

(02:29:26)
And for me, as someone who doesn’t have much, honestly, childhood trauma or anything like that, it’s been an interesting year for me working in therapy and elsewhere, understanding how that affects the mind. And also, I understand that hurt people, hurt people, and that someone with a traumatic background isn’t going to have sympathy for applying that traumatic pain to someone else, even if that person isn’t the cause of what put them in that spot.

Channel 5

Lex Fridman
(02:29:53)
If we can go back to Channel 5, can you tell the origin story of that?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:29:56)
Yeah. Channel 5, during the All Gas No Breaks days, we used to tell people that we were called Channel 5 if we wanted them to stop antagonizing us while we were filming, because every town has a Channel 5. So when people were like, “What’s this for?” If they were being super rude and trying to get in the camera and be hell of obnoxious, we would just say, “Oh, we’re Channel 5.” And they would be like, “Oh, my grandma’s going to see that,” and they would leave us alone. So Channel 5 was a diversion tactic during All Gas No Breaks.

(02:30:22)
And it just so happened that we were in Miami Beach one time and this kid came up drinking liquor, trying to yell about whatever they yell about in Miami Beach, like titties or whatever, and we’re like, “Bro, this is Channel 5. Be careful what you say.” And he was like, “For real?” And he just walked off. And I said to my friend at the time, I was like, “That sounded pretty good, right? Channel 5.” And he goes, “That does sound pretty good.” He’s like, “That’s got to be trademarked though.” No, it’s not trademarked.

(02:30:50)
It’s crazy, right? There’s a Channel 5 in every city, Channel 5 KTLA, Channel 5 Seattle, Como News, dude, Channel 5 itself, we own it, because no one’s thought of something that simple, because you’d think you’d have to specify. We own channel5.com, channel5.news. Dude, we own it. It’s awesome.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:12)
So it was the same kind of spirit as the previous thing.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:31:17)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:17)
What was the first one you did under the Channel 5 flag?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:31:20)
Miami Beach Spring Break.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:22)
I think I’ve seen that and it’s going to be a callback. I think somebody mentioning eating ass there too.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:31:31)
That would be the place.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:32)
I believe that was-
Andrew Callaghan
(02:31:33)
There’s only about five places in the US where people yell about eating ass all the time, Bourbon Street, South Beach Miami, 6th Street in Austin, Broadway in Nashville. And I’m just going to go ahead and say Times Square, you might not think it, but-
Lex Fridman
(02:31:46)
Times Square, really?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:31:47)
Yeah, they yell about ass there.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:49)
Times Square.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:31:51)
I would say Beale Street in Memphis, but it’s not good.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:55)
Oh, yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:31:58)
The median age is too high on Beale Street for anyone to yell about ass.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:03)
Oh, this is a fascinating portrait of America, through that specific lens. So Miami Beach. And then how would you describe your style of interviewing, just now that you’ve collected so many? If you had a style, how would you describe your style?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:32:20)
I guess before especially, it used to be like deadpan. Now I would describe it as more directed, but still relatively affable, agreeable, deadpan interview style.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:31)
Yeah, like in the face of absurdity, you’re just there with a microphone. There’s a comic aspect to it, and that’s intentional.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:32:42)
Yeah, I used to look at the camera like Jim from the office back in the day. I don’t do that anymore.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:48)
What about the editing? How do you think about the editing?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:32:52)
I still do most of it, but Susan helps a lot too. It’s my associate. Yeah, the editing style, like I said, we pioneered this editing style that honestly was inspired a bit by Vic Berger, but we took it to real life, crash zooms, chopping up vocals a bit to add comedic timing where it didn’t necessarily exist. You might add two seconds of awkward silence that are built with room tone, or you might make everything really fast by cutting silence and switching camera angles. But now, we try to be pretty straightforward because we want to be taken more seriously.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:29)
Yeah, sure. What’s crash Zoom, by the way?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:33:31)
A crash zoom is when it’s artificial zoom that you might add in Adobe Premiere where the camera zooms in on someone’s face.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:39)
Where the resolution is not there?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:33:41)
The resolution is not there, unless you have a Blackmagic Cinema Camera.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:45)
Which you don’t.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:33:45)
We don’t use those. The file size is too big.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:48)
That’s the only constraint?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:33:50)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:50)
Okay.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:33:50)
100%.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:51)
All right. And you also do voiceover storytelling.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:33:54)
I think the first time I really did that was in the San Francisco Streets video because there’s so much content about San Francisco homelessness, tenderloin shoplifting, but there’s not that much context in those videos about the history of San Francisco, the housing crisis, NIMBYism, random zoning stuff that sounds boring, but has a major role in the current situation on the streets there as to why the tenderloin is neglected by police and by the City Council and the other neighborhoods like Knob Hill and North Beach was so nice. So I added that purposely to the San Francisco video. And then also, to the Philadelphia Streets video to accentuate the reporting and add some historical analysis.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:33)
What’s your goal with some of these videos, like the Philadelphia Streets one? Is it to reveal the full spectrum of humanity, or is it also tell a story that’s almost political about the state?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:34:43)
Number one is always humanization. That’s the primary goal, is to take people in circumstances where they’re often news items and remind the public that these are people with lives and concerns and dreams just like you. But secondly, we also want to start introducing more solution-oriented journalism. So not just, “Oh my God, I’m becoming aware of how horrible this is,” but what can you actually do to help? And as you could see with the Vegas Tunnels video, people are responding pretty positively to it like here’s how you can maybe help a homeless neighbor, help get them an ID, help them qualify for housing or get a job at the scrap yard. There’s always ways to help, but so much of the YouTube world is over-saturated by just endless videos of people suffering, and the comments are always like, “Wow, so horrible.” But what does that really do for somebody?

Rap

Lex Fridman
(02:35:29)
You’ve interviewed many rappers.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:35:32)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:33)
Educate me?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:35:34)
There’s a lot to it.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:35)
Yeah. Can you explain this drill rap situation? What is drill rap?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:35:41)
It’s an evolving situation. Drill began in 2010. Some people say it was Chief Keef in Chicago. I think it was King Louie in Chicago, but I think all of it was very influenced by Waka Flocka Flame who dropped an album called Flockaveli in 2010 that was hyper violent, adrenaline-boosting, rap music made by people who were actually in the streets. So in the 90s, you had 50 Cent, you had rappers rapping about whatever, gangster shit, selling crack and beating people up, but they weren’t actually doing it.

(02:36:12)
Drill has a true crime component to where drill fans want to know that the person rapping about catching bodies does in fact kill people. So drill, it’s pretty horrifying. It sounds great, but it started in Chicago, then it spread to England, and now it’s bounced back to New York, the Bronx and Brooklyn specifically, and spread from New York to the rest of the country. So now there’s probably a drill rapper every 10 square miles.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:41)
So as opposed to pretending to be a gangster and killing people, you get some credibility by actually doing it?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:36:51)
Yes. And the fans are typically not in the communities that are affected by poverty, so they’re like superheroes to white kids.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:01)
It’s dark.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:37:02)
And not just white kids, but just anyone who’s not in the hood. It’s not necessarily a race thing. There’s white drill rappers too. Slim Jesus was a big one. He’s out of the picture now, but there’s white drill rappers.

O Block

Lex Fridman
(02:37:14)
Slim Jesus. You made a video on O Block.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:37:18)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:19)
What is O Block? The place, the culture, the people [inaudible 02:37:22]?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:37:22)
O Block is a housing project in South Chicago in the Englewood area where Michelle Obama grew up. It’s also where Chief Keef was born and raised. I don’t know if he was born there, but he was raised there and he is the forefather of modern drill music as we know it. So these are the projects where drill began. It’s also the first place where you have that intersection of drill music and true crime because O Block has a lot of rappers, and then nearby is an area called St. Lawrence, aka Tookaville, which has a lot of rappers as well. And so these two rival drill gangs basically have a lot of history and it connects to music at large.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:04)
So you’ve interviewed people there. Was there any concern for your safety?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:38:10)
No. I think that O Block has calmed down a lot. For one, it has security, so you can’t even really get in and out. But two, I think that O Block’s trying to rebrand itself a lot. It could be because Lil Durk’s avoiding a RICO charge, could be for a variety of reasons. I know you don’t know exactly what that means, but-
Lex Fridman
(02:38:31)
Lil Durk or RICO charge?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:38:33)
Rapper Lil Durk is affiliated with O Block, and a lot of people have been murdered and retribution for killings that Lil Durk may or may not have influenced the ordering of. But anyways-
Lex Fridman
(02:38:45)
And Lil Durk documented the killings via rap music probably.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:38:51)
Okay. I know you don’t know about drill, but Lil Durk was associated with a rapper named King Von, and King Von perhaps paid for the assassination of a rapper named FBG Duck, who got killed in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood. It’s possible. The O-Block 6 are drill-associated, not rappers, but just shooters, and they, perhaps operating on King Von’s behalf, went and killed FBG Duck. King Von was Lil Durk’s artist. King Von’s now dead. So there’s definitely a concern that some of the Fed charges will fall on Durk. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it’s rumors in the hip-hop community.

(02:39:27)
So O Block right now, and when I filmed the video, is trying to go through a major image rehab. If you go on any Instagram of anyone in O Block, they’ve all converted to Islam. And so they post pictures of themselves praying in the morning and have captions like, “Put the guns down, let’s pray.” So I think when I went there, they saw it as a good opportunity to do a positive rebrand. And so I interviewed a rapper named Boss Top, who was there all the way back in 2011 when Chief Keef was coming up. And so he basically ensured my safe protection, but he didn’t even need to. They’re all very friendly and they know exactly what’s up with YouTube stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:03)
I like how 2011 is the old days, like the ancient-
Andrew Callaghan
(02:40:06)
Oh yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:07)
The founding fathers.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:40:09)
I was in eighth grade.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:14)
Oh, man. Time flies when you’re having fun.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:40:18)
It sure does.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:19)
Lil Durk. Where’s Lil Durk now?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:40:21)
Atlanta.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:23)
So he left Chicago, not safe.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:40:25)
Yeah, every rapper has to leave their hometown. It’s what I did.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:28)
It’s a journey.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:40:32)
Seattle would’ve taken me out, bro.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:35)
You do interview a lot of people. That’s a top comment, but it speaks to the reality of the fact that you always find somebody rapping or you create the space for people to rap. What’s that about?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:40:47)
I don’t know, man.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:48)
Well, they’re usually really good.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:40:50)
You think so?
Lex Fridman
(02:40:51)
I appreciate it.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:40:52)
Well, hell yeah, man. Rappers-
Lex Fridman
(02:40:54)
In their own way.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:40:55)
Since I touched a microphone, rappers have gravitated toward me. I think there’s something happening.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:01)
You’re a rapper whisperer?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:41:02)
I think there’s something happening on a deeper cosmic spiritual level that lets the mind of rappers know that they have a safe place in front of our camera crew.

Crip Mac

Lex Fridman
(02:41:11)
You have an interview with Crip Mac?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:41:13)
I do. Free Crip Mac. He’s in VO right now.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:16)
Oh, he is?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:41:17)
Yeah. Is that a hashtag?
Lex Fridman
(02:41:19)
Yeah, for sure.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:41:21)
That’s an intense interview. People should go watch it. People should go watch all your interviews, but that one is pretty intense.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:27)
Thanks.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:41:29)
I was a little afraid for your life.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:41:31)
Oh, Crip Mac’s the safest guy in the world.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:34)
He’s a sweetheart?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:41:34)
Oh, definitely dude.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:35)
Yeah, thought it was fun.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:41:36)
I feel more safer on Crip Mac than I do with any given pedestrian.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:40)
Yeah, he was loud and flavorful.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:41:43)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:43)
I should say. So who’s he? What’s his story?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:41:47)
Well, his name’s Trevor. He grew up in Ontario, California in the Inland empire, moved to Texas with his mom after his dad left. His mom started dating a cop from Houston named Mr. Gary. His mom found Mr. Gary getting anally penetrated by a co-worker, and so she booked Crip Mac a one-way Greyhound ticket to LA where he joined the Crips.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:13)
That’s a good story.
Speaker 1
(02:42:14)
[inaudible 02:42:14].
Andrew Callaghan
(02:42:14)
It’s true.
Speaker 1
(02:42:21)
Oh, you jumped right to Mr. Gary.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:42:22)
Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 1
(02:42:25)
[inaudible 02:42:25].
Andrew Callaghan
(02:42:25)
I’m just saying that he’s a classic case of somebody without a father figure who found camaraderie and sense of belonging and purpose in a street gang, which in LA is like a rule of law in most of the city.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:38)
We were, I forget in what context earlier, talking about martial arts and fighting and he’s got to work on his punching form.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:42:44)
Yeah, I think so. He gets into a lot of fights in jail though, and from what I’ve heard, he wins-
Lex Fridman
(02:42:49)
He does that?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:42:49)
About half of them. So it’s good.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:51)
What did he go to jail for now?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:42:52)
Firearm possession. It was a probation violation.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:55)
Oh.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:42:56)
It’s too bad.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:58)
All right. So Philly, you went to the border, Occupy Seattle protests. You went to Ukraine.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:43:09)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:11)
What are some interesting things that stand out to you from memory? Just as I asked the question, some interesting-
Andrew Callaghan
(02:43:17)
I was in jail at the border for a while. That was horrible.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:20)
What was that like? Was that your first time?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:43:23)
Yeah, well, I didn’t know that I couldn’t hop my own border as an American. I’m thinking, “This is my country. I can get in any way that I want.” Wrong. You can only enter the US through an official port of entry, which I learned the hard way because I got arrested by border patrol and held as a detainee at a Migrant Center for a few days.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:42)
What was that like?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:43:44)
Horrible.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:45)
Which aspect?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:43:47)
Well, I don’t know. It was just to be in a place like that, and I probably sound like such a wimp right now because I know someone’s watching this who’s done some hard time, but we thought we were going to do at least six months in jail because the guards freaked us out and were like, “You’re being charged with a federal crime. You know what you boys did is serious. We’re waiting on word from San Antonio about whether or not we’re going to extradite you.” So we’re just sitting in these cells alone, most of the time in solitary, with no pillows.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:16)
No pillows.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:44:17)
No pillows, no mat, nothing. Just a space blanket, and I was sleeping on my shoes, stinking up the place. It was no good.

Aliens

Lex Fridman
(02:44:24)
You mentioned the UFO Convention.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:44:26)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:29)
What have you learned from those guys, the UFOlogists?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:44:32)
I really want to know what you think about that. That’s the one question that I want to reverse on you because you’ve talked to so many people. Do you think that aliens have actually visited earth?
Lex Fridman
(02:44:42)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:44:43)
When?
Lex Fridman
(02:44:45)
Exact dates? I think there’s alien civilizations everywhere. I talk to a lot of people that have doubts about it. I just think I even suspect there’s an intelligent alien civilization in our galaxy and I just can’t imagine them not having visited us. So I lean on that. What that actually looks like, I don’t know. The stuff we’re seeing in terms of UFO sightings, I think to the degree it’s real, it’s much more likely government projects. So military, Lockheed Martin, this kind of stuff.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:45:24)
So you think that they have knowledge of it?
Lex Fridman
(02:45:27)
Yeah.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:45:28)
One thing I think about with aliens is scale. So we have this idea that an alien would be a gray alien or a almost humanoid lookalike that would visit us in human form, arms, legs, head. But who’s to say that they’re not able to shrink down to microscopic size with the same neural capacity?
Lex Fridman
(02:45:45)
Yeah. Or just have a very difficult to perceive form.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:45:49)
But they would go small, not big.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:52)
No, I think that would take a humanoid-like form just to be able to communicate with humans. I think that the big challenge with aliens is to be able to find a common language. So if you come to another planet and you suspect that there’s some kind of complexity going on, but it looks nothing like humans, you have to find a common language. And I think aliens would try to take physical form that’s similar that us dumb humans would understand.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:46:16)
Language is really interesting too. I have this series that I’m going to announce for the first time on here, but I’m really interested in endangered languages in the US. There’s like 150 languages in the US with less than 1,000 speakers.
Lex Fridman
(02:46:27)
Wow.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:46:28)
And I want to help spearhead efforts to preserve some of these. For example, Hawaiian Sign language, 15 of those people left.
Lex Fridman
(02:46:35)
Holy shit.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:46:36)
Because when Hawaii got annexed, the ASL community tried to make it so the deaf native Hawaiians wouldn’t be able to speak their native sign language. And so they would do it under the desks at schools for the deaf and blind, and they would get their mouth washed out, washed out with soap and stuff if they so much as did the Hawaiian hand signs. Also, the Gullah Geechee language and the South Carolina Sea Islands. Hilton Head Island and stuff, that’s almost a Creole language that’s been in the US for hundreds of years existing in isolation. That’s being threatened by golf course developments. I don’t know how into language you are, but I’ve been getting super nerded out about it.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:14)
Actually, I’m interviewing somebody tomorrow who’s an expert in human language. He’s from MIT, studying the syntax of a lot of languages, including in the Amazon jungle, the peoples that live in the Amazon jungle region. Yeah, it’s fascinating. Human language is fascinating, and also the barriers that creates, and also how the games are played, to what you’re speaking, by governments. This is part of the story of Russia, and Ukraine, is a battle over language. The Ukrainian language is a symbol of independence, which is why they were trying to make it the primary language of the nation. And so sometimes the language represents the culture and the peoples, and it’s intricately tied to the culture of the people.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:48:04)
I’ve been trying to learn Navajo.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:06)
Which languages do you know?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:48:08)
Spanish and English.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:11)
Spanish well?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:48:12)
Si.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:14)
I don’t know Spanish that well. So that passes me. You’re fluent.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:48:19)
It means yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:19)
Oh, it doesn’t. Ola.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:48:22)
That was good. That was real Cancun Spring break.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:25)
Well, I actually speak fluent Spanish according to Spotify because every episode is translated, overdubbed by AI in Spanish.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:48:34)
Oh my God.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:34)
Yeah. There’s a very-
Andrew Callaghan
(02:48:35)
You have a Spanish robot assigned to you?
Lex Fridman
(02:48:37)
I have a Spanish robot. I sound incredibly intelligent and intellectual in Spanish.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:48:42)
Senor Fridman.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:44)
Exactly. From everything you’ve done, all the people you’ve seen, do you think most people are good, underneath it all?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:48:56)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:59)
So the ones that do all the extreme shit?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:49:01)
Okay, I’ll put it like this. Most people think they’re doing the best thing for the world. I don’t think anyone, except for maybe a small fraction of sociopaths, wakes up every day and says, “I’m going to fuck somebody’s life up today.” I think the far majority of people are fighting for what they think is right and do want to see America succeed and want us to be in a happy place where no one is subjugated. I just think people have drastically different ideas of what means will get us there. And unfortunately, that’s leading to a lot of misunderstandings between cultures.

(02:49:32)
And yeah, I think that most people are good. I’ve been through some things that leads me to believe that a lot of people though are primarily motivated by self-interest, and that in a fight or flight situation, most people will choose flight. So I don’t know if people are courageous as a whole, but I think generally good, but the energy to stand up for what’s right, not sure about that.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:54)
They have the capacity though to do good.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:49:57)
I think human beings are inherently selfish as well, but I don’t think that selfish is inherently bad. I think humans are primarily motivated by self-interest, but generally have positive intentions.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:12)
I do hope more humans rise to the occasion and have courage, courage of their convictions, courage to have integrity. But yeah, I think that most people are good and they want to do good, and they have the capacity to do a lot of good. That’s why I have hope for this whole thing we’ve got going on. How do you heal the misunderstandings between people you think?
Andrew Callaghan
(02:50:36)
Listening. It’s the only option we have. No forced education, no forced meetings or mediations between political opponents. Just listen to more people and really listen. Try to get rid of whatever preconceived notions you might have about how you should feel about someone you are supposed to disagree with, and just keep your ears and your heart open to people that you don’t know and your life will change.
Lex Fridman
(02:51:00)
Keep your heart open.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:51:01)
A lot of people are scared to listen.
Lex Fridman
(02:51:04)
Well, Andrew, I’m a big fan and thank you for being one of the best listeners in the world.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:51:10)
Amen.
Lex Fridman
(02:51:11)
And showing the full spectrum of humanity to us so we can listen as well and learn. And just thank you for doing everything you’re doing. Keep doing it.
Andrew Callaghan
(02:51:20)
Hey man, thanks so much for having me on. You’re a great man.
Lex Fridman
(02:51:23)
Thank you, brother. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Callaghan. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Hunter. S. Thompson, “The Edge, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame | Lex Fridman Podcast #424

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #424 with Bassem Youssef.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors.
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Bassem Youssef
(00:00:00)
If I hate you, that’s great, but if I have a story to support that hate, that’s even better.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:04)
One of your favorite words, “Jihad.”
Bassem Youssef
(00:00:09)
That’s my favorite hobbies. It doesn’t matter now, who do you vote into power; they will not listen to you, they would listen to the people who paid them to be there. When the military came in, people were walking to me, pointing their fingers like, “Don’t speak about [inaudible 00:00:24], don’t speak about the army. We love you now, but don’t you…” They would, like that. So I called John Stewart, I was like, “I don’t know what to do.” And he said the most interesting thing ever. And say, “If you’re afraid of something, make fun about the fact that you’re afraid of it.”
Lex Fridman
(00:00:43)
The following is a conversation with Bassem Youssef, a legendary Egyptian-American comedian, the so-called John Stewart of the Middle East, who fearlessly satirized those in power even when his job and life were on the line. Bassem is a beautiful human being. It was truly a pleasure for me to get to know him and to have this fun, fascinating, and challenging conversation. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Bassem Youssef.

Oct 7


(00:01:21)
Your wife is half Palestinian, and I’ve heard you say that you’ve been trying to kill her, but she keeps using the kids as human shields. So have you considered negotiating a ceasefire?
Bassem Youssef
(00:01:31)
Well, the thing is, every day, every minute of the day in a married life is a negotiation. Everything can blow up into a full-scale war. Starting from a simple sentence like, “Good morning, what should we do with the kids today? What should we do with that piece of furniture?” Any sentence can lead you to heaven or to hell in the same time.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:54)
So, you do negotiate with terrorists.
Bassem Youssef
(00:01:56)
Oh yeah. Yeah, 100%. You must. Yeah. And for her, I’m her terrorist too. So it’s equal.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:01)
Terrorists on both sides. On a more serious note, when you found out about the attacks of October 7th, what went through your mind?
Bassem Youssef
(00:02:08)
If I’m allowed to use a curse word, I was like-
Lex Fridman
(00:02:11)
As many as possible.
Bassem Youssef
(00:02:12)
I was like, “Oh shit.” Part of my stand-up comedy is I describe a situation where I was in a restaurant with producers and there was a bombing two blocks away in Chelsea, New York in 2016. And of course, this is the like, “Damn, what’s going to happen to us now?” And there’s two different reactions, the white reaction, which is like, “Oh my God, I hope nobody is hurt. This is terrible. I hope everybody’s okay.” And there’s the Arab reaction. “What’s his name? What’s his name? What is the name?” Because you know what’s going to come. I was scared what’s going to really happened in that area, and I said like, “Oh my God, it’s going to be horrible.” And the way that it was reported, I didn’t know how to handle this. So I went into hiding for a few days, three or four days, and I talked about Piers Morgan team talking to me two times, three times. I was like, “No, I can’t. How can you defend that? How can you defend the rape, the decapitated babies and whatever?”

(00:03:12)
And then I started kind of looking in the news a little bit, and then I started seeing people coming on the shows and saying things that I know as an Arab, as a Muslim, as someone from that region, that it’s not true. But I didn’t know what to say, how to say it. So by the third time when they asked me, I said, “Fine, put me on.” And I went there, it was [inaudible 00:03:36], figuratively speaking, a suicide mission because it’s a lose-lose situation. I can lose stuff in Hollywood. I remember my managers like, “Bessem, be careful. I mean, are you sure you want to do it?” My managers was like, “Please don’t do it. Please don’t do it.” And on the other side, if I don’t perform well, whatever, “Well” means, I’m going to be rejected by my own people. So it was a lose-lose situation because whatever I say, it’ll never be enough, and whatever I say will not be good enough. And I was going into there, and I felt that I was going into a trance for the 33 minutes that I was on that interview for the first time.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:20)
You blacked out?
Bassem Youssef
(00:04:21)
I blacked out. I blacked out. And a lot of people ask me, “Was that a bit when the earpiece kept falling?” It’s like, “No, it was really falling off and it disconnected and I had to save it because I cannot see them, I can just hear them and I could expecting at any time, “Okay, Bessem, thank you.”” I was fighting for every second, to say words, to put stuff in there.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:45)
For people who don’t know, this is your conversation, interview with Piers Morgan and you couldn’t see.
Bassem Youssef
(00:04:51)
I couldn’t see. I was just like, the lens of the camera and-
Lex Fridman
(00:04:54)
It was like a surreal dream or nightmare.
Bassem Youssef
(00:04:56)
Yeah. “Hello, Bessem.” It was like, “Hello, Bessem,” I was like, “Hi.”
Lex Fridman
(00:04:59)
And it could end at any moment, your career and everything.
Bassem Youssef
(00:05:02)
Everything. Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:04)
So what was the drive that got you to actually do it, to overcome that fear?
Bassem Youssef
(00:05:10)
Multiple things. First of all, I don’t want to say it’s just my wife’s family because my wife’s family has always been there, but this time was different. The bombing, the attack, they’re usually one of those people that they’re aware of everything. When whatever happened in Gaza, they are always in safe places. But this time, it seems that there was no place safe. And already we heard about two, three of the cousins, and the uncles already lost their home. So this was too much. So I wanted to say something for those people, because I know that… One of the jokes that I made about like, “Oh, it’s Hasan, her cousin, he’s a loser, he’s a doctor. He’s a doctor.” And every time a hospital was bombed, we were worried about him. So I wanted to say that because I felt that this is a family that I have never seen in my life. She actually hardly saw an uncle or two, because they cannot leave. But I said, “I need to speak, at least I do something for those extended family that I have never known.”

(00:06:17)
But also because when Piers Morgan team called me a couple of times and said, “Okay, let’s see what’s going on in the show,” and I just watched the stuff, and the lies, and the one-sided reporting that made my blood boil. And then I thought, “What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of if I say something, I can lose my career. Wait a minute, but that was the reason why I left Egypt.” I said, “Wait, I left Egypt, I came to United States, I came to the Land of the Free where I can say anything I want. And yet I have limitation of what to say. I mean, I thought we left that shit behind. I mean, what’s happening?”

(00:06:57)
And I understand the connection of how sensitive it is when you speak about Israel and all of the ready-made accusations. But as an Arab, as a Muslim, I don’t react the same when you talk about Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or Egypt or any of them, it’s like, “Hey, you want to dis some of these countries, I’ll do that with you because I have strong opinions about what happened and I already been expressing them.” But that’s why, and there’s a lot of Jewish people who come to my show and they understand that. They understand the separation, but that kind of a grouping of blackmailing people and saying, and not saying what they have in their mind, it is that one of the things that kind of pushed me to go on the show.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:40)
The thing that was bothering you, was that what was being said or how it was being said?
Bassem Youssef
(00:07:46)
Both. Because there are lies, which is usually in the media, but there was the total disregard of humanity. You talk a lot on your show about human suffering, and I felt that here the human suffering was not equal. I felt that’s why I came up with this like, “What’s the exchange rate today? What’s the exchange rate today?” Of course, it’s terrible to see anybody die, but I feel that like, isn’t our life not worth anything?
Lex Fridman
(00:08:20)
Yeah. You had a chart akin to crypto, you analyzed it from an investing perspective, of course, in a dark human economy-
Bassem Youssef
(00:08:27)
The ROI on-
Lex Fridman
(00:08:30)
The ROI. And you were saying that a certain year was a good year.
Bassem Youssef
(00:08:34)
Yeah, 2014.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:34)
2014 was a good year for investment purposes and also to refer to family member that you called a loser, you were saying that you called him, had a conversation with him, and he keeps saying that he’s not using anybody for human shields, and you called him a loser. What do you do? He can’t even keep a job.
Bassem Youssef
(00:08:51)
Liar. He lied to us because I have to believe. It’s also one of the things, like how it was said, it was stuff that I’ve been hearing. I don’t know what turned on in my head, but it’s stuff that I’ve been hearing all my life from the media, “Israel warns civilians before bombing them, and that’s okay,” but that’s not okay. Israel is trying to minimize the civilians, but killing them anyway. And that’s okay, but that’s not okay. So it is kind of like the indoctrination that we’ve been hearing, as if it is okay, and then suddenly it’s not.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:27)
Yeah, there’s a kind of several layers of bullshit, almost sometimes hiding the obvious horror of the situation with kind of politeness and all this kind of stuff. Just the basic value of human life. That said, it’s a difficult situation.
Bassem Youssef
(00:09:44)
It is.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:45)
What would you do if you were Israel? Bibi called you, awesome, big fan, big fan of your comedy. First of all, would you hang up right away? Would you hear him out?
Bassem Youssef
(00:09:54)
Oh, I’ll definitely hear him out. That was like, “Wait a minute. That’s material. That’s material, man.” It was like, “So Netanyahu called me. I was sitting with my family. Just like, I’m on my phone, and it was like, “Oh, Netanyahu.”
Lex Fridman
(00:10:05)
Yeah, it just shows up that way. I mean, what would you do? What would you do in this situation?
Bassem Youssef
(00:10:13)
To answer this question, we need to understand how Israel thinks. There is an incredible speech given by Gideon Levy, the famous Israeli reporter [inaudible 00:10:23]. He describes a situation where he was in the West Bank and there was a checkpoint. And in that checkpoint there was an ambulance with a Palestinian patient and it was there, sitting for an hour and a half, not moving. And then he went to talk to the soldiers, like, “Guys, why are you not letting them go?” It’s like, “Ah, let them go.” And then he told them, “Imagine if he was your father.” And the soldiers stood up, it was like, “What? These are pigs. These are not humans.”

(00:10:58)
So when you tell me what would you do if Israel would do, we need to ask how does Israel look at the Palestinian and view the Palestinians? Because they do look at them less than human. And there is an incredible talk by [inaudible 00:11:12] Meyer. He was a Holocaust survivor, and he said, “I learned in Auschwitz when I was there in the Concentration Camp that in order for a dominant group of people to dehumanize another group, they need first, to dehumanize themselves. And Israel looks at Palestinians as lesser people, as lesser beings, as some people who are dispensable. And the way that they treat them is that, they don’t really care about… That’s why that the exchange rate thing.

(00:11:42)
So for me, if I am Israel, it’ll be like, “What would you do if you’re the United States in the time of the Native Americans? They were killing people with the millions.” When you dehumanize a group of people, you really don’t care. So if I was Israel, I would do exactly what Israel is doing right now, because there’s no one is holding me accountable. There is no one stopping me, and I can get whatever I want, throughout my history, through violence.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:08)
I think a lot of the things you just said are a tiny bit slightly exaggerated. So let me try.
Bassem Youssef
(00:12:14)
Please, please.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:14)
Let’s try. So not everybody in Israel.
Bassem Youssef
(00:12:17)
Of course.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:17)
So let’s look at several groups. So people in government, IDF soldiers and citizens that are neither of those. And not everybody of any of those sees Palestinians as less than human, just some percentage. So what percentage is that in your sense?
Bassem Youssef
(00:12:39)
It’s the people who have the power.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:41)
So it’s mostly the focus of your commentary, when you say, “People in Israel,” you really mean the people in power.
Bassem Youssef
(00:12:47)
The people who have the power, but as much as, of course, I mean the people in power, because even when I speak about America, I speak about people in power. When I speak about Egypt, I speak the people about power, because you can’t really talk about the 100 million people in Egypt, or the 11 million people in Israel. Of course not. There are people who go in, and they demonstrate against Netanyahu and they want him out of the government. But we have to admit that the Israeli society at a whole have moved quite bit to the right and has been many extreme. And you know what happens when you go to the right or you go to the most extreme, the other person go to the most extreme, and extremism breeds extremism. So thank you for the clarification, but I really meant, with the people of power. When people criticize the United States for going in Iraq, of course I’m not criticizing citizens.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:32)
But you made another point, which is an interesting point and it’s very difficult to see in the heart of people. But I wonder if you look at the average Palestinian and the average Israeli, and when they look at the other, do they have some hate in their heart? Well, everybody probably has some. What is that amount? When you look at a person that looks different than you, how much hate is there?
Bassem Youssef
(00:13:57)
It depends on what is the living situation of each person. So in the Berlin Film Festival, just like a few couple of weeks ago, there was an Israeli and a Palestinian receiving an award together. And the Israeli director said, “We are going to go back to Israel. He’s going to go to the West Bank, he will have no rights, and I’ll have full living rights.” These people managed to work together and be friends, and they have empathy to each other. Now, the average Palestinian, it’s a very difficult question because is it the Palestinian in the diaspora or the Palestinian in Gaza? Or the diaspora in the West Bank or the one as a citizen of Israel, who still have less right than a normal citizen of Israel, a Jew?” And it really depends. There are Arabs in Israel who are having a great life, and there are people, Arabs, who are having a miserable life, but definitely people that living in Gaza or in the West Bank is kind of like on the lower tier of the living conditions. Now, let’s talk about the hate. What does that Palestinian see from an Israeli? The Palestinian see oppression, limitation of movement, limitation of freedom. And then when there’s something happens, you see the full force coming in, destroying their home, taking away members of his family. There would be absolutely no reason for him to love the other. The Israeli, because he doesn’t have the power, but he lives under his government, all he sees is the rockets or whatever, but he sees the reaction and he doesn’t see what happened to those humans. And as humans, we are selfish. We see what really affects us as humans. And I cannot even imagine what it would be like to live as a Palestinian, and I’m not even talk about Gaza because everybody talks about Gaza. But let me give you an example, and I’m not going to talk about the 12,000 kids killed in Gaza, let’s talk about just the four weeks in the West Bank.

(00:15:57)
March 4th, Amir al-Najjar, age 10, sitting next to his father, shot in while he’s sitting in the car next to his father by the IDF soldiers. Mohammed Ziyad, 13 years old, March 3rd, shot in front of a UN school while sitting with his friends. Mohammed Ghanem, age 15, March 2nd, he shot while standing in front of a storefront during a night raid. February 23rd, Saeed Jardal, he was killed by a drone fire. February 22nd, Fadi Suleiman killed while standing in front of a top of a red cross building. Nihil Ziyad, February 14th, Valentine’s Day, killed and shot in the head while leaving school. February 11th, Mohammed Khattour, US citizens killed while being in a parked car. And [inaudible 00:16:54], February 9th, killed right in front of his home because a military car came reversing back to him, and then somebody opened the door, shot him and leave. This is a daily life of people in the West Bank.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:07)
What is the justification the IDF provides?
Bassem Youssef
(00:17:11)
Terrorism.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:13)
Terrorism?
Bassem Youssef
(00:17:14)
Or I don’t know. I mean you cannot really say, “Human shields,” but they would say they were throwing rocks. There was a guy who went on Chris Rock and he said his son, a US citizen was killed, and they were throwing rocks, so we killed him. Even when they were throwing rocks, you killed him? But the thing is, you see, this is how easy for them to get rid of Palestinians. I mean, I had to say, I prepared a little bit for the podcast because you are in tech and I am ignorant in tech. There is a movie called The Lab. It is directed by an Israeli director called Yotam Feldman. And he talks about how the military industry in Israel is very advanced. And what is really mind-boggling is in that movie, he shows how the military tests its weapons in the field, in urban areas, on Palestinians.

(00:18:08)
It is heartbreaking, as a doctor, there’s five stages of trials. There is discovery, pre-clinical, clinical, and then market, and then post-market evaluation by the FDA, the FDA approve, and then the FDA post-market. Five just to take a pill. And you go in and he interviews people as like, “Where did you test this?” They tested in the field.

(00:18:35)
So when human life is so cheap, and it is so indispensable, it gave me a visceral reaction because this has been actually the state of humanity. Humanity lived, and survived and thrive by actually killing each other. But there was kind of a, we were remotely, we are removed from it. People in Greece didn’t know what the Alexander the Great was doing. He was killing and pillaging. We call him, “The Great,” but he was killing. He was conquering, he was invading. Julius Caesar, all of the greats, he would do it, but killing was difficult. Killing had to have some sort of… You have to be with your enemy. Then you go back, catapults, then cannons, then a little bit back, and then you are kind of starting remotely. Now you’re killing people behind the screen with a push of a button. A lot of people say, “Terrorism, they killed you with a knife, killed one person with a knife, shot you. That’s terrorism.” But if you fly a $64 million F-16 and you drop up in an A-84 bomb that costs $16,000, that’s not terrorism because it’s remote. You’re behind the screen.

(00:19:49)
So what happened, what Israel is doing, it is removing itself, like America too, drones [inaudible 00:19:55]. And then when you push someone to be, they always brag about bombing them to the Stone Ages. What happens when the screens, and all of the obstacles that you have been put between you and those people, that you have treated them this way, when this is a breach and you come face to face, you will come face to face with what you have created.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:17)
Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting things you just said. So one is the methodology of killing. If you want to look at some horrific, hard-scaled killing, people often talk about the Holocaust, but that’s visceral. You can look at Holodomor by Stalin, where the murders through starvation.
Bassem Youssef
(00:20:37)
By Churchill in India.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:39)
Churchill, in India, and the Great Leap Forward by Mao. So starvation is a thing we don’t often think of it as murder because it’s quiet, it’s slow. And the interesting thing about starvation is that the people don’t complain as they’re dying because they’re exhausted. That’s one. And the other is the value of human life, it does seem that every culture has an unequal valuation of human life. So those two things combined create a complicated military landscape of the world.
Bassem Youssef
(00:21:22)
Yes, but the thing is that how we would look at technology as the savior, as if we talk about how, “AI will disrupt, will disrupt, will disrupt.” And now if you talk about going to the West Bank, the people in the West Bank walk, and they don’t see humans, they see people shouting them from towers or behind the screens and they have biometrics that is developed by Basel System, that’s done by HP or Google and Amazon who are part of Project Nimbus. And you see indivision developing all of this metric, and surveillance and all of that stuff. And then, you have something like the gospel that people have actually said that the gospel can actually create a target list using AI and give you a green, yellow, or a red to go ahead. And now AI is not just disrupting the market, it’s disrupting our humanity. And we became so comfortable killing people from afar, killing people with a push of the button. And now it is like dating apps when you swipe left and right, it’s like, “Oh, right,” it becomes so cheap. It’s not meeting someone. It’s like, “Oh, [inaudible 00:22:36],” it’s like a lot of fish in the sea. Same with AI. Boom, 500 people killed. Boom, get killed. It’s so easy, it’s so easy, it’s so easy. And then it’s so far removed from you.

(00:22:46)
So when you put these people in this condition, you have literally put them in a different universe than yours. You are behind in your air conditioned screens, pushing them, blowing up a university. It’s amazing. But then you meet what you have done, you meet the Frankenstein that you have created, and then people are like, “Oh, look what they did to us.”
Lex Fridman
(00:23:07)
You just gave me this image of a dating app from hell. Where leaders are just sitting there and swiping left, right.
Bassem Youssef
(00:23:15)
Like, “Invade,” “Destroy.” “Puppet government.”
Lex Fridman
(00:23:21)
Yeah. And then, turn off the phone and go to sleep. So I traveled to the West Bank and I mentioned to you offline that I really loved the people there. I’ve met a bunch of people like that in Eastern Europe where I grew up. Yeah, like the flamboyant, the big personalities, all of that. I also met a person who’s in charge of a refugee camp who was shot by an IDF soldier. And I’m not sure the words he said are important as the consequences of the thing that you mentioned, which is the deep hate in his eyes. That didn’t feel repairable at all. It was pain, it was like a foundation of pain, and on top of that, a hatred. And I was like, “Wow, you kill one person. This is what you create.”
Bassem Youssef
(00:24:19)
Mm-hmm. Because we have kind of like a front row seat to what’s happening. We think we are in it, but we can’t really grasp it. I mean people’s like, ” Oh, we’re just going to go in, get Hamas out and we are going to get them back in.” And what about the people get back in? How do you think they would look at you? What have you created? What have you done?

(00:24:44)
My show in Egypt was all about propaganda. It’s all about the use of words. Words are very important. The decapitated babies were not chosen randomly. Because you see, it plants a certain image in your brain. Imagine if you’re going in what a baby can do; it can smile, cry and poop, that’s it. It is absolutely no threat. So when you tell people, “40 decapitated babies, they’re so animalistic, they didn’t see the babies. Women raped. Of course, he’s an animal to do that.” And they would go through that and what was very frustrating about the conversation is the Gish galloping. The gish galloping. You see the distractions? You see what happens? ” What’s the proportionate response?” “Can Israel defend itself?” “Do you condemn Hamas?” “Does Israel have the right to exist?” “Decapitated babies.” “Raped women.” “Why don’t the Arab countries take them?” “Muslims kill Muslims.” “Look what happened in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq.” See how they kind of distract you? They throw little things at you so you don’t know what to do. Or the honor war, “The UNN,” “Anti-Semitic.” “October 7th,” “October 7th,” “October 7th,” and then suddenly you are distracted and pulled into discussing all of these little things and you’re not discussing what’s happening right now. It is basically stalling, giving them time to do what they do.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:06)
So there’s some degree to the propaganda though. So the beheaded babies and all this kind of stuff that is so over the top that it shuts down actual conversation about actual wrongs, war crimes on both sides. So it’s overstating it to where everyone on social media and everywhere in the press and everywhere is arguing, almost become desensitized to actual horrors of death, which are more mundane. They’re not so dramatic as beheaded babies.
Bassem Youssef
(00:26:35)
Yeah, because may be shot, but decapitated babies, there’s like a knife blade that goes into the skin, the trachea, the flesh, the spine. Decapitated. You can just, like, “He’s dead.” No, you go in. This is the hate. So much hate. And that’s why you-
Lex Fridman
(00:26:51)
You have made me laugh at the darkest shit. You’re such a beautiful person. Your dark humor is just wonderful.
Bassem Youssef
(00:27:01)
But you see this happened to Jews before. Remember blood libel? Where did the blood libel come from? It come from these rumors that Jews suck baby’s blood. This is what they did to them.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:11)
Yeah, it’s in the cup.
Bassem Youssef
(00:27:12)
Exactly. That’s a very delicious baby cup.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:15)
Delicious baby blood.
Bassem Youssef
(00:27:16)
But this is what you do. You tell people something. And it happened with the Native Americans when they were here, when they went in and they wipe a whole tribe. And Jewish people, one of the minorities that were persecuted and had this used against them for a very long time, and it is terrible, and it’s terrifying that’ it’s been used again.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:35)
So I just did a very lengthy debate on Israel and Palestine and the really painful thing from that, those two historians, and it was deep, it was thorough, it was fascinating. But in constantly asking about sources of hope or solutions, there was none. There was a really dark sense of, it’s hopeless, from both sides. It’s hopeless. So I look to you for a source hope. For a source of hope. Is there any hope here? Solutions? Short term, long term?
Bassem Youssef
(00:28:22)
Obama have kind of summarized this beautifully in his book. He said, the reason why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so chronic is one side have so much power and the other side have absolutely no power. And that’s what Obama said, he said, you have Israel, that basically don’t listen to us because they’re supported by people who are bigger than the president, bigger than administration. They know that they can. I mean, Netanyahu was quoted on tape many times saying like, he’s basically belittling Americans like, “We control 80% of the population. We don’t care.” This has nonchalant, kind of like, “We have them.” And there’s nothing really that compels Israel to give up anything because at the end of the day, what is compromise? Compromise is like, “I give something, you give something.” Israel’s giving anything, and they project that on you.

(00:29:15)
So for example, how many times have we heard, “Oh, Palestinians were giving four, five, six, seven, 15 chances and they said no to them.” And yet when you read the history, that’s not the case at all. For example, in the whole idea about Arafat walked away from Oslo, that didn’t happen. And there is an incredible video by, what’s his name? Joe Scarborough with Misha. And they were hosting her father Brzezinski. He was the national security advisor. And Joe Scarborough was like, “Well, Arafat left the Oslo Accord and the Palestinians left.” And then Brzezinski said, “This is like embarrassingly shallow.” It’s like, “Listen, what happened was there was a lot of catches on the Oslo Accord. It was very unfair to the Palestinians. So Arafat said, “I agree, but I need to take it to the Arab capitals.”” And they went to Sharm el-Sheikh, they came to Egypt, and he and Ehud Barak went to there. And then Ehud Barak left because there was election and he lost the Ariel Sharon game and it was destroyed. This is one of the reason why people… It’s kind of like facts don’t matter as much as what is the narrative that has been controlled.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:32)
But what were the biggest barriers to peace there? Do you think it’s, fundamentally leaders don’t want a two-state solution? Or was there nuanced small differences that, if solved, could lead to a two-state solution?
Bassem Youssef
(00:30:46)
I mean, maybe there was a certain point when the Israeli leaders were more open to compromise. But I can’t say that because each time Israel gives back land, it has to be after some use of force. The 1973 war, the first and second, the casualties in Gaza, they never give up land willingly and because of peace. Because if I have that much military, I can do whatever I want, why would I give up anything? I have that much power. Why would America or China give everything if they’re so powerful? And especially if they have this kind of open check from the United States. So it is really about what can push Israel to give up something? Because you are so much stronger than me, what could compel you to give up something? And this is why the whole thing about trying to equalize Palestinians and the Israeli state and government, it doesn’t make any sense.

Two-state solution

Lex Fridman
(00:31:49)
So what is the source of hope? John Stewart, who will talk about it from many angles, somebody you admire, a friend, he proposed a two-state solution.
Bassem Youssef
(00:32:03)
Of course.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:07)
Look to the comedians for hope.
Bassem Youssef
(00:32:09)
Yes. Well, everybody’s talking about the two-state solution, but Israel has said many times, or Netanyahu and [inaudible 00:32:15], “There’s going to be no state solutions.” In the past, it’s like even Naftali Bennett, he came in on [inaudible 00:32:23] like, “Yeah, maybe in the past we wanted two-state solutions, but look, every time we give them land, they kill us. So no state solutions.” And they are openly saying it.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:29)
But that’s, perhaps rhetoric?
Bassem Youssef
(00:32:31)
The rhetoric that is supported by action. Because look at what they’re doing in the West Bank, as you said. They are cutting it, illegal settlement, piecemealing it. So if you have an intention at all to give them anything, why do you keep doing this?
Lex Fridman
(00:32:48)
And you’ve called it, “A bunch of little Gazas.”
Bassem Youssef
(00:32:51)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:51)
It’s a nice little picture of what’s happening.
Bassem Youssef
(00:32:56)
Piecemealing it. Because what happened in the past four months, the Palestinians have been micro-dosing on it for a very long time.
Bassem Youssef
(00:33:00)
The Palestinians have been micro-dosing on it for a very long time. Little by little, little by little. And we would shout every time when it gets too much and then we’ll shut down, and then little by little. But this time it was hard. It was hard to see the blatant oppression. And the world said, “Maybe the Hamas Ministry of Health are giving us the bad numbers. Maybe these are human shields.” And I laughed. There’s 13,000 babies killed. Does that mean that there are 13,000 military target hiding in their diapers? Because it doesn’t make any sense to kill that many babies it’s just like, “Oops, it’s out of our hands.”
Lex Fridman
(00:33:45)
It’s hard to know what to do with those numbers. Just one baby is enough.
Bassem Youssef
(00:33:51)
But you know what happens when you hear so many numbers? Numbers become numbers and you become so desensitized. And this is why there’s a difference between saying, “13,000 Palestinian kids dead.” It’s like, “Mila Cohen an Israeli baby, 10 month old, she was killed in her crib.” And this is what we hear from CNN. We never hear a story about the Palestinian kid. That’s why thank you for giving me the space for saying the names of the Palestinian children that were killed just in four weeks. Because humans needs context. They need depth. They need a 3D look at what they can look at. But if you just tell numbers, “Oh.” They don’t mean anything.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:34)
Is there some degree to where both leaderships, Hamas, PA, Palestinian Authority, Israel, all want war, like perpetual war to remain in power?
Bassem Youssef
(00:34:49)
That’s an interesting question. But let’s admit something. The Arab regimes in the area have actually used the problem of Palestine in order to stay in power, in order to take, get excuses, have this enemy. And Israel, the Israeli government has used that too. And maybe the Palestinians. But my problem with when going into discussion this is that the two sides are not equal. They’re not equal in power, they’re not equal in influence, and they’re not equal in international support, especially with the United States. People who have made changes in history were the people with power, the people who would have the ability to change things and the Palestinians cannot really change it. What can they change?
Lex Fridman
(00:35:39)
Well, is that true though, with how much support the Palestinian people have? So just like you said, there’s a lot of Arab states that will voice their pro-Palestinian position in order to distract from their own corruption and abuses of power in their own countries. But I don’t think, if you look globally, there’s a complete asymmetry of power and public opinion here, maybe in the press in the West. But if you look globally…
Bassem Youssef
(00:36:12)
But do they have the same kind of weapons that the Israeli have?
Lex Fridman
(00:36:14)
Literally power? No, there’s a major asymmetry of literal power.
Bassem Youssef
(00:36:20)
Some money to their leaders. Does that make any difference? And also when you say Palestinian Authority, which authority are you talking about? Hamas or the Palestinian Authority who has been kind of a domesticated, kind of like a puppy for the Palestinians who basically have been an informant on their own people. And this is the thing also that kind of really pissed me off when I was hearing the thing about these things like, “Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, Hamas.” We have Netanyahu on tape confessing that he supported Hamas giving money in order to cause factions between the Palestinians. So it’s just like it doesn’t make… You just told me this. You just told me this, you just told me they didn’t have any support Hamas, but Hamas is like “What?”
Lex Fridman
(00:37:01)
To which degree does Netanyahu represent the Israeli people? Is a real question.
Bassem Youssef
(00:37:08)
To which point does Trump or Biden represent the American people?
Lex Fridman
(00:37:12)
And to which degree does Hamas represent the Palestinian people?
Bassem Youssef
(00:37:16)
None of these represent it, but who have the power in order to make the decisions? It really comes down to that.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:23)
Well, who does have the power? You’re giving a lot of power to Israel.
Bassem Youssef
(00:37:28)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:28)
But the Arab League-
Bassem Youssef
(00:37:31)
What should Hamas do? What do you think? What should Hamas do?
Lex Fridman
(00:37:33)
Continue doing what the charter says which is trying to destroy Israel. And the role of the Palestinian people is to overthrow Hamas and get a more moderate leadership probably. And the role of the Israeli people is to vote out this right-wing government and elect a more moderate leader so that there’s a chance at peace with two moderate leaders.
Bassem Youssef
(00:37:56)
So before Hamas even got to control 2006 Gaza there was a real sure one in 2000, and we all know what happened, and I really sure one kind of had make the came up with this amazing policy of breaking kids’ bones in the into father. So even Barrack he was also, I mean which one is moderate I think is Hamas is a product of what happened. I mean, if there was no apartheid in South Africa, there will be no NFC. There will be no Nelson Mandela though if there was no Nazis in Paris will be no French resistance. And I’m not saying, and again, I don’t want to be put in a position to defend Hamas or anybody because you know what that entails. But those are Hamas, again, not defending them.

(00:38:50)
They went into October 7th. Why did they did that release our hostages, the people in prison? Because if you’re talk about people who are kidnapped, Israel kidnaps people every single day and when they had the first exchange in November 4th, Israel leaves 400 people. Three quarters of them were women and children. Why are those people in prison? There’s one in four kids that are in prison that stay in solitary confinement, which is by international law, a form of torture and you’re putting kids through that.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:22)
Is it possible, so first of all, ceasefire and longer term, is it possible for Arab states and the United States to get together and with power through diplomacy enforce a solution?
Bassem Youssef
(00:39:41)
It’s a very, very ideal solution, but you know and I know that Arab states don’t really have the power. All of the powers are in the hands of America.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:51)
I think they have the power. See, I think they have the power.
Bassem Youssef
(00:39:54)
Maybe they Don’t want to use it. Maybe they don’t want to.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:58)
Because there is a benefit. The dark sense I have is that a lot of people win from the suffering that Palestinians are going through because they can point to that and distract from
Bassem Youssef
(00:40:14)
Definitely
Lex Fridman
(00:40:15)
Corruption in their own states. And then obviously Iran can benefit also from the same kind of dynamic distracting from the authoritarian nature of their regime.
Bassem Youssef
(00:40:27)
Definitely. But what is the core of the problem here? Is it the Arab states using the suffering or actually the suffering itself and the suffering comes from people being displaced. Their homes were taken away. There are 7 million Palestinians in diaspora, seven millions, 7 million went out there and now they’re living in Canada and America and Europe. They had homes there. They cannot go back to 1.7 million people. Of the people in Gaza don’t belong in Gaza. They were pushed from other places. The piecemeal thing of people are being in Germany, I’m going to shift gear a little bit. It’s going to be a little bit of fun. There is a book that I bought the rights to and I want to turn it into a movie, and I optioned the right for two years in March of last year, before October 7th, after October 7th, I bought the permanent, right,

(00:41:26)
That book, it’s called the Muslim and the Jew, and it is written by an author called Ronen Steinke. I read an article about this book in 2016 and I chased that book for rights for seven years. I didn’t have that much money, but I wanted that book and that book was translated into English called Anna and Dr. Hanmi, and that book tells the incredible story under Nazi Germany where Arabs went in droves to Berlin in 1920s after the first World War in the Weimar Republic, and they became doctors and engineers and journalists for two reasons. Number one, they’re cheap, very cheap because of the inflation. And two, a lot of the Arab nationalists didn’t want to send their kids to England or France because they were the occupiers and Dr. Hanmi was the hero of that. He’s an Egyptian doctor and that’s why I personally connected with him and he went to medical school, didn’t find a place to live, so he lived in the Jewish ghetto.

(00:42:34)
Like many Arabs, he didn’t find a school to work at, a hospital to work in, so he worked in a Jewish hospital. So there was a lot of Arabs who lived with the ghetto and actually the first director of the Berlin mosque with a Jewish convert who converted to Islam, and he was a gay activist. I’m telling you, this is a crazy story, and this is not a fiction story. This is actually like a nonfiction. It’s written actually based on the statement, the documents of the Nazis and Gustavo, Dr. Hemi, he was in this hospital and the Nazis came in and they killed and tortured and beat up the Jewish doctor and they made him the head of his department. Then now he’s surrounded by Nazi doctor. They didn’t touch him because he was an Arab. There was kind of like a thing between Germany and the Arabs because they wanted to appease to them in order to have kind of a grassroots base in the Arab world where he want to go next.

(00:43:38)
And this is why 19 34, 19 35, the racial laws of Nuremberg, they had a name change. First they were called anti-Semitic. Then they changed into anti-Jewish because also Arabs were Semitic, so they wanted to appease the Arabs. Now what happened to Dr. Hanmi when that happened to him, he would go back to the ghetto and he would see the apartments next to him. The Jewish apartments become more and more and more flooded with people because they were moving Jews and pushing them and putting them together, pushing them to the side and each flat, each apartment instead of one family, it would have 3, 4, 6, 7 families. And he was there when at home and he looked, he was there.

(00:44:29)
This is where the people he grew up with, he lived with, and now he’s seeing that kind of discrimination just because he was an Arab. And then he started to kind of atone for, because he felt responsible because he wasn’t treated the same way. And he started to go and treat Jewish people in their homes because they couldn’t go to hospitals. And then one family gave them his daughter. It’s like, this is Anna. Save her. He took her pretended that she’s his niece, put a hijab around her, taught her Arabic, called her Nadia, my daughter’s name by the way.

(00:45:05)
And he hid her in plain sight for seven years in front of the Nazis as his nurse. It’s an incredible story. And then not just that, he went to prison and then he went out and he formed with the Arab people that was imprisoned with him, a network that saves 300 Jews. You see that kind of story. This is the Jews that were living in the airport. I’m not saying that the Jews living in the airport was living like an incredible life. Of course, as LA kind of minority, they did not have the full power of their full advantages of the rule. That’s normal. But we had this kind of a relationship

(00:45:42)
Before Israel was erected in 1948. And then of course, everybody looked at Jews at time as fifth column. And of course the nationalistic regimes used that. And this is why what Biden said was very dangerous when he said, if there’s no Israel, no Israel, you are the leader of the free world. You are the President of the United States. Do you mean that you are telling me that Jews in your country, in the United States of America are not safe? That is wrong on two levels. Number one, America historically and right now is more safe to Jews in the world than anybody. They’re safer than the Jews in Israel.

(00:46:23)
They never had pogroms or the Holocaust like Europe. They live here a good life, not perfect life, but they’re better. Second of all, if you are the president and you’re telling that a group of people will not feel safe unless there is a different one, you are already feeding into their fifth column. They’re like, you’re Russian. You come from there. And there is a group of laws in the Russian constitution that says that Russia will protect its citizens everywhere in the world. What happens if the president says like, oh, you’re Russians. You’re protected by your own country. Don’t belong here. This
Lex Fridman
(00:46:51)
Is terrible. Yeah, you’re right. That’s actually an indirect threat. Even saying Muslims cannot feel safe in America or something like this. That means that’s a threat.
Bassem Youssef
(00:47:03)
But what would a Jewish person in Beverly Hills or in Brooklyn feel if he hears that you are already telling people you need to be loyal to Israel? I mean, Israel is a foreign country. I am sorry, but Israel is a foreign country. Israel is a client country that we sponsor, and it should actually be responsible and held accountable for what they do.

Holocaust

Lex Fridman
(00:47:28)
You mentioned 1948, the Nakba, but before that, 41, 39, 41 to 45, the Holocaust. What do you do? What do do with the Holocaust? How do you incorporate into the calculus of what’s,
Bassem Youssef
(00:47:46)
Oh, it’s terrible
Lex Fridman
(00:47:46)
Of morality. That leads up to the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from the land. How do you work that
Bassem Youssef
(00:47:56)
Out? It is terrible, but I mean the systemic annihilation of Jewish people under the Nazi, that is a carefully engineered thoughtful plan. It was terrible. It was kind of like the human ingenuity put into something that is very evil, but also it is not just that happened. We need to remember that Otto Frank, the father of Anna, Frank has his visa, refugee visa rejected by the United States. There’s a lot of people that were rejected by the United States, rejected by other European countries, and then they were pushed into Palestine.

(00:48:31)
So you have to put yourself between and the Arabs, okay, we’re sitting here, okay, come and then, all right, you don’t have a home or a country anymore that kills you. I mean, you see, if I’m not an Arab and you give me that kind of piece of terrible human tragedy, like oh my God, that is terrible. But then I’m an Arab like, yes, I’m so sorry, but what do I have to do with that? Why is that my fault? The persecution of the Jewish people have started since then the eighth and ninth century because they were like they first anti-Christians, they were with criminal immigrants. They were conspirators. This is the anti people as if Europe kind of throw anti-Semitism on us. You understand that like Henry Ford, Henry Ford is one of the biggest anti, he was the inspiration for Adolf Hitler.

(00:49:28)
This is how anti-Semitic Henry Ford was. And you kind of gloss over that and then suddenly we as Arabs have to pay the price. Why?
Lex Fridman
(00:49:44)
Several questions I want to ask there, but one just zooming out, why do you think hatred of Jews has been such a viral kind of idea throughout human history? Oh,
Bassem Youssef
(00:49:56)
It’s very easy. It all started from Christ. They killed Christ. They kill Christ. They killed Christ. They’re the killer of Christ. That’s a very sexy story. And that stayed for years. That stayed for centuries. I’m sorry, centuries. They’re the killer of Christ. And then the Catholic Church did not allow usury, but they would work in usury, so they become rich. Now, the people that we hate, that we accuse them of feeling Christ are becoming rich. So that’s envy now and that’s hatred. I mean, when you talk about ghettos, ghettos were not just as secluded parts in cities. Sometimes those ghettos or outside the cities, Jews were not even allowed to work a lot of professions.

(00:50:42)
They were not allowed to get into the syndicates of certain professions. So they had to work usually and they got rich, so the people hated them more. The first crusade didn’t kill a single Muslim. All the killed were Jews. And when they finally arrived to Jerusalem, all the killed were Jews. They almost annihilated the Jews. So it was all this, and of course you have the dark ages. Who do you need as an enemy? The Jews. They’re the killer of Christ. There’s nothing bigger than this.

(00:51:15)
And then you fast-forward. I mean, one of the things that I found out that was very, very, very, very crazy when Henry Ford imported the protocols of the elders of Zion, by the way, in the Arab world, protocols of the elders of Zion is so popular and for the obvious years and for the people who don’t know it’s kind of a bunch of stories. And basically it’s like the Jews saying, we got to control the war and we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that and whatever. What people don’t know that that is a work of plagiarism. It was plagiarized from a satirical play called Conversation in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, and it is kind of based on one chapter or one scene or something. It’s crazy, but it’s crazy
Lex Fridman
(00:52:12)
How sticky it is. Yes, that’s weird
Bassem Youssef
(00:52:15)
Because if I hate you, that’s great, but if I have a story to support that hate, that’s even better.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:20)
But it’s one of the best stories, one of the stickiest stories about hate. Of course, it’s probably the most effective. A lot of peoples hate other groups of peoples, but that’s just the sexiest story of them
Bassem Youssef
(00:52:36)
All. Because humans need to concentrate their hate, their insecurities and their shortcomings into one thing that they can practice that hate on. If it’s a person, great, if it’s a group, even better.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:55)
How do you into this calculus incorporate That group is pretty small. There’s 16 million Jews worldwide, and you mentioned how is that the responsibility of the Arab peoples? Everybody should be to blame for not taking in Jews after the Holocaust, but the reality of the situation, if we look at the religious slice of this, there’s 16, let’s say million Jews, and there’s, I don’t know how many Muslims, but 1.8 billion. That difference, that a hundred x difference. Do you incorporate that into the sense that Jews in Israel might feel for the existential dread that this small group might be destroyed? Jews
Bassem Youssef
(00:53:48)
In Israel have every right to feel afraid because of everything that they see and everything they’ve been told everything. But I would say that the calculus or the numbers doesn’t, of course being small,
Lex Fridman
(00:54:02)
It
Bassem Youssef
(00:54:03)
Is of course a factor, but it is never an excuse in order to take something that’s not yours. It’s saying like, Hey, you have 300 million Americans and we have 52, 52 give one state for, there’s too many of them, too many of you just give them something. It’s like the fact that I have something and you don’t, and I have, there’s too many of me, and there is little of you. And then you come in and it’s not really Israel against the Arab word or the Muslim or because we have to say we up big time.

(00:54:34)
But it is the Palestinians that are in and they are being subjected to that. So it’s not really like the 1.8 billion and the 16 million Jews and the 1.8 billion. If you look at them, some of them don’t care. Some of them live into regimes that being oppressed and those regimes are supported by the United States in order. It’s easier for me as an empire to take what I want from this country if I control the dictator. And I tell them that his power is linked to my desire to keep him in power. So that’s why you have a total disconnect between people in power in the Arab and the Muslim countries and the people themselves.

1948

Lex Fridman
(00:55:15)
Can you speak to the 1948, because you mentioned taking land that’s not yours, maybe parallels with Native Americans. There was a war, the Jewish minority fought that war against several Arab states and won that war. How do we incorporate that into the catalyst?
Bassem Youssef
(00:55:41)
Yeah, well, that’s also a misconception, like a misinterpretation of the event because it seems that it was the small, it’s kind of like a David and Goliath kind of story. And I was always like, how did we not do that? But in reality with numbers, I can’t pull it up right now, but if you look at the numbers, the number of tanks, the planes, the trained officer, because many of those Jewish fighters came from World War Two, they were seasoned fighters and they actually had more planes, more tanks, more artillery, more pieces of weapon, more of all of other combined, because the people that really was Egypt and 1948, many of those Arab countries didn’t even have their independence. So they would kind of send a cavalry or a people in horses. But in fact, the whole idea was like we won against seven nations. The numbers totally in Israel’s favor. They were better equipped, they were better trained. They had more tanks and artillery and airplanes, and they planned better. So yes, they deserved the win because they planned and we did it. So
Lex Fridman
(00:57:00)
To you, there was an asymmetry of military power even then. But what do you do with the fact that the war was won? So if you look at the history of the world, there is wars fought over land.
Bassem Youssef
(00:57:15)
I agree with you. This has been the history of humanity. Humanity was not living peacefully. It’s all about people taking people and equaling people taking their land. But there’s two difference here, mostly usually the conquering power. For example, England, they had England and they conquered you in India and after the occupation finished, they go back to England,

(00:57:39)
France, Greece, Persia, Egypt. They will go in, expand and shrink, expand and shrink. It’s always been there. What is different here is exactly what happened in Australia and the United States. A group of people came in not just to conquer and take the land, but to completely change, to replace them and get them out or kill them. It was very easy with the Indians because they had smallpox. There was no social media. They did it over 400 years. They had time. The problem is what is happening right now, I agree with you. It might not be that new, but we are there and we are watching it happen.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:16)
And so now we have to confront the realities of war and empire and conquering,
Bassem Youssef
(00:58:22)
Because what’s the problem? We told ourselves we can be better. After 1948, there was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It means that we are going to be better humans. We are not going to kill and take land. We’re not going to displace people. We’re not going to take people for what they’re, there’s now laws, there’s international laws, there’s International Court of Justice, and now Israel is giving the middle finger to all of them.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:45)
So isn’t in some fundamental way. This whole thing that we’re talking about is us as a civilization on social media in articles and books, in newspapers. We’re just trying to figure out who are we as a
Bassem Youssef
(00:59:01)
People. I think that the shock came from the fact that we thought that we as humanity have evolved and now we are. What have actually changed is that we became more advanced in effectively eradicating a group of people because of the technology that we have and the fact that we can do that under the eyes and ears of all the world. And we are watching it under our phone. We have a window. We have a window to the war. 1945, people didn’t know what was happening in Japan. Well, we heard about it on the radio like, oh, today our forces came in and they launched. We don’t know. We heard it. Maybe we saw pictures after that and it’s quite edited. But now we see it, we’re into it, and it’s so much for our psyche and we can get it. The Arabs say like, guys, you told us we came to the West because we were told that we were equal.

(00:59:55)
The university declaration of right, one of the co-authors, his name is Stephane Hessel. He’s a Jew. He’s a survivor of the Holocaust. And what happened to him, he died, by the way a couple of years ago, but before he died, he was canceled by so many people and he was called anti-Semitic because he joined the BDS movement and he spoke about truth Palestine, that is the author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that we value so much. And we think that that would define our humanity. But then we go in and we are shocked. It’s like maybe we were sold something. Maybe that was false advertisement.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:40)
You shared a tweet by an account called Awesome Jew. It reads Islamo-Nazi comedian Bassem Youssef comedian in quotes, by the way.
Bassem Youssef
(01:00:53)
Yeah, yeah, of course, because I’m not funny.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:55)
So Islamo-Nazi comedian, Bassem Youssef is now denying the October. I love that you retweeted this twice, I guess suppose because it’s advertising some upcoming dates. He’s now denying October 7th massacre. The Muslim Radical Bassem Youssef is notorious for his radical radical set twice for his radical hatred of Jews in Israel. In a recent clip, he claims that the atrocities committed on October 7th, they’re fabricated or looking for all information regarding any of his upcoming shows, as well as the venues which host the scumbag. Would Jews feel safe around this Nazi Nazi?
Bassem Youssef
(01:01:34)
Yeah,
Lex Fridman
(01:01:36)
This is my first time interviewing a Nazi
Bassem Youssef
(01:01:39)
Honor. It’s my first time I actually get called a Nazi.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:42)
First time. First time.
Bassem Youssef
(01:01:43)
I have been called so many things in Egypt. So in Egypt, I was called a CIA operative, a Mossad spy, a secret Muslim brotherhood, a secret Jew. And there was also an article that was published about me in the state-Run Media saying in details how Bassem has been recruited by CIA agents using John Stewart in order to use satire to bring down the country. I was a Freemason, an infidel, a member of the Knights of the Temple, something like that. And there’s actually people, the Muslim Brotherhood on their show, they would say like, he’s action Israeli, and they have forged and Egyptian Id for him to come here. So it’s kind of like when I said I left all of that behind and I come here, it’s like, boom, anti-Semitic, Nazi. I mean, I really covered everything. I don’t know what else. I mean, think it’s kind of like I’m collecting PhDs. I’m just getting all of these credits.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:51)
How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the attacks? I mean, this goes back to the decision to do the interview with Piers Morgan. How do you psychologically do all of it?
Bassem Youssef
(01:03:03)
These kinds of attacks? At the beginning its fun, but when they evolve into something else, so for example, I was laughing of all of the stuff about calling me this, calling me that, but then when people would come and thread the theater, because it’s not the people who are making those accusations that would come to you. It’s the people that will hear and see those accusations and act on it. And there’s always the fear of, I mean, we have in the air board a lot of things that somebody would hear something about someone else and go kill him and whatever, anybody else. So there’s this, but somehow I want to make fun of it. And it is to be called an Islamo-Nazi. It must been the funniest thing ever
Speaker 1
(01:03:49)
Does Islam Nazi. Wow. How did you An radical Muslim me. A lot of Islamist’s hate me. They don’t call me a secular infidel. So it’s kind of like, who am I? Maybe I have an identity
Bassem Youssef
(01:04:04)
Crisis and I need the people to tell me who I’m,

Egypt

Lex Fridman
(01:04:08)
Let’s go to the beginning. Let’s go to your childhood. You grew up in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt,
Bassem Youssef
(01:04:13)
Childhood.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:15)
Well, let’s figure out how you came to be who you are.
Bassem Youssef
(01:04:18)
How did you become an Islamo-Nazi.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:20)
Yeah, exactly. It’s a long journey. I do like the swastika tattoo on your, which I didn’t.
Speaker 1
(01:04:28)
How did you see my?
Lex Fridman
(01:04:28)
You know what you did. I know I did. It was very inappropriate. You’re also obviously a sexual harasser of me.
Speaker 1
(01:04:36)
This is
Bassem Youssef
(01:04:36)
Like a me too.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:37)
Yes.
Bassem Youssef
(01:04:39)
This is like 2020. Someone will come up. It’s like, okay,
Lex Fridman
(01:04:41)
We clip it. This is your me too moment. All right, Cairo, what’s, what’s a defining memory, positive or negative from your childhood?
Bassem Youssef
(01:04:54)
My memory in general was cool. It was cool. I went to a Catholic school for primary school, elementary, and by the time I’d done, there was kind of a start of a decline into the public education. And my parents, they’re middle-class working officials. My dad was a judge, my mom was a business professor and they were one of the people who’s like, they didn’t have that much luxury. My dad drove a regular car, a Fiat, which is the equivalent for the Lada in Russia.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:30)
Thank you for speaking to the audience.
Bassem Youssef
(01:05:35)
Lada.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:35)
So would that be a good car
Bassem Youssef
(01:05:38)
Or bad car? No, it’s kind of like the minimum. And my dad was not a command of showing off whatever money they would do. They would put it for us. Education, give everything to their kids. This is kind of a very, very typical mentality, and I’m sure it’s in many cultures, but we grew up with this. Everything that we have is like for kids, so they will put us into education. So.
Bassem Youssef
(01:06:00)
… everything that we have is left for kids, so they will put us into education. So middle school, that was… 1986 was the beginning of the explosion of international schools, private schools. And these schools were relatively expensive. Of course now with today’s currency, it’s ridiculous, but at that time it’s very expensive. So I went to that school, and from… There was this moment, it was like you feel less right away. I mean, of course there’s the regular bullying and stuff, but it’s not that. It’s kind like you always feel less. You don’t have that much of purchasing power that can allow you to go to the same outings or travel with them. And even how you dress, it will be modest compared to them.

(01:06:43)
So I was always an outsider, and I compensated with that by two things, being good at school and being good at sports. So I was not like the typical nerd. It was just like, I was playing football, basketball, track and field, and I was one of the… People would like to have me on their team. So I wasn’t kind of like, “Ah, he’s a nerd, get him away.” But I never had a girlfriend. I never had any kind of… I was not boyfriend material. So that kind of leaves remnants in you, that you’re not good enough.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:15)
But psychologically you were always… Like when you were by yourself, you felt like an outsider.
Bassem Youssef
(01:07:19)
Yes, all the time. And that’s why I’m more of a loner. I don’t have a lot of what you call friends. I have acquaintances, people that I do stuff with, but I don’t have the people that I tell them everything. When I went to medical school, now medical school is a different animal. Medical school is where all of the people from the public schools go. Public schools are very… They don’t have English language as a strong part, but they are brilliant people, because they would mostly study in Arabic. But they are brilliant and they are very, very, very smart, very sharp. But then I’ll go there. Now I am the sissy boy from the private school that comes into medical school. Now I’m an outsider again, and I go into residency and I pick up salsa. So now I’m a salsa teacher while being a cardiothoracic surgery resident. And I’m an outsider for the third time because in salsa, I’m kind of like the respectful doctor. And in resident, I’m the guy who is just dancing. And everything, of course, as a medical resident, you will mess up a lot.

(01:08:25)
So they would always like, “Oh, because you’re a dancer. Oh, because you don’t care about medicine. You just want to go there and dance with women,” which is true. So all of my life, I felt that I’m an outsider. I’m not part of the team. I’m not part of the core group. And I have a story that you would love. Right before my residency, I was so much into salsa, so I had all of the money, and then you saved that. And I was working summers and I was doing extra jobs, and I took that money and I went to Miami in order to learn Rueda de Casino, which is the Cuban kind of circle salsa kind of thing. And I went there in the summer of 2001. My return ticket was 9/12/2001.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:22)
The universe has a sense of humor. I got to tell you that.
Bassem Youssef
(01:09:26)
9/12, I was supposed to be on a plane coming back to Egypt. What happens? Thank God I ran out of money 10 days before that. It was like, “All right,” I changed my ticket and I came back. 9/11. I’m kind of like, ah, sleeping… My mom, “Wake up, wake up!” “What? What?” And I see the two tower falling, Mom was like, “Oh, you’re here, you’re here, you’re here, thank God you’re here.” And I was like, “I could have been in Guantanamo right now.”
Lex Fridman
(01:09:54)
Yeah, flying on 9/12.
Bassem Youssef
(01:09:58)
But by the way, I was in Miami when they went to the flying school, in Miami. So I mean, I had like 9/11 written all over my face.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:08)
You’d be all over the news.
Bassem Youssef
(01:10:09)
All over… And my mom was like, “What? He went there to dance salsa. I didn’t know that salsa is like a name for terrorists.”
Lex Fridman
(01:10:17)
Why salsa? Why did that attract you? Can you explain what salsa is? So I mentioned to you offline that I’ve been doing a little bit of tango, trying to learn it.
Bassem Youssef
(01:10:25)
Yeah. Samba, salsa, bachata, merengue. It’s kind of like Latin dances and it’s like… I don’t know how you describe salsa. Couple dance and Latin beat. And I did it because I once… And I talk about that in my Arabic stand-up comedy, not the English. I talk about how I didn’t have really a great social life. And my friends went there one day, and I go into a place which it was called El Gato Negro. No, no, it was called Big Fat Black Pussycat. And then I think they thought it will be racist or something though, so to change it to El Gato Negro. Anyway, so-
Lex Fridman
(01:11:14)
Great, great, great decision.
Bassem Youssef
(01:11:18)
I know. So I went there. I was like, “Damn! Music and women and I’m a doctor, a doctor dancing salsa. That is a chick magnet.”
Lex Fridman
(01:11:26)
Yeah, 100%.
Bassem Youssef
(01:11:28)
We do everything for that.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:31)
All of human [inaudible 01:11:32]
Bassem Youssef
(01:11:32)
Even power, even money.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:33)
All the wars we’ve been talking about.
Bassem Youssef
(01:11:35)
Women.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:37)
At the end of the day-
Bassem Youssef
(01:11:37)
The approval from the other sex. We are babies. We are terrible people. So of course that was great. But then, as a nerd, I went in so hard and now I became a salsa teacher. And I earned more money from salsa, more than I did as a doctor’s resident.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:58)
I didn’t know this part of you. That’s hilarious.
Bassem Youssef
(01:12:02)
I know. I was making a killing amount of money, huge amount of money. And I would go finish my shift and I’d go to the salsa class, and sometimes I would have like 70 people in my salsa class.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:16)
Oh wow.
Bassem Youssef
(01:12:16)
I had the biggest salsa class in Egypt, at the beginning of the 2000. And it was fantastic. And it was an outlet because you go there and there’s the shifts and people dying. Damn. And then you go salsa.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:28)
An escape. You must’ve been good.
Bassem Youssef
(01:12:31)
I was okay. I was cool. I was fun. There were people better than me, but I have a thing about teaching. I like teaching people.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:39)
So you mentioned heart surgery. So what motivated you to become a doctor?
Bassem Youssef
(01:12:43)
It was a choice of exclusion. I mean, there’s nothing else you can do with these high grades other than doctor and engineering. I hate math, so go be a doctor. This is the Middle East. What do you expect? It’s either… In my joke in my show, I said you can be one of three things in the Middle East, a doctor, an engineer, or a disappointment. That is the choices that you have. So years after, I’m a disappointment.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:14)
You’re damn good at it though. That’s a hard path, though. And it’s a fascinating one for-
Bassem Youssef
(01:13:22)
Can I tell you something?
Lex Fridman
(01:13:22)
Yes.
Bassem Youssef
(01:13:23)
That actually I was thinking about why did I actually go into medicine and why did I always choose the hardest thing, although I didn’t love it? And I have to tell you, I had an epiphany only two weeks ago, and I don’t know if that’s actually related or not. Remember when I told you I went to this school, and I didn’t have that much money and I didn’t have the luxury of time or money to be with those people and do what they do? So by the time I finished school and everybody was going to university, everybody in my school went to the AUC, the American University in Cairo. Of course, private American education, party time.

(01:14:03)
I mean, of course they’re brilliant and everything, but they have a different social life. And part of me now, I realize that just very, very recently, maybe I went to the hardest school ever so I don’t have space to use other than studying. Because if I have that much space, what I’m going to do with it? I don’t have that much freedom. I don’t have that much money. I can’t compete with those people going out, so maybe I need a solid excuse that I’m in a place where I don’t have that much of a spare time.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:41)
Is it also possible… I like how this is a therapy session where we’re psychoanalyzing you. Is it also possible that you always just pick the hardest thing you could possibly do?
Bassem Youssef
(01:14:50)
Maybe, but-
Lex Fridman
(01:14:52)
Maybe that’s the Piers Morgan thing too.
Bassem Youssef
(01:14:55)
Maybe. But when I left Egypt and I came here, I still had the choice to go back to medicine. But I hated it. Medicine traumatized me. The amount of… You give up… My brother in Egypt, he had a daughter. She’s a brilliant basketball player. She’s in the national team. Amazing. I used to play basketball also in the Egyptian League, but I never was… Kind of my favorite position in the court was the bench, and I was not as good as her. And then it was time for her to go into college, and he didn’t talk to me for six weeks. I said, “Tamer, what’s happening to Farida? Which college?” Like, “I didn’t want to tell you. She went into medicine.” I said, “What? Medicine? Why did he do?” Because he knows how I hated it. I was traumatized. And I said, “Dude, she’s a basketball player. Make her go to an easy school.” Said, “Nah…” So that’s kind of why-
Lex Fridman
(01:15:49)
You still did it. You still did it.
Bassem Youssef
(01:15:53)
I still did it, but I don’t know, is it because of the difficulty or because of what I told you? Maybe I needed something. Maybe because I was not very confident in my social life, so I needed a distraction not to have that much of a social life.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:07)
Oh wow, okay.
Bassem Youssef
(01:16:09)
You understand?
Lex Fridman
(01:16:09)
I see. Yeah.
Bassem Youssef
(01:16:11)
It’s kind of… Because I will always have an excuse. I’m studying, I have something, I have exams. And I don’t know, I kind of self-sabotaged my own thing because I couldn’t compete with those people on the outing and the money and whatever, so I need an excuse to be… Like, “Oh, he’s a doctor. He’s studying.”
Lex Fridman
(01:16:26)
At least in your own mind, you couldn’t compete.
Bassem Youssef
(01:16:28)
Yeah, I always felt as less because, I mean, I didn’t have any girlfriends in school. I had very late in life, everything to me came to life, so I always felt… Even stand-up comedy, it came very late to me in life, so I always feel that I’m not good enough. I feel that I didn’t spend the time to fill the foundation that other comedians do, so I always feel that I am too lucky. I always feel that this is a fleeting thing. And when I had the height and the fall, the fall of… In Egypt, when I would like the top of everything, I was so famous, and then everything was taken away from me. That’s like, “Ah. You see? I told you. That happens when you don’t build foundation, you fall.” So I always feel that I am not good enough, or if I am in a position where people think I am, deep inside I’m not. You know that I have a speech impediment, that I was not meant to be a TV presenter? In Arabic, it’s very obvious. I cannot roll my Rs.

(01:17:32)
I cannot say “rrr.” I cannot roll it. So in Arabic, like Spanish, it’s very obvious. So when I did my first video on the internet, that made me famous. And then I got my television deal back there in Egypt. My partner at the time, he took the video and he went to a producer, and said like, “Are you giving me a guy with a lisp?” That’s why when I came on television, I was the first ever guy with a lisp. I had two things going for me, the lisp and the big nose. And I was always bullied for these two all the time, so I always felt less.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:03)
See, but that’s a foundation of creating a great person.
Bassem Youssef
(01:18:07)
Yeah. Because if you’re pretty, you don’t need to do much.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:14)
I probably wouldn’t recommend it, but it is true that-
Bassem Youssef
(01:18:18)
So if you are pretty, do some disfigurement that you’re-

Jon Stewart

Lex Fridman
(01:18:23)
Find the flaws and be extremely self-critical about them. So you saw Jon Stewart on TV for the first time in 2003, I believe. How did that change your life?
Bassem Youssef
(01:18:37)
I was in a gym and I was running on the treadmill. And at that time, CNN was coming up on cable. And I was watching, and there is this studio, I don’t know what it is. So I put the earphones on and I started watching. And I was so taken by this that I stopped the treadmill and I just stood for the 20 minutes like this on the treadmill, just like standing there. I didn’t know what he was saying, I didn’t understand what is Democrats, what is Republicans? Those names that he’s saying… What is Fox News? I don’t understand. But I was fascinated. There was something… You know when you don’t understand the music, but you get the rhythm? It was that.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:23)
I wonder what that is that you saw. It’s like the timing of the humor. I mean, Jon Stewart is one of a kind. His biting criticism of power, I would say. And also ability to highlight the absurdity of it all.
Bassem Youssef
(01:19:39)
But you understand, I didn’t understand any of that. I didn’t understand any of the references. But it is the rhythm. You know sometimes when you even see a comedy that’s the language you don’t understand, but there’s a rhythm? Da da da, da da da, boom boom. There’s something, there’s something in the music. So there’s something with the videos and the pictures and he and the face and people reacting. What is this? What is this? What is this? And we had the global edition. So I went to the YouTube and I just started to kind of watch every single episode that I can. I said, “Do you think we can have this in Egypt?” I said, “Ah, never.” And then 2011, I had a friend of mine who was also a YouTube partner, it was something new at the time, he said, “Let’s do something on internet. Let’s do something…” I said, “I want to do Jon Stewart.” It’s like, “Nah, do Ray William Johnson, Jon Stewart will not work.” It’s like, “Nah! I want to do Jon Stewart.”
Lex Fridman
(01:20:35)
So that was in there.
Bassem Youssef
(01:20:36)
Yeah, it was in there. And I did it. And it worked.

Going viral during the Arab Spring

Lex Fridman
(01:20:42)
Can you talk about 2011? I mean, the Arab Spring, what is it? People here in America-
Bassem Youssef
(01:20:49)
It depends on which side-
Lex Fridman
(01:20:52)
Did something happen or what?
Bassem Youssef
(01:20:55)
Depends which side of the equation you are. Because for a lot of people it’s a conspiracy. It’s American made. It is the Muslim Brotherhood, it’s the Islamists, it is Israel, it’s everything else other than people. But it’s a pure revolution. It’s a pure… I think we put too much weight on conspiracies. I think it is normal human behavior that then get maybe used or abused or taken advantage of by other powers, and then the conspiracy starts.

(01:21:26)
But at the time, the Arab Spring didn’t start in Egypt. It started in Tunisia. Bouazizi, a fruit vendor, burned himself up like the American soldiers who did that a few days ago. And that kind of sparked protests in Tunisia. And Ben Ali was a dictator in Tunisia for about 20 years, and they removed him. So suddenly it was kind of like a domino effect. And then Egypt started and it just took 18 days. And people, hindsight is 20/20. Same said just Mubarak became a burden on the military because the military are the real rulers of the country. You might have a president that kind of have certain powers, but at the end of the day, when the military sees that a certain president is too much of a burden, too much of a… So they cut him off.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:17)
And Mubarak is the leader of Egypt at the time.
Bassem Youssef
(01:22:18)
At that time. He was there for 30 years.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:20)
30 years. By the way, speaking of which, because it was a joke in your Mark Twain speech. I got teary-eyed just watching that. That was just great. You’re fucking great, what you did with Mark Twain Awards for Jon Stewart. It’s great. I mean, your comedy is great in general, and I wanted to go to your show. I definitely will. But that’s like a little stroll and a complete tangent of just a masterful introduction and celebration of Jon Stewart. Anyway, Mubarak. 30 years.
Bassem Youssef
(01:22:48)
And it’s a joke that I say also, Mubarak was a president for 30 years. Like, “Oh my God, you had a president for 30 years?” It’s the Middle East. It’s a very short first term. It’s like we’re still warming up, baby.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:58)
Just warming up.
Bassem Youssef
(01:22:58)
And I told them, we need to plan ahead. We need to plan our vacations, our careers, our jail time. It’s just like we need to-
Lex Fridman
(01:23:05)
That’s great. It’s true.
Bassem Youssef
(01:23:10)
So we had kind of the shortest, nicest revolution, 18 days. And we thought, “Oh, 18 days, we can change the country in 18 days.” But of course we were naive and we had this kind of hope. So Mubarak was removed. There was an interim period by the military, took it for one year, then they did elections. Muslim Brotherhood came to power. They stayed for one year, and then the military removed them. And in these three years, my show started, it started by kind of a YouTube video.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:41)
It became famous overnight.
Bassem Youssef
(01:23:43)
Overnight, five to six videos, boom, went out. And at that time I was waiting to get my clearance to go to Cleveland. I was accepted in a fellowship as a pediatric heart surgery in a hospital in Cleveland. And I said, ” All right, I’m just going to do a couple of videos. Maybe I’m going to put it in internet, and maybe after a year or two, after I come back from the fellowship, somebody will come, ‘Hey, why don’t you write a show that looks like John Stewart?'” That was my mind. It took five weeks. I had my first contract of television, and overnight, the exposure. And over the next two, three years, I had 30 to 40 million people watch. 30 to 40 million people watching every episode. A lot of this like, “Wow, that’s too much.” That is terrifying because it means that there are 30 million people who have an opinion about you.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:32)
You said there’s a lot of aspects of that sudden fame that were just horrible.
Bassem Youssef
(01:24:38)
It’s toxic. It’s unnatural. When people started to recognize me in the street and take pictures, I was awkward. It’s like, “Why do you want to have a picture of me? Why? Is it…” Because I didn’t feel that I’m worthy enough to be a reward for someone to have a picture. And I didn’t understand it. I was kind of an ass sometimes because… People thought it was arrogance. No, it was confusion. And I remember my director and my producers and people, they always saw me in a very bad mood. It’s like, “Why are you not enjoying this?” It’s like, “Because this is not natural. This is not natural, this adoration, this love, and this have to end somehow.” And it did. Because at a certain point you are a human, and people, kind of the adoration and the fun and the love comes because they see you saying stuff… because you do your job, basically.

(01:25:31)
Political satire is basically us making fun of politicians in the media. And a lot of people have really strong opinions about politicians in the media. So we came that, we articulate that, and we give it to them and we make them laugh. So for them, we made a great job. So why don’t you do more? But you are limited. And at a certain time, you can’t. And at a certain time you’re afraid because we’re humans, because you’re afraid about if I continue speaking up… not something will happen to me. I’m kind of like maybe have some protection because people see me, but what the people around you? And I’ve seen that. So that’s why at a certain point, that’s it.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:13)
I mean, there’s a lot of things to say there, but one of the difficult things of fame in your situation is you’re not just having fun. You’re criticizing power.
Bassem Youssef
(01:26:22)
Yeah. And it is loved by the people, but it comes with a price. Because at a certain… If the power is too strong and you are not into a situation or a system that allows that, that gives you that kind of safety-
Lex Fridman
(01:26:37)
So what happened?
Bassem Youssef
(01:26:39)
What happened? So the height of my fame was when the Muslim Brotherhood was in power. And at that time they had their media, and I had one show. I had one hour per week, and they had five channels, 24/7. And they were like… Jon Stewart said it beautifully once. It’s like, “We say shit and you say shit, and we just say shit better than you.” This is exactly what Jon Stewart was like. “We’re just better at saying shit back at you.” So basically I had one hour and they had the five thing that they were like… They’re calling me all kinds of names, not just me, all their enemies. And then I just had one hour and I would kind of annihilate them in one hour a week. So at a certain point they would even kind of side with the army against the liberal seculars, whatever you call it. And at a certain point, the army kind of flipped everybody.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:38)
What do you mean flipped?
Bassem Youssef
(01:27:42)
Yeah, they removed the Muslim Brotherhood. They came to power. And I have to say, I admit it, I supported that in the beginning because I had daily threats. I was actually interrogated and arrested under the Muslim Brotherhood. I was in an interrogation for six hours, and they were asking me all my jokes. And I used that in my standup comedy describing exactly what happened in the six hours. And it is so funny.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:04)
Okay, well, it’s hilarious. But what… Slow down. You were interrogated by the Muslim Brotherhood?
Bassem Youssef
(01:28:13)
The general prosecutor. The general prosecutor. And it was basically because of complaints by the officials in the government. Because in order the general prosecutor to do it, it has to have a high up mandate to bring that person to questioning.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:25)
So they went through kind of official channels.
Bassem Youssef
(01:28:27)
Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:28)
So it’s all-
Bassem Youssef
(01:28:29)
Yeah, it was official. It was legal.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:30)
Yeah. Very legal.
Bassem Youssef
(01:28:32)
So I went there, and I asked… And it’s kind of like a bunch of insulting Islam, insulting president, spreading false rumors. And I went there, and it was funny because I go into the building where there’s police officers and there’s judges, and all of them are big fans of the show. And some of them were taking pictures of me. And then I’m sitting there, and it was the most ridiculous interview ever because he was asking me about my jokes. It’s like, “What did you mean by this joke?” And it’s like, “Nothing.” And it was there for six hours.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:03)
He’s just reading your jokes back to you.
Bassem Youssef
(01:29:05)
He was reading my joke, and he’s reading the jokes and the junior judge is sitting there cracking up. It’s like, “I remember that.” It’s like, “Guys, guys.”
Lex Fridman
(01:29:15)
That’s dark.
Bassem Youssef
(01:29:17)
It’s kind of like… And I’m laughing, but in the same time it’s like the whole situation is ridiculous. But then at the end, I was released on bail. So I went back to my show, and I make fun of that. And you have to be honest, the Muslim Brotherhood were in power, but Egypt was right out of the revolution, for there was kind of an equal spread of power between the people. There was not someone who would come in and just… The Muslim Brotherhood didn’t have that power yet, but people saw that they were moving towards that. And then the tension rose, and then there was a kind of a confrontation between them and the army. And then a lot of people were killed in the street. It was terrible massacre. And then suddenly, I am blamed for all of that. It’s like, “You made fun of us, so now it made it easier for people to kill us.” Like, “Dude, come on. You’re doing that to me too. I just did it better than you. And the fact that you sided with the same people that flipped against you, that’s not my fault.”
Lex Fridman
(01:30:11)
Did you criticize the army at all?
Bassem Youssef
(01:30:13)
Yeah. So after that show, I did one episode against the army and I was canceled the next day. And then I went to another channel, did 16 episodes in a different season, and I was walking on eggshells. And then that was canceled again. And then the production company that was doing my show, that we severed ties, because we didn’t have the show, they had their offices raided, they have people having death threats. So I woke up one day, 11th of November 2014, and my lawyer said, “Leave the country right now. There is this legal case that they… They’re coming for you.” But they said, “You cannot…” It was an arbitration case, and I lost against the channel that basically canceled me. And I told them, “But there’s no jail time in arbitration.” It’s like, “Yeah, tell that to the judge. Just leave.” So I jumped on a plane. The verdict was 12:00 noon, 11 November. 5:00 afternoon I was on a plane, left Egypt, and I never came back since then.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:11)
Was there a worry of non-legal things like assassination?
Bassem Youssef
(01:31:19)
I can tell you something, I was so stressed because of the show and because of everything, sometimes I would wake up in the morning and I hope that a bullet will come and finish everything because I was so stressed. It’s like, “I would love…” Because I’m too much of a chicken to kill myself, so I would rather have someone else do it for me. So I was under so much pressure. And I remember the day that my show was canceled indefinitely, the second time, under the army. And I was like, “Ah. I don’t have to worry about what kind of script I have to write next week.” Because remember when you asked me about that tweet? About all those… Those accusation doesn’t bother me. Infidel, spy, secret Jew, Zionist, Islamonazi. That’s bullshit. What really leaves a mark is the criticism to your craft and your work. So, “You’re not funny,” goes deeper.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:19)
Yeah, certain things get to you better than others, especially if you have a secret suspicion that you are maybe not funny.
Bassem Youssef
(01:32:29)
Maybe I’m not, because I was put into that, it’s like, because that touched your insecurities. Like, “I know, but you shouldn’t say it out loud.”
Lex Fridman
(01:32:37)
You shouldn’t say the truth out loud.
Bassem Youssef
(01:32:38)
You shouldn’t say it out loud [inaudible 01:32:42]
Lex Fridman
(01:32:42)
But what about the weight of the responsibility of speaking truth to power, walking on eggshells, what did that feel like?
Bassem Youssef
(01:32:51)
Well, after the Muslim Brotherhood were removed… You have to understand, when the military coup happened, it was a very popular coup. People loved the army. In Egypt, the army is more sacred than the religion. People love the army. Popular army can go no wrong. So me going against the army was… I mean, the Muslim Brotherhood was not very popular. They were popular for their own basis, but people accepted the fact that we make fun of them. But Sisi, at that time, he was a God. And I used to go to this high class club called Gezira Club, and this is basically kind of the upper middle class, upper class kind of people. And during that year of the Muslim Brotherhood, I was the most popular ever. People come, “Yay!” When the military came in, people were walking to me, pointing their fingers like, “Don’t speak about Sisi, don’t speak about the army. We love you now, but don’t you…”

(01:33:47)
They were like that. So I called Jon Stewart, I was like, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.” And at that time, all of the channels were closed down, all of… I was the only one left because it was difficult for them to get rid of me very quickly because I was too popular. It was kind of like piecemealing kind of like… And I remember I told him, “I don’t know what to do.” He said, “You don’t have to do anything, just, your safety comes first.” And said, “But I can’t. I mean, I’ve been doing that for two years and I cannot just say, ‘Bye-bye guys.’ I have a responsibility. I have a team, I have people working for me. And also, I cannot just disappear.” And he said the most interesting thing ever. And say, “If you’re afraid of something, make fun about the fact that you’re afraid of it, instead of talking about that something.”
Lex Fridman
(01:34:42)
Brilliant.
Bassem Youssef
(01:34:44)
So there was a whole episode that we did not even mention Sisi. We did not even mention it, but the videos did all the thing. And the whole episode was me trying to avoid talking about him. And that’s how the comedy was created, the fact that I don’t want to be here. And so he said, “You’ll be surprised how people can relate to that,” because there was a lot of kind of like, “Oh, we love him, but we feel we cannot speak.” So just by doing the simple thing about mirroring the society, that goes a long way.

(01:35:19)
And I kind of try to do what I can under the military. I mean, they came up with a machine that treats AIDS and Hepatitis C virus and basically every single… And I went to town with that because people… It doesn’t really have to go in to go to the bigger post like, “You’re an asshole.” No, you talk about their propaganda. You talk about what they want people to perceive them at, and it’s a failure. And for that, that kind of hit them even more. Because what do authoritarian figures do? They work on two things, fear and propaganda. And from that, it gets the respect. So when you go into their propaganda and expose them, they have nothing else.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:11)
That’s brilliant. So you are walking on eggshells, but you’re doing it masterfully, that you’re revealing sort of the flaws in the propaganda, the absurdity of the propaganda and in so doing are criticizing them.
Bassem Youssef
(01:36:21)
And this is why comedy is very specific, because people say, “You were not as hard on him as you were on the Muslim…” I was like, “Yeah, because on the Muslim Brotherhood we were just saying shit for each other,” but now the ceiling was like here. So it’s kind of like, how can you do something from here?
Lex Fridman
(01:36:37)
Yeah, exactly. That’s the art form. Yeah. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, a lot of the criticism came from children stories and children’s cartoons.
Bassem Youssef
(01:36:51)
Double meaning, double innuendos, stuff that means other stuff. That is-
Lex Fridman
(01:36:51)
Real creative.
Bassem Youssef
(01:36:55)
That’s the brilliance.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:57)
But everyone knows.
Bassem Youssef
(01:36:59)
Everyone knows.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:00)
Because you are putting a mirror, you’re mirroring the society. It’s fascinating, actually.
Bassem Youssef
(01:37:04)
And that’s why I was canceled twice.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:07)
And that is a scary one, the army. You see that in Ukraine, everybody supports the army. That’s why Zelensky getting rid of the head of the army was a big, big deal. It’s a really dangerous thing. And everyone was afraid to say anything negative about the army, especially during war, in that case. And in this case, maybe there’s civil war, that kind of thing.
Bassem Youssef
(01:37:30)
But think about it. Actually, an army during peace is much more dangerous. Because think about it. I don’t really have an enemy to fight, but I have all of this power, all of this tank. Why does this actor have more money than me? I’m protecting him. Why does this businessman think that he can get onto his private plane and go to Paris? And why I’m here sitting, not having all of these things? And there’s a lot of time on your hand because your job is to go fight. When you don’t go fight, and when you have the lack of… That’s one of the things I love the United States about, is the fact that the army cannot really get power, but the power is actually in the military-industrial complex, which is a different issue. It’s kind a different kind of issue. But if you have all of that power, why am I sitting around just playing guard for you guys?
Lex Fridman
(01:38:22)
That’s why Iran is terrifying because you have this military that just becomes a police force that turns against its own people. So you’re a famous guy talking shit in the middle of all that.
Bassem Youssef
(01:38:36)
Yeah. And when I left, I went through a very dark side, dark, dark, dark. Because all of the insecurities, all of the stuff that had been working on my head now came to life. And now I’m in America and I’m a nobody. I’m a nobody. And now it’s like I have to do something. I have to earn some money. So I started to do stand-up comedy five years ago, and I sucked because it was my second language and it was new. And now I would go to these comedy clubs-
Bassem Youssef
(01:39:00)
It was my second language and it was new. And now I would go to these comedy clubs with kids and 21, 22 people. And then I’m there with a family to support that. I’m going there to do it for $15, $20. And I was bad. I was bad.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:14)
You’re bombing.
Bassem Youssef
(01:39:14)
Bombing big time.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:15)
Eating shit.
Bassem Youssef
(01:39:15)
Eating shit big time, dying up there big time. And I would go back home and I would cry. And then what made it worse is sometimes like a fan, not a fan, a bunch of fans from Egypt. It’s like, “Bassem Youssef…” They come and it’s like….
Lex Fridman
(01:39:16)
Yeah, just-
Bassem Youssef
(01:39:35)
Their disappointment. That kind of face of adoration that goes into… And I could see it in their face. “I think he’s going to drive an Uber in a couple of weeks.”
Lex Fridman
(01:39:50)
Oh, that’s so incredible.
Bassem Youssef
(01:39:51)
That kind of pressure. And I would go and I would cry and I… And then the fans were like, “Oh, you left. You gave up. You were a sellout. You’re a coward. Why don’t you speak from abroad? You’re safe now.” It’s like, I already spoke. I don’t want to be an activist. I was doing that for comedy when it was good for everybody, but now they want me to go into YouTube and just like throw rocks from outside. I was like, “You don’t understand. I have family there.”

(01:40:20)
And it was this kind of thing, like I’m being attacked for not doing what I should do in their face and attacked for not being funny and not doing good… And now I feel like, maybe it was wrong and… It was so traumatic that I don’t know actually how I went through these years. And I blocked so many details from my brain, because I have been using this technique for a while now that I have been erasing a lot of my… There is a lot of memory gaps in my brain, and I’m trying to suppress it because it was very, very, very traumatic. And a lot of people told me, “You have to go to therapy.” But I’m worried to open the floodgates. And I’m thinking, if I’m functional and I’m not killing anybody, I’m okay.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:16)
I think Elon tweeted, “‘Never went to therapy,’ is going to be on my headstone.”
Bassem Youssef
(01:41:21)
Yeah…
Lex Fridman
(01:41:25)
You’re best buds. Okay. I mean that is terrifyingly difficult to… After being a surgeon, after being a superstar, super famous, going to eat shit at local tiny clubs in the United States. I mean eating shit period. Like bombing is really, really, really difficult. Really difficult, for twenty-year-olds.
Bassem Youssef
(01:41:52)
Imagine when you’re 45, 46. And then people’s like, “Is this his midlife crisis? What is this?” I went through a lot of pain and a lot of the doubts and it was terrible.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:08)
How did you survive? I know you [inaudible 01:42:11] most of it, but what gave you strength through all that?
Bassem Youssef
(01:42:14)
Because I didn’t have any other choice, because I started that and the only reason that I could… is continue. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t want to go back to medicine. I don’t want to do that. And I don’t know. And bit by bit, bit by bit, I started to kind of be better, be better, be better. And I was at a certain time, a year ago, a year ago, this is where I started to kind of hone the craft and kind of sell more tickets and sometimes even sell out some shows and sometimes sell a theater. So it was going and the money was flowing and it was good. And then I was like, I wanted faster, I wanted more. I want it now. I want Netflix deal and whatever. And then the Piers Morgan thing happened and then I blew up and then suddenly I’m selling out everywhere.

(01:43:03)
And it’s like, “Ah, if the war happened two years ago, I will not be ready.” So now they come to the show, and by the way, my show had nothing to do with October 7th. My show is my thing that I’ve been crafting and working on. You know how difficult it’s to do the first hour, the hour that I’ve been working on for five years? And it’s all my personal story, all about what happened to me in Egypt, me as an immigrant, coming here to the United States, finding Trump as a president, finding myself in the middle of a guns rally, finding myself in the middle of a bombing, kind of talking about how I got my citizenship. It’s funny stories about my origin story.

(01:43:41)
So they come in and they expect October 7th and all of a sudden my personal story, but it’s good and it kills and they love it. It’s like if that kind of blew up in America happened to me two, three years ago, I would not have… People would come and be disappointed.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:54)
I got to say the timing of October 7th is very suspicious.
Bassem Youssef
(01:43:57)
Oh my God. Please don’t say that.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:58)
I don’t know. I’m just asking questions. I don’t know.
Bassem Youssef
(01:44:01)
I’m telling you, one of the funniest thing, a guy… I was in Dubai and a TV anchor came to me. “Bassem Youssef, he flourishes during revolutions and wars.” Like, whoa, whoa. Wait, what? Dude. You’re making me sound like a bad omen. A very bad omen.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:19)
Yeah. You, Hamas and Bibi together orchestrated all of this.
Bassem Youssef
(01:44:23)
Oh my god. That’s the trilogy.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:27)
You guys should go on the road together. I’m telling you that phone call is coming,
Bassem Youssef
(01:44:31)
Yeah, but Hamas has to open.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:34)
And that would really bomb, right? That
Bassem Youssef
(01:44:34)
They would really bomb.

Arabic vs English

Lex Fridman
(01:44:41)
I love dark humor. You do a show, like you were saying, in English and in Arabic, and the story is very different.
Bassem Youssef
(01:44:50)
Totally different. Two different stories.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:52)
I would love to… just the language difference, because the music of the language is also different. So how can you convert it into words, but what’s the difference in the music of the languages?
Bassem Youssef
(01:45:03)
I’ll tell you, because I thought about that thought.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:08)
[inaudible 01:45:08]. All right, all right.
Bassem Youssef
(01:45:10)
Okay, so when I was doing the English first, I actually had good jokes, but I was missing the delivery because the cadence and the music and the rhythm is different. The way that an English-speaking American member of audience will receive it’ll be different than how I receive it. The energy, everything’s different. So when I kind of got it, I didn’t know how to switch back to Arabic.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:40)
Oh wow. Yeah. Fascinating.
Bassem Youssef
(01:45:43)
Because here’s the thing. With English stand-up comedy you have a huge library, you have a legacy. You have years and years and years and years of people doing comedy. But in Arabic it’s very new to us. And most of the Arabic stand-up comedy, especially in Egypt, is very tamed. This is kind of like, imagine the stand-up comedy scene in American 1960s before Lenny Bruce.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:05)
So no swearing, conservative, careful.
Bassem Youssef
(01:46:07)
No swearing, nothing, conservative, everything.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:08)
No [inaudible 01:46:09].
Bassem Youssef
(01:46:09)
It’s kind of very… So I didn’t know what to do with Arabic, so I broke the barriers. I became Lenny Bruce, I became George Carlin. So I went in and I went and I changed the whole thing.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:21)
The seven words you’re not allowed to say.
Bassem Youssef
(01:46:23)
Ah, for me, 15 words.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:26)
There’s a lot.
Bassem Youssef
(01:46:28)
Arabic is a very rich language. So here’s the difference between the Arabic and the English show. The English show, surprise, surprise is a unifying language, even for a group of Arabs.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:28)
Interesting.
Bassem Youssef
(01:46:43)
So if I give the same exact show to the same 1000 audience members in the same theater, and they’re the same people, same makeup of like Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, Saudis, English will be a unifying language. Arabic is a dividing language.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:43)
Why is that?
Bassem Youssef
(01:47:01)
Because you have 22 dialects, and the dialects are vastly different. And maybe Egyptians understand a little bit of Lebanese, but not that much. But the references, Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, totally different animal. That’s like a totally different language. Saudi, Emirati, Kuwaiti, totally different. People understand the Egyptian dialect because it’s the dialect of most of the artwork and the movies. But the reference in the everyday street talk might not be understood by them. So now I have to go in and talk to all of these dialects together.

(01:47:32)
So a big part of my show is like, “What are you guys expecting of this?” When I do profanity and you’re going to like it. This is the problem with the show as a dialect, and I construct all of these sentences formed of so different words. For example, an iron in any Arabic dialect is an iron. In Saudi Arabia, it means ass. That’s one example. That’s one example. So imagine if you can actually construct sentences having all of these things in one… So I would construct a whole section of my show about that.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:13)
So it’s really very much about, like self-reflective on language and the limits of language that’s allowed.
Bassem Youssef
(01:48:19)
And the limits of language. And I tell them part of the show is I know what’s the problem with me doing Arabic. It’s like if this was an English show and I was telling you fuck and shit and bitch, you’ll be, “Ha, ha, ha, ha…” But if I do one swear word, all of you will cringe. It’s like, why?
Lex Fridman
(01:48:31)
That’s fascinating.
Bassem Youssef
(01:48:32)
Is it because we are ashamed of our own… So it’s not just about swearing, it’s about… There’s a lot of philosophical pathways in this. Yeah, there’s profanity and people have fun, whatever. But it is about how do we treat our language? And I tell them, “We speak Arabic as Arabs, but it’s not the same Arabic.” It’s crazy, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:48:54)
And you’re doing the show in America also, which is another level of [inaudible 01:48:58].
Bassem Youssef
(01:48:57)
Oh yeah. Actually the Arab diaspora in America is some of the best audiences I have. They are wonderful. And I did it also in the Middle East, and maybe I’ll do like an Arab tour in the Middle East in the fall.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:12)
Which countries would you go to or not?
Bassem Youssef
(01:49:14)
I already did Jordan, Lebanon. I’m doing UAE, I’m doing Kuwait.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:20)
Egypt?
Bassem Youssef
(01:49:20)
Bahrain. Egypt, I don’t think so. I don’t think so.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:23)
Is it personal? Is it worry about your safety?
Bassem Youssef
(01:49:29)
Well, I have the American citizenship right now, so I am relatively safe. There’s a block, honestly. There’s a block. There’s so much that happened. And I’ll never bad mouth Egypt. It is my country. It has all of my marriage. 40 years of my life I lived there. But when you get hurt so much, instead of trying to kind of… I don’t want to take revenge, I don’t want to like battle. I just want to avoid because Egypt gave me so much fame and so much love and so much hate and so much rejection. It was a very tumultuous relationship. Very, very difficult.

(01:50:12)
And a lot of people tell me, “Well, don’t you miss Egypt?” And I tell them every time, “The Egypt that I miss is not there anymore. It’s not bad or good. It’s not worse or better. It’s just I’m different.” And the places are different and the people are different and their circumstances are different. Whatever image you had you have of what you love is not there anymore. That’s why a lot of immigrants, especially Arab immigrants, they live here, but they’re there. And then when they go back for a vacation, they get disappointed because they didn’t find what they want. And then they come back here and they’re disappointed because they want to come back, but it’s not there anymore.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:46)
Yeah. Their view of that place is from a different time. I have that… My parents, but everybody that left the Soviet Union, I mean it’s such a complicated relationship with that. It’s sometimes borders on hate, disappointment. In the case of the Soviet Union, perhaps similar to Egypt is the promise is sold when you were younger and the promise is broken by the possibility of what it was supposed to be. With the Soviet Union, I’m sure with Egypt it’s the same. Iran is the same. So they have a very complicated relationship with that.
Bassem Youssef
(01:51:26)
Yeah. That’s why, for example, people from Iran, I remember quite well the World Cup that was done in the United States, and the Iranian team will play in America. And there were people in the audience all wearing Iranian shirts. They hate the regime, but they have this kind of connection with the country. And this is the whole thing. You can actually love the country and you not have to agree with the regime.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:54)
Would you ever perform in the West Bank?
Bassem Youssef
(01:51:56)
No.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:56)
Gaza?
Bassem Youssef
(01:51:57)
Because if I go there, I have to go through the Israeli checkpoints and I don’t want to go through the… I don’t want to have an Israeli soldier telling me what to do.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:04)
Yeah, there’s a demeaning aspect to that whole-
Bassem Youssef
(01:52:06)
Very.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:07)
Even in subtle ways, yeah.
Bassem Youssef
(01:52:09)
Yeah, yeah. I mean I have so many Palestinian friends with an American passport, US passports, living here, they’re born here. And they talk about the humiliation and the intimidation and the harassment that they go in. It’s like, do you want me to try?
Lex Fridman
(01:52:24)
Yeah, that little bit of a humiliation…
Bassem Youssef
(01:52:29)
A little bit.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:32)
Oh, sometimes it’s major, but-
Bassem Youssef
(01:52:32)
I know, I know.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:34)
… I noticed that even the little bit, after a lifetime of that, it can turn to hate towards the other.
Bassem Youssef
(01:52:44)
Yeah, and resentment.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:45)
Resentment. And then how do you do anything with that resentment?
Bassem Youssef
(01:52:48)
I have a friend of mine, he is from Palestine from the West Bank. He’s American. He was born here. And we have of course all of this discussion of what happened. And he tells me on October 11th in the West Bank, and there was a village called Qusra. And on that village, the settlers went in around the village and they send a message on Facebook. It was like, “You rats, get out of your sewers and we’re going to be waiting for you.” Intimidation through technology. Qusra have another settlement next to it called Esh Kodesh. Esh Kodesh, they have people there who were training something called [inaudible 01:53:32], which is basically the guardians of [inaudible 01:53:36]. And it’s like a paramilitary group that trains other settlers on military compact, give them weapons and do military drills.

(01:53:45)
And they went there militarized and went there, and it was actually co-founded a Jew from Brooklyn. Not even… and like an Israeli. And he’s like one of the disciples of Meir Kahane. I’m sure that you know who Meir Kahane is, who was the Jewish defense leader, the people who assassinated Alex Odeh here in the United States, and they were there with their weapons outside intimidating people. Now this story carries everything that is wrong with the situation. You have people from Brooklyn, from outside, just because they’re Jewish, they can’t come and they can claim the land from the people there. Anybody from… just because he’s Jewish, you can come and take the land from other people.

(01:54:25)
They’re using technology to intimidate Palestinians. They have unchecked military power. These are not IDF soldiers, these are settlers and they have free reign in order to intimidate and to kill the people. And you understand, this is the daily life of Palestinians, not in Gaza. In the West Bank.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:45)
What do we do, what do people do to nudge this towards peace, towards flourishing?
Bassem Youssef
(01:54:55)
Here’s the thing, I want to talk to the people of Israel. What is Israel doing right now is not just unfair to the Palestinians, it’s unfair to the Jewish people in Israel. No, it is unfair to the Jewish people around the world, because the way that Israel links itself to Judaism, at a certain point… Remember ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and when everybody hated Muslims? Humans are simple. They cannot have the nuances to separate. So anybody with a Muslim name, with a Muslim face with a beard who looks Muslim, he would do it because of that actions of those atrocities, you have the power as a person to separate yourself from an abusive power, a horrible power, and be yourself.

(01:55:43)
I am really worried because the rise of antisemitism and the rise of hate against Jews is not because of the Jews. It’s because of the actions of a government. Jews do not have to be on the side of apartheid. Ronnie Kasrils, he’s a Jewish South African, and he fought shoulder-to-shoulder next to Nelson Mandela. He was part of the African National Conference, ANC. And he had an article said like, “I know what apartheid is and I saw Israel and this is what they have.” And the thing is, Israel, the Israeli government should listen to other people. You cannot call anybody who criticizes you either an antisemite, or if they’re already Jewish, you call them like self-hating Jew. You cannot do that. You cannot continue doing that, because we did that.

(01:56:28)
When I would go in and criticize the Islamists, it’s like, “Oh, you’re self-hating Muslim. You’re not really Muslim, you’re an infidel, you’re a secret, you’re secular,” whatever. We have the power in order to reform the course by holding people in power accountable. And the thing is, it is very stupid to actually call this antisemitism. My idol is Jon Stewart. I voted for Bernie Sanders. Sarah Taxler, the one who did this amazing documentary about me, Tickling Giants, she’s a Jew. She is married to an Israeli Jew. We have a good ratio because we know what the right is. They don’t have to associate themselves with the action of the Israeli government.

Sam Harris and Jihad

Lex Fridman
(01:57:09)
One of your favorite words, Jihad.
Bassem Youssef
(01:57:13)
That’s my favorite hobbies.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:15)
Favorite hobby.
Bassem Youssef
(01:57:15)
It’s in my shows. What’s your guys’ favorite… I talk about how when a white shooter does something, he talks about all of his family. And I was like, “What if we took this for Arab terrorists. What are his hobbies? Jihad.” You see? You could be a comedian.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:34)
Yeah. Wow. You’re making me feel good. Okay. Sam Harris has done several episodes on Jihad and people should go listen to it, even if you disagree with it. But the basic idea that he’s proposing is that this idea of Jihad in the negative connotation of it, of martyrdom, is counterproductive, is destructive to the possible future flourishing of Palestinian people. What do you think of that? There’s just the idea of martyrdom-
Bassem Youssef
(01:58:11)
Yeah, I totally agree. But people don’t wake up in the morning and say like, “I want to declare Jihad.” Think about it. Why would anybody choose to end his life by taking other people with him, and end that life? His life must be miserable. He must be pushed into that. Nobody chooses death over life willingly. One of the first suicide bombers in the Palestinian resistance were Christians. We don’t talk about that.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:40)
I think he would say that the presence of a story that you can tell yourself when you’re in a really shitty place, that you can go to a much better place by sacrificing your own life… just the fact the presence of that story is there is harmful.
Bassem Youssef
(01:58:57)
Of course. But here’s my problem with Sam Harris, and usually people, they have free range talking about the Islamic faith and nitpicking the stuff that makes it put in a bad light. I can go and nitpick every single religion. They are Jews there like Ben-Gvir who openly say spitting on Christians is not a hate speech. I mean, you can bring me all kinds of videos of Islamic Jihadists saying horrible things on YouTube, and I can bring you Jews who live there, they say like, “we are going to have the whole world enslaved for us. And everybody would love to be slaves for the Jews.” I can use the Talmudic argument that if you tie a man to a tree and he dies of thirst and hunger, you didn’t kill that man. And this is kind of the same arguments like, “Ah, we are not killing Palestinians. They’re dying by themselves.”

(01:59:52)
So the nitpicking of a certain narrative, religious narrative that is separate from the political context and what’s happening right now, it’s very unfair, because I can read… If you want to have a deep dive into religious texts, nobody will be happy. And I can bring stuff from the Talmud and the Torah and stuff that is horrible. But this is a way, again, of distraction.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:20)
I dare you to talk about Buddhism and Jainism though. Try.
Bassem Youssef
(02:00:24)
Well, the people who killed the Muslims in Myanmar, weren’t they Buddhist?
Lex Fridman
(02:00:29)
Yeah. Well, hey, let’s go Jainism. Okay, I’ll find the religion. I’ll get back to you. I’ll have to find one.
Bassem Youssef
(02:00:35)
The Church of the Flying Monster-
Lex Fridman
(02:00:36)
The spaghetti thing?
Bassem Youssef
(02:00:39)
Spaghetti.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:42)
As a person who tries not to eat carbs, I’m deeply offended by that.
Bassem Youssef
(02:00:45)
I mean, there’s Scientologists, all they do is actually buy real estate.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:51)
I think there’s a few books written about the fact that they do other stuff as well. So even there…
Bassem Youssef
(02:00:57)
I know, I know.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:58)
Mormons sometimes… They’re some of the nicest people I’ve ever met, but I’m sure there’s also darkness there too. Oh boy, religion.
Bassem Youssef
(02:01:08)
There’s soaking in Mormons.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:11)
There’s what?
Bassem Youssef
(02:01:12)
Soaking.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:12)
What’s soaking?
Bassem Youssef
(02:01:13)
Okay. Soaking, basically if you get into the woman and you don’t move, that’s not adultery. That’s not like-
Lex Fridman
(02:01:25)
Oh, interesting. So there’s a loophole.
Bassem Youssef
(02:01:25)
Yeah, you go in and you just stay…
Lex Fridman
(02:01:29)
There’s a loophole.
Bassem Youssef
(02:01:31)
A loophole. That’s the thing. Religion has loopholes.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:31)
Religion has a loophole.
Bassem Youssef
(02:01:32)
Yes. And Muslims, we do that the whole time. We pick and choose our sins, the stuff that we enjoy. It’s just we’re humans.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:39)
There’s 72 virgins waiting for all of us.
Bassem Youssef
(02:01:41)
Maybe if I converted you as a Jew, I’ll get you 80. I don’t know. We can negotiate.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:46)
But I also have questions about whether-
Bassem Youssef
(02:01:48)
I’ll give you a very good deal. And maybe I’ll throw there a Camry.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:51)
I have to be honest. A Camry? It’s pretty good. What year? I don’t know.
Bassem Youssef
(02:01:57)
1998. Best year ever.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:59)
Well, they last a long time, so I’m not sure I want 72. I-
Bassem Youssef
(02:02:04)
Well, I’ll throw five in the mix and see how we feel.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:08)
Yeah, can we-
Bassem Youssef
(02:02:08)
If you want to upgrade…
Lex Fridman
(02:02:09)
Yeah. Can we do a trial period? But in general, if you just zoom out, do you think religion is… In what way is it good for the world? In what way is it harmful?

Religion

Bassem Youssef
(02:02:22)
If there was no religion, humans would have invented religion, because think about it. Think of the early humanity. You’re a caveman or whatever, and then you see your family members killed and then you say, “What? I’m going to be the sheep or the gazelle that just ends and perish? I am more important.” I think with the development of consciousness, humans thought that they are much more precious and important than the other animals because they have now intelligence. So my life will not end like that. My death will be even more important. There’s consequences for that. There’s consequences for what I do.

(02:03:01)
And then the early man was there in the desert and all of these natural phenomena. They didn’t know what to do. They were afraid. So they need to have refuge. They need to have something to take care of. They need to have a reason for everything, because if there’s no reason, it’s chaos. It’s chaos.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:19)
It’s terrifying.
Bassem Youssef
(02:03:20)
It’s terrifying. There’s nothing. There has to be a reason. There has to be a reason, there has to be a purpose. There has to be a cause, something. I’m not just going to be die like a cockroach being stepped on. And that’s kind of part of it is ego.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:36)
The whole world rotates around you in a way.
Bassem Youssef
(02:03:38)
It’s the ego. So religion actually got a lot of it from humanity itself. Like me, like us being humans. And many religion is a collection of stories, and those stories based on things that humans did themselves and they attributed it to gods.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:57)
And there’s an aspect of religion where you humble yourself before a thing that is much greater than you. So that has, I would say, a very positive effect of humbling.
Bassem Youssef
(02:04:08)
It will be great if it stop there. But here’s the thing, if you humble, in order that your ego kicks in and feel that you are better than someone else who’s not humbled in front of the same God-
Lex Fridman
(02:04:08)
You always go there.
Bassem Youssef
(02:04:19)
… that means that I will have all of that [inaudible 02:04:22] that I can use that because now… What does mean, being humble? I’m divine. But I’m not-
Lex Fridman
(02:04:28)
Yeah. Also, I’m way more humble than you.
Bassem Youssef
(02:04:29)
Ah, but you’re not. So you see how they kind of like the oxymoron. I’m humble and I’m surrendering, but in the same time I am better than you and I’m more entitled. Isn’t it crazy?
Lex Fridman
(02:04:38)
Yeah, it’s beautiful. It’s crazy. It’s absurd. It’s-
Bassem Youssef
(02:04:41)
I mean, look at the Muslim, Christians and Jews and everyone. Say, “All right, Muslims, we surrendered.” I’m talking about the extreme ones. I mean people… I surrender to God. Good. Keep it that way. If you go there. I surrender to God, that means that I am closer to God than you, then you should die. Okay, Christians. Christ is love and he loves me and we are going to be together. But you don’t get into his kingdom and you die. You see, it’s the same thing. If you-
Lex Fridman
(02:04:41)
Just stop it and-
Bassem Youssef
(02:05:11)
Like stop there. Stop where you are humble and you feel that you’re a piece of shit and you are a worthless human being and you are there. Stop there. But once you says like, “Oh, that makes me a better person than you, and it makes me more with God than you, so that would give me the entitlement to kick your ass.”
Lex Fridman
(02:05:30)
Yeah, we always ruin a good thing,
Bassem Youssef
(02:05:32)
Don’t we?
Lex Fridman
(02:05:34)
That ego. You’ve been outspoken, with Piers Morgan, but just on this topic, and you talked about the Superman story, which I would love it if you were in a Superman movie. But have you lost job opportunities because of this, because of speaking out?
Bassem Youssef
(02:05:56)
There was a couple of things that were going on, but they stopped again. I don’t know if it’s October 7th.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:03)
Can you tell the Superman story just so-
Bassem Youssef
(02:06:03)
Yeah, yeah. So-
Lex Fridman
(02:06:04)
What role were you?
Bassem Youssef
(02:06:06)
Oh, okay-
Lex Fridman
(02:06:06)
What did you audition for?
Bassem Youssef
(02:06:08)
Yes. Okay, okay. So in June I was traveling to Dubai and an hour before I get into the car and go there, my manager is like, “Bass, I’m going to send you a script, read it. It’s for Superman.” It’s like, oh, Superman. I am not really good in auditions. I’m not a seasoned actor. So I was like, “Okay, I’m just going to do it, send the tape.” I do the tape, I send it. I go to the airport, and I read… and I think I can talk about it now because they said they changed the script. So basically what I found it interesting in that new script is that there is a dictator in a country that invades another country, and Superman interferes politically. That’s the first time we ever see Superman interferes politically. So basically it was Russia and Ukraine, but because of me, it was like it couldn’t be Russia and Ukraine. So it had to be something kind of with a flavor.

(02:06:59)
So I read the role as if a mixture of Trump and Mubarak. I did this mix, like, “You know…” Kind of the Middle East, but also kind of the essence of Trump into it. I went to the airport. It’s like an hour. It’s like James Gunn saw it, he loves it. It’s like, what? I never had an audition that fast. I mean, I had a few roles, but not that fast, not like that. And then I said, “Well, the strike starts tomorrow and we need to be on the phone… After the strike, we cannot talk.” The SAG after strike, like the writers and the actors strike. So like, “well, I’m going to be on a plane right now.” It’s like, “Okay, once you land, you can have a Zoom call with James Gunn.”

(02:07:41)
I have a call with James Gunn. I’m a huge fan of him. The guy took something like Guardians of the Galaxy, nobody knew about it, made amazing trilogy. And he is like a really cool guy. I like what he did. And it was really nice. And he started to talk to me about the movie. And I talked to people before we were casting them. So I know that everybody on set have a good chemistry. It was amazing. So in your mind, if you’re an actor, what does that mean? You got the part. And he told me, “You got the part.” Month goes by, strike goes by. October 7th happens. I do Piers Morgan one and two. And then I go to my Australian tour. My manager called me. “Bassem…” The strike was over. It’s like, “You don’t have the part anymore.”

(02:08:27)
I was sad, very sad, but for three days. And I said, “[inaudible 02:08:30].” I’m actually doing very well. [inaudible 02:08:34]. And then when I went to Chris Cuomo after I finished the show, he told me, “Did you lose any opportunities?” And that was off record, after the show was concluded. And I talked about Superman, and I found myself when I was talking, I was angry, I was bitter. And I went home. I was like, ” Why was I angry? Why was I bitter? It wasn’t meant to be. And I’m living a good life now. I don’t need to…”

(02:09:08)
So when I was asked again the next day in two different interviews, the BBC and another one also with my friend, [inaudible 02:09:15], I said the story in a different way. I said, “I don’t have any anger. As a matter of fact, maybe if I was Warner Brothers…” I didn’t talk about James Gunn. I thought it was the studio. If I was Warner Brothers and I’m a Muslim, I wouldn’t have a Zionist or a pro-Israeli in my movie. But I want to tell them that when I criticize Israel, I am not a threat to you as a Jew. And we can actually have more in common. That was more of a kind of empathic.

(02:09:41)
So when I said, that the internet went crazy, and James Gunn have haters because the Snyder-verse and all of this. It’s a world that I don’t understand. And James Gunn had all of these attacks on him, and I was pissed with how it was handled. I wasn’t angry at James Gunn, but I thought it was handled… So my publicist and manager is like, “Bassem, stay calm, don’t speak. It’s better to not talk about it.” I said, “Okay.”

(02:10:13)
So there’s nothing wrong about me, but I see the heat is rising against James Gunn. And that is a guy that I had a personal connection with, even through Zoom. And I didn’t like what was happening. And then he called me and he explained to me and said, “Bassem, I actually have camera tests before people, before finally…” I didn’t know that. “And then we changed the script and it was the strike. So I didn’t call.” And also I thought to myself, I’m small. I’m a small actor. I’m not that important for him to call me to say, “We’re going to change the script.”

(02:10:42)
So I still think that the timing sucks and everything. But then I went and I did a video explaining exactly what I’m telling you, because I didn’t want to be famous for the wrong reasons, because that would be unfair. Because already people were… and I was having interviews. “Can you come about to Superman?” I was like, ” Guys, that’s it. I’m not going to talk about it, because this is a non-issue.” And when I talked to James on the phone, I felt how sincere he was. So I didn’t want someone, because of me will, have that kind of attack, because I know what it means to be on the other side of that kind of attack. It’s terrible. And it ruins your life and it ruins your day. And nobody deserves to be doing that. And I don’t want to be the reason for someone else to go through that pain.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:25)
And you also said that you don’t want to be a victim.
Bassem Youssef
(02:11:29)
Yeah, I don’t want to be. I’m doing great. I’m selling out everywhere. I’m having a wonderful, loyal audiences coming to me. Why I would be angry about the role of its Superman? Yes, it’s great to be in the superhero movies, but so what?
Lex Fridman
(02:11:43)
There’s a wisdom in that. Even if you weren’t doing great, that’s a choice a lot of people can come to, which is like, do I play victim here or not?
Bassem Youssef
(02:11:53)
It’s greed. It’s greed. They want more attention. They want to be more into the thing. They want more and more. And there’s so much to go around to be enough for all of us. But it is-
Bassem Youssef
(02:12:00)
There is so much to go around to be enough for all of us, but it’s great. It is ego, ego, ego, ego. I need to be in the center, I need to be victimized, I need to make people feel sorry for me and love me. It is not the right way. It is not because it is fake, it’s fake, it’s made up. I did not victimize myself when I left for Egypt. I speak about it now, but in that dark times, I was detained in airports. I didn’t have my American passport yet, I was still traveling with my Egyptian passport, and I was detained in an Arab airport and I was going to be delivered to the Egyptians.

(02:12:38)
I had shows, when I was still starting, I had hecklers being sent to me by the Egyptian embassy and Egyptian Consulate in New York and in London to curse me and to take videos of that and then send it to state-run media in Egypt. I didn’t speak about that because I felt that if I speak about that, I feel about what was going on to me, I would be victimizing myself. It’s like if I’m going to be good, I’m going to be good because of what I do, not because of what people’s perception of what I’m going through.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:07)
That becomes a slippery slope, and somehow victimizing yourself=
Bassem Youssef
(02:13:10)
Goes to more victimizing, and then you cannot leave that habit. You can only exist and thrive if people feel sorry for you.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:18)
Yeah, Israel and Palestine currently both have that temptation.
Bassem Youssef
(02:13:25)
I would always push back when you do the comparison, because one of them is not really the same kind of power.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:33)
For sure, for you that’s a big problem.
Bassem Youssef
(02:13:35)
It’s very easy to say why Palestinians would victimize themselves, but Israel, with all of that military white man, it’s too much. What Israel is doing is that they’re victimizing the Jewish experience, and I don’t think it’s fair for a lot of Jews. I don’t think that they should use the Holocaust and the persecution that happened to Jewish people all through history in order to push an equally oppressive agenda. That is not fair and it’s not good for the Jewish people living, and it is basically a disrespect to the memory of the Holocaust. I told you I want to make a movie about the Holocaust. I do, because what happened, that kind of engineered torture, should never happen again, and it should not be happening now.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:20)
To you, what Israel is doing is leading to more anti-Semitism in the world?
Bassem Youssef
(02:14:23)
A hundred percent. Can I be a conspiracy theorist for a second?
Lex Fridman
(02:14:27)
Please. There earth is flat, we all know this.
Bassem Youssef
(02:14:30)
A part of me thinking maybe they’re doing that intentionally, because if there’s a rise of anti-Semitism in Jews, there will always point like, “See, they hate us, so we can do whatever we want. If we let go of our might in our strength, we are going to go back to the concentration camps because you see how the word hates you.”
Lex Fridman
(02:14:53)
Again, when you say “they”, are people in power.
Bassem Youssef
(02:14:56)
Yeah, absolutely. Listen, it’s always the people in power. I believe that humans are easily corruptible and easily repairable, but the corruptive part is much easier. People could change, but power, people in power are very dangerous. Very, very dangerous. Especially if you have religion – which is power by itself -military might, political support, and money. Dude, that’s a very, very, very dangerous recipe.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:29)
All that said, I do believe in the power of the little guy. The individual just overthrow the government. I don’t know if you heard, but the Arab Spring… It happens.
Bassem Youssef
(02:15:41)
We are here-
Lex Fridman
(02:15:42)
Just among friends.
Bassem Youssef
(02:15:43)
We are Americans, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:15:44)
Yes.
Bassem Youssef
(02:15:44)
We’re Americans
Lex Fridman
(02:15:45)
Allegedly.
Bassem Youssef
(02:15:47)
We’re Americans.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:50)
How funny is that? Just given our two backgrounds. We’re American.
Bassem Youssef
(02:15:54)
We’re Americans. It’s like we’re Americans. There’s one thing about the power of the little guy that I am very sad about because you see… I love America by the way. I consider it my new home, and I want my kids to grow up here. I am very grateful for the opportunity that I have in the United States, and I criticize the United States politics, and I criticize it out of love. The same way that I was criticizing what’s happening of Egypt out of love. What is worrying for me is how the power of the little man is diminishing.

(02:16:35)
It doesn’t matter now who you vote into power, they will not listen to you. They would listen to the people who paid them to be there, and it is very concerning because I can see the American democracies turning, not even slowly, very rapidly into an oligarchy. I’m sure that all of the millions of people who are voting, they don’t vote for the NRA, they don’t vote for APAC, they don’t vote for the pharmaceutical companies, they don’t vote for the military industry complex. Yet, the people in power, they come in, they take your vote and my vote, and they’re loyal to those people, not to us. It is very, very, very concerning. Very concerning. This is the danger of American policies, American politics and American democracies. It’s dangerous, because basically, the vote becomes just a ceremony that the someone with the more funding will get to power, and then he’s not loyal to you.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:41)
Still the fire. We are in Texas. Everybody’s armed to the teeth here.
Bassem Youssef
(02:17:47)
What are these arms going to do in front of tanks?
Lex Fridman
(02:17:51)
You said the American military is unique in this way.
Bassem Youssef
(02:17:55)
I know, but for now
Lex Fridman
(02:17:57)
For now, the tanks are… First of all, I believe Russia has more tanks than the United States. Tanks. I’m not an expert in military strategic deployment of arms, but the United States uses different kinds of weapons.
Bassem Youssef
(02:18:13)
They have drones and they have the lasers, and they’re sitting comfortably behind the screens. It’s kind of like it turns a big Xbox game.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:22)
They sell a lot of those things to everybody.
Bassem Youssef
(02:18:25)
It’s crazy because the defense budget is 68% of American military, it’s like almost 850 billion each year. Most of that weapons, we don’t even need it. We just do it because of the contracts. There was an incredible 60 Minutes, I’m sure that you saw it, the one about the gouging of the prices of the Department of… It was one of the most fascinating things that I’ve ever seen. They say like a valve, a safety of a oil valve, that used to be sold for $329, now it’s sold for $9,000. Why? Because there’s only five weapon companies and they can control the prices, and in 2006, the whole Apache fleet of the American army in Iraq was grounded because there was one valve that they were gouging the price and didn’t want to give them. The Stinger missile, the one that you carry and it’s like the anti-aircraft, used to be sold for $25,000. Now it’s sold for $400,000. Nobody is doing that because the DOD has fired 130,000 people, including engineers and negotiators.

(02:19:35)
Now, in order to cut expenses, now we’re paying more money. The thing is, we do not have a say in this. We do not have a say in how my tax money and your tax money is being spent, because I’m sure you don’t want your money to be sent to Israel like that. I’m sure, even if you’re Jewish, I’m sure, I’m sure that I don’t want my money to be given to some Muslim countries who kill other Muslims. I’m sure. Here’s the thing, what kind of power do we have other than speaking? What is left for us is free speech. Now when you speak, they call you anti-Semitic. You see why I’m angry.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:11)
Still, America’s holding pretty strong despite the criticisms on the free speech front. If you look at the freedom of the press, freedom of the speech index, America is not at the top.
Bassem Youssef
(02:20:23)
It is not. This is why, for example, it is very disheartening for me to see that the Western media, Western press, that used to be the beacon of freedom as now using as mouthpieces. It is funny how Nixon got angry in the New York Times in 1971 when they found leaks about Tim lying about the Vietnam War since the beginning. Now, he hired the plumbers, the special units, in order to go in and find the leaks. This was Watergate basically, because he was angry to see who leaked that instead of fixing the problem. Now, the New York Times have published this story about the rape that was a hoax that was written by Anna Schwartz, someone will have no experience, and now when it was leaked, instead of them correcting themselves, they went in and they had their own investigation to see who leaked. The New York Times in 2003 became the mouthpiece of George W. Bush of the WMD, and now as an American, I see the New York Times becoming a mouthpiece of a foreign country? Why do you do that?

TikTok

Lex Fridman
(02:21:28)
One of the things that’s really difficult to know is where to find the truth. It does seem that both sides use propaganda, and both sides lie a lot.
Bassem Youssef
(02:21:40)
Both sides as in?
Lex Fridman
(02:21:41)
Both Israel and Palestine. Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel, there’s a lot of lies
Bassem Youssef
(02:21:48)
I know, but it’s a lot of inequality, man. There’s a lot of people on the internet, but who have the mainstream media siding with.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:59)
Thanks to social media.
Bassem Youssef
(02:22:00)
Yes, thank God for social media, because now it’s individuals. They’re the people. They’re people. You are comparing BBC, New York Times, Washington Post with just people with a TikTok account.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:13)
Who have more power in your view?
Bassem Youssef
(02:22:15)
It is actually very, very fascinating to see the little man having that power over the media, because-
Lex Fridman
(02:22:20)
In fact, disproportionately so. This is my problem.
Bassem Youssef
(02:22:24)
You cannot call people with TikTok propagandists while people being paid to casually give you the news and they deliberately lie to you.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:31)
Yes, I can. They’re both propagandists.
Bassem Youssef
(02:22:35)
Yes, but the mechanism and the intentions are different because here’s the thing-
Lex Fridman
(02:22:42)
I’d rather have the TikTok guy than the…
Bassem Youssef
(02:22:47)
The TikTok guy is a TikTok guy, but if you have the New York Times being exposed to be lying, and then they get this UN report, which is like a disgrace, and you just put the title and you don’t talk about it. I’m fine with CNN and Jake Tapper and all of those people spreading the rape allegations for years. I don’t even want them to refute them, I want them to bring the Israeli reports saying that it didn’t happen. The Israeli media themselves, they didn’t even bother, not once. Is that balanced? That’s not, so that’s why people in TikTok, because they have to take matters in their own hand.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:24)
The problem with the people in TikTok is the drug, the dopamine rush, of getting a lot of likes. Instead of talking about the death of civilians, they’ll talk about beheaded babies, or the equivalent of. They’re going to actually make up stories, because the made up stories are going to be more viral. Now, we’re just in the sea, in this muck of lies.
Bassem Youssef
(02:23:45)
There’s a lot of people who actually exposed those lies on TikTok. You have both.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:48)
True.
Bassem Youssef
(02:23:49)
You have both. It’s kind of like the democracy of the social media as we always it. But if you have the street-run media that is the legacy media, CNN, BBC, New York Times, Fox News, all of those people, and they are spreading lies and they’re not even doing the journalistic job in order to at least bring the other side, that’s problematic.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:09)
That’s worse. You’re supposed to be journalists.
Bassem Youssef
(02:24:12)
It’s supposed to be report. Report.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:17)
I see that this as a catalyst, an inspiration, for the citizen journalists to rise up.
Bassem Youssef
(02:24:24)
This is what you’re doing.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:25)
This, yeah,
Bassem Youssef
(02:24:26)
This is what you’re doing. No, this is what you’re doing, because you go into a deep dive. This is a no filter thing. There’s no spin.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:32)
The long form, the long form is going to save us.
Bassem Youssef
(02:24:38)
I see why you hate the TikToks, like a dopamine rush.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:40)
Stupid TikTok. Five hours later.
Bassem Youssef
(02:24:43)
I saw the resentment in your face.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:47)
Can’t look away.
Bassem Youssef
(02:24:48)
Those 30 seconds, I do four hours.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:53)
Both have a place, both are exciting, but it is very dangerous because you can’t look away. I almost never, maybe I’m doing it wrong, but I almost never feel better ever after having used TikTok.
Bassem Youssef
(02:25:08)
Makes two of us. I can’t. I have a team. By the way, I give my password to a team. I don’t even go there because once in a dark night, very late at night, I went TikTok, and it was like, two hours. What?
Lex Fridman
(02:25:26)
Yeah.
Bassem Youssef
(02:25:27)
What? I said, ” No, this is dangerous.” I’m really like an Instagram and Facebook guy. I don’t need that.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:35)
Even there, man.
Bassem Youssef
(02:25:37)
I barely get out of Twitter, I mean X, I can’t. It’s a cesspool. It’s just like the concentrated hate, X is too much. It’s too much. I can’t.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:47)
You don’t check it at all, you try not to check it at all? It is very intense.
Bassem Youssef
(02:25:51)
I don’t, I post something and I run.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:57)
Post and ghost. You’re doing comedy here in the United States right now?

Joe Rogan

Bassem Youssef
(02:26:02)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:03)
Joe Rogan has the Comedy Mothership, which is an incredible club. Have you considered doing that club?
Bassem Youssef
(02:26:09)
I would love to.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:09)
Do you know Joe?
Bassem Youssef
(02:26:11)
Of course. Who doesn’t new Joe?
Lex Fridman
(02:26:14)
I feel like it’s a small world of comedy. That’s why I…
Bassem Youssef
(02:26:17)
I think Joe’s story, like what he did and stuff that he did in the UFC and his podcast, it’s very impressive. The fact that he’s there and he’s bringing all of those people, whether in comedy or his podcast, is very impressive. This is what the media is all about, what the internet is all about, to give you the experiences of stuff that you might never experience. That is very important. You do it with people where you go into their brains. He goes, takes people, and they take their experiences and their lives and their stories. It’s very interesting. This is the beauty of that art form, because you have all of these experiences at the tips of your hands and it’s there for you to learn from. When he moved to Texas and we did the Comedy Mothership, anybody who would push comedy forward, that is the most difficult art form and the most demanding. The fact that you do that, and he might not even be making money out of it, but he’s doing that because of his passion, that is enough.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:25)
He really believes in creating this place where comedians could be really free. One of the cool things about the Comedy Mothership is comedian is king there. You have to bow down to the…
Bassem Youssef
(02:27:41)
Because the comedian who came there came after eating shit, dying out there.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:46)
Eating shit everywhere else.
Bassem Youssef
(02:27:47)
Basically, you’re a saint.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:50)
I have eaten shit for many years.
Bassem Youssef
(02:27:54)
Now, I’m going to give you shit.

Joe Biden

Lex Fridman
(02:27:58)
You already told me what you think about the state of politics in the United States, but now tell me what you really think. What do you think of the choice of Trump versus Biden? How did we end up here?
Bassem Youssef
(02:28:08)
I don’t know, man. The fact that you have two people over the age of 90, it is-
Lex Fridman
(02:28:14)
I think it’s over a hundred, but that’s all right.
Bassem Youssef
(02:28:16)
Combined like 170. It is so sad. It is so sad that this is what we can produce as a society, like a demagogue and a sleepy Joe. He’s not there, man. He’s gone. He’s gone. When old people could be a danger for themselves, he’s a danger for the whole world. The whole world. If an old person would die who would have a hip replacement, we can need them a new planet because of one decision. It’s not just that, it’s not that. I am a Democrat, and I told you I vote for Bernie Sanders. I supported him 2016, but I couldn’t vote then. Of course, a huge fan of Obama. One of my things is he’s the first Muslim president, but he killed Muslims. It’s like, that’s things Muslims do.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:24)
I love that line.
Bassem Youssef
(02:29:31)
I think the whole idea, my shock, is… I told you about what Biden said about “I’m a Zionist.” Okay, you’re a Zionist, but then it’s, “Jews are not safe in anywhere other than Israel.” It’s like, dude, what the hell are you saying? If you don’t care about me and you don’t care about my misery, why would I care about you winning or losing? I have a joke that I told people. Why would even Biden listen to us? He just raised $ 145 million in California alone from pro-Israeli groups. What can we, Arabs, working in the vape business do to him? We cannot compete with that. Practically. Life is unfair. The guy’s a politician. He needs bills to pay. He needs a campaign to run. He needs money. He will go to the people who will give me money. Joe Biden is the highest paid politician from Israeli lobbyists, $4.6 million over the years.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:35)
I also believe in great leaders that go against all of that. Unfortunately-
Bassem Youssef
(02:30:41)
Bernie Sanders was like that.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:43)
Bernie Sanders, yes, but also age. I don’t want to be ageist.
Bassem Youssef
(02:30:48)
Of course, no.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:50)
Because I remember listening to Bernie Sanders 20 years ago on Tom Hartman show, and I don’t want to say anything against Bernie, but he was sharper then.
Bassem Youssef
(02:31:00)
Of course.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:01)
There’s a thing with age.
Bassem Youssef
(02:31:02)
Of course. I think I’m a huge fan about putting a limit on your working years, because you don’t want to have a Mitch McConnell moment every now. Because now the whole thing of what is this, isn’t this not like a horse by [inaudible 02:31:17]? It is unfair. It is unfair. The whole idea that you have unlimited… You have a limit for the president, but you don’t have a limit for Congress people and senators? What do you mean? This is, basically, you can go in and be in governance forever, and the longer that you can get, the more corrupt you’ll get.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:35)
Yes, that’s the thing.
Bassem Youssef
(02:31:38)
That is very concerning for Americans.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:39)
Everybody. Everybody becomes corrupt after. That’s why two terms is a good limit.
Bassem Youssef
(02:31:44)
For everybody.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:46)
Maybe half a term for Egyptian leaders.
Bassem Youssef
(02:31:51)
Our half-term is 15 years,
Lex Fridman
(02:31:55)
Quarter term. You should come back and run for office there.
Bassem Youssef
(02:32:01)
Oh my god, no. There’s a curse in Egyptian of Egyptian presidency. No, nobody comes there. He is either dead or in jail. It’s not the most appealing job.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:13)
They might make a statue of you though. Make you look good.
Bassem Youssef
(02:32:16)
After my death. I look very good dead.

Putin

Lex Fridman
(02:32:24)
When you look at what happened with Navalny, since you kind of really thought about this in Egypt, what happened with Navalny in Russia? What do you think about that?
Bassem Youssef
(02:32:39)
What happened in Navalny in Russia is not something new in Russia. Putin have this whole history of poisoning and killing people. I would have to cite credit Putin. He’s bringing us the essence of the dark ages, the Middle Ages. Basically, Putin is the living example of what happens if Game of Thrones was reality. It’s like, death by poison. Like blow up a plane, it like mysteriously disappears. It is very dark, but it’s like, wow, it’s a television show.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:20)
Maybe that’s what attracts us to that part of the world is that it’s so much on display, this game of power, of geopolitics, of war.
Bassem Youssef
(02:33:32)
The same happens in the West, but behind closed doors. It’s not that open, it’s not that pronounced. It’s like, “Oops, Epstein.” I think because the West is more advanced in movies and cinemas, we kind of direct it better. I think the outcome is the way that you kind of set the scene, it’s like scene, and scene.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:58)
That’s why people about landing on the moon, they’re like… I get it, but we haven’t gone back.
Bassem Youssef
(02:34:06)
The Earth is flat.

War

Lex Fridman
(02:34:13)
If we zoom out, do you think there will always be war in the world?
Bassem Youssef
(02:34:17)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:17)
Always be suffering? Yes?
Bassem Youssef
(02:34:19)
Yeah. But, here’s the thing, I don’t think for long. I don’t think that will happen for them.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:25)
Wait a minute.
Bassem Youssef
(02:34:27)
Because here’s the thing. Humanity is destined to have war, it will have war, but something happened in the last 50 years. Now, we have much more lethal weapons. The problem is the beginning, it’s like swords against swords, horses, cavalry, like cannons, catapults, medium-sized. But now, like a press of a button, you can annihilate the whole planet, and this is the problem. Wars will always continue, the problem is when is going to be the tipping point where we are actually going to destroy ourselves. It is so easy now to destroy ourselves. The amount of weapons and the quality of weapons that we have, it is designed to kill more effectively. It is crazy. It’s like we can create our own destruction on ourselves, and I think we are not that far away from it.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:19)
Just looking at nuclear weapons. The fascinating thing about nuclear weapons is I’ve gotten to learn recently just how few people are involved in a full on nuclear war that basically kills everybody. Three plus billion people right away.
Bassem Youssef
(02:35:39)
The consequences the of the nuclear winter, it’s unlivable.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:45)
All it takes is one president can do it. It could be even a false alarm, misunderstanding,
Bassem Youssef
(02:35:52)
Like what happened in the Cuba Missile crisis.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:56)
Again. And now there’s more nations are prepared and ready to launch. I don’t know.
Bassem Youssef
(02:36:07)
You have a media and a 24 hours kind of thing that makes you at edge the whole time. That’s that’s crazy.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:13)
There’s a dark perspective on this where there’s certain members of the media that would kind of enjoy the prospect of nuclear war a little bit. Just let’s get as close to it as possible.
Bassem Youssef
(02:36:26)
You have another factor that will contribute to that: religion. Remember how the radical Islamists talk about the end of time and whatever, but most of the Islamists don’t have that much power. Problem is with Christian Zionists now being on the top of the world with America, they have been pushing for that kind of conflict to kind of escalate, escalate. Listen to Sarah Palin’s “God wants us here”, like Karl Rove, “All of the new gods”, the Dispensationalist Reagan. Here’s an incredible book called Forcing the Hands of God. Beautiful book I read. It’s published 1998, but it still matters today. The whole idea about, especially the Zionist Christians who love Israel, but they hate the Jews, they’re anti-Semites but they love Israel because of its role. This is all basically formed because of the interpretation of the Bible of Schofield and how they talk about the end of time, then Armageddon, and then the late great planet Earth, and then left behind Sirius and all of that.

(02:37:27)
It’s all about, we are heading to Armageddon. The problem is Islam, they’re people that believe that at the end of time. Then, we have the Christians that believe in the end of time. Then, you have Israel happy that those people are using it for the end of time. Then, the whole idea about them pushing as many weapons and troops and people in the Middle East to be there for the nuclear Holocaust. John Hagee, one of the pastors talk about that, about the brimstones and it’s not going to be a nuclear Holocaust. It’s crazy how people are so despising life that they are wanting death. Now, you all would have these revelations, but these revelations mean nothing if you don’t have an effective weapon in order to make it happen. This is the crazy thing, and I’m worried that the end is going to be by someone that wants to meet God a little bit earlier.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:20)
Somebody who’s really in a hurry. I have good news for you, maybe we’ll become a multi-planetary species.
Bassem Youssef
(02:38:28)
Maybe Elon Musk will lead the way.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:31)
To get out in space.
Bassem Youssef
(02:38:33)
Maybe he’s one of them. He’s a secret lizard.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:39)
I asked you offline to not mention the lizard people. They are-
Bassem Youssef
(02:38:43)
There’s like a whole people that believe in the lizard people, it’s crazy.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:48)
I actually have to be honest, I haven’t fully looked into lizard people. I probably should.
Bassem Youssef
(02:38:51)
You should.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:53)
Maybe I’m afraid of the truth.
Bassem Youssef
(02:39:04)
Removing my face.

Hope

Lex Fridman
(02:39:09)
Let’s say you’re wrong about the end of the world,-
Bassem Youssef
(02:39:12)
I hope so.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:12)
And it all turns out great and humanity flourishes. Why would that happen? What gives you hope for that trajectory for humanity?
Bassem Youssef
(02:39:26)
Younger people, the people of TikTok that you don’t like. There is a lot of bullshit there.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:36)
After you saying this, people just keep sending you TikTok videos. These younger people, these younger people?
Bassem Youssef
(02:39:43)
This woman showing her boobs, that woman?
Lex Fridman
(02:39:45)
That’s going to save us? All right, awesome. Thank you.
Bassem Youssef
(02:39:57)
Remember the joke that said, we thought that when we have internet, we’re going to have be more informed, and now we are watching twerking videos. That is true. But on the other side, the fact that you have the availability of information, I’m learning a lot. There’s people who are using that platform for that. It’s not the majority because it’s not very interesting and exciting, but I think there might be a tipping point where there’s enough people that will be aware and maybe they would collectively do something in order to bring back the power to the small man. Maybe it sounds very naive, but we don’t know. We don’t know, because you have already seen the legacy media and the legacy politicians shaking in the past few months.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:48)
They’re getting nervous.
Bassem Youssef
(02:40:49)
They’re getting nervous because people are calling them out, and those people were hiding behind their desk, behind in their offices and not to holding out how to support that. People now are calling them out. It is not going to happen this year or next year. But I think it’s something.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:02)
What advice would you give to those young folks?
Bassem Youssef
(02:41:03)
I will never give advice to those people.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:07)
Get off TikTok.
Bassem Youssef
(02:41:09)
I will never, because their input is different than mine. There’s one thing I learned when people saw me. Did the revolution fail in Egypt? The revolution is not an event. It’s not like, “Hey, we go in, we topple the government.” That’s not a revolution. A revolution is a process, it’s a very long process, and maybe that process, as much as we don’t like what happened in the Arab War, but the people there, the awareness that happened and the discussions that have been opened that you didn’t even imagine would happen in the Middle East is happening. Maybe the beginning of any hope of change is that people start talking, speaking out, talking about stuff they were not allowed to speak about. Like, for example, Israel.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:54)
The revolution continues. Bassem, you’re a beautiful human being. It was truly a pleasure and honor to meet you, I can just feel the love radiating from you. I hope I get to see you perform live. I hope to get to see you many more times. Thank you for being who you are.
Bassem Youssef
(02:42:11)
Thank you so much. AI would love to invite you for my new special, the Islamo-Nazi Bassem.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:18)
That should be the title of your autobiography.
Bassem Youssef
(02:42:20)
Islamo-Nazi. Thank you so much.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:22)
Thank you, brother. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bassem Youssef. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, let me leave you some words from John Stewart: “The press can hold this magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen, or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected, dangerous, flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex | Lex Fridman Podcast #423

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #423 with Tulsi Gabbard.
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Tulsi Gabbard
(00:00:00)
It’s a sad state of affairs when some of the most influential voices in our country will label someone a lover or supporter of dictators simply because you’re saying, “Hey, we shouldn’t be going to war. There is another way.”
Lex Fridman
(00:00:20)
The following is a conversation with Tulsi Gabbard, who was a longtime Democrat, including being the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. She endorsed Bernie in 2016 and Biden in 2020. She has been both loved and heavily criticized for her independent thinking and bold political stances, especially on topics of war and the military industrial complex. She served in the US military for many years, achieving the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. And now she’s the author of a new book called For Love of Country.

(00:00:58)
This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

(00:01:03)
And now, dear friends, here’s Tulsi Gabbard.

War in Iraq


(00:01:07)
You’ve served in the US military for many years, achieving rank of Lieutenant Colonel. You were deployed in Iraq in 2004 and ’05, Kuwait in ’08 and ’09. What lessons about life and about country have you learned from that experience of war?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:01:25)
So many. Central to those lessons learned was having my eyes open to the very real cost of war.

(00:01:35)
Of course, I served in a medical unit during that first deployment to Iraq. It was 2005 during the height of that war, and unfortunately we took a lot of casualties. We, across the entire US military, my brigade that I deployed with was from the Hawaii National Guard. We had approximately 3000 soldiers who were operating in four different areas of Iraq. And my first task every day was to go through a list of every combat related injury that had occurred the day before in the country.

(00:02:14)
I went through that list name by name, looking to see if any one of our nearly 3000 soldiers from Hawaii had been hurt in the line of duty. And then, if seeing them on the list, tracking them down. Where were they? Were they getting the care they needed? Would they be able to get sufficient care to stay in the country and return to duty? Did I need to get them evacuated? Usually it would be to military hospitals that at that time were in Landstuhl and Ramstein in Germany. And then from there, getting them to either Brooke Army Medical Center, which is here in Texas, that specialized in burn related injuries, or to Walter Reed, and tracking them and their care until they were finally home with their families. It never became a routine task. It never became like, okay, cool, check the list, kind of dot the Is, cross the Ts. It was that daily confrontation with the reality of the cost of war. Friends of mine were killed in combat.

(00:03:26)
Experiencing firsthand that high human cost of war caused me, a 20-something-year-old from Hawaii… I had left my seat in the state legislature to volunteer to deploy with my brothers and sisters in my unit to Iraq, and so recognize the cost of war, I think, in two fundamental ways. Number one is the high human cost of war on our troops and on the people in the country where this war was being waged. And also the cost on American taxpayers.

(00:03:56)
Seeing then, back again in 2005, and recognizing KBR Halliburton, one of the biggest defense contracting companies then, and I know that they’re still very much in that business now, Dick Cheney being connected with that company at one point or another, but in our camp specifically, which was one of the larger ones in Iraq at that time, there wasn’t anything that happened in our camp that didn’t have the KBR Halliburton logo imprinted on it. We had a big shack, a place where we ate our meals. They call it a dining facility, a DFAC in the military. They served four meals a day. They brought in, and they being KBR Halliburton, they imported workers in from places like Nepal and Sri Lanka and the Philippines to come in and cook food and work at this dining facility.

(00:04:48)
I got curious about how much it costs us as taxpayers. And so I started asking around some of the people, and I think at that time it was like, well, every time a soldier or a service member walks through the door, if I were to go in for breakfast and grab a banana and walk out, that’s an automatic $35 per head per meal four times a day, thousands and thousands of people.

(00:05:13)
And then we made friends. There’s a pretty large Filipino community in Hawaii. A lot of Filipino soldiers from Hawaii. We made friends with the Filipino workers who were there. They would often go in the back of the tents and set up their own rice cookers and cook their own meals, which is where the real good food was. But just started talking to them and getting to know them and asked like, “Hey, how much do you get paid?” And on average it was like, “Oh, I get paid like 500 bucks a month.” 500 bucks a month to go and do this work of either cleaning out porta-potties, picking up trash, the dining facility, doing laundry, all of these different tasks, because the military wanted soldiers to be out doing things that only soldiers could do. Understandable. But when I started putting two and two together and knowing that this company, one company alone, was making trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars, and yet this Filipino mom is making 500 bucks a month, maybe getting one day off a week, maybe, working 12 hours a day otherwise. And I said, “How often are you able to go home to your family?” “Well, they’ll let us go home a couple of weeks every other year.”

(00:06:26)
It was an eye-opening experience that growing up in Hawaii, I frankly hadn’t given much thought to before, but it’s what led me ultimately coming back from that first deployment there was no way that I could go back to the life that I had left behind. And I knew somehow, someway I needed to find a way to use those experiences to try to make a positive impact, to try to influence those… I mean, frankly, the politicians who are making decisions to go and launch these regime-change wars and send our men and women in uniform into war, and to what end, ultimately.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:11)
If we can just go back to that list. So the list is just name and injury, name and injury.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:07:17)
Name, unit, potentially location if someone had documented that, and their injury.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:24)
And it’s just pages and pages of that.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:07:26)
Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t get to call home every day, but when I called home and talked to my parents, I felt the tension in their voice. They didn’t want me to worry about anything at home. And so they were always like, “Hey, how are you? What can we send you?” And this and that. But it wasn’t like I was calling them from down the street and saying, “Hey, how’s it going? Let’s go have lunch,” or whatever. I knew that the reason for that tension was they were terrified of getting a phone call delivering the worst possible news. And that was what I thought of as I went through that list of how it is the reality of war. Behind every one of those names on that list was a husband or a wife, parents, sons and daughters, family members, who had no idea what we were dealing with, really. All they knew was what they saw on the news.

(00:08:31)
What my dad told me later when I got home after that deployment was that every time they saw the news, and they saw a helicopter shot down or crashed or some IED, they held their breath until they saw or heard the news of who it was or what it was.

Battle injuries and PTSD

Lex Fridman
(00:08:53)
What can you say about what the soldiers had to go through physically and psychologically when they get injured?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:09:01)
The physical; some injuries appeared to be minor upfront. At that time, traumatic brain injury was not something that was talked about much, if at all. Many had visible wounds. Others are now what we know appeared like, “All right, cool, you checked out,” but had invisible wounds. Those who were injured in a way that did not allow them to get back to work, found it emotionally very difficult to be put on a plane and evacuated out of there. Feeling guilty that they were leaving their friends behind, and not thinking about themselves or not feeling bad for themselves, but instead feeling bad for being forced to be in a position to leave.

(00:09:59)
For soldiers, of course, we all have our own political opinions on things, but when it comes right down to it in a war zone, it’s about your friends. It’s about your brothers and sisters that you’re serving alongside. It’s not about the politicians or whatever insanity is going on in Washington. It’s about getting up and going out, getting the job done and coming back home together.

(00:10:25)
I had friends of mine who were from Hawaii, who were from American Samoa, a very culturally tight-knit community, who confided in me throughout that year that we were there, infantry soldiers who were going out on security patrols and doing raids every day, just some of the very traumatic experiences that they went through. No physical injury, but creating a kind of emotional stress and trauma that, as human beings, they were struggling in dealing with.

(00:11:08)
On a positive note, Polynesian culture especially, but also Asian culture and other cultures around the world, our guys found that shortly after we got there, the unit that we were replacing were taking the guys out on patrol and saying, “Hey, here’s this village. Here’s where we found friendlies.” Or, “Here’s where we know that there are insurgents operating, and they’ve got allies and lookouts.” And showing them the lay of the land basically.

(00:11:35)
And what our guys found was that as they were doing these ride-alongs, they call it a left seat, right seat when you’re coming in and taking over, that there was a bit of a tense, even adversarial type of relationship, where on the military side there was an assumption of suspicion or lack of trust just with the locally Iraqi people who lived around the base that we were at. And without anybody telling them to culturally, our guys began trying to build relationships.

(00:12:13)
For Hawaii and Samoa, and we had soldiers from Guam and Saipan, little things like you’re riding down in a Humvee, you’ve got a gunner in the turret with a 50 cal or a machine gun of some sort, little things like pointing the muzzle to the sky as you’re riding through a town rather than pointing it directly at where people are walking down the street was a huge gesture of an assumption of, “Hey, let’s actually talk and become friends.” We had our guys riding down the street and throwing shakas out to the local people there, breaking bread, sharing tea, and building those relationships.

(00:12:55)
Again, I served in a medical unit and what we saw was a downward shift in casualties from the unit that had been there before us, simply because of that basic human connection that our guys sought to make. And then, gradually, finding local people who lived in the town right next to us were saying, “Hey, you guys, somebody was digging a big hole a mile down the road. You might want to bypass that or check that out.” And finding weapons, caches and IEDs, improvised explosive devices, and other things that helped save people’s lives.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:33)
On the cost side of things, how is it possible for a company like Halliburton or others to get away with $40 bananas? However much it was, but the overhead costs.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:13:45)
Look, what they will claim is that it’s expensive to move logistics through a country at war, but they get away with it, ultimately, this insane war profiteering, and they’re not alone. Obviously, there are other companies that this is their business model. They get away with it because of their political connections, and the lobbyists that they have, the relationships they have with politicians. And ultimately, what President Eisenhower warned against with regard to that cozy relationship between Congress and even what he called then the military industrial complex, it’s been alive and well. He warned us against it, and I would say it’s thriving more now than ever before.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:37)
How powerful is the military industrial complex as a thing? Is it a machine that can be slowed down, can be stopped, can be reversed?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:14:47)
It can be. It’s powerful. I don’t think you can overstate the powerful nature of it because it extends so deeply within our government. It’s not just those in these specific big defense contracting companies that benefit from it. You look at the revolving door within the Pentagon, for example, where you have both high-ranking people who wear military uniforms as well as those who serve as high-ranking, Department of Defense civilians who are literally working their way into a big payout when they leave that job.

(00:15:26)
We see it with our own Secretary of Defense now. He retired as a general officer, went and served on one of the boards for one of the big defense contractors, and then now back as the Secretary of Defense. We see the same thing in Congress with members of Congress and senior professional staffers in Congress. Same exact revolving door where you have people, whether they’re writing contracts for the Department of Defense, for the company that then wins the bid for that contract, and then going and working for that company. Or those in Congress who are writing policies and doing exactly the same thing.

War on terrorism

Lex Fridman
(00:16:03)
You have been both a war hawk and a war dove at times. So what is your philosophy on when war is justified and when it is not?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:16:13)
War is justified when it is in the best interest of our national security, and when it is the last resort, when all diplomatic efforts have been completed and exhausted and war is the last possible route that must be taken to ensure the safety, security, and freedom of the American people.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:41)
So that’s a high-level beautiful idea, but there’s messy details. So terrorism, for example.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:16:48)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:49)
The United States involvement in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was in part the big umbrella of the war on terrorism. So, when you decide whether something’s justified or not and whether something can be defeated or not, how hard is it? Is it even possible? To what degree is it possible to defeat terrorism?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:17:11)
Well, first of all, part of the problem of our foreign policy has been how many conflicts, wars, military actions have been waged in the name of this “war on terrorism” in the name of national security, legislation like the Patriot Act that violates our civil liberties and freedoms in the name of the war on terrorism and national security when it’s not justified. I’ll use Afghanistan as an example.

(00:17:44)
I support the initial mission that lifted off shortly after the attack on 9/11, the Islamist terrorist attack on 9/11. It was a relatively small group of US military launched to go after those al-Qaeda cells and Osama bin Laden in the wake of that attack. That is the mission that should have been supported and focused on in its execution. Instead, as you know, attention was diverted very quickly to the regime-change war in Iraq that was waged on false pretenses, and the resources and focus was taken away from that initial mission that went to Afghanistan.

(00:18:34)
The war in Afghanistan blew up into something that became about regime change and governance and the Taliban, and less focus on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. And it became this thing that even general officers had a hard time articulating what is the objective here? What are we trying to accomplish? What does winning look like? At what point do we know it’s time to exit and get out? And as you look at things like the Afghanistan files and others, the answers to these simple and essential questions shifted and changed over time, over a very long time.

(00:19:17)
Similarly, in Iraq. I bought into a lot of what was being sold by the administration and by Democrats and Republicans and Congress at the time. And very quickly, even as I was on the ground there, started to have my eyes opened up into how we had been lied to tremendously, and how that protracted war went on for a very, very long time with decisions being made that ultimately served to strengthen terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, the creation of ISIS and others, really undermining our national security interests in the meantime. Understanding the enemy that you are trying to defeat is essential to being able to build a strategy.

(00:20:06)
The declaration of President Biden, for example, saying, “Well, the war on terror is over. The war on terror is over.” What does that mean? Or, “The forever wars are over.” Well, what does that actually mean?”

(00:20:21)
I served on my last most recent deployment in 2021 to East Africa and Somalia, where al-Shabaab is one of those Islamist terrorist groups that follows the same ideology as al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas and others. This group has been allowed to grow and be strengthened, even though they are one of the main groups that provides funding to al-Qaeda in that entire region.

(00:20:49)
So any president or politician can declare a war to be over, but when you have an enemy like these Islamist terrorist groups who are still intent on their goal and their objective, which is to ultimately establish their Islamic caliphate and destroy Israel and exterminate the Jewish people, and basically kill or convert anyone who doesn’t adhere to their ideology, that continues on. And they will only become stronger the longer our leaders put their heads in the sand and pretend like, “Oh no, this doesn’t exist.”

(00:21:29)
This kind of war, this war specifically, is one that has to be waged militarily and ideologically. And the ideological component to this, which is defeating their ideology with a superior one, is one that I pointed out in Congress during the Obama administration, we, the collective we, were failing at. The Obama administration was failing at because they were so afraid of being labeled Islamophobes, that they refused to accurately identify that ideology driving these terrorist groups. And instead said, “We are countering violent extremism,” was the term that the Obama administration started to use and was coined and kind of mandated across the US government.

(00:22:14)
Well, again, you have to know the enemy that threatens you and why they’re doing what they’re doing if you have any hope of actually preventing their attack, both militarily, and as we’re seeing now with Hamas’s actions, not only directly in the assault on Israel, but how Hamas achieved their objectives in spreading their ideology around the world.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:43)
If you look at the lessons learned from the US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, how do you fight terrorism?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:22:52)
Clearly understanding who they are and where they are and why they’re doing what they’re doing is essential, first of all. Obviously, there are different groups, different names. They have morphed and changed based on their locale and how they operate. Building relationships with people in other countries, both state leaders as well as religious leaders and others who share that same objective of defeating these Islamist terrorists on both fronts, and acting as a united front in taking that action. What exactly that action looks like, details on the ground dictate that. Details about these different groups will dictate that.

(00:23:37)
But we’ve seen examples of this before. I saw this in Somalia. We saw it in some cases in Iraq where, for example, you have Imams who recognize the threat that these terrorist groups pose to their own people and their own communities, and exerting their influence in defeating the terrorist Islamist ideology with their own teachings of Islam and preaching peace amongst their people.

(00:24:10)
War is ugly and it is messy. It is also an unfortunate reality of the world we live in. So, while I firmly believe that we must always pursue peace, I’m not a pacifist, I’m a realist, and recognize that where there are these threats, we must do what we can to work towards that safety, that security, that freedom and peace that we all want.

War in Gaza

Lex Fridman
(00:24:44)
If we look at the perspective of Israel and the Israel-Gaza war going on now, what do you do with the fact that the death of a civilian serves as a catalyst, gives birth to hate, potentially generational hate? So in Israel’s stated goal of destroying Hamas, they are creating immeasurable hate. What do you do with that? From a perspective of Israel, what is the correct action to take in response to October 7th?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:25:21)
It’s a complex question with a complex answer. I think Israel’s approach has to be in recognizing that delineation as far as possible. And I know it’s tough when you have a terrorist group like Hamas that is so interwoven within the community of people in Gaza. But to recognize that there should be, and there is a shared purpose there for the Palestinian people to be able to live free and in peace and not under the oppression of this terrorist group, just as the people of Israel would like to live in peace and free from the threat of attack from a terrorist group that wants to exterminate them.

(00:26:12)
The complexities of what’s going on in Israeli politics is, I think, a different conversation, but also one that is directly intertwined with the answer to this question. When you have some people in the Israeli government who don’t want the Palestinian people in Gaza at all and want them to go and repatriate in other countries, I think that’s a big problem, and that further exacerbates this hatred and resentment that continues to grow there. This is a generation’s long challenge, unfortunately, of the resentment and tension that exists between many Israelis and many Palestinians that can only be resolved when there’s strong leadership representing both peoples who are able and willing to come together and recognize that the only way forward is to let the past be in the past and find a way towards peace in the future.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:16)
How do you think, how do you hope the war in Ukraine will end?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:27:20)
The only way that this war ends is to do exactly what we’re talking about. There has to be a brokered dialogue and conversation about peace that has to occur with representatives from Russia and Ukraine. It is really truly heartbreaking to see both how efforts that began just weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine to do exactly this, were thwarted by the Biden-Harris administration, and other Western powers has cost so many innocent people’s lives. And this is where I get…
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:28:03)
… innocent people’s lives, and this is where I get… I have friends in Ukraine. I’ve been there more than a few times. I’ve enjoyed and appreciated the time that I’ve spent there. When I hear from my friends about how afraid they are of their husbands being conscripted and feeling like they have to hide for fear of being yanked off the streets, their friends and family members who’ve been killed in this war. The only way this ends is when both sides come to the table and find an agreement that neither side is going to be completely happy with, both sides being forced to make some concessions, but one where they will both walk away and this war can end.

War in Ukraine

Lex Fridman
(00:28:50)
What’s the role of the US president perhaps to bring everybody to the table? Do you think that the US president should sit down with Zelenskyy and Putin together?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:29:01)
Yes. Yes. In an ideal world, yes. This should have happened long ago. The question of whether or not President Biden is the right person to do that at this time when all of the statements and comments that they have made, the Biden-Harris administration has made from the beginning of this war essentially point to their objective being to basically destroy Russia, and that’s one of the reasons why they have supported both the continuation of this war for as long as it’s lasted, as well as why they have thwarted efforts towards peace.

(00:29:44)
Whoever that most effective neutral broker is, that’s the best person to do this. The Biden-Harris administration, I think the role that they have to take is actually encouraging Zelenskyy to sit down and begin this process. Those kinds of engagements are the most, to me, the most powerful exercises of diplomacy that can’t be matched, especially when our president’s foremost role and responsibility is to serve as commander in chief, and I wish that we had leaders who were more willing to engage because I think we’d make a lot more progress more quickly to find areas both of mutual interest as well as to help de-conflict and de-escalate areas where there is tension or disagreement or adversarial interests.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:41)
Well, some of it is basic human camaraderie. People call me naive for this, but sometimes, just knowing that there’s a human on the other side. Even when it’s in private, if you look at Zelenskyy and Putin for example, just humor. Both are very intelligent, witty at times, even funny people. Yes, this is wartime. Yes, a lot of civilians and soldiers are dying. There’s hate, but if you can look above it all and think about the future of the countries, the flourishing of the people and the stopping of the death of civilians and soldiers, then in that place, you can have that basic human connection.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:31:28)
I agree. I don’t think that’s naive at all and I think there are so many examples through history that point to the power of that, the real power in that. In the Cuban Missile crisis, how JFK had to literally find a secret way to communicate with Khrushchev to try to go around the backs of the military commanders who were urging him to take military action, and instead find, hey, we both ultimately want the same thing. Neither of us wants to launch a catastrophic nuclear war so let’s figure this out.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:05)
Of course, there’s examples throughout history. Leaders are complicated people. They’re manipulative people, so you have Hitler and Chamberlain meeting and Chamberlain kind of getting hoodwinked by Hitler’s charisma and being convinced that Hitler doesn’t have any interest in invading and destroying the rest of the world, so you have to-
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:32:26)
Be smart. Don’t be hoodwinked.

Syria

Lex Fridman
(00:32:31)
You’ve met, and you’ve been criticized for this, you’ve met with Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and as part of the campaign when running for president, got criticized for not calling him a war criminal. What’s the right way to meet and communicate with these kinds of leaders?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:32:50)
As I just stated, we need leaders who have the courage to meet not just with allies, but with adversaries in the pursuit of peace, in the pursuit of increased understanding. If policies are being made through the lenses and the barriers of bureaucrats and the media and others who have or may have their own interests. Our president, a leader, even members of Congress can’t make decisions with the kind of clarity that we the American people need them to make.

(00:33:32)
I think that these kinds of engagements are weaponized and politicized as they were against me by those who have their own interests, whether it be the military industrial complex or in Washington. If you’re not part of the official narrative of the US government, which was intent on a regime change war in Syria, then you’re an outcast. And it was unfortunate because people levied all kinds of accusations and smears against me for going and having the audacity to go and learn more, try to seek the truth, in the hopes of preventing more needless war and in the hopes of preventing yet another quagmire and disastrous war in the Middle East. And simply for going, and yes, meeting with Assad, also meeting with religious leaders in Syria, also meeting and talking with people on the streets of Damascus, talking with college students, talking with people from the opposition party who would like to see Assad replaced, talking with local law, just a whole host of people over the course of a few days, the accusation was like, “Oh, she loves dictators.”

(00:35:10)
It’s a sad state of affairs when some of the most influential voices in our country will label someone a lover or supporter of dictators simply because you’re saying, “Hey, we shouldn’t be going to war. There is another way.” And I’m not alone in this. People who were against the war in Iraq were given similar labels, until it became popular in our politics to have been against the Iraq war. We see the same thing now with people like Tucker, myself and others who are saying, “We should not be waging this proxy war against Russia via Ukraine and using the Ukrainian people’s lives in this war.” Well, now all of a sudden, you’re a Putin lover or a Putin puppet or whatever, the traitor, treason, all of these accusations that are used ultimately by people who are not interested in having a substantive conversation about the truth, about looking at these wars and conflicts with a comprehensive view on exactly all the dynamics that are at play.

(00:36:20)
And that’s what I found when I came back. I went to Syria looking forward to coming back and shedding light on different perspectives, experiences and stories that I found that would give people a more broad understanding of what was happening in that country. And what I found was there was zero interest in the mainstream media or in Congress in hearing any other perspective other than their own, which was, “We need to launch this regime change war through the use of arming and equipping known terrorists within Syria to overthrow the regime,” without them stating any realistic idea of who would take control once Assad was overthrown. But the reality actually being that no matter which opposition group they might try to prop up, they would not have the power to withstand the terrorist groups whose stated goal it was to go and take over power from Assad. They had no interest in trying to gain true understanding, and it was very disheartening. It was very disheartening and a big lesson learned about where their interests really were focused.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:40)
Yeah, it’s a simplistic narrative template that’s fit into every single situation. A lot of stuff is not talked about in the Russia-Ukraine war. One of the things that’s not talked about is, okay, so Putin is overthrown, then who do you think will come into power?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:37:58)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:58)
One of the things I talk about with Arestovych is that Putin, and he gets criticized for this, that Putin, out of all the people that might take power is the most liberal, is the most dovish. In fact, every indication shows that he really hates this war, and so everybody that will step in if he steps down or if he is overthrown is just going to accelerate this war and the expansionism and the thirst for empire and all that kind of stuff that the U.S military industrial complex will feed into. So you have to think about what the future holds and what the different power players are and what the level of corruption there is, and the realistic view of the situation versus the idealistic view of the situation.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:38:53)
Just on that note real quick, I think that was exposed in broad daylight when it appeared that the former head of the Wagner Group was about to try to launch a coup, and how that was so celebrated, even on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and others touting that this was somehow going to be a great thing, without looking at who is this guy really? What has he been doing in different countries around the world and what would be his ruling philosophy and how that would differ or benefit American interests or the interest of security and peace.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:35)
But also the interest of Ukraine or Russia, or humanity overall, just the flourishing of nations, which is great for everybody, and collaborations with nations.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:39:44)
I agree.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:45)
Friendly competition. One of the things I love about the 20th century is the friendly, sometimes not so friendly, competition between the Soviet Union and the United States in space, in the space race. That’s created some incredible engineering and scientific breakthroughs and all of this, and also made people dream about reaching out to the stars, and war destroys all of that, or damages it. Hopefully just damages it. Hopefully the Phoenix will rise again.

Warmongers


(00:40:13)
Well, let me ask you about the criticism you’ve mentioned. It’s probably the most common criticism of you, that you love Putin. So just to linger on it, what do you think is the foundation of this criticism?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:40:29)
Well, I’ll tell you when it began. My first day in Congress was January 3rd, 2013. I believe it was the third, fourth, fifth, somewhere around there, and my last day was January 3rd, 2021. I had been given my experience of serving as a soldier in the Middle East, and the motivation that really drove me to run for Congress in the first place. I served on the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Armed Services Committee for almost eight years, the eight years that I was there, with my drive and motivation to actually be in a position to challenge the influence of the military industrial complex, to try to prevent us from needlessly going to war.

(00:41:19)
And so the likes of Hillary Clinton and the cabal of Warmongers in Washington, they weren’t fans of mine to say the least. I can’t say it was a total surprise, but it was disheartening nonetheless that the very day that I announced my candidacy, that I was running for president, which was in February, 2019. The hour that I walked up onto that stage to announce my candidacy, it was in Hawaii and I gave my announcement speech, NBC News published a hit piece that planted the seeds of suspicion in voters’ minds that somehow, I was a darling of Putin and Russia and whatever. It was baseless, all of it baseless. And that continued like a steady drumbeat throughout my candidacy, but that really was escalated when in a podcast with David Axelrod, Hillary Clinton said, “Oh, well, the Russians are grooming her.”

(00:42:22)
And this came from a very influential person. She was the former Secretary of State, the former US Senator, former First Lady, someone who wielded and continues to wield a lot of power in the Democratic Party and amongst voters, and that took it to a whole new level. What is the basis for this? Nothing. It is a tired yet dependable playbook that is used not only by people like Hillary Clinton, but also people like Mitt Romney and others to try to smear, discredit and destroy the reputations of people who have the audacity to question their objectives as they call for one war or another, or have the audacity to say that this is not in the best interest of peace, or in our country, our national security.

(00:43:29)
They keep going back to this playbook as they do today, because again, they’re not willing to debate the substance of one position versus another, which is what we should have. If people feel so strongly that we should be going and waging this war, that war, okay, great. Go make your case to the American people. Go stand on the floor of the United States House and actually have this debate. Allow those who are saying, “No, this is not a good idea,” to also stand freely and make that argument. Instead, they resort to the kind of name-calling that tells voters, “Hey, you can’t trust this person or anything that they say.”

(00:44:12)
Myself and some of my other colleagues got the same treatment when we tried to pass legislation in Congress that would have taken out provisions from the Patriot Act that are most egregiously violating our Fourth Amendment rights and civil liberties, authorities that have allowed our government to illegally surveil Americans without a warrant. And as we did so, we were called traitors. We had other members of Congress on the house floor saying that if you pass this legislation, you will be responsible for another nine-eleven style attack on our soil.

(00:44:48)
These are all distraction tactics to try to divert our attention away from what’s actually happening, and instead, just tell voters, “Hey, you can’t trust these people.” Obviously, this has happened to Trump. It’s happened to Bobby Kennedy. It’s happened to people like Rand Paul and others. There’s a small group, but a growing number, at least I’m on the Republican side at this point, people who are actually willing to stand up and challenge the military industrial complex, challenge the warmongers in both parties.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:22)
Well, people on the left have challenged the warmongers as well throughout the last few decades.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:45:29)
Less so recently. I agree with you, but less so recently, and this is one of the reasons why I left the Democratic Party, one of the foremost reasons. I devote an entire chapter to this issue in my book, For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind. Going into the detail of some of the things we’ve talked about, about my own experiences, about what I have learned along the way, but also how even in the last year or two years, certainly under this administration, people who I worked with in Congress who were Democrats, dependable voices for civil liberties, dependable voices, speaking out against the insanity of people who wanted to wage war for the sake of war. They’re largely silent now.

(00:46:25)
And unfortunately within the Democratic Party in Washington, there is no room for debate, that if you challenge the Biden administration’s position on foreign policy, you’re going to hear about it. And what we have seen is that’s exactly what’s happened, and people have retracted statements or just fallen silent or whatever the case may be. This debate that should be existent within both parties, on the Democrat side unfortunately, it just doesn’t exist anymore.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:02)
There seems to be some kind of mass hysteria over the war in Ukraine. It was strange to watch that the nuance aspect of the discussion was lost very quickly. It was, “Putin bad.” It was a war between good and evil. And in that, if you bring up any kind of nuanced discussion of how do we actually achieve peace in the situation, you’re immediately put on the side of evil.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:47:32)
Yeah, which is pretty sick when you think about it.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:36)
The cynical view is, of course, it’s the military industrial complex machine, the war profiteers just driving this kind of conversation. I hope they don’t have that much power. I hope they just have incentives and they push people and they use people’s natural desire to divide the world into good and evil and fight for the side of good. People just have a natural proclivity for that, and that’s a good thing, that we want to fight for the side of good, but then that gets captured.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:48:10)
And manipulated.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:11)
Yeah.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:48:12)
Yes. I admire your hopefulness. I am hopeful also because of the goodness in people and the naturally compassionate nature of people. However, I will tell you from firsthand experience that what we talk about is the national security state, and the military industrial complex, this cabal of warmongers that extends not only within government but outside of government, extends to many powerful media outlets. They are incredibly powerful and don’t have any qualms at destroying those who try to get in the way of their power, and they’ve got a lot of tools. They’ve got a lot of tools to do that, which I think is why President Eisenhower chose to include this in his farewell address as a warning, because the only recourse, the only real power that has the ability to destroy them and stand up against them is a free people living in a free society, exercising the rights that we have enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Nuclear war

Lex Fridman
(00:49:33)
I just talked to Annie Jacobsen. She wrote a book on nuclear war, a scenario of how a nuclear war will happen, second by second, minute by minute. I apologize. If it happens, how it would happen. It is terrifying.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:49:47)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:48)
It’s terrifying how easy it is to start, that one person can start it first of all, and then there’s no way to stop it. Even potentially with tactical nuclear weapons, that the machinery of it, how clueless everybody is combined with the machinery of it, it’s just impossible to stop, and it’s just between Russia and the United States especially. And then all of a sudden, you have nuclear winter and 5 billion people are dead, and they die through just essentially torture, slowly. How do we avoid that? How do we avoid a nuclear war? That’s something that you talk about and think about. How do we avoid this kind of escalation of a hot war?
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:50:40)
I think the most essential thing, first of all, is understanding exactly what you have just detailed. We are in this very strange and absurd time where we have talking heads and so-called pundits on TV. We have politicians, we have people who are talking about a nuclear war as though it is a war that can be won, period, and a war that can be waged somehow without that risk of escalation to the point of destruction of human civilization. And so they talk about this as though it’s just another war, and especially as they talk about the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Oh, well, this is small and we think it’ll send a message without actually escalating to the point where we are dealing with the kind of destruction that we witnessed in World War II.” That’s a dangerous thing when it becomes normalized as, “Well, we’ve got this new missile that’ll go and it’s targeted and it’s strategic, and it’ll only harm this, quote unquote, military target.”

(00:52:06)
Ronald Reagan was 100% correct when he said a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be waged. It was true then and it’s true now, no matter how much these guys who are producing these weapons or those who are benefiting from that industry try to tell us, “Oh no, it’ll never happen.” So to me, that’s an important first step, to continue to inform and educate and sound the alarms to people. Don’t buy this crap because it’s not true, and I look forward to listening to your podcast, but the PSA that was put out by New York City’s Emergency Management Office about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack, you would find it funny if it wasn’t so deeply disturbing. How they created this public service announcement, they distributed it everywhere across the city, on the internet. I think it was on the radio where you had a woman who appeared to be an actor coming in and saying, “Hey, in the event of when the big one hits, here’s what you should do. Focus on doing these three things,” and I’m paraphrasing but I encourage you to watch it.

(00:53:23)
I’m paraphrasing but she said, “Get inside. Stay inside and stay tuned.” That was it. And, “Get inside, go away from the windows. Stay inside. Don’t go outside until you get the all clear, and stay tuned. Follow our account on Instagram and Twitter.” And at the very end of this short PSA, her closing words were, “We’ve got this.” And it was so disturbing in that it was so completely out of touch with reality. It creates this kind of false sense of security that, okay, well, it’s like here’s what you do when a tornado hits or when a big storm hits, and categorizing the big one, a nuclear attack within that same kind of preparedness that you would want people to have in the event of a natural disaster of some sort. And it is reflective of the carelessness with which people in our government, that careless attitude that people in our government have towards nuclear war and a nuclear attack, even as they set us up for failure in pushing us closer and closer to the brink of a nuclear war occurring, whether it be an intentional attack, or as we saw during the last Cold War, one that could be launched unintentionally. How many near misses were there during the last Cold War? I saw this documentary called The Man Who Saved the World, and it was some mid-level officer who happened to be on duty and who didn’t do what he was told in launching the nuclear missiles because of what they thought was an incoming attack, and it turned out to be a complete mistake or misread on the radar, but that’s what we’re facing.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:33)
But by the way, there’s so many things to say there, but one of the things that Annie Jacobsen details is just how organized the machinery of all of this is, where the humans involved don’t have to think. They just follow orders. There’s a very clear set of steps you take, and there’s very few places where you can inject your humanity and be like, “Wait a minute, what’s the big picture of this?” The only person that can think is the…
Lex Fridman
(00:56:03)
That can think is the president of the United States. The president of the United States gets six minutes after the warning. The early warning system says, whether it’s false or not, says that, “We believe that there’s been a nuclear weapon launched. You have six minutes before you can make the decision of launch back, initiate.” And to me, that’s what I’m voting based on, in the current situation.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:56:36)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:36)
You really have to see that as one of the most important aspects of the United States President, is, “Who do you trust in those six minutes to sit there?”
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:56:45)
I agree.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:46)
And I’m not really sure, looking at Biden and Trump, boy, I don’t know, but I do know that I would like somebody who’s thinking independently, and not part of the machinery of warmongers, that that’s really … I mean, I don’t want to make it sound cynical or dramatic, but sometimes in such scary situations, in such dramatic situations, you kind of follow the momentum.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:57:16)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:17)
When the right thing to do, the right thing for a leader to do is to step back and look of all human history, and ignore all the people in the room that are saying stuff, because most likely, what they’re going to be saying is warmongering type of things.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:57:36)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:36)
That’s one of the things, why I also get criticized for, I still think Zelenskyy is a hero for staying in Kyiv. Everybody was telling him to flee. It was all the information was basically saying the world’s second biggest military is like coming at Kyiv. It’s just dumb on all fronts to stay in Kyiv, but that’s what a great leader does, is ignores everybody and stays.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:58:05)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:06)
“Screw it. I’m going to die for my country. I’m going to die as a leader,” and that’s the right thing for a leader to do.
Tulsi Gabbard
(00:58:12)
It’s sad that … I mean, to me, that’s what we should expect of our leaders, is exactly that, and it’s sad that having a leader in that position fulfill their responsibility, and the oath that they take is seen as a heroic act, when we should … That’s your job. That’s what we elect our leaders to do, and yet, so many have failed. But to your point, it’s not cynical at all to know that in those rooms, especially in these moments of crisis, unfortunately, there are the predominant and prevailing opinion of this warmongering establishment that’s not specific to one party, is the knee-jerk reaction, which is to go to war, or to execute an act of war.

(00:59:17)
This is one of the biggest costs of this establishment, destroying the reputations of, and smearing and trying to cancel and censor those who are voices of peace, or just those who take a contrarian position and say, “Well, hey, why don’t we just pause for a moment and actually think this through? Why don’t we talk through, ‘What happens if we take this course of action? What happens if we go down a different path?’ Let’s actually be thoughtful about what our options are for A, B, and C, and then make the decision in a thoughtful manner based on that.” Even advocating for that is seen as a kind of heresy in the warmongering establishment in Washington, and the cost of their retaliation against those who are reasonable voices, who look at the world as it is, not some fantasy that they wish existed is, in those rooms, during those critical moments, people will, even if they know in their heart or their mind that this could end really badly, their instinct is to self-censor and not speak up because they don’t want to experience the wrath and ire, whether it be coming from four-star generals, or the secretaries of state, or defense, or these high-ranking people in positions of power and influence.

(01:00:48)
They don’t want to be the one guy in the room who’s just like, “Hey, guys, let’s just take a breath and actually think this through. What will happen, not just in the immediate response of this action that you’re advocating for, but what are all of the other people, other actors, stakeholders in the world, how will they respond, and then how will we respond to them? How will they respond to us?” Actually go through this exercise of, in the military, this is commonly referred to as, “What are the second, third, fourth order of effects that will occur as a result of pursuing a specific course of action?”
Lex Fridman
(01:01:25)
It’s weird how difficult it is to be that person in the room.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:01:29)
It requires courage-
Lex Fridman
(01:01:31)
Yeah, but like it-
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:01:31)
… which is sad, but it requires courage.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:33)
But why does it require, like even just to ask, “Okay, we’ve been in Afghanistan and Iraq for this number of years. What’s the exit plan?”
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:01:41)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:43)
Just bring that up every day at a meeting.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:01:45)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:46)
Like, “What’s the exit plan?” It’s strange that that gets criticized, the war in Iraq and so on, but I just remember there’s this pressure you can’t quite criticize, or ask dumb questions about, “Wait, what? Why are we going into Iraq again?” Like-
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:02:01)
But they’re not dumb questions.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:03)
Right. In retrospect, you’re like, “Oh, they’re not dumb questions at all,” but actually required a lot of courage to ask them while still working within the institution. It’s easier if you’re an activist from the outside saying, “No war,” this kind of stuff.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:02:15)
Sure. Sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:16)
But within the institution, in the position of power, to ask the questions like, “Maybe let’s not.”
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:02:23)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:23)
It seems really difficult, and the same kind of thing in the war in Ukraine and just any kind of military involvement. Again, I guess the cynical interpretation is that it’s the military industrial complex that permeates just the halls of power.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:02:41)
It does, and what is behind the military industrial complex? And there are different examples of this. You can look at the pharmaceutical industry as well. There’s a huge amount of money and a huge amount of power that wields tremendous influence over members of Congress. There are different examples of this across different sectors of our society, but I think the military industrial complex over time has proven itself to be the most powerful and influential, and that’s what is behind it, is this is why they try to destroy anyone who dares to ask the most obvious questions is because it is about power and wielding power.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:32)
Well, the good thing about the United States presidents is they have the power to say F you to everybody in the room, I think.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:03:39)
They do.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:40)
It just seems like they don’t quite take that power. People say like, “Yeah, the U.S. President doesn’t have that much power.” I don’t know about that. It’s just like if you look at the law, especially in the military, when you’re talking about war and the military, they have a lot of power.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:03:55)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:56)
So they can fire everybody.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:03:59)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:00)
They have a lot of power. They can stop wars, they can start wars. They have a lot of power.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:04:04)
The position of the presidency certainly does. Unfortunately, we have people, too often, who assume the presidency from a position of weakness because they’re afraid of losing power, and so they make those calculated decisions not based on what is right for the right reasons, but instead, driven by fear of loss of power and loss of influence, and that’s where, especially given all that we are facing, we need leaders in the presidency and in Congress who have courage to be that voice in the room to ask about, to remain mindful of and rooted in the Constitution to, even as we are seeing this legislation being billed as the anti-TikTok bill, that’s really not about TikTok, it’s about freedom of speech.

TikTok ban

Lex Fridman
(01:05:13)
Can you actually explain that bill?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:05:15)
Yes. I guess the bottom line upfront is this is another piece of legislation being expedited through Congress with strong bipartisan support in the name of national security interests that is essentially a power grab and an assault on freedom and liberty. And I’ll just say this in, I think, probably the top three things that they’re not actually telling us that’s in the bill. Freedom of speech, it’s our ability to be able to express ourselves, whether it be in person, on a podcast, on a social media platform, in a newspaper, whatever the platform may be. This legislation gives the executive the power to decide which platforms are acceptable for us to be able to use TikTok itself.

(01:06:18)
The words, TikTok, is not actually in the bill, but it gives the power to the president to decide, “Who is a foreign adversary?,” single-handedly, no consultation with or agreement from members of Congress or anyone else. It actually gives the power to a cabinet secretary to designate, “Who is a foreign adversary?,” and if a social media platform has at least 20% ownership in a social media platform, that platform may be banned from doing business in America essentially, but it’s not just a foreign state actor that could be named as a foreign adversary. It also includes a line in the legislation that if, let’s say a person has at least 25% financial interest or ownership in a social media platform, they’re an American citizen who may be working or living in some other country, or working or living here, but doing business with other countries. If the executive branch of our government decides that this individual is under the influence of, or controlled by someone that they deem a foreign adversary, then that platform must not do business in America, and that person obviously, even an American citizen, is banned from conducting that business. They must divest, essentially.

(01:08:02)
So when you look at, and this is where there’s been a lot of chatter around this, when you look at Elon Musk, for example, well, you already have people in the Biden administration, even President Biden himself, implying that Elon Musk’s activities need to be investigated. Well, he is someone with Tesla who does business in a lot of countries, including China, and therefore, he must be investigated. It is not at all a stretch of imagination to say that X could be the next platform that the executive branch decides. Nope. We’ve designated this person to be a foreign adversary, and therefore, his business interest cannot be allowed for this social media platform, cannot be allowed to exist.

(01:08:44)
We’ve seen this already with people accusing him and X of interfering in our elections. Again, it’s ironic that it’s coming from the Democratic party, that they are claiming that a guy who has set himself, he’s committed to free speech and is allowing free speech on his platform, and is not allowing the federal government to manipulate his platform by deeming which accounts are okay to post their content and which accounts are not because of disinformation, or whatever they claim it to be, it’s not an accident that the social media platforms that have been proven to take action at the behest of the federal government and the White House to censor certain voices, they’re not included with or being targeted at all in this legislation or outside of it, yet, other platforms that are not cooperating or collaborating somehow are. So the underlying issue here, this is being sold as TikTok and national security, but ultimately, even as Ron Paul said, this is a legislation that’s the greatest assault on liberty since the Patriot Act was passed.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:03)
Yeah, it’s quite dark that it’s just a grab of power.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:10:07)
It is.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:08)
I mean, it’s not just with Elon, it’s probably with Zuck, with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. It puts pressure. It’s not just about banning, but it puts pressure for them to kind of moderate behavior, which is a slippery slope.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:10:29)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:29)
Of course, it’s a beautiful dance of power, because you don’t want tech companies to have too much power either, or individuals at the top of those tech companies to have too much power, but then, do you want that power in the hands of government?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:10:45)
No.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:45)
The history of this nation is a fascinatingly effective journey towards the balance of power, and it does seem like this sneaky, little thing, as much as I hate TikTok on all fronts. My brain rots every time I use TikTok. I know it is also the national security dangers of China and so on, but it’s just like, “TikTok, man.”
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:11:09)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:10)
I just … I don’t know, it’s so addicting. It’s so addicting. So when I first saw this TikTok bill, I was like, “Yes,” on all fronts, but then they got me. The Trojan Horse got me. No-
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:11:22)
I mean, they all … And this is like The Social Dilemma documentary, I think exposed a lot, that there’s so much that these algorithms do in these various social media platforms that’s problematic to say the least. Data security and privacy is a serious issue. These are serious things, and so let’s have a conversation about these serious things, and cease these attempts to have our government try to tell us what we are and aren’t allowed to see, where we are and aren’t allowed to say what we want to say. That’s really what it comes down to.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:07)
Yeah, more and more trust people to, whenever social media companies do bullshitty things for the people to make documentaries about it, to discover, for great journalists to do great journalism, and find the flaws in the hypocrisy and the call for transparency, all those kinds of things. I don’t trust, in most cases, government regulation of technology companies because they seem to be really out of touch.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:12:34)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:34)
One, they want power.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:12:36)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:36)
They’re really intimidated by the power that the tech companies have, and two, they don’t seem to get at the technology at all. So they’re hindering innovation, and they’re just greedy for power, and those are not-
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:12:48)
Yeah. It’s a bad combination.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:49)
It’s a bad combination.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:12:51)
The thing here too, though, is this extends far beyond social media companies. This is a very specific example, but it’s one example of many how those who are greedy for power are continuing to try to find ways to tell us how to live our lives. They’re increasingly trying to tell us, again, what we’re allowed to see and hear, whether it be social media companies, or what shows up in a Google Search engine, for example, and if they’re not finding a willing and compliant social media company or big tech company, then they’re looking for ways to reach their hand into those tech companies and force compliance, but in the age of disinformation, misinformation, hate speech, all of the excuses that are given for government, either directly or indirectly through big tech, to try to censor certain voices, it really undermines the truth, which is the way to defeat bad speech is with better speech and more speech. Whether it’s hate speech or things that you might be offended by, or things that you might disagree with, the answer is not to have some entity with the power of censorship and being the “Authority” to decide what is good speech and acceptable, and what is bad speech and unacceptable. It’s what you said, let’s encourage this debate, and encourage people who are inspired by like, “No, man.”

(01:14:39)
“I saw this thing or this thing is happening, and it’s pissing me off, so I’m going to bring a superior argument. I’m going to show what the right way is.” And gosh, this is what our founders envisioned for us as a society in this country, and we would be so much stronger with a more engaged people and a more informed people if we had this and had it supported.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:06)
Do you think … What are the chances that the TikTok ban bill passes?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:15:12)
The way that it passed through the House of Representatives with such an overwhelming bipartisan support and so quickly, and President Biden saying that if it comes across his desk, he’ll sign it, I thought it would pass through very quickly. I’m only slightly encouraged by the fact that the Senate, at least, appears to be saying, “Hey, there are serious free speech concerns around this bill, serious civil liberties concerns around this bill. We need to do our due diligence.” I won’t say I’m cautiously optimistic because I understand how that place works, but their pause at least gives people the opportunity to continue to kind of sound the alarm and for people to call their senators and express their concerns with this, that are very real, valid concerns.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:05)
Yeah, this is really messed up. Just, in case we didn’t make it clear, I think this is really, really big danger if this thing passes. Even if you hate Elon Musk or your whatever, this is really, really, really dangerous. If the government gets a say over the platforms on which we communicate with each other, it’s a huge problem.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:16:24)
And there’s a section in there as well, just kind of the last piece on this, is if you use a VPN, and you try to use a VPN to access this, you could have problems with the law, and you take that a step further and say, “Well, how would they know?” There’s a surveillance aspect to that. So once you start peeling back the layers of this really toxic onion, it really leads seriously to a pretty dark, and dangerous, and oppressive place.

Bernie Sanders

Lex Fridman
(01:17:00)
You were a long-time Democrat. You were the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, until you resigned in 2016 to endorse Bernie. I should say I love Bernie. I loved him before he was cool, all right? Anyway, can you go through what happened in that situation, and with the Democratic National Committee and with Bernie, and why you resigned?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:17:26)
As a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, one of the things that the rules of the DNC required was that officers of the DNC, of which we were, as I think there were five or six of us who were vice chairs at the time, you have to remain neutral in a Democratic primary. So you’re not as a party supposed to be tipping the scales in any direction for any candidate during a primary election. And so I had no plans to get involved for any candidate or against any candidate during that primary, and just the hopes of like, “All right, we got to make sure that this is a fair and balanced primary so that voters have the best opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choosing.” I saw a couple of things pretty quickly. Number one is that the chair of the DNC at the time was a woman named Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a congresswoman out of Florida, and she made very serious decisions unilaterally that many times, we found out about via tweet or press release that showed she was tilting the scales in the favor of Hillary Clinton in that 2016 primary.

(01:18:51)
The other thing that I saw was how the mainstream media and those who are supposed to be in a position to be neutral arbiters to facilitate debates and forums and conversations so that voters can be best informed in who they want to vote for, were calling Hillary Clinton the most qualified person ever to run for president in the history of our country because of the positions that she had held as secretary of state, as a U.S. senator, as first lady, and yet, they glossed over those titles without ever holding her, asking questions even, or holding her to account for her record, especially in the area of foreign policy. The job she was running for was to be commander in chief, to be the president of the United States. That responsibility to serve as commander in chief is the foremost responsibility a president has. It’s essentially the one area where the president can unilaterally make decisions without education, healthcare, immigration. Congress has to actually pass legislation. President can come through and say, “Hey, here’s the policies that I want.”

(01:20:07)
“Here’s legislation that I’ll propose,” but those changes can’t be made without Congress, working with Congress to pass them. So she was essentially being let off the hook for her record, as an American, as a soldier, as a veteran. That was a big problem for me, and so I made the decision to resign as vice chair of the DNC so that I could endorse Bernie Sanders, who largely at heart, I believe is a non-interventionist. He hasn’t focused a lot on foreign policy. It’s not at the heart of what his focus has been for decades, but he was certainly far more of a non-interventionist than Hillary Clinton, who has shown through her record to be the queen of warmongers in Washington. I wanted to be in a position where I would have a platform to inform voters about her record so that they could make that decision for themselves, so that they could see, “Hey, in this area, on this issue, which is incredibly important, there is a clear contrast between these two candidates running in the Democratic primary,” and that’s what drove my decision to resign and to endorse Bernie Sanders, and that’s what I went on to do throughout the rest of that primary election.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:34)
What do you like most about Bernie, the positive?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:21:37)
You know, what I like most about him is he is who he is, unapologetically so, both in personality, but also in what he advocates for, and what he’s advocated for for a long time. So you can agree or disagree with his positions, but he is who he is.

Politics

Lex Fridman
(01:22:02)
Like I said, you were a long-time Democrat. You ran for president in 2020 as a Democrat. Now, you’re an independent, and you wrote an excellent book, describing your journey ideologically, philosophically through that. Why did you choose to leave the Democratic party?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:22:25)
In the book, I go into a number of the central reasons why I made that choice, but fundamental to them is that the Democratic party has become a party that is opposed to freedom, that is opposed to the central and foundational principles that exist within our founding documents, and that serve as the identity of who we are as Americans and what this country is supposed to be about. It has become a party that is controlled by this elitist cabal of warmongers, who are driving forward this “Woke agenda,” and we see it through their racializing of everything. We see this through their defund the police mission. We see this through their open border policies. We see this through how, in their education policy, they’re failing our kids, and how they are pushing this narrative, that ultimately is a rejection of objective truth.

(01:23:52)
The fact that it’s a question up for debate about whether or not … Well, actually, it’s not a question up for debate for them. They are actively pushing …
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:24:03)
… question up for debate for them. They are actively pushing for boys who identify as girls to compete against girls in sports, changing our language so that the word woman, the identity of being a woman is essentially being erased from our society and it is the height of hypocrisy and, frankly, an act of hatred towards women that they are so intent on doing this, and ironic that it’s coming from the party that for so long proclaimed themselves to be the greatest feminists and the most pro-woman party in the country.

(01:24:47)
I go into detail around each of these issues and more in the book. But you will see as we go through each of these issues, fundamental and foundational to every one of them is that, sadly, the Democratic Party has become a party that is so consumed by their desire for power, this insatiable hunger for power, that they are willing to destroy our republic, our democracy, our freedom, just so that they can try to hold on to power and gain more power.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:26)
So these are just different mechanisms for power. The identity of-
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:25:29)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:29)
… politics and the warmongering are related to each other in that they’re mechanisms to attain more power.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:25:35)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:38)
You’re making it sound like only the Democratic Party are full of power-hungry people. So to you, the Republican Party, I don’t know if you’ve met those folks, but some of them-
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:25:48)
A couple of them.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:49)
… are also in love with power and are…
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:25:52)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:53)
At times, to some degree, politicians in general are corrupt, sometimes within the legal bonds, sometimes slightly outside of the legal bonds. And so, to you, to what degree is sort of the Democratic Party worse than the Republican Party? So I don’t want to paint a picture of this beautiful vision of the Republican Party that-
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:26:15)
No.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:15)
… they’re somehow not-
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:26:16)
That doesn’t exist.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:17)
… power-hungry.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:26:18)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:18)
[inaudible 01:26:18].
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:26:18)
And I’m glad you brought this up. The book details why, after 20 or so years as a member of the Democratic Party, I decided to leave. But also… And it goes through my experiences and things that I have seen and learned along the way, but I also point out exactly that fact in the book. But from the very beginning what the prologue is we should not be naive to think that this only exists within the Democratic Party.

(01:26:49)
There are very serious problems within both of our political parties, specifically coming from politicians who are driven by this desire for power and who are so afraid of losing that power that they’re willing to do whatever they feel they need to do, which centers around taking away our freedom because the more free we are to make our own decisions, even if they may end up being the wrong decisions, but to learn from those things and know that we’ve got to live with the consequences, the beauty and messiness of what a free society looks like.

(01:27:27)
They’re so afraid of us because they see us as the people and our freedom as the central threat to their ability to remain in power. I think the difference that we’re seeing today is that, unfortunately, we talked about this a little bit how the Democratic Party has become a party where you must walk in lockstep with the leadership of that party or risk being faced with your reputation being destroyed and smeared and all of these different attacks. And the reason why they do that is to put people like me and Bobby Kennedy and others up as an example of saying, “Hey, if you step out of line, if you challenge us, this is what we’re going to do to you.”

(01:28:15)
The Republican Party has also done that, and they also have politicians and leaders who are more interested in feeding the thriving system in the Washington establishment. But we are also seeing that the Republican Party also has some voices and, I would say, increasing voices of people. And I would put Donald Trump in this category who are challenging the, quote, unquote, norms of the Republican Party that are represented by people like Nikki Haley or Mike Pence, for example. The Republican Party is not a monolithic entity, and it means different things to different people.

(01:29:03)
And that’s where I think the real challenge in this next election is less… it’s really less about one political party over another, and it’s more about our opportunity as voters to select leaders… First of all, to fire those who are against freedom and who are warmongers, who, by their essence, are willing to take away our freedom in the name of national security and vote for people… Nobody’s perfect. We shouldn’t hold anybody up on a pedestal, but vote for those who are committed to the Constitution and who hold those values that represent the interests of the people.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:53)
I am not a fan of this choice, but here we are, Biden versus Trump. So let me ask you sort of a challenging question of pros and cons. Can you give me pros and cons of each? What’s the biggest strength and biggest limitation of, let’s say, Biden?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:30:12)
This is a tough question. I’ve known President Biden for a lot of years. I knew his son Beau, who served in the National Guard the same time that I did. I considered Joe Biden a friend. He’s someone over the years that I’ve talked to and shared laughs with and spent time with in different situations. The positive characteristics that drew me to Joe Biden of the past, they are not represented in how he has led as president, and I’ll let the pundits theorize as to how that is or why that is.

(01:30:58)
But the truth that I know exists, which points to his weakness, is that instead of listening to his better angels, he has instead at every turn… If you go back and I look back to his inauguration speech where he promised to be a president for all Americans, and during his campaign, promised to be the uniter in chief, to bring a country together that was deeply divided. That’s the Joe Biden that I’ve known for many years.

(01:31:34)
A guy who has worked with different people with different backgrounds and different political views but tried to find at different points in time a way to work together. At every turn, he has done the exact opposite of what he spoke about during his inauguration speech and has left us as the American people today more divided, less secure, both from an economic standpoint as well as a national security or safety and security standpoint, and less free as a society and as a people.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:20)
So the biggest criticism would be he divided us or continued the division that’s been there. Who do you be the greatest uniter? To me, over the past few decades, to me, Obama. You’ve been very critical of Obama on the foreign policy side-
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:32:36)
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:37)
… on many fronts. But to me, that guy did really good. Maybe some people say just rhetoric, but I think rhetoric matters in your president. I think he was out of all the presidents we had as probably the most effective uniter of the people. Would that be fair to say?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:32:57)
During his 2008 campaign, yes. I think that his message resonated with so many people across generations and across different views, different backgrounds to where people cried on the night that he was elected because they felt so hopeful. I talked to people, and I know people who set aside their entire lives to work on his campaign to be a part of this hope and change mission that he laid out that would bring us together. Some of the people that I know personally, they gave up their lives during the campaign, and after he won, they went to Washington, DC, because they wanted to be able to do the work that they had that he had laid out and continue to be a part of this mission that they expected would extend beyond the campaign.

(01:33:59)
And they’ve expressed to me personally how heartbroken they were because so quickly after he was elected, instead of bringing in a new generation of fresh leadership that was not a part of the Washington establishment, he instead immediately chose to surround himself with people who were more of the same old, same old. Who were essentially part of the problem. And many of his actions after that proved that fear and that brokenheartedness that they felt to be true. I’ll mention one example related to civil liberties that we talked about.

(01:34:45)
He was someone as a US senator who gave some pretty powerful speeches on the Senate floor about his concerns with the Patriot Act, his concerns with surveillance from the NSA, his concerns with a violation of our Fourth Amendment Rights and civil liberties. But when, as president, he was confronted with leaked information about this surveillance occurring under those authorities in his presidency, he sided… he took the side of the national security state and did not take action to right the wrongs that he correctly pointed out as senator and during his campaign for the presidency, which is unfortunate because he really did build this unifying momentum throughout his campaign.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:37)
What do you think that is? Why is it so hard as a president to kind of act on the promises of the campaign? But also just, I mean, his speech is basically anti-war speech that really resonated to me. The fact that he was against the war in Iraq early on.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:35:54)
Yes. And that was a huge point of distinction between him and Hillary Clinton.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:58)
Mm-hmm.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:35:58)
Probably one of the biggest.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:00)
Why is it so hard when you step into the office of President to sort of act on your ideals?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:36:09)
I think it goes back to what we talked about a little bit, which is what are you driven by and what are you afraid of? And if you are concerned for whether or not you can get re-elected, who’s going to fund that re-election effort? Who’s going to fund the presidential library and your legacy that will follow?

(01:36:37)
There have been some documented examples around how he promised to crack down on Big Pharma, but when push came to shove, his Department of Justice campaign funding was threatened, and they chose not to take action even when they had a very, very strong case to make. This was with regard to the opioid crisis in the country. And this just goes back to the heart of why it’s so essential that we have leaders who have courage and who are focused on doing what we elect them to do.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:19)
And who are resistant to the love of money and power.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:37:25)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:27)
It’s hard.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:37:28)
And we are human. We are fallible. We are flawed by nature. And I’ll go into kind of the next one you asked about Trump.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:36)
Mm-hmm.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:37:37)
The weakness side and the lessons that I hope have been learned from 2016 for him and his team is you have to be in a position where you are surrounding yourselves with other people of courage who aren’t just thinking about their next political job or their next job getting a cable news contract or looking for fame themselves or looking at how they can monetize their position for their… whatever their next financial interest might be. But people of courage who know what they’re up against to really seriously clean house across the federal government and the corruption and rot that is so deeply entrenched in order to truly be effective.

(01:38:27)
And if he is re-elected, that is my hope that that he sees… he’s learned from what went wrong in 2016. That he went in with a largely non-interventionist, more focused on peace agenda, and yet he surrounded himself with people who are at the heart of the warmongers in Washington and who directly went against the policies that he advocated for. On the strength side, I think it’s easy to point out because it’s also what has caused him to be so attacked in ways that we haven’t seen before. Certainly not in my lifetime by the Democrats, by the Biden administration, not only now, but something that started back in 2016 when he was a candidate.

(01:39:28)
He’s a guy who, by all measures, has been successful in his own life, and because of that, he’s not coming in with this desire to please Washington that many other politicians have. And because he is so willing to challenge the, quote, unquote, norms, and these are not norms that serve the interests of the American people. These are norms that serve the interests of the most powerful, he’s a direct threat. And so that attitude and that mindset of not coming in with the kind of caution that too many politicians come in with of wanting to be the popular one at the parties or whatever it is that they want, that is the strength that he brings.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:19)
Yeah, I just had a conversation with Dana White, and he’s good friends with Trump, and he talks to the fact that he seems to be resistant to the attacks. Some aspect of that is just the psychology of being able to withstand their attacks that are there in the political game, and that can break people. You just don’t want the headaches.

Personal attacks


(01:40:44)
So to withstand the attacks is tough, and something about his psychology allows for that. I mean, I guess a question for you also in your own psychology, you’ve been attacked quite a bit. We’ve mentioned some of that sort of misrepresentations, and how do you deal with that by yourself? How do you not become cynical or overcompensate the other direction, that kind of stuff?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:41:08)
It really stems from having a clear sense of purpose. I never saw… I’ve served in state government, I’ve served on our city council in Honolulu and served in Congress, but at no time have I seen this as a, quote, unquote, political career. I don’t have that ladder-climbing ambition that a lot of politicians have. My sense of purpose is deeply rooted in my dedication and my desire in my life to be pleasing to God and to live a life of service. And what better way to be pleasing to God than to try to do my best to work for the well-being of God’s children?

(01:42:01)
Being rooted in that has made it so that, as the attacks are coming from different directions, even as people who I was friends with, former colleagues of mine, others, even family members, even as they have turned away or become attackers against me themselves because of different reasons related to politics, of course, it’s a sad thing, especially when it’s someone that personally and have had a personal friendship or relationship with. But I don’t live my life trying to please politicians or please the people who show up on TV or anyone else. As long as I am doing my best to be pleasing to God, that is where I draw my happiness from and my fulfillment and contentment and strength.

God

Lex Fridman
(01:43:00)
So you’ve spoken about the value of religious faith in your life, of your Hindu faith, and seeing the Bhagavad Gita as a spiritual guide. So what role does faith in God play in your life?
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:43:13)
It’s everything. It is central to who I am, what inspires me, what motivates me, where I find strength, where I find peace, where I find shelter, and where I find happiness. And this has been a constant throughout times of challenge, times of darkness, times of heartbreak, times of happiness, in always feeling very secure in knowing that God’s unconditional love is ever present, and no matter what else is happening in my life, that God is my best friend. And remaining centered and grounded in always remembering that and meditating upon that truth is it’s everything to me.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:15)
The interesting thing about the Hindu God is how welcoming the religion is of other religions. Just-
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:44:24)
It’s true.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:25)
… how accepting it is. So in that way, in many ways, it’s one of the most beautiful religions on earth. So who do you think God is to you in specifically the texts, but also you personally? What does He represent? So for Hinduism, it’s also God can be [inaudible 01:44:54]. There’s also a aspect where there’s a… it’s a part of all of us. There’s a uniting thing, not a singular figure outside of us.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:45:04)
I think one of the things that’s most commonly misunderstood about Hinduism that people don’t know is that Hinduism is truly a monotheistic religion. That there is one God, and He goes by many names that describe His different qualities and characteristics. And as you pointed out, Hinduism is uniquely of a non-sectarian spiritual practice, essentially. It’s not a, quote, unquote, religion that you convert into, or you leave behind, or whatever the case may be. Bhagavad Gita, a central scripture and text that comes from India, literally means Song of God. And the principles that are conveyed throughout the Bhagavad Gita are applicable to all of us.

(01:46:02)
They are timeless truths that, whether you consider yourself Christian or Catholic or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu, these truths are eternal and relevant through all time. So for us as kids growing up, we learned from and had bedtime stories that came from both the Bhagavad Gita and the New Testament. My dad was raised Catholic, my mom was raised Episcopalian, and both of them were attracted to the Bhagavad Gita as they were in their own lives searching for a more personal relationship with God than they had been able to find elsewhere in their own spiritual journeys. And that’s where the application of… There’re teachings in the Bhagavad Gita, for example, that talk about Bhakti Yoga.

(01:47:04)
Bhakti Yoga essentially translates into dedicating your life, striving to develop a loving relationship with God. Karma Yoga. There’s a chapter in the Bhagavad Gita that speaks about Karma Yoga. Karma is a word that has become a part of the… Both karma and yoga have become very common terms, but what it really means is trying to dedicate your actions in life that have… in a way that have a positive impact on others, being of service to others. And so for me, growing up, I never really understood as kid the idea of sectarianism of one religion battling against another because I knew and understood and experienced that the real meaning of religion was love for God.

(01:47:59)
No matter what name you worship Him by or how you worship that is the real meaning of religion. And the application of that in your life is you ask, “How do I see God in a personal way?” I see… I know that God is my best friend. God is my confidant. When I am struggling with a problem in my life or during those quiet moments by myself where I am anxious or I’m sad, I turn to God for that solace, for that clarity, for that strength to both know what the right thing to do is and the strength to act accordingly and to constantly strive to further develop that very personal loving relationship with God.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:01)
Tulsi, this was an honor to finally meet you, to talk to you. This was amazing. Thank you.
Tulsi Gabbard
(01:49:05)
Thank you, Lex. It’s so wonderful to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:09)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tulsi Gabbard. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address. “A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. American makers of plowshares could with time and as required, make swords as well.

(01:49:45)
But now, we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. This conjunction of immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs | Lex Fridman Podcast #422

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #422 with Mark Cuban.
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Mark Cuban
(00:00:00)
The person who controls the algorithm controls the world, right? And if you are committed to one specific platform as your singular source of information or affiliated platforms, then whoever controls the algorithm or the programming there controls you.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:20)
The following is a conversation with Mark Cuban, a multi-billionaire businessman, an investor and star of the series Shark Tank, longtime principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and is someone who is unafraid to get into frequent battles on X, most recently over topics of DEI, wokeism, gender and identity politics with the likes of Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Mark Cuban.

Entrepreneurship


(00:00:55)
You’ve started many businesses, invested in many businesses, heard a lot of pitches privately and on Shark Tank. So you’re the perfect person to ask what makes a great entrepreneur?
Mark Cuban
(00:01:07)
Somebody who’s curious, they want to keep on learning because business is ever-changing. It’s never static. Somebody who’s agile, because as you learn new things and the environment around you changes, you have to be able to adapt and make the changes. And somebody who can sell, because no business has ever survived without sales. And as an entrepreneur who’s creating a company, whatever your product or service is, if that’s not the most important thing and you’re just dying and excited to tell people about it, then you’re not going to succeed.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:39)
But it’s also a skill thing. How do you sell? What do you mean by selling?
Mark Cuban
(00:01:42)
Selling is just helping. I’ve always looked at it about putting myself in the shoes of another person and asking a simple question, can I help this person? Can my product help them? From the time I was 12 years old, selling garbage bags door to door and just asking a simple question, do you use garbage bags? Do you need garbage bags? Well, let me save you some time. I’ll bring them to your house and drop them off to streaming. Why do we need streaming when we have TV and radio? Well, you can’t get access to your TV and radio everywhere you go. So we break down geographic and physical barriers, and Cost Plus Drugs. What’s the product that we actually sell? We sell trust. In a simplistic approach, we buy drugs to sell drugs, but we add transparency to it. And bringing transparency to an industry is a differentiation, and it helps people.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:30)
Trust in an industry that’s highly lacking in trust.
Mark Cuban
(00:02:33)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:35)
Okay. So what’s the trick to selling garbage bags? Let’s go back there. At 12 years old, is it just your natural charisma? I guess a good question to ask, are you born with it or can you develop it?
Mark Cuban
(00:02:45)
Oh, you can definitely develop it. Yeah. Because selling garbage bags door to door was easy, right? It was like… 12-year-old Mark going, “Hi, my name is Mark. Do you use garbage bags?” You know what the answer is going to be, right? “Can I just drop them off for you once a week? Whenever you need them, you just call and I’ll bring them down.” “Sure.” So that was easy.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:02)
But I’m sure you’ve been rejected.
Mark Cuban
(00:03:04)
Oh, yeah. Of course. Not everybody says yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:06)
What was your percentage?
Mark Cuban
(00:03:08)
I don’t remember, but it’s pretty close to a hundred percent.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:10)
Oh, okay. So that’s why you don’t remember.
Mark Cuban
(00:03:12)
Yeah. Right? Because who’s going to say no to a 12-year-old kid who’s going to save time and money? But typically, my career where I’ve started companies, it’s to do something that other people aren’t doing. Whether it was connecting PCs to local area networks and at MicroSolutions. And the salesmanship was walking into a company and just saying, look talk to me and I can help you improve your productivity and your profitability. Is that important to you? And the answer is obviously always yes. And then the question is, can I do the job and can I do it cost effectively? And so you didn’t have to be a born salesperson to be able to ask those questions, but you have to be able to be willing to put in the time to learn that business. And that’s the hardest part.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:55)
I’m sure there’s a skill thing to it too, in how you solve the puzzle of communicating with a person and convincing them.
Mark Cuban
(00:04:03)
Yeah, there’s skill from the perspective that I read like a maniac. Then now you can give me an example of any type of business and it’ll take me two seconds to figure out how they make money and how I can make them more productive. And I think that’s probably my biggest skill, being able to just drill down to what the actual need is, if any. And then from there, being able to say, well, if this is what this company does, and this is what their goal is, how can I introduce something new that they haven’t seen before? And is that a business that I can create and make money from?
Lex Fridman
(00:04:35)
So figure out how this kind of business makes money in the present and then figure out, is there a way to make more money in the future by introducing a totally new kind of thing?
Mark Cuban
(00:04:43)
Correct.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:45)
And you can just do that with anything.
Mark Cuban
(00:04:46)
Pretty much. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:48)
And you think you’re born with that?
Mark Cuban
(00:04:50)
No, I worked at it. Because going back to what I said earlier about curiosity, you have to be insanely curious because the world is always changing. My dad used to say, we don’t live in the world we were born into, which is absolutely true. If you’re not a voracious consumer of information, then you’re not going to be able to keep up. And no matter what your sales skills or ability are, they’re going to be useless.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:12)
You learn about life from your dad. You mentioned your dad.
Mark Cuban
(00:05:16)
My dad did upholstery on cars, got up, went to work every morning at seven o’clock, came back five or six, seven o’clock, exhausted, and I learned to be nice. I learned to be caring. I learned to be accepting. Just qualities that I think he really tried to pass on to myself and my two younger brothers were just be a good human. And I think he didn’t have business experience. So as I got into business, he would just say, “Sorry, Mark, I can’t help you. I don’t understand what you’re doing.” Neither one of my parents had gone to college. You’ve got to figure it out for yourself.

(00:05:52)
But he was also very insistent that… He worked at a company called Regency Products where they did upholstery on cars, and he would bring me there to sweep the floors, not because he wanted me to learn that business, because he wanted me to learn how backbreaking that work was. He lost an eye in an accident at work, a staple broke, and the only thing he wanted for my brothers and I was for us to never have to work like that, to go to college to figure it out.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:18)
You said to be nice. That said, you also said that when you were first starting a business, you were a bit more of an asshole than you wish you would’ve been.
Mark Cuban
(00:06:25)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, because I was more of a yeller. I didn’t have-
Lex Fridman
(00:06:30)
No, really? Mark Cuban?
Mark Cuban
(00:06:33)
What you see on the sidelines would be at a Mavs’ game. Maybe a little bit. But I also didn’t have any patience for somebody I thought wasn’t using my common sense, because I was always on the go, go, go, go, go, particularly when I was younger, just trying to be successful, trying to get to the point where I had independence. And I would tell this to people. Either you’re speeding up and getting on the train, or we’ll stop and drop you off at the next station, but let’s go where you go.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:02)
Did you have trouble with the hire fast, fire fast part of running a business?
Mark Cuban
(00:07:06)
Yeah, always, because I hated firing people. ‘Cause it meant, one, it was an admission of a mistake in the hiring. And two, the salesperson in me always wanted to come out ahead, and I was always horrible at firing, but I always partnered with people who had no problem with it. So I always delegated that.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:23)
Well, that’s the tricky thing. When you’re working with somebody and they’re not quite there, and you have to decide, are they going to step up and grow into the person that that’s the right or they’re not. And in that gray area is probably where you have to fire.
Mark Cuban
(00:07:37)
Well, it’s hard, yeah, for sure because it’s obviously a failure somewhere in the process. What did we do wrong? And when I would interview people for jobs, 99% of the people I’ve ever interviewed I’ve wanted to hire, because in my mind, it was like, okay, I can figure out how to make this person work. And then they wouldn’t. And then people at the company would be like, “Mark, you suck at this.” And so I always delegated the hiring.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:06)
Yeah, I’m the same. I see the potential in people. I see the beauty in people, which is a great way to live life. But when you’re running a company, it’s a different thing.
Mark Cuban
(00:08:15)
It’s different. And you got to know what you’re good at and what you’re bad at, right? I was good at… I was a ready-fire-aim guy, and I always partnered with people who were very anal and perfectionist because where I could just go, go, go, go, go, go, they would keep me inside the baselines.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:29)
They would do the due diligence, I suppose.
Mark Cuban
(00:08:32)
Yeah, or just, yeah, the detail work, the dot the I’s and the cross the T’s.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:35)
What does it take to take that first leap into starting a business?
Mark Cuban
(00:08:38)
That’s the hardest part. It really depends on your personal circumstances. I got fired. I was sleeping on the floor of six guys in a three-bedroom apartment, so I couldn’t go any lower. So there was no downside.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:38)
Starting at the bottom.
Mark Cuban
(00:08:50)
Yeah, there was no downside for me starting a business. And it was just like… I was 25 when we started MicroSolutions, and I’d just gotten fired and it was like, look, I’m a lousy employee. I’m going to just start going to some of my prospects that I had at my job and asked them to front the money that I needed to install some software and found this company, Architectural Lighting, who put up $500 for me. That allowed me to buy software and have 50% margins and that’s how I started my company.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:22)
But by way of advice, would you say? It’s a terrifying thing.
Mark Cuban
(00:09:25)
Yeah, you’ve got to be in a position where you’re confident. I get emails and approached by people all the time, what kind of business should I start? That tells me you’re not ready to start a business. Either you’re prepared and you know it or you don’t. In the United States, with the American Dream, everybody always looks at themselves and say, okay, I have this idea. And then you go through this process of saying, okay. You talk to your friends or family, what do you think? And they almost always, oh, it’s a great idea. Then you go on Google and you say, oh my god, no one else is doing it. Without thinking, 10 companies have gone out of business trying the same thing. But okay, it’s on Google. And then people stop because that next step means, okay, I have to change what I’m doing in my life.

(00:10:11)
And that’s not easy for 99% of the people. Some people look at that as an opportunity and get excited about it. Some people get terrified because it’s, okay, maybe I’m comfortable, maybe I have responsibilities. And so whatever your circumstances are, if you want to take that next step, you have to be able to deal with the consequences of changing your circumstances. And that’s the first thing. Do you save money? If you have a job, but d’you have a mortgage? Do you have a family? You’ve got to save money. You can’t just walk. They’ve got to eat and they’ve got to have shelter. But on the other side of the coin, if you’ve got nothing, it’s the perfect time to start a business.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:49)
Desperation is a good catalyst for starting a business, but in many cases, the decision, as you’re talking about you’re going to have to make is to leave a job that’s providing some degree of comfort already. So I suppose when you’re sleeping on the floor and there’s six guys, it’s a little bit easier.
Mark Cuban
(00:11:05)
It’s really easy, right? Particularly when you get fired and you don’t have a job and you’re looking at bartending at night to try to pay the bills. And so it wasn’t hard for me, but to your point, it really comes down to preparation. If it’s important enough to you, you’ll save the money. You’ll give up whatever it is you need to give up to put the money aside. If you have obligations, you’ll put in the work to learn as much as you can about that industry so that when you start your business, you’re prepared. And you can always, at night, on weekends, whenever you find time, lunch, start making the calls to find out if people will write you a check or transfer you the money to buy whatever it is you’re selling. And by doing those things, you can put yourself in a position to succeed. It’s where people just think, okay, Geronimo, I’m leafing off the edge of a cliff and I’m starting a business. That’s tough.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:57)
But sometimes that’s the way you do it, though.
Mark Cuban
(00:11:59)
There’s always examples of any situation or scenario, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:12:03)
Anecdotal evidence for everything.
Mark Cuban
(00:12:05)
But if you’re going into a new business, you’re going to have competition unless you’re really, really, really, really, really lucky. And that competition is not going to just say, okay, let Lex or Mark just kick our ass. And so, you’ve got to be prepared on how you’re going to deal with that competition.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:18)
What do you think that is about America that has so many people who have that dream and act on that dream of starting a business?
Mark Cuban
(00:12:28)
I think we’ve just got a culture of consumption and more. And to get more, you’ve got to… Creating a business gives you the greatest potential upside and the greatest leverage on your time, but it also creates the most risk.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:47)
So that capitalist machine, there’s a lot of elements. By contrast, the respect for the law, like an entrepreneur can trust that if they pull it off, the law will protect them. There won’t be a government.
Mark Cuban
(00:12:59)
Hopefully that’s still the case. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:00)
Well, yeah. There’s always…
Mark Cuban
(00:13:03)
Versus other countries, right? So us versus other countries. Joe Biden of all people said to me, it was at an entrepreneurship conference that when he was vice president, he had put together, and we had gone up there, a bunch of us from Shark Tank to talk to young entrepreneurs from around the world. And he said to me, “Mark, I’ve been to every country around the world, and the one thing that separates us is entrepreneurship. We’re the most entrepreneurial country in the world, and there’s no one else who’s even close.” And when you look at the origin of the biggest companies in the world, for the most part, there’s an American origin story somewhere behind there. And I think that just gets perpetuated on itself. We see those Horatio Alger stories, we see examples of the Jeff Bezos of the world, the Steve Jobs of the world, and those are the types of people we want to copy.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:58)
Yeah, we want to be really careful and try to really figure out what that is because we don’t want to lose that.
Mark Cuban
(00:14:04)
For sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:05)
We want to protect the… Whatever. And that’s a lot of the discussions about what’s the right way to do government, big government, small government, what’s the right policies, but also culture, who we celebrate. One of the things that troubles me is that we don’t enough celebrate the entrepreneurs that take risks and the entrepreneurs that succeed. It seems like success, especially when it comes with wealth, is immediately matched with distrust and criticism and all that kind of stuff.
Mark Cuban
(00:14:32)
Yeah, well, it’s changing for sure, because you can go back just 12 years, right? Traditional media dominated, let’s just say through 2012, that was the peak of linear television. Newspapers weren’t as strong, but they still had some breadth and depth to them. And then social media comes along and everybody gets to play in their own sandbox and share opinions with people who think just like them. And it also gives them the opportunity to amplify those feelings. And I think that’s where celebrating entrepreneurs really started to subside some. There were always people who were progressive that were like, billionaires are bad or millionaires are bad, depending on the time period, but you didn’t really see it on an ongoing basis. It wasn’t going to be on the evening news. It wasn’t going to be in the front page of the newspaper. It was going to be if you read a book and someone talked about it, or you read a magazine and there was an article talking about this progressive movement or that progressive movement, whatever it may be, or political parties. But now all of that is front and center in social media.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:41)
Yeah, we’re trying to figure it out, how we deal with the mobs of people and the virality of it all. And I think we’ll find our footing and start celebrating greatness again.

Shark Tank

Mark Cuban
(00:15:51)
Well, that’s the whole reason I do Shark Tank.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:52)
That’s true. That show celebrates the entrepreneur. That’s true.
Mark Cuban
(00:15:56)
t’s the only place where every single minute of every single episode, we celebrate the American Dream. And the reason I do it is we tell the entire country, and it’s shown around the world even, we’re amazing advertising for the American Dream, and I don’t even know how many countries, but every time somebody walks onto that carpet from Dubuque, Iowa or Ketchum, Idaho, that sends a message to every kid who’s watching, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12-year-old kid that if they can do it from Ketchum, Idaho, you can do it. If they can have this idea and get a deal or even present to the Sharks and have all of America see it, you can do it. And I’m proud of that. 15 years of that, it’s just been insane. Now kids walk up to me and go, yeah, I started watching you when I was five or 10, and I started a business because I learned about it from Shark Tank. And so I think it celebrates it, and we convey it, and I don’t think it’s going away, but there are different battles we have to fight to support it.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:57)
Yeah, I love even when the business idea is obviously horrible. Just the guts to step up.
Mark Cuban
(00:17:04)
To be there.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:05)
To believe in yourself. To really reach. That’s what matters, because some of the best business ideas are probably, maybe even you and Shark Tank will laugh at.
Mark Cuban
(00:17:17)
Oh, for sure. Without question. The good ones, we’re not going to recognize every good one. And then sometimes we’ll just motivate people to work even harder to get it done because of what we say to them, and that’s fine too. There’s been great success stories that we said no to.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:30)
What stands out as a memorable business on you’ve been pitched on Shark Tank. What’s the best one that stands out on-
Mark Cuban
(00:17:37)
There’s no best one, right? They’re all different. They’re all best in their own way, I guess. There’re stupid ones, and we haven’t had any world-changing earth-shattering ones because those aren’t going to apply to Shark Tank. They don’t need us. So we typically get businesses that need some help at some level or another. But there’s ones I’ve passed that I wish Spikeball, do you know what Spikeball is? So it’s just rebounding net that you can put on the beach and you have these yellow balls, and you play a game of, it’s just a competitive game, but they’re killing it. So if you go to beaches in New York or LA, you’ll see kids playing it all the time. And it was a fun game that I wish I had done a deal with, and there’s been others.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:21)
And you passed.
Mark Cuban
(00:18:21)
And I passed. They were getting some traction and they wanted to create leagues, Spikeball leagues, and they wanted me to be the commissioner, and I don’t want to be a commissioner of a new Spikeball league.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:32)
So you have to have this gut feeling of will this scale, will this click with people?
Mark Cuban
(00:18:39)
Of course, yeah. Can it be protected? Is it differentiated? Is it something that makes me think, why didn’t I think of that? Or is it just a good solid business that’s going to pay a return to the founder and may not be enough of a business to return to an investor?
Lex Fridman
(00:18:56)
Yeah, and I guess the question you’re trying to see, will this scale? There’s promise? Will the promise materialize into a big thing?
Mark Cuban
(00:19:06)
Well, see, I don’t even care if it’s going to be a big thing, right? Because it’s all relative to the entrepreneur. We had a nineteen-year-old from Pittsburgh Laney, who came on with this simple sugar scrub, and there was nothing outrageously special about it. I didn’t see it becoming a hundred-million-dollar business. I thought it could become a two, three, five-million-dollar business that paid the bills for her. And that was good enough. And six months after the show aired, she called me up, she goes, “Mark, I’ve got a million dollars in the bank. What am I going to do?” I’m like, “Enjoy it. Put aside money for your taxes and go back to work.” And so it doesn’t have to be a huge business. It’s just got to be one that makes the entrepreneur happy.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:45)
But then there’s the valuation piece. Do a lot of the entrepreneurs overvalue their business?
Mark Cuban
(00:19:52)
Yeah, that’s the nature of it, right? And that’s really where the biggest conflicts in Shark Tank happened. That’s an evaluation. They think this is the best business ever. We had one lady couple that came on and they had this scraper for cat’s tongues, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:20:10)
Nice.
Mark Cuban
(00:20:10)
Bizarre. One of the most bizarre pitch ever.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:14)
I love it.
Mark Cuban
(00:20:15)
And they had this insane valuation and it was on because it was corny and fun TV, not because it was a good business.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:21)
Oh, really? Okay. You didn’t see the potential.
Mark Cuban
(00:20:23)
None. Yeah, none.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:25)
There’s a lot of cats in the world, Mark. Come on.
Mark Cuban
(00:20:27)
Yes, there are. And they’ll go very well without me.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:30)
So how do you determine the value of a business, whether it’s on Shark Tank or just in general?
Mark Cuban
(00:20:35)
It’s actually really easy. So if you take, just to use an example, a business that’s valued at $1 million, and I want to buy 10% of that company for $100,000, then in order for me to get my money back, they’ve got to be able to generate a hundred thousand dollars in after-tax cash flow that they’re able to distribute. Can they do it or can they not? Right? And if it’s a $2 million… Whatever the valuation is, that’s how much cash, after-tax cash they have to generate to return that money to investors. Or the other option is, do I see this as business potentially having an exit? Do they have some unique technology or do they have something specific about them that some other company would want to acquire? Then the cash flow isn’t as, I don’t want to say important, but isn’t going to guide the valuation.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:28)
And how do you know if a company’s going to be acquired? So it’s the technology, like the patents, but also the team, is it-
Mark Cuban
(00:21:34)
Yeah, it could be any of the above. It could be a super products’ company that I think is going to take off.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:41)
And how do you know if they can generate the money? You made it sound easy.
Mark Cuban
(00:21:45)
Yeah, can the person sell? And if not them, can I do it or someone on my team do it for them?
Lex Fridman
(00:21:52)
So you’re looking at the person.
Mark Cuban
(00:21:54)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. That’s where Barbara Corker is the best. She can look at a person and hear them talk for 20 minutes and know, can that person do the job and do the work.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:02)
Can you tell if they’re full of shit or not? So one of the things with entrepreneurs, they’re like we said, overvaluing, so they’re maybe overselling themselves, but also they might be full of in terms of their understanding of the market or also-
Mark Cuban
(00:22:17)
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:17)
… or exaggerating what they’re think or do, all that kind of stuff. Can you see through that?
Mark Cuban
(00:22:21)
Yeah, for sure. Just by asking questions. So if they are delusional at some level or misleading at another level, I’m going to call them on it. So you get people trying to sell supplements that come on there and it’s a cure for cancer or whatever it may be, or there’s this latest fad that increases your core strength without doing any exercises. Shit Like that I’m just going to bounce, I’m going to pound on them. Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:48)
I still love that. I still love the trying. Just trying.
Mark Cuban
(00:22:51)
No, give them credit, right? Because they know all of America’s going to see it, and they’ve deluded themselves to believe this story so strongly.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:58)
There’s a delusional aspect to entrepreneurship. You,
Mark Cuban
(00:23:04)
That’s a great question. Do you have to be ambitious and set aside reality at some level to think that you can create a company that could be worth 10, a hundred, a billion dollars, yeah, at some level. Because you don’t know. It’s all uncertainty. But I think if you’re delusional, that works against you because everything’s grounded in reality. You’ve got to execute. You’ve got to produce, you can have a vision and you can say, this is where I want to get to and that’s my mission, or this is my driving principle. But you still got to execute on the business plan, and that’s where most people fail.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:40)
Yeah, you have to be kind of two-brained, I guess. You have to be able to dip into reality when you’re thinking about the specifics of the product, how to design things, the first principles, the basics of how to build the thing, how much it’s going to cost, all of that.
Mark Cuban
(00:23:53)
Yeah. Because if you can’t do the basics, you’re not going to be able to do the bigger things. And at the same time, you’ve got to be… One of the things that entrepreneurs do that I always try to remind any of that I work with on is we all tend to lie to ourselves. Our product is bigger, faster, cheaper, this or that, as if that is a finite situation, that’s never going to change. And there’s always somebody, I call them leapfrog businesses. Whoever’s competing against you, if you do a B or C, they’re going to try to do C, D and E, and you better be prepared for that to come, because otherwise they’re out of business too. So you’re never in a vacuum. You’re always competing against sometimes an unlimited number of entrepreneurs that you don’t even know exist who are trying to kick your ass.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:37)
And the tricky part of all this too is you might need to frequently pivot, especially in the beginning.
Mark Cuban
(00:24:43)
Hopefully not.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:45)
So you think in the beginning, the product you have should be the thing that carries you a long time.
Mark Cuban
(00:24:51)
Yeah, because that’s your riskiest point in time. And so if you’ve done your homework, which includes going out there and testing product market fit, you should have confidence that you’re going to be able to sell it. Now, if you didn’t do your homework and you go out there and you sell whatever it is and you’ve raised money or whatever, just to pivot, you’ve already shown that you haven’t been able to read the market. And so it’s not that pivots can’t work and always don’t work. They can, but more often than not, they don’t. You pivot for a reason. That’s because you made a huge mistake.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:28)
Well, I also mean the micro- pivots, which is iterative development of a-
Mark Cuban
(00:25:33)
Oh, yeah, just iterations. Yeah. Entrepreneurship, having any business is just continuous iteration, continuous. Your product, your sales pitch, your advertising, introducing new technology, how do you use AI or not use AI? Where do you use it? What person’s the right person? There’s just a million touch points that you’re always reevaluating in real , early ‘time that you have to be agile and adapt and change.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:00)
But especially in software, it feels like business model can evolve really quickly, too, like how are you going to make money on this?
Mark Cuban
(00:26:07)
Yeah, software for sure, because anything digital, because it can change in a millisecond.

How Mark made first billion

Lex Fridman
(00:26:13)
Speaking of which, how did you make your first billion?
Mark Cuban
(00:26:16)
So my partner, Todd Wagner and I would get together for lunches, and we were at California Pizza Kitchen and Preston Hollow in Dallas, and he was talking about how we could use this new thing called the internet. This is the late ’94, early ’95, to be able to listen to Indiana University basketball games because that’s where we went to school. And he look, when we would listen to games, we would have somebody in Bloomington, Indiana have a speakerphone next to a radio, and then we would have a speakerphone in Dallas and a six-pack or 12 pack of beer, and we’d sit around listening to the game because there was no other way to listen to it. So I was like, okay, my first company, MicroSolutions, I’d written software, done network integration. And so I was comfortable digging into it, and so like, okay, let’s give it a try.

(00:27:08)
So we started this company called AudioNet, and effectively became the first streaming content company on the internet. And we’re like, okay, we’re not sure how we’re going to make this work, but we were able to make it work when we started going to radio stations and TV stations and music labels and everything and evolved. Audionet.com, Which was only audio at the beginning, to broadcast.com in 1998, which was audio and video, and became the largest multimedia site on the internet. Took it public in July of 1998. It had the largest first day jump in the history of the stock market at the time. And then a year later we sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in Yahoo stock, and I owned right around 30% of the company, give or take. And so after taxes, that’s what got me there.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:02)
Well, there’s a lot of questions there. So the technical challenge of that, you’re making it sound easy, but you wrote code, but still, in the early days of the internet, how do you figure out how to create this kind of product of just audio at first and then video at first?
Mark Cuban
(00:28:18)
A lot of iterations like you talked about. We started in the second bedroom of my house, set up a server. I got an ISDN line, which was a 128K line and set up, downloaded Netscape server, and then started using different file formats that were progressive loading and allowing people to connect to the server and do a progressive download so that the audio, you can listen to the audio while it was downloading onto your PC.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:47)
Yeah, it was a super choppy. So you’re trying to figure out how to do it.
Mark Cuban
(00:28:49)
Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. It would buffer it. It wasn’t good, but it was a start.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:53)
But it was good enough the first
Mark Cuban
(00:28:55)
Kind. Yeah, because there was no other competition, right? There was nobody else doing it. And so it was like, okay, I can get access to this or this. And then there were some third party software companies, Zing and Progressive Networks and others that took it a little bit further. So we partnered with them and I started going to local radio stations where literally we would set up a server. Right next to it, I had a $49 radio, the highest FM radio that I could find, and we’d take the output of the audio signal from the radio with these two analog cables, plug it into the server, encode it, and make it available from audionet.com. Then I would go on Uunet bulletin boards. I would go on CompuServe, I would go on Prodigy, I would go on AOL, I’d go wherever I could find bodies, and I’d say, okay, we’ve got this radio station KLIF in Dallas.

(00:29:48)
It’s got Dallas sports and Dallas News and politics, and if you’re in an office or you’re outside of Dallas, connect to audionet.com and now you can listen to these things on demand. And that’s how we started. And it started with one radio station, and then it was five, then it was 10, then it was video content, then the laws were different then. So we could literally go out and buy CDs and host them and just let people listen to whatever music. And we went from 10 users a day to a hundred to a thousand, to hundreds of thousands to a million over those next four years.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:25)
How did you find the users? Is it word of mouth?
Mark Cuban
(00:30:27)
Word of mouth.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:27)
Just word of mouth.
Mark Cuban
(00:30:28)
Didn’t spend a penny on advertising.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:29)
So the thing you were focusing on is getting the radio stations and all that.
Mark Cuban
(00:30:32)
But radio and TV, anything, any content at all.
Mark Cuban
(00:30:34)
You
Lex Fridman
(00:30:34)
Pick up the phone, how’d you,
Mark Cuban
(00:30:37)
Wherever I put everything that was public domain, I’d go out and buy a video or a cassette, whatever it was. And this was before the DMs, the digital minimum Copyright Act of 90, whenever it kicked in. So literally anything that was audio we would put online so people could listen to it. And if you think about somebody at work, they didn’t have a radio most likely. And if you did, you couldn’t get reception. Definitely didn’t have a TV, but you had a PC and you had bandwidth available to you and the companies weren’t up on firewalls or anything at that point in time. So our in-office listening during the day just exploded because whoever’s sitting next to you, what are you listening to? And that was the start of it. And then in early 98, we started adding video and just other things, and we had ended up with thousands of servers.

(00:31:26)
There was no cloud back then. And just pulling together all those pieces to make it work. But where we really made our money was by taking that network that we had built and then going to corporations and saying, look, it’s 1996, ’97, ’98. And to communicate with your worldwide employees, what they would do is they would go to an auditorium that had a satellite uplink, and then they would have people go to theaters or ballrooms and hotels that had satellite down links and they would broadcast the product introductions, whatever. And so we said to them, look, you’re paying millions of dollars to reach all your employees when you can do it. Pay us a half a million dollars, and we’ll do it just on their PCs at work. So we did. When Intel announced the P 90 PC, we charged them $2 million or whatever to do that.

(00:32:20)
When Motorola announced a new phone or a new product, we would charge them. And so we used a consumer side to do a proof of concept for the network, and then we would take that knowledge and go to corporations, and that’s how we made our revenue.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:34)
And there’s some selling there with the corporations?
Mark Cuban
(00:32:36)
Yeah, a lot of selling there, but we were saving them so much money, and they were technology companies. They wanted to be perceived as being leading edge. And so it was win-win.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:45)
How much technical savvy was required? You said a bunch of servers. At which point do you get more engineers? How much did you understand could do yourself? And then also, once you can’t do it all yourself. How much technical savvy is required to understand enough to hire the right people to keep building this and innovation?
Mark Cuban
(00:33:03)
I did all the technology, and then we hired engineer after engineer after engineer to implement it. And so, yeah, from putting together a multicast network to software to just all these different things,
Lex Fridman
(00:33:17)
Was this a scary thing?
Mark Cuban
(00:33:19)
It’s terrifying, right? Because as we were growing, trying to keep up with the scale, and literally, we’re buying off-the-shelf PCs, and then server cards as the technology advanced and hard drives and things would fail, and we would have to… We didn’t have machine learning back then to do an analysis of how to distribute server resources. There was a time when Bill Clinton and all the Monica Lewinsky stuff happened. They released the audio of their interviews of him or something like that. And literally, I knew at that point in time when that was released, everybody at work was going to want to listen to it, right? So we had to take down servers that were doomed.
Mark Cuban
(00:34:00)
… Was going to want to listen to it. We had to take down servers that were doing Chicago Cubs baseball and just make all these on-the-fly decisions because we didn’t have the tools to analyze or be predictive. It was all technology-driven and marketing.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:17)
The acquisition by Yahoo. Can you tell the story of that, but also in the broader context of this internet bubble? This is a fascinating part of human history.
Mark Cuban
(00:34:28)
On the acquisition side, we were the largest media site on the internet, and it wasn’t close. There was nobody close. We were YouTube and relatively speaking, we would be 10X YouTube relative to the competition because there was nobody there. It became obvious to Yahoo, AOL, and others that they needed a multimedia component. We had the infrastructure, sales, all that stuff.

(00:34:52)
Yahoo, when we went public in ’98 or right before, I think it was, they made an investment of $2 million, which gave us a connection to them. After we went public, they decided they needed to have multimedia, so in April of ’99, we made a deal, and then July of 2000 is when it closed.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:18)
Can you explain to me the trickiness of what you did after that?
Mark Cuban
(00:35:24)
The collar?
Lex Fridman
(00:35:25)
Yeah.
Mark Cuban
(00:35:25)
Okay. When we sold to Yahoo, we sold for $5.7 billion in stock, not cash. After Micro Solutions, when I sold that, I took that money and initially I told my broker I wanted to invest like a 60-year-old man because I wanted to protect it, but then he started asking me all kinds of questions about all these technologies that I understood, like networks I had installed. We had become one of the top 20, let’s say, systems integrators in the country. At one point in time, we were the largest IBM token ring installer in the country. It was crazy. Banyan, Blast from the Past.

(00:36:08)
Anyway, these Wall Street bankers or analysts rather, that were the big analysts of the time would call me up because they would ask my broker, “What does he know about this product, this product?” I knew them all, what was working and not working. The ones that worked, I say that it’s working and they say something, the stock would go up $20. My broker was like, “You know this better than they do. You need to invest.”

(00:36:32)
I started buying and selling stocks, and this was in 1990 and was just killing it. I was making 80, 90, 100% a year over those next four years to the point where guy came in and asked to use my trading history to start a hedge fund, which we did. I sold within nine months, it was great. The point being as it goes forward, so when we sold to Yahoo, I already had a lot of experience trading stocks, and I had seen different bubbles come and go. The bubble for PC manufacturers, a bubble for networking manufacturers, they went up, up, up, up, up, and then they came straight down after the hype where somebody just leapfrogged.

(00:37:14)
When we sold to Yahoo, I was like I’ve got a B next to my name. That’s all I need, or all I want. I don’t want to be greedy. I’d seen this story before where stocks get really frothy and go straight down. I knew that because all of what I had was in stock, I needed to find a way to collar it and protect it. Understanding stocks and trading and options and all that, my broker and I, we went and shorted an index that had Yahoo in it.

(00:37:42)
The law at the time was you couldn’t short any indexes that had more than 5% of that stock in it, of the Yahoo stock. I took pretty much $20 million dollars, everything I had at the time, and I shorted the index.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:58)
This is fascinating, by the way, because based on your estimation that this is a bubble.
Mark Cuban
(00:38:02)
Or just mine not wanting to be greedy.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:04)
Sure. The foundation of this kind of thinking is you don’t want to be greedy.
Mark Cuban
(00:38:09)
Yeah. How much money do I need? Where other people were saying, oh, I think you can go up higher, higher, higher. I went on CNBC and I told them what I had done, and Yahoo stock had gone up significantly from the time I had collared. One of the guys, Joe Kernan was on there, “Don’t you feel stupid now that Yahoo stock has gone up X% more?” I’m like, “Yeah, I feel real stupid sitting on my jet.”
Lex Fridman
(00:38:37)
There is some fundamental way in which bubbles are based on this greed.
Mark Cuban
(00:38:42)
For sure, and I’d seen it before, like I just said. What I did was we put together a collar where I sold calls and bought puts, and as it turned out, when the market just cratered, I was protected. Over the next two, three years, whatever it was, it converted to cash, paid my taxes, etc, but it protected me. As it turns out, it was called one of the top 10 trades of all time.

(00:39:08)
What was even more interesting out of that period, my broker at that time was at Goldman Sachs, and I had asked him to see if there was a way to trade the VIX, the volatility index, and there wasn’t. One of the people that Goldman that we were working with to try to create this actually left Goldman and created indexes that allowed you to trade the VIX.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:32)
It’s not trivial to understand that it’s a bubble. You’re lessening your insight into all this by saying you just didn’t want to be greedy, but you still have to see that it’s a bubble.
Mark Cuban
(00:39:43)
Yeah, obviously if I thought it was going to keep on going up and there was intrinsic value there, I would’ve stayed in it. It wasn’t so much Yahoo, it was just the entire industry. We’re looking at the magic seven or whatever it is stocks now and people were asking is it in a bubble? I would get into cabs and people would just start talking about internet stocks.

(00:40:06)
There were people creating companies with just a website and going public. That’s a bubble where there’s no intrinsic value at all. People aren’t even trying to make operating cap profits, they’re just trying to leverage the frothiness of the stock market, that’s a bubble. You don’t see that right now. You don’t see any IPOs right now for that matter, so I don’t think we’re in a bubble now, but back then, yes, I thought we were in a bubble, but that wasn’t really the motivating factor.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:32)
Do you think it’s possible we’re in a bit of an AI bubble right now?
Mark Cuban
(00:40:35)
No, because we’re not seeing funky AI companies just go public. If all of a sudden we see a rush of companies who are skins on other people’s models or just creating models to create models that are going public, then yeah, that’s probably the start of a bubble. That said, my fourteen-year-old was bragging about buying NVIDIA with me in his Robinhood account. He tells me the order, I place it, and he was like, “Oh, yeah, it’s going up, up, up.” I’m like yeah, we’re not quite there yet, but that’s one thing to pay attention to.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:09)
Yeah, we’re flirting with it. You said that becoming a billionaire requires luck. Can you explain?
Mark Cuban
(00:41:15)
Yeah. There’s no business plan where you can just start it and say yeah, I’m definitely going to be a billionaire. If I had to start all over, could I start a company that made me a millionaire? Yeah, because I know how to sell and I know technology, and I’ve learned enough over the years to do that. Could I make $10 million? Probably. $100 million? I hope so. But $1 billion, just something good has got to happen.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:39)
Timing.
Mark Cuban
(00:41:40)
Timing. Internet stock market was going nuts when we started, and that certainly I couldn’t predict or control. It’s like AI right now, AI’s been around a long, long, long, long time. The NVIDIA GPUs, you couldn’t predict that now’s the time that they were going to get to that cost-effectiveness where you could create models and train them and although it’s expensive, it’s still doable. We had ASICs for custom applications and we had CPUs that were leading the way, but GPUs were more for gaming and then crypto mining, and then all of a sudden they were the foundation for AI models.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:27)
I think luck being essential to becoming a billionaire is a beautiful way to see life in general. First of all, I personally think that everything good that’s ever happened to me is because of luck. I think that’s just a good way of being. It’s like you’re grateful.

(00:42:43)
That said, there’s some examples of people that you’re like, they seem to have gotten lucky a lot. We’ll mention Jeff Bezos. It seems like he did a lot of really interesting, powerful decisions for many years with Amazon to make it successful.
Mark Cuban
(00:43:01)
But he was really able to raise money, a lot of money, and people were really dismissive of him because they weren’t profitable and we were in an environment where it was possible to raise [inaudible 00:43:16]-
Lex Fridman
(00:43:15)
It was possible to raise that money. What about somebody you get sometimes feisty with on the internet, Elon. Could even look at Zuck, and Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett.
Mark Cuban
(00:43:25)
Look, Zuck was just trying to get laid and it took off and he wrote some good stuff.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:29)
Aren’t we all? Isn’t that the foundation of human civilization?
Mark Cuban
(00:43:32)
At some level, right? More power to them, you can’t take anything away from them. Snapchat, same thing, took off. Apps didn’t take off in 2007 when the iPhone came out, apps took off in 2011, 2012, and if you were there with the right app at the right time.

(00:43:48)
Even Facebook in 2004, the bubble had burst and the price for computers had fallen enough. And kids in school all needed computers or laptops. If he had tried to do something like that five years earlier… He was too young, but five years earlier or five years later, or Friendster might’ve been the ultimate or MySpace,
Lex Fridman
(00:44:12)
Friendster, I remember Friendster.
Mark Cuban
(00:44:14)
Or MySpace. I had a MySpace account, and that was before Facebook.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:17)
Yeah, the timing’s important, but there’s the details of how the product is built, the fundamentals of the product.
Mark Cuban
(00:44:25)
But that’s what gets you. When the opportunity is there, that’s what allows you to take advantage of that opportunity and the kismet of it all because it wasn’t like any of the people I mentioned, there weren’t others trying the same thing. You had to be able to see it. You had to be able to visualize it and put together a plan of some sort, or at least have a path, and then you had to execute on it and do all those things at the same time and have the money available to you because it wasn’t like whether it was Google or Facebook, they raised a shitload of money. It wasn’t bootstrapping it that got them there.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:59)
Raising money is not just about sales, it’s about the general feeling of the people with money at that time.
Mark Cuban
(00:45:07)
And proximity.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:09)
Oh, yeah. Sure.
Mark Cuban
(00:45:10)
If Zuck wasn’t at Harvard and he was at Miami of Ohio University or he was at Richland Community College, same idea, same person, same execution, and nothing.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:20)
I believe in the power of individuals to realize their potential no matter where they come from.
Mark Cuban
(00:45:29)
I agree 100% with that.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:31)
But luck is required.
Mark Cuban
(00:45:33)
The only delta is scale. We’re not all blessed with the access to the tools you need to hit that grand slam.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:42)
But then also, billion is not the only measure of success, right?
Mark Cuban
(00:45:45)
Absolutely not. Right. Everybody defines the success in their own way.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:49)
How do you define success, Mark Cuban?
Mark Cuban
(00:45:51)
Waking up every day with a smile, excited about the day. People always say when you get that kind of money, does it make you happy? My answer always is if you are happy when you are broke, you’re going to be really, really, really happy when you’re rich.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:08)
But you got to work on being happy when you’re broke, I guess.
Mark Cuban
(00:46:11)
You’re just being happy. If you were miserable in your job before, there’s a good chance you’re still going to be miserable if that’s just who you are.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:19)
That’s a pretty good definition of success, by the way.
Mark Cuban
(00:46:21)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:21)
How do you reach that success by way of advice to people?
Mark Cuban
(00:46:27)
We talked about my dad, my parents. I never looked at my dad and said okay, you’re not successful. He busted his ass and when he came home, we enjoyed our time together. There was nothing at any point in time where I felt like this is miserable, we’re awful, we don’t have this, we don’t have that. We celebrated the things we did have and never knew about the things we didn’t have. I think you have to be able to find your way to whatever it is that puts a smile on your face every day. Some people can do it, and some people can’t.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:07)
It’s not always about the smile on the outside, it could be a smile on the inside.
Mark Cuban
(00:47:11)
Whatever it is, whatever makes you feel good.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:14)
Even the struggle, like with your dad, the really, really hard work can be a fulfilling experience because the struggle leading up to then seeing your kids and seeing your family.
Mark Cuban
(00:47:29)
Exactly right. That was my dad’s grand slam, seeing three kids go to college, be successful, be able to spend time with them. That was the other thing he really made me realize is the most valuable asset isn’t the money, it’s your time. That’s why from a young age, I wanted to retire because I wanted to experience everything that I possibly could in this life. He got joy from us, I get joy from my kids, and that’s the most special thing that you ever can have.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:00)
Beautifully said. You have made some mistakes in your life?
Mark Cuban
(00:48:05)
Yeah, a lot of them.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:06)
One of the bigger ones on the financial side we could say is Uber.
Mark Cuban
(00:48:12)
Yeah, we call that not doing something. Yeah, it wasn’t a mistake, it was just… It was a mistake.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:16)
I like how you tried to…
Mark Cuban
(00:48:20)
I always try to look at mistakes at things you did that didn’t turn out as opposed to things you didn’t do, the negative.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:27)
Can you tell the story of that? And maybe it’s just interesting because it is illustrative how to know when a thing is going to be big and not, what are the fundamentals of it, and how to take the risk and all this kind of stuff.
Mark Cuban
(00:48:40)
The backstory of that is Bill Gurley came to me and said, “Mark, there’s this guy, Travis, that has this company, Red Swoosh, which is a peer-to-peer networking company that I think you can help.” I invested and would spend a lot of time with Travis.

(00:48:57)
It’s funny because back then, that was 2006, I was an investor at Box.net with Aaron Levy and… Oh, there was one other company, but there were three of them where there’d be emails where I’d introduce them and we’d all talk in these emails and they’d all gone to have astronomical success.

(00:49:20)
Red Swoosh had its issues. I always look at peer-to-peer as stealing bandwidth from the internet providers when bandwidth was a scarce commodity. What Travis did with that though, was great. He convinced gaming companies who wanted to do downloads of the clients for those games to use his peer-to-peer on Red Swoosh. He busted his ass, and I think he sold it for $18 million, so he did well.

(00:49:47)
So it was natural for him to come to me, and I still have the emails and ask me about Uber Cab. I thought okay, this is a great idea. I really, really like it. He showed me his budgets, and I think they were raising money at $10 million or $15 million or whatever. I’m like, “Your biggest challenge is going to be you’re going to have to fight all the incumbent taxi commissions. They’re going to want to put you out of business. That’s going to be a challenge and I think you don’t have enough money designated for marketing to get all that done.” I said, “I’d invest, but not quite at that valuation.” Never came back to me.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:26)
Yeah, there’s some lessons there connected to what you’re doing now we’ll talk about [inaudible 00:50:32], it’s looking at an industry that seems like there’s a lot of complexity involved, but it’s hungry for revolution and the cabs are that.
Mark Cuban
(00:50:43)
Yeah, for sure. They were dominated by an insulated few, they were not very transparent, you didn’t know the intricacies, they were very politically driven, an old boy insensuous network. I told him, “Travis, the best thing about you is you’ll run through walls and break down barriers. The bad thing about you is you’ll run through walls even if you don’t have to.”
Lex Fridman
(00:51:07)
There you have to see, is it possible to raise enough money? Is it possible to do all this? Is it possible to break through? It’s a fascinating success story with Uber.
Mark Cuban
(00:51:18)
I think he tried to go too big. He had too big an ambition, which cost him in the end, not financially and personally, but just in terms of being able to stick it out with them, but that’s what makes him a great entrepreneur.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:32)
It’s a fascinating success story. You have certain companies like Airbnb just go into this thing that we take completely for granted.
Mark Cuban
(00:51:41)
And change it all.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:42)
Just change it all.
Mark Cuban
(00:51:43)
Linda Johnson, who worked as our general counsel at broadcast.com, was Brian’s GC and chief operating officer. They had a smart, smart team.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:55)
They believed in it. It’s a beautiful story because you’re like all right, all the things that annoy you about this world, they’re an inefficient, and it just seemed like a pain in the ass-
Mark Cuban
(00:52:05)
See, I probably would’ve said no like a lot of people did to Airbnb because I’m like I don’t want people sleeping in my bed.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:12)
I would’ve too. I was like this is not going to work. I’ve done couchsurfing and stuff and it was always… It didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem like you could do this at a large scale.
Mark Cuban
(00:52:20)
To monetize it. Yeah, but he did more power to him.

Dallas Mavericks

Lex Fridman
(00:52:24)
In 2000, I think January, you purchased a majority stake in the NBA team, Dallas Mavericks for $285 million. At this point, maybe you can correct me, but it was one of the worst performing teams in franchise history.
Mark Cuban
(00:52:42)
It’s true.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:44)
How did you help turn it around?
Mark Cuban
(00:52:46)
I had this big, tall guy named Dirk Nowitzki, and I let him be Dirk Nowitzki, and I got out of the way. I think more than anything else, there was the turnaround on the business side, and then there was the turnaround on the basketball side. On the basketball side, I just went in there, immediately said whatever it takes to win, that’s what we’re going to do. Back then, they had three or four coaches that were responsible for everything and I was like okay, we spend more money training people on PC software than we do developing the most important assets of the business.

(00:53:19)
I made the decision to go out there and hire 15 different development coaches, one for each player. Everybody thought I was just insane, but it sent the message that we were going to do whatever it took to win. Once the guys believed that winning was the goal as opposed to just making money, attitudes change, efforts went up, and the rest is history.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:47)
The assets of the business here are the players.
Mark Cuban
(00:53:48)
The players.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:48)
The players.
Mark Cuban
(00:53:48)
Yeah, for sure. On the business side, the first question I asked myself is what business are we in? I really didn’t know the answer immediately, but within the first few months, it was obvious that the entire NBA thought we were in the business of basketball. We were not, we were in the experience business.

(00:54:08)
When you think about sporting events that you’ve been to, you don’t remember the score, you don’t remember the home runs or the dunks, you remember who you were with, and you remember why you went. It was my first date with a girl who’s now my wife or I went with my buddies and he threw up on the person in front of us. My dad took me, my aunt, my uncle took me. Those are the experiences you remember.

(00:54:28)
Once I conveyed to our people that this is what we were selling, that what happened in the arena off the court was just as important as what happened on the court, if not more so because if mom or dad are bringing the 10-year-old, you have to keep them occupied because they have short attention spans.

(00:54:45)
I would get into fights with NBA, put aside the refs, but getting in fights in the NBA, I would say NBA, nothing but attorneys, because they had no marketing skills whatsoever. To their credit, they realized that was a problem and started bringing in better and better marketing people.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:01)
Part of the selling is you’re selling the team, selling the sport, selling the people, the idea, all of it.
Mark Cuban
(00:55:09)
Yeah, the experience. Have you ever been to an NBA game?
Lex Fridman
(00:55:12)
Miami Heat.
Mark Cuban
(00:55:13)
Do you remember walking into the arena and you feel the energy? That’s what makes it special.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:18)
Yeah, the energy is everything. Especially playoff games.
Mark Cuban
(00:55:20)
Right, for sure. Even a regular season game, even against the worst team, that’s where we get… Because the tickets tend to be a little bit cheaper on the resale market, that’s where parents will bring their kids. You hear kids screaming the entire game, and the parents are thrilled to death, they got to do something with their kids. The kids are thrilled to death because they got to see basketball, an NBA game, and scream at the top of their lungs.

(00:55:44)
If it turns out to be a close game, and that ball’s in the air, and if it goes in, everybody’s hugging and high-fiving people you’ve never seen before in your life, and if it misses, you’re commiserating with people you’ve never seen. That’s such a unique experience that’s unique to sports. We never sold that and that’s exactly what we started.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:01)
I have to say, just going to that game turned me around on basketball because I’m more of a football guy. Basketball wasn’t like the main sport. I was like oh, wow, okay.
Mark Cuban
(00:56:09)
It’s fun. It’s different. The energy in a stadium is completely different than the energy and arena. In the stadium, particularly if it doesn’t have a roof, it’s hard to bottle that energy. You feel it and you see… I’m from Pittsburgh, so there’s the terrible towels and people screaming defense and everything at Steelers games, but in an arena, the energy level is just indescribable.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:33)
How much of it is the selling that tickets in person, but also versus what you see on TV? When you’re owning a team, do you get any of the cut for the what’s shown on TV?
Mark Cuban
(00:56:44)
Yeah. There’s a TV deal that’s done with either a local TV broadcaster and we get all of that, or a network broadcaster like ABC, ESPN, T&T, whatever, we get one 30th of that.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:58)
What role does the TV play in turning a team around?
Mark Cuban
(00:57:01)
It keeps fans connected. Look, when the team is doing really well, it’s easy. There’s more viewers, everybody’s more excited. When you’re not, there’s still going to be hardcore fans and general fans and kids that like to watch the game.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:15)
What about the personality of the people in the stands? Clearly, you’re part of the legend of the team because you’re literally there going wild.
Mark Cuban
(00:57:26)
Yeah, screaming the whole game. It’s funny, the way I am here is how I am 24 hours a day, unless there’s a Mavs game. For whatever reason, that’s where I let out all that stress and frustration. The fan’s the sixth man. We need fans to bring that energy and amplifying that as much as we can is important.

DEI debate

Lex Fridman
(00:57:49)
You’ve had a beef recently on Twitter on X with Elon over DEI programs. What to you is the essence of the disagreement there?
Mark Cuban
(00:57:59)
I wouldn’t call it a beef.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:01)
It’s a bit of fun?
Mark Cuban
(00:58:03)
Yeah, it’s fun for me. It’s his platform, he gets to run it any way he please. He pays for that right, and so I have total respect for whatever choices he makes even if I don’t agree with them, but because it’s his platform, people are less likely to disagree with him, particularly somebody who’s got a platform themselves.

(00:58:33)
When we start talking about DEI and it’s just de facto racist and this stuff, stuff that I just think is nonsense. I have no problem sharing my opinion. If he disagrees, okay, he can disagree, I don’t care. It’s fun to engage, but he doesn’t really engage, he just comes back with snark comments, which is his choice.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:58)
In your comments, you do a bit of snark too.
Mark Cuban
(00:59:01)
Yeah, a little bit.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:04)
You’re pretty, let’s say, rigorous in your response. There is some exchange of ideas, there’s some snark, there’s some fun, all that kind of stuff. You do voice the opinion that represents a large number of people and that’s great. That’s really beautiful. But just lingering on the topic, what to you is the good and the bad of DEI programs?
Mark Cuban
(00:59:28)
Really simple, D is diversity. That means you just expand your pool of potential applicants to people who you might not otherwise have access to. To look where you didn’t look before, to look where other people aren’t looking for quality employees. That’s simple.

(00:59:47)
The E in equity means when you hire somebody, you put them in a position to succeed. The I, inclusion, is when you’ve hired somebody and they may not be typical, if you will, you show them some love and give them the support they need so they can do their job as best they can and feel comfortable and confident going to work. It’s that simple.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:08)
That’s a beautiful ideal. When it’s implemented, implemented poorly perhaps, or in a way that doesn’t reach that ideal, do you see, maybe when it’s quota based, do you see that it can result in essentially racism towards Asian people and white people, for example?
Mark Cuban
(01:00:27)
There’s a lot to unpack there. First, you can’t do quotas. There are illegal unless you’re… And I’m not the lawyer on this subject, but unless you’re trying to repair something that’s happened in the past, some discrimination that’s happened in the past. It’s not quota-based, and I think that’s really just a straw man that people put out there.

(01:00:50)
Now, does that mean that there aren’t DEI programs that are implemented poorly? Of course not. Everything that’s implemented poorly in one company to another. Sales, marketing, human resources, you can pick any element of business and find companies that implement it poorly, but that’s the beauty of capitalism in a free market or mostly free market where if you make these choices and they are the wrong choices, you’re going to lose your best people. You’re not going to be able to hire the best people. You’re not going to execute on your business plans in the way that we discussed, regardless of the size of the company.

(01:01:28)
It also, I think, depends on where you’re having the discussion. When I’m in a different group of people off of X, the feedback’s completely different. To your question of reverse racism, yes, it happens because people are people. There’s no human being that is 100% objective. It’s also, there’s very, very, very few jobs that can be determined on a purely quantitative basis.

(01:02:07)
How do you tell one janitor from the other, who’s the best? How do you tell one salesperson that you’re hiring versus another you’re hiring because they haven’t sold your product yet, so you don’t know? We talked earlier about firing people because you made mistakes.

(01:02:21)
Yes, there’s discrimination against any group, white, Asian, black, green, orange, whatever it may be, but I truly believe that there’s far more discrimination against people of color than there are people who are white. I think it’s become a straw man, that reverse discrimination because of DEI is prevalent or near ubiquitous.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:48)
Much of American history was defined by intense radical racism and sexism. But in the recent years, there was a correction and I think the nature of the criticism is that there’s an overcorrection where DEI programs at universities and companies, when they’re not doing their job well, are often hard to criticize because when you criticize them within the company or so on, they have a very strong immune system. If you criticize a DEI program, it seems like it’s very easy to be called racist, and if you’re called racist or sexist, that’s a sticky label.
Mark Cuban
(01:03:33)
You’re getting into the culture of organizations and leadership within organizations, and accepting any type of criticism, put aside DEI. When I criticized the referees in the MVA, I got fined. That was their option. I knew what I was getting into, not that they’re completely analogous, but it’s cause and effect.

(01:03:56)
If I’m in a major company and I’m publicly criticizing or even internally criticizing a sales plan or a product, our product sucks. There was a Google engineer that got fired for saying Google had AGI, and nobody believed they did and they knew that created problems. It wasn’t DEI related, but it was saying something publicly that was, in the CEO’s eyes, to the detriment of the company.

(01:04:23)
I think those are all analogous. If you’re trying to accomplish something within an organization because you think there’s a problem and there’s people speaking out saying look, we’re getting it wrong, I think I’m a victim of all this, and the company… Then leadership has got to make a decision. Do they agree or not agree? Are they right or are they wrong? Is it positive or negative to the company? And you decide.

(01:04:50)
This conversation that conservatives are being silenced in organizations now, I haven’t seen it. The other side of your question, I think unpacking it, is what’s driving all this? Put aside universities for one. In corporate America, when I talk to people in corporate America about DEI, they always start talking about ideology.

(01:05:25)
I’ve talked to Bill Ackman, who you’ve had on, and when I asked him, “Bill, you run your own companies. Who’s telling you what to do?” “They are.” “Who’s they? “It’s the universities, the people who have this ideology of DEI.” I’m like, “Did they force you? Did they coerce you? Did you lose control of your company?” “No, it’s not me. It happens to other people.” Then I talk to other people, same thing.

(01:05:52)
I try not to go one-on-one in Twitter conversations on this topic. In the DMs, I’ll talk to people who are really conservative and I’ll ask the same question and be like, “Who’s forcing you to do this?” “It’s the ideology that’s everywhere. Didn’t see the Harvard thing in University of North Carolina.” I’m like I’ve never had anybody try to push me in this direction to do this. This was my business choice. I’m not trying to tell other people you have to do this. You make your own business choices. Where companies have made their business choices, and if somebody doesn’t feel confident or comfortable with it, they may feel they’re being discriminated against.

(01:06:30)
There was something I just read in the Wall Street Journal, where the Wall Street Journal had a company interview 2 million people, and the difficulty in firing and how people, when they were fired, 40% of the people who were fired felt like it was wrong, that they were doing a great job. Then it talked about the HR person going through the hassle of trying to explain to this person through performance reviews that they weren’t doing a good job, yet the people still thought they were doing a great job, despite being told they’re not doing a good job.

(01:07:04)
I see that as being an analogous to all this huffing and puffing about reverse discrimination and conservatives not being able to speak up because if 40% of people who have been fired don’t believe they should have been fired, there’s a disconnect somewhere in how you think you’re doing your job. If you just feel like, I can’t speak up because of it, because of you’re white, and that doesn’t comport well with DEI programs, a lot of things are going to happen.

(01:07:39)
Either that’s going to come up in your performance review, HR or your boss is going to have to address it in some way, it’s going to get to HR at some level, and then decisions are going to have to be made. You can’t just fire somebody because they spoke up. Somebody’s going to have to communicate with you. I think a lot of… I just don’t trust the supposed volume-
Mark Cuban
(01:08:00)
I just don’t trust the supposed volume that people say it’s happening at, versus everything I’ve read and seen. And when I talk to people in positions of authority within organizations and ask them who’s forcing them to implement these ideologies, nobody says… Nobody says yes, that there is somebody. But on Twitter, it sounds great.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:22)
It is true for Conservatives, but in general, you can sell books, you can get likes when you talk about this ideology, and there’s a degree to which, “Is this woke ideology in the room with us right now?” Meaning it’s this boogie monster that we’re all…
Mark Cuban
(01:08:38)
Or is it a positive?
Lex Fridman
(01:08:40)
I guess another way to say that is they don’t highlight a lot of the positive progress that’s been made in the positive version of the word “woke” in terms of correcting some of the wrongs done in the past.

(01:08:51)
But that said, if you ask people in Russia, a lot of them will say, “There’s no propaganda here. There’s no censorship.” And all that kind of stuff. It’s sometimes hard to see when you’re in it that this stuff is happening. It does seem difficult to criticize DEI programs, not horribly difficult, terrible, they are this monster that infiltrates everything, but it is difficult and it requires great leadership.
Mark Cuban
(01:09:20)
So where have you criticized it and been condemned? Academic or…
Lex Fridman
(01:09:24)
Academic.
Mark Cuban
(01:09:25)
Okay. Academic, let’s… Two different worlds.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:28)
Companies and academic, yeah.
Mark Cuban
(01:09:29)
Two different worlds.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:30)
But I also think it’s not… I really want to point my finger at the failure of leadership of basically firing mediocre people. People that are not good at their job. The problem to me is DEI’s defense mechanism, like immune system, is so strong that the shitty people don’t get fired. So the vision, the ideal of DEI is a beautiful ideal. It’s just like…
Mark Cuban
(01:10:01)
Well, maybe it’s because I’m an entrepreneur, when I see an ideal that you try to implement it, and support it, and get to that point. But universities and companies are night and day different.

(01:10:12)
I can see an argument for the ideology in a university. I can see, you look at the amount of money spent on it. And so while the goal is right, the way they implement it in universities, the way they implement most things in universities, is wrong. There’s a reason why tuition has gone up a multitude, or a multiple, of inflation. They’re not well run organizations across the board. So I’m not going to argue with that at all. So when you’ve seen me argue with DEI, I haven’t waded into DEI in universities at all.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:46)
That’s mostly focused on companies.
Mark Cuban
(01:10:48)
A hundred percent because that’s where I exist. But at the same time, I read Christopher Rufo’s book where he talks about the genealogy of wokeism and ideology, but then he gets to the point, and I hope I’m remembering this right, where he says that the response to it is decentralized activism, if you will, that’s not the word he used, to try to counter that DEI.

(01:11:12)
And that seems, to me, to be counter to the whole Conservative movement right now, other than school boards where it’s centralized, and the Republican candidate is all about centralized power in him. And to me, that’s just a conflict in a lot of the underpinning of the whole DEI conversation, that a lot of which goes through Christopher Rufo right now.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:41)
Let’s continue on a theme of fun exchanges on the internet.

(01:11:45)
So Elon tweeted, “The fundamental axiomatic flaw of the woke mind virus is that the weaker party’s always right (in even if they want you to die).”

(01:11:57)
And you responded, at length, but the beginning is, “The fundamental axiomatic flaw of the anti-woke mind is that it allows groups with historical power to play the victim by taking anecdotal examples and packaging them into conjured conspiratorial ideology that threatens to upend the power structures they have been depending on.”
Mark Cuban
(01:12:22)
Says it all, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:12:24)
Well, there’s a tension there. So, yes, but both can be abused. Both positions of power can be abused. There’s power in DEI, and there’s shitty people that can crave power, and hold onto power, and sacrifice their ideals.
Mark Cuban
(01:12:45)
Okay. Put aside universities.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:47)
Dammit.
Mark Cuban
(01:12:48)
Because I’m not going to argue that universities implement DEI well, and I’m not going to tell you that they need to be spending twenty-some million dollars a year on DEI positions. To me, that’s insane. Do I look at the Harvard and North Carolina decision and say it was a great decision? No, because I think having a diverse student body helps make for kids who are better prepared for the real world. But I’m not running a university, so it’s not my choice. Maybe at some point in the future I will, but not now. And in terms of terms the corporate side of it, who’s telling anybody what to do?
Lex Fridman
(01:13:37)
Well, maybe you can give me some help.
Mark Cuban
(01:13:41)
Sure. I’m here to help you, Lex.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:44)
There’s an example in the AI world of a system called Gemini 15, Google…
Mark Cuban
(01:13:52)
Everybody was black or whatever, people of color.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:54)
George Washington was Black, Nazis were Black.
Mark Cuban
(01:13:57)
So why is it when that came out, it was a big uproar, but when somebody… So, who was it? One of the people who were trying to fuck with me, I forget which one.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:09)
There’s so many people.
Mark Cuban
(01:14:10)
But he pointed out to Elon that Grok, Elon’s AI, was woke when it answered certain questions, and other people have pointed out other things to Elon about Grok, however it’s pronounced, that was leaning left or woke. And Elon’s response was, “Oh, it’ll change. It’s a mistake. We’re fixing it.” When it happens to Gemini and Google, it’s the end of the world. “Look how woke they are. And it’s a reflection of all their culture.” Now Google comes out and says it’s a mistake. And then they doxxed the guy who’s the Product Manager or whatever of AI, of that product who… And then they go back and look at his old tweets, and show that he’s very left leaning and very DEI supportive, and that’s the end of the world.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:01)
It’s not the end of the world, but Google’s so much dependent on trust, that trust a Google search has as objective as possible, channel into the world of information. And so that brand is really important for us.
Mark Cuban
(01:15:19)
So you’re giving them too much power. And maybe I’m not recognizing the power. So I’ll tell you a personal experience.

(01:15:29)
Up until a month ago, maybe if you put in keto gummies, Shark Tank keto gummies, into Google, it would show up with scammy ads, scam ad, after scam. And I would get emails, up until a month ago, from elderly people asking me why the gummies weren’t working, and why the companies were charging all this money on a month-by-month basis when they tried to cancel. And they said it was the number one deal on Shark Tank of all time and all Shark… It was a mistake.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:07)
Well, there’s fraud, there’s mistakes, but the mistakes…
Mark Cuban
(01:16:12)
No, but why didn’t Google fix it? This just didn’t happen once over one week, over two weeks. And because it was hard to fix. As it turns out, I was working with them to try to find a fix, and we would both look at the same page. And, if you were inside of Google within the Google. com domain, it would show one page. If you were outside of Google, it would show another. And it took us looking at it at the same time for anybody to realize it. Meaning that there’s a lot of technology problems that are hard to fix.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:41)
They’re super complex, and we could talk about it forever with social media. The criticism towards Google, towards other companies when they’re based in Silicon Valley, there could be an ideological drift into an ideological bubble out of which the technology is created, and they could be blind to the obvious bias that comes inherent to…
Mark Cuban
(01:17:00)
But they’ve got billions of customers who are not going to… So what you’re saying is, the free market stops with artificial intelligence, that people don’t pay attention and respond, that Google doesn’t listen to the responses, that people inside of Google will ignore their own best financial interest, and even their own best personal interest, because they know they’re going to get doxxed now by Elon and others, and so I just don’t see that.

(01:17:27)
And Elon’s not allowed to make those same mistakes, but… Elon’s allowed to make those mistakes, but Google isn’t?
Lex Fridman
(01:17:33)
Oh, no. Elon is 100% should be criticized for the ridiculousness of overstatements that he makes about various products. He’s having a bit of fun, like you are also, and I also believe in the free market, but it’s not always efficient. There’s a delay.
Mark Cuban
(01:17:50)
Just takes time. It’s fine.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:52)
So which is why Elon is important when calling out, I think overstating the criticism of Gemini, but Elon and others are just…
Mark Cuban
(01:17:58)
Gemini wasn’t even a fully available public product yet.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:03)
It’s still a bias that resonates with people.
Mark Cuban
(01:18:06)
That’s the way neural networks work though. That’s why there’ll be millions of models, because weights and biases, putting together a neural network.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:16)
No. So the Black George Washington is a correction on top of the foundation model to keep it “safe.” One of the big criticisms of all of the models, frankly, probably even Grok, a little bit less so, is they’re trying to be really conservative in the sense of trying to be careful not to say crazy shit, because we don’t know how the thing…
Mark Cuban
(01:18:44)
It’s brand new and we know what happens, and they do it on the front end with prompts, and they try to do it on the back end with the neural networks that are underneath them, and it doesn’t always work. And that’s why there’s going to be millions of models rather than just four foundational models, or five, that everybody uses.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:02)
Well, I guess the main criticism is you want to have some transparency of all the teams that are involved and that this kind of… To the degree there’s a left-leaning ideology within the companies, it doesn’t affect the product.
Mark Cuban
(01:19:16)
But that’s the beauty of…
Lex Fridman
(01:19:17)
The free market.
Mark Cuban
(01:19:19)
That’s where the market corrects it. And not only from the outside, because everybody is going to test it. When YouTube first came out, or not first came out, after Google bought them, there used to be different commands you could give it. There were prompt commands that you could give it, and you could find all the nasty porn that got loaded before they kicked it off. And it was just the nastiest shit ever. And even now to this day, if there’s some horrific tragic event, somebody’s loading it up.

(01:19:53)
Now, I know that’s not direct to your point of internal influence to the output, but people on the outside are going to check for that now. It’s almost like the new bug contest to try to find bugs in software. And then on the inside, if it’s all left-leaning, and all you have is left-leaning employees, because most Conservatives won’t want to work there, then again that’s self-correcting as well.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:16)
That’s the hope, but it can self-correct in different kinds of ways. You can have a different company that competes and becomes more conservative. My worry is that it becomes two different worlds where there’s like…
Mark Cuban
(01:20:27)
Already is.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:29)
No, come on, don’t give up.
Mark Cuban
(01:20:31)
Oh, I’m not giving up. So where does this go? Is the question. What happens next? And going back, I’ve been in so many PC revolutions, or evolutions, where porn was the big issue. Now we don’t even talk about porn being an issue, even though every post on Twitter now has “link in bio” for a porn post, we don’t even think that’s a negative anymore. That’s just an accepted thing. And now it is become very… Where your politics on Twitter. But again, as you extend that and things grow, as AI models become more efficient, and trainable for a lot less money, or even locally on a PC or a phone, we’re all going to have our own models, and there’s going to be millions, and millions, and millions of models and not just foundational models.

(01:21:29)
Now maybe they’re built some on open source, maybe it’ll be copy-pasta where you can just cut and paste and create your own model and train it yourself. Maybe it’ll be mixture of experts where maybe it’ll be a Meta front end. Like we’re working on a project where we take 30 different AI models and there’s just a Meta search engine where it searches all of them, and you can compare all the outputs and see what you think is the best, like a search engine. Because you might get, “Is DEI good?” “Is the Covid vaccine good?” You’re going to get a variety of outputs and you have to make that decision yourself.

(01:22:09)
That’s what I think is going to happen with AI as well, because I think brands… There’s no way the Mayo Clinic and the Harvard Medical School are just going to contribute all their IP to ChatGPT, or Gemini, or whatever. It’s going to have to be licensed or they’re going to do their own.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:27)
That’s a very hopeful message. But that said, human history doesn’t always autocorrect really quickly, self-correct, really quickly. Sometimes you get into these very painful things. You have Stalin, you have Hitler, you can get to places very quickly where the ideological thing just builds on itself.
Mark Cuban
(01:22:50)
Twitter is not real world. There’s 20…
Lex Fridman
(01:22:54)
Twitter is not real world. That’s true, yes, but you could still have a nation captured by an ideology.

(01:23:00)
I think America has been really good at having these two blue and red, always at tension with each other, dividing the populace, and in the process of doing that, figuring stuff out. Almost like playing devil’s advocate, but in real life.
Mark Cuban
(01:23:18)
And that’s fair. And that’s right. As opposed to Pravda telling you everything you want to know and everybody believing it, because there’s control of everything.

(01:23:26)
And so going back to what you said earlier, people in Russia don’t think invading Ukraine… A lot of them see it as a positive. I’m sure you have relatives and friends who think it’s the best thing that ever happened, because they believe in Putin.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:42)
They’re denazifying Ukraine, they’re removing the Nazis from Ukraine.
Mark Cuban
(01:23:46)
Because exactly what Putin said. And we don’t have one uniform media outlet. That’s the difference. Even though people like to talk about mainstream media as being the source of a lot of the friction, there is no such thing as mainstream media anymore. Fox is the biggest cable news channel with the biggest audience, and they call everybody else mainstream media. It’s insane the things that we accept from our sources of information. To me, that’s the bigger problem. The bigger problem is trying to figure out what is free speech and what is the line of tolerance for free speech? And at what point does hateful free speech crowd out other people? Putin’s the master of that. You’re going to jail or you’re going to be dead if you disagree. Now, God help us if we ever get to that point here, but the person who controls the algorithm controls the world. And if you are committed to one specific platform as your singular source of information or affiliated platforms, then whoever controls the algorithm or the programming there controls you, in a lot of respects. And I think that’s where our biggest problem has been. We get people attached to specific platforms, and apps, and media outlets, and they become part of that team, and they identify as such, and either you’re part of the team or you’re not. And that to me is the fundamental problem.

(01:25:18)
It’s not woke ideology, because I never felt any pressure to make the choices that I’ve chosen, including diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I’ve never forced anybody or told anybody to do it. I just said, “Here’s my experiences.” Whenever I’ve talked to people who talk about the woke ideology, no one ever got forced. If you look at Dylan McDermott, if there was a way to gauge the number of impressions that she had, and where they sourced from, I’d be willing bet any amount of money that 90% plus of the impressions and discussions of Dylan McDermott were on, right-leaning media.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:57)
Several things, actually, let’s even go there. You gotten a bit of a beef with, again, fun, with Jordan Peterson about this.
Mark Cuban
(01:26:03)
That’s the guy whose name I couldn’t think of.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:05)
So the topic there was the gender transition and Dylan Mulvaney. Can you explain the nature of the beef? It’s an interesting claim you’re making and most of the people who are concerned about this are Conservatives.
Mark Cuban
(01:26:21)
The point is that if you looked at impressions when you run an ad, you’re curious about impressions and who sees them, but if you look at the impressions related to Dylan McDermott, like I just said, I bet 90% or more were in conservative media, and I don’t know how many followers she had, 250,000 followers or whatever when the Bud Light ad came out. And if it weren’t for Kid Rock shooting at Dylan McDermott Bud Light cans, she’d be long forgotten.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:53)
But most of the people that care about censorship are going to be free speech advocates. So most people that care about Putin suppressing speech, or anybody else suppressing speech, are going to be libertarian. So there’s probably an explanation of that.

(01:27:08)
The criticism that Jordan Peterson could provide, I guess he said that Dylan Mulvaney popularized the kind of mutilation in his view, that can affect… There’s a very serious life-changing process that a person goes through, and when that’s applied to a child, it can do a lot of harm to a person if…
Mark Cuban
(01:27:32)
But my point still holds, I don’t know how many kids were following, and you could look at the followers list, it’s not like it’s hidden. Back then, if they had 250,000 followers and now we’re on TikTok where he might get 50 some thousand views or likes, I don’t know how many views, but likes, I’ve never seen any evidence that Dylan McDermott influenced people to transition their gender. As he transitioned to her, it was documented on TikTok over the course of a year. And again, when you go back and look at the views on those TikToks, it wasn’t enormous.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:14)
But the trends start. It could be… What worries people is for young kids there to be a trend of, especially when you feel like an outsider, you feel not yourself, less than yourself, all this kind of stuff that kids feel like, that if it’s because popular enough, if it’s a trend, you would gender transition without meaning to do that. It is just part of a trend. That’s the worry they have.
Mark Cuban
(01:28:44)
That is a big stretch, to think that all the things that have to happen before you transition gender, and I’m not saying kids might find it cool, or in the moment expedient, if you will, to dress up as the other gender. Great, who cares? But to go through the actual physical transition, I don’t remember what the numbers were that I read, but I do remember that the latest numbers that came out in terms of transitioning were from JAMA, which is a medical association, that said from 2021 to 2022, the numbers went down.

(01:29:27)
But the bigger point is there are no numbers for 2023 when, post-Dylan McDermott. So there’s no way to know if the assertion is true, even marginally true. Now, you can easily suggest it, but you can say that about any social media influencer. Kids are dying because… It’s just like when people accused Trump of potentially influencing people to inject bleach into their veins. That’s a big old leap to say that because Trump says it, that people are going to start injecting, and then they find somebody who actually did. And it’s like, “Oh, it must be true. This is a trend now.” I’m just not buying it that there aren’t enough roadblocks in the way.

(01:30:18)
Now, I’m not saying it never happens, and for me, to me, you should have to wait until you’re 18 to actually have any surgery to transition. And if your parents approve it earlier, then you can have a conversation with your doctor. But you’re suggesting that everybody in that process to transition, a minor is corrupt. That the doctor, the sociologist, the psychologist, all the people involved, the hospital where the surgery is happening, the insurance company that’s paying for it, they all have been corrupted by this trend. I just don’t see that.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:55)
Well, not corrupted, but people, it’s back to the DEI thing, there could be pressure, and we are…
Mark Cuban
(01:31:02)
Pressure to operate? So think about all the people who have to be complicit to do an operation.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:07)
It’s not complicit like evil complicit. It’s more…
Mark Cuban
(01:31:10)
No, it is evil complicit. Because somebody…. In hospitals right now, they won’t perform abortions because of state law. In Alabama, they stopped IVF treatment immediately after that ruling by that judge, the Q Anon judge, to think that they’re not going to pay attention to the possible consequences of being the hospital that does transgender, that gives doctors operating rights there and not be aware of the risks associated with it and double check, to me, that’s just insane. They’re risking their entire business, and livelihood, and personal relationships for not checking that this fourteen-year-old boy who wants to be a girl or vice versa, is there waiting for surgery. I just don’t see that.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:58)
In America, yes. But if we look at humans in general, and Jordan Peterson, I think unjustly, incorrectly brought up Auschwitz.
Mark Cuban
(01:32:09)
That was ridiculous.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:10)
But if we look… To me, World War II is a very interesting time. It does reveal a lot about human nature, and that humans are able to commit atrocities without really speaking up. The point I want to make is that when you’re in this situation where everybody is around you is committing an atrocity, you can be the good German…
Mark Cuban
(01:32:37)
But…
Lex Fridman
(01:32:38)
Human nature is such that you can do [inaudible 01:32:41] things.
Mark Cuban
(01:32:40)
But that is in a time of war.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:45)
But it’s still human nature. It’s interesting to remember that.
Mark Cuban
(01:32:48)
It’s a time of war when you feel like there’s nationalism, patriotism, everything that comes up. Russia, the moms of the kids sent to Ukraine who didn’t come back, in Russia, feels certainly different than the everyday Russian who’s just taking whatever information that’s available from a unified controlled media.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:09)
But we should remember human nature. It’s interesting.
Mark Cuban
(01:33:12)
I’m not dismissing human nature at all, but there’s a difference. I think that human nature, self-preservation influences those decisions. There’s nothing about self-preservation involved in DEI, wokeness, transgenderism to compare it to Auschwitz. That’s insane.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:29)
Well, that comparison is almost always, probably always, is insane comparison between anything and the Holocaust.
Mark Cuban
(01:33:37)
I agree.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:37)
I think there’s a name for that rule, but once you bring up Hitler, the conversation ends.

Trump vs Biden

Mark Cuban
(01:33:42)
Goes away.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:43)
I do appreciate you bringing up Trump and bleach as an example. So continuing on fun exchanges between you and Elon, you said, “If they were having Biden’s last wake and it was him versus Trump, and he was being given last rights, I would still vote for Biden.” To which Elon replied, caricaturing you, “If Biden were a flesh-eating zombie with five seconds to live, where, upon being reelected, Earth would plunge into a 1000 years of darkness, I would still vote for him.”

(01:34:16)
That’s basically quoting you, but in a caricature. And you responded, “While, I have your attention. Wanted to say thank you! Your consultants at Tesla followed up about using Cost Plus drugs…” About which we’ll talk about. “… To save the company money. Truly appreciated.” And in parentheses, “(My limit is 300 years of darkness.)” Very well done, Mark.

(01:34:41)
What’s your intuition, if we just stick on Biden and Trump for a sec, what’s your intuition why Biden would make a better president than Trump?
Mark Cuban
(01:34:48)
Look at the basics. If you look at the people he’s hired, there hasn’t been any turnover in his cabinet at all. If you look at the people he’s hired over the course of his career, or while he was Vice President in particular, there’s nobody who’s turned on him, and came out, and written books, and made public statements about how he’s bad for the country.

(01:35:12)
Now, compare that to Trump, the people closest to him, almost all of them turned, unless there’s a financial relationship involved, and to me that says everything.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:26)
The dynamics of the team is important to you when you [inaudible 01:35:28].
Mark Cuban
(01:35:27)
If you’re going to be the most powerful person in the world, you better know how to manage and lead. And that’s not to say Biden hasn’t made a lot of mistakes. Immigration, the border, is a horrific mistake, and hopefully he recognizes that. And I don’t like the fact that he doesn’t admit his mistakes and just say, “Okay, I got to fix it.” Or, “I made a mistake in Afghanistan.” Whatever it may be. The position of Commander in Chief and President, you’re going to make mistakes.

(01:35:59)
Then I look at the other guy, never admits a mistake, and the list is long.

Immigration

Lex Fridman
(01:36:04)
What do you think about the immigration situation? A lot of Conservatives are using that… The theory is that the reason it’s happening is because they would be able to illegally vote.
Mark Cuban
(01:36:19)
That’s insane.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:20)
For Biden.
Mark Cuban
(01:36:21)
You can’t be an illegal immigrant and vote.

(01:36:24)
And now, in a lot of states, because of the Conservatives, they’ve passed laws saying you have to show identification. When I voted in Texas, you had to show state identification. They can’t vote. You can’t register as an illegal alien, that I’m aware of, to vote.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:39)
But of course, that story, and it really worries me, enables, or serves as a catalyst for questioning the legitimacy of an election.
Mark Cuban
(01:36:49)
I remember going to the debate with Trump in 2016, and he was debating Clinton, and one of the things he said was, “We don’t even know if this election will be legitimate if I lose.” This was in 2016 before he was even elected, and that was where he was going. That’s just what he does. He’s never admitted a mistake. The guy’s failed a zillion times. Most people say, “Okay, I learned from them.” I read a book about Roy Cohn, and Roy Cohn was the ultimate deny, deny, deny, and that was one of Trump’s mentors. And you can see almost everything that Roy Cohn ever did in the same way that Donald Trump approaches things.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:27)
But, given how drastic the immigration situation is, that story becomes more believable.
Mark Cuban
(01:37:33)
Of course it does, but the facts are still the facts. And in red states, they’re going to be checking every ID, they’re going to be making sure that’s not the case, and you can also make the argument, “Well, in the blue state, it doesn’t matter.” In the swing states, they’re still going to be checking because they know Trump is going to sue the out of them when he loses. And so again, that’s where people will take those self-preservation steps to keep their job and do the right thing.

(01:38:01)
There’s still enough people who believe in this country and how amazing it is to do the right thing. And a lot of the premise of what some Conservatives are saying and doing, the underpinning of it is that their fellow citizens will not do anything, not some things, anything, that serves the best interest of this country. And to me, that’s just wrong. That is just misleading and wrong.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:27)
I just worry about… I don’t care about Trump or Biden, I care about democracy. I just worry. I worry about the viral nature of the idea of this illegal immigrants.
Mark Cuban
(01:38:39)
It’s very functional. Either they get across… There’s a thousand different ways, an unlimited number of ways to enter the United States of America undetected, and the south border where it’s the easiest and the worst, and Biden needs to take steps to reduce that.

(01:38:55)
Remember, when Biden was vice president and Obama was president, they called Obama, the Deporter in Chief. He had no problem deporting people. And I think if I had to guess, and this is just a guess, that when they looked at the initial statistics for immigration when Biden took over, they thought there was room for more immigrants, not because they would vote, but you can make a fiscal argument that, in a world where the birth rate is flat to declining, we need immigrants. And immigrants typically don’t have a higher crime rate or anything than indigenous American citizens. Indigenous isn’t the right word, but American citizens. And so they made a calculated mistake. They made a decision that was wrong, and now they have to fix it or it’s going to hurt them severely.

(01:39:48)
But I don’t buy what Elon’s pushing that the whole reason is they are voters and will become voters.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:57)
And we should say the obvious, you’re a descendant of immigrants.
Mark Cuban
(01:40:02)
For sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:02)
And the immigrants is what makes this country great, in many parts, the diversity of this nation. And we should probably keep the people that are already been in this country for a while and are killing it, like PhD students and all this. It’s like [inaudible 01:40:17].
Mark Cuban
(01:40:16)
That’s not what Donald Trump wants, though. He wants to ship them all out. There’s just a whole lot of hyperbole when it comes to talking to all, about talking about all of these things we’re talking about. When it’s right versus left, my team versus your team, my tribe versus your tribe, the only way to stand out is hyperbole.

(01:40:34)
The hard part, and why I like this conversation, is how do you distinguish hyperbole versus reality? And I get where you’re going, Lex, where it’s like what… The smallest spark sometimes can cause people to change, and then that spark becomes bigger, and then it becomes more widespread, and then all of a sudden your country has changed. It’s not what you thought it was. I get that completely. And yes, you always have to be on top of that to make sure, but a lot of that comes from lack of leadership, and lack of trust, because there’s nobody who’s saying, “All right, Republicans, that’s all hyperbole and you’re wrong for that. Democrats, you fucked up on immigration. You up in Afghanistan. Here’s where you made these mistakes. Own it.”

(01:41:23)
There’s nobody who says, “We’re not going to just bring in Republicans if the Republicans win.” And there’s nobody who says, “We’re not going to just bring in Democrats. We’re going to bring in a mix. We’re going to try to get balance on the Supreme Court.” There’s no leadership that’s doing it. That’s the fundamental problem. It’s not about the ideology of woke. No leadership.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:45)
Leadership, whatever systems we’ve created, it’s really frustrating that if you don’t like Trump, it’s really is Trump derangement syndrome. He’s definitely Hitler, and if you don’t like Biden, he’s senile, lizard person…
Lex Fridman
(01:42:00)
Senile lizard person that-
Mark Cuban
(01:42:04)
Right, everybody gets labeled right because that works on social media. Look, if Elon changed the algorithm just by taking himself out of it, seriously, I’m not saying don’t post, right? Post all you want, but if you look at his followers, they’re almost all right-leaning. If you look at the people he engages with positively, they’re almost all right-leaning. And if you look at the people he engages with negatively, like me, I consider myself an independent, but I lean left on the DEI topic. That influences the algorithm. And so you see what you see because of what he says.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:44)
Yeah, well, I mean for sure. But there could be a lot of influential people on Twitter that influence the algorithm and all that kind of stuff. But I do feel it’s not even about ideology where you lean, it’s about the algorithm, not prioritizing drama. The attention grabbing thing or the lower lizard version of that where people just want the drama. They want to tear you down.
Mark Cuban
(01:43:13)
Right. When I last read through all the stuff on their algorithm, right, maybe it’s changed, whoever has the biggest account and gets engagement on that account influences what people see the most.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:26)
Yeah, I mean, that’s interesting. I don’t know if that’s, to the degree that’s true, they’ve pretty-
Mark Cuban
(01:43:31)
I’m sure it’s still the case.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:32)
…Pretty rigorous description of the way the algorithm works. It’s actually kind of fascinating. There’s a clustering of people based on interests-
Mark Cuban
(01:43:41)
But I think they called the nearest neighbor approach, and I think that’s what they do. And so whoever has the biggest account, has the most neighbors who in turn have their neighbors who in turn have their neighbors, and that’s how they discern what comes next.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:53)
But there’s a clustering still. So if you don’t give a shit about Elon, you’re not-
Mark Cuban
(01:43:57)
And you’re not following him, yeah, you’re not following-
Lex Fridman
(01:43:59)
You’re not going to have an influence. It’s not going to have an influence.
Mark Cuban
(01:44:02)
When you get a break, just create a burner account on Twitter and see who they recommend to you.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:07)
Elon.
Mark Cuban
(01:44:08)
And not just Elon, I mean the people that Elon likes. And I’m saying that’s not Elon saying add this person, add this person and suggest this person, this person, and this person. I’m saying that’s what the algorithm is.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:19)
Yeah. There should be transparency around that. For sure. That’s the-
Mark Cuban
(01:44:22)
And there is. There is. And that’s the whole point, right? He knows there’s transparency and he knows the impact. That’s why when I say take yourself out of the algorithm, don’t include his account, that changes I think the output of the algorithm.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:34)
Well, when he wasn’t owning Twitter, he was one of the biggest accounts, if not the biggest account already.
Mark Cuban
(01:44:39)
He wasn’t. But still. even the Kim Kardashian accounts, whatever, it wasn’t open source to Elon’s credit. It is now. So I couldn’t see it to know. Right? So I didn’t get the sense one way or the other of one element being dominant over the other. But obviously conservatives felt that left leaning was more dominant back then.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:00)
Yeah, I would love to see numbers on all of this.
Mark Cuban
(01:45:02)
Yeah, you and me both.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:04)
DEI, everything like this. Sometimes anecdotal data really frustrates me. It frustrates me primarily because of how sexy it is. People just love-
Mark Cuban
(01:45:05)
That’s a great way to describe it.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:15)
Love a story, and I’m like, Goddamn it, this is not science. This is-
Mark Cuban
(01:45:20)
It’s not even common sense.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:22)
Well, no, I think anecdotal stories often have a wisdom in them.
Mark Cuban
(01:45:27)
No doubt, right? There’s something to be gained from seeing them.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:30)
There’s a signal there, but how representative is that signal of the broader thing?
Mark Cuban
(01:45:35)
There’s a whole lot more noise than signal more often than not.

Drugs and Big Pharma

Lex Fridman
(01:45:37)
All right, so as I mentioned, Cost Plus Drugs, there’s so many questions I can ask here, but what’s the big question? What’s broken about our healthcare system?
Mark Cuban
(01:45:47)
There’s no transparency. And when the lack of transparency leads to lack of trust and when you can’t trust the healthcare system other than maybe your doctor, that’s a broken system.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:58)
So what aspect of this system does Cost Plus Drugs is trying to solve?
Mark Cuban
(01:46:04)
So the thing we’re trying to solve for is trust. And the way we feel we get there is through complete transparency. So when you go to costplusdrugs.com and you put in the name of the medication, if it’s one of the 2,500 and growing that we carry, we will first show you our costs, what we actually pay for it, then we’ll show you our 15% markup. Then we’ll show the pharmacy fill fee and shipping, and that’s your total price. And that alone, that transparency alone, is completely revolutionizing how drugs are priced in America today. And it’s led to research being done comparing our pricing to CMS and ours being cheaper than even the government is negotiating, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so just that transparency alone has had an impact and saved millions of people hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:59)
And maybe it results in more transparency in other parts of the system too, seeing the business of it. What do the so-called middlemen companies. So the PBMs-
Mark Cuban
(01:47:09)
Correct. The pharmacy benefit managers.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:10)
Thank you. CVS Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts, and United Health’s Optum Rx, they control majority of the market. What do they do wrong?
Mark Cuban
(01:47:22)
They put profits over everything. And they know in an industry that’s completely opaque, they can pretty much do what they want and nobody gets to see what they’re doing in detail. And so the first thing when you sign a contract with one of those big PBMs, it says you can’t disclose any of this. And the fact that you can’t be disclosed means they could tell Lex’s company that they’re getting a great price and they’re only being charged X. And they can tell Mark’s company, oh, you’re getting a great price and we’re charging Mark X plus, right? But Mark doesn’t know any better because there’s no way to know.
Lex Fridman
(01:48:03)
The markup is not transparent.
Mark Cuban
(01:48:05)
The cost isn’t transparent, the markup isn’t transparent. And there’s different things, like I was just talking to a company in a presentation a couple days ago, and they took the step to leave the big three PBMs to go to a rebate free PBM that was smaller. And what they said led to the decision, they had a contract with the PBM for these things called rebates, where depending on the volume of medications you buy, they’ll kick back to you a percentage of them. And as it turns out, when they compared what was contracted for to what they actually got, they were getting underpaid every single year. They just don’t care. They’ll take products. There’s a drug called Humira, and it is the number one revenue drug in the country. And there’s also a biosimilar, multiple biosimilars, but one we carry called Yusimry. And, Humira, the pre-rebate price is about $8,000 per month. After rebates, depending on the size of the company, it’ll be anywhere from three to $6,000 a month. You can go to get your doctor to prescribe that biosimilar Yusimry and you pay $594. But those big three PBMs won’t allow their clients to get Yusimry because they don’t get a rebate on Yusimry. So they’d rather keep a drug on their formulary, even though their patients, their customers would save a lot of money, they’d rather keep a drug and exclude another because they’ll make a lot more money.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:39)
So the CVS Caremark spokesperson, I think responded to you, Phil Blando, with the usual language that so deeply exhausts me, but I was wondering if there’s any truth to it. Employers, unions, health plans and government programs work with CVS Caremark precisely because we deliver for them. Lower drug costs, better health outcomes, and broad pharmacy access through our true cost, cost vantage and choice formulary initiatives, we are the leading agent of change, innovation, and transparency in the market.
Mark Cuban
(01:50:18)
That’s a whole lot of nothing.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:20)
So they are not transparent?
Mark Cuban
(01:50:23)
No. Call them up. You go to Cost Plus Drugs, we’ll give you our price list of all 2,500 plus drugs.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:29)
The actual cost?
Mark Cuban
(01:50:30)
The actual cost, and what we sell it for because it’s just a plus 15%. Call up any of the big three companies and ask them for the same thing. They’re going to laugh at you. It’s so bad, in fact, if you do business with them right now and you just ask for your claims data, meaning how many people use Humira that we’re paying, what are we paying for it? They won’t even give it to you unless you really, really scream and yell at them and then they’ll charge you and take six months to get it. So when we moved away from them, we wanted to get what our claims data was to understand what we were going to be facing. They wouldn’t give it to us until six months later, I forget the exact month. And then they charge us for it as well, our own data.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:08)
On the CEO front, you’ve said that CEOs don’t understand healthcare coverage and it’s costing them big. What’s the connection between Cost Plus Drugs and companies?
Mark Cuban
(01:51:20)
I can speak for my own companies, and this applies to all companies, bigger companies that’s self-insured, because we self-insure. When we started Cost Plus, I finally said, okay, it’s time for me to understand how I’m paying for my healthcare for my employees and their families. And the first thing I looked at was a lot of these companies use employee benefits consultants, and turns out I was paying $30 per employee per month, which was millions of dollars a year, and they were just sending us to the companies that paid them the biggest commissions. I’m like, how fucking dumb am I? So I’m like, okay, we’re cutting that. And then I looked at our medication, our prescription deal that goes through the PBMs that we were using and that the consultant connected us with. And I took a list of, this was early on in Cost Plus Drugs, list of the generic drugs that we sold that cost more than $30 that the Mavericks also had purchased.

(01:52:20)
We were able to get that claims data, and it turns out we spent $169,000 with that PBM, one of the big three PBMs, and it would’ve cost us buying from Cost Plus Drugs $19,000. And that’s just a simple example. Then I looked at the insurance side of things. We self-insure, so there weren’t premiums per se, but we were getting charged $17.15 cents per employee per month just to use the network that they put together for us, providers, hospitals or whatever. And I’m like, all right, are there companies that won’t charge us to put together these networks? Turns out there’s a lot of them. And those insurance companies and those PBMs are also responsible for determining what claims, what to authorize and what to deny. So for a drug, it may be, all right, this is an expensive drug, but before they’ll say they’ll pay for the drug that your doctor wants to prescribe for you, you have to try these three other drugs in what’s called step up therapy to see if these other cheaper drugs work or they’re not even necessarily cheaper, they may be being pushed because they’re getting a higher rebate.

(01:53:31)
And so I’m like, that’s insane. I want my employees to get the medication that the doctors say is best. And so I didn’t realize those were the intricacies of where my healthcare dollars went. There’s not a single CEO who does because that’s not a core competency that they need. And the CFOs, that’s not their core competency and the HR people, they contribute and they understand it some because they’re dealing with the claims, but they spend most of their prescription drug related time or healthcare related times trying to get pre-authorizations approved. So your kid breaks their arm or you get sick and you go to the doctor and before the doctor will do a surgery or do whatever, they have to go to the insurance company and get preauthorized. And then they always say no. And then you have to go back and somebody has to argue for you. And that just eats up employee time because I’m sick or my kid’s sick and you’re wasting my time. Eats up HR time.

(01:54:29)
The CEOs don’t know any of this, right? So what I’m saying is one, the smartest thing to do is to get a healthcare CEO at every company with over let’s say 500 employees that focuses on all these things. You’d save a shitload of money. And two, healthcare is your second largest line item expense after payroll. And in some companies it’s hundreds, billions of dollars and you don’t understand it and you’re letting these guys rip you off? And it’s because these big CEOs don’t understand it and are getting ripped off that the industry is the way it is because that allows the opacity to continue.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:07)
That’s fascinating. So that most companies outsource, offload the expertise on the healthcare side when they really should be internally, there should be an expert that [inaudible 01:55:20]-
Mark Cuban
(01:55:19)
Yes, because it’s the wellness of your employees and their families and-
Lex Fridman
(01:55:22)
It costs a lot of money.
Mark Cuban
(01:55:24)
Yeah, but if your employees aren’t healthy or if they’re worried about their kids and what is more worrisome and detrimental to the performance of a company? A DEI program or having to go to HR and scream and yell and explain, and your doctor wasting their time doing the same thing to get authorization for a surgery or a medication? It’s insane.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:49)
What made you decide to step into this cartel-like situation where so much is opaque?
Mark Cuban
(01:55:56)
So I got a cold email from a Dr. Alex Oshmyancy, who’s my co-founder. He’s a radiologist by trade in a physicist and a smart mother fucker. And he had a pharmacy that he wanted to create a compounding pharmacy that would manufacture generic drugs that were in short supply because it happens all the time that things aren’t available. I’m like, you’re thinking too small. We should do something on a much bigger scale. And then it was right around the time they were sending the pharmacy bro, Martin Shkreli, to jail. And so I was reading up on that and he increased the price of this drug, Daraprim, I think it was like 7500% or increased a low cost drug to $7,500, one of those.

(01:56:34)
And I’m like, well, if he can just jack up the price to this drug and charge more and get away with it, this has to be an incredibly inefficient market. And so the question is why is he able to do it? And it was immediately apparent that it was a lack of transparency. And so can we start a company that is fully transparent with our costs, our markup and our selling price, and see if it works? And so we went for it and it took off immediately. I mean, you read a press release from a company saying they were creating a cost advantage program basically pretending to replicate us? We haven’t been in business two years. How insane is that?
Lex Fridman
(01:57:13)
Did you get a lot of pressure? I mean, I’m sure they’re very good at playing games, so cartel-type situations they protect. It feels like healthcare is very difficult to get in there.
Mark Cuban
(01:57:23)
Yeah, it does. And the whole industry is an arbitrage, but we don’t work inside the system. We work outside the system. And so we don’t work with those biggest companies, the biggest companies with the most dominant control. It’s very insulated and very controlled, like you said, we work outside them, we won’t work with them. And so because of that, we don’t have access to every medication because they’ve told a lot of the big brand manufacturers that if they work with us, they’ll take them off their formularies or change the rebate structure so that they won’t be prescribed as much.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:52)
That’s dark.
Mark Cuban
(01:57:53)
Yeah, it is dark. But we’ll get past that, right? Because there’s a downstream impact of all this in the rebates and the greediness of those big three PBMs. When you go to a local pharmacy here in Austin, and let’s just say you have a friend here that is on Medicare or Medicare Advantage, and they go to a local pharmacy and they get a drug that costs $600. Well, in the insurance company, that $600, the pharmacy first buys that drug for probably that price, minus 5%. So $570. Then there’s probably a copay by the patient, and that’s probably $20. So now the net investment that the pharmacy, the local pharmacy has for that brand medication is $550. Where it gets really fucked up is those big three PBMs, they’re not reimbursing them $550 or more. They’re reimbursing them $500 or less. And literally those community pharmacies are eating that loss, and as a result, they’re going out of business left and right.

(01:59:01)
And the most insane part of it is yes, with corporate employer insurance, that happens, but it happens more with Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage. It happens all the time with those, almost with every script. So the government is complicit in these community pharmacies going out of business. So how does that connect to Cost Plus Drugs and what we’re doing and the big brands? The big brands know that if all these community pharmacies are going, tens of thousands of them are going to go out of business because of the way this pricing is, they’re going to lose a connection between their brand medications and grandma and grandpa and Aunt Sally and all that business is going to get transferred to the big companies and they’re going to have even less leverage. So they’re working with us to come up with programs that are very supportive of independent pharmacies, and that’s going to allow us to break the cartel because it’s in their best interest not to allow them to be so vertically integrated that they destroy the entire community and independent pharmacy industry.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:03)
Is there other aspects of the healthcare industry that could use this kind of transparency and revolutionizing?
Mark Cuban
(02:00:10)
Yes. Yeah. So what we’re going to do with our own healthcare, we’re not going to be in the business of selling healthcare or anything like that or operate, but the things we do for my companies, we’re only going to do deals with providers, healthcare providers, that allow us to be completely transparent. So that whatever contracts we do, we’re going to post them all. Whatever pricing we get, we’re going to post them all so that every company who’s our size or even bigger will have a template that they can work on, which will take it away from the big three insurance companies and the big three PBMs. Because now without that transparency, they have to use consultants who are getting paid by those big three, those big companies and aren’t giving them the best response. And so now that transparency will overcome that.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:56)
And you’re using your, how should I say it, celebrity? Your name to push this forward?
Mark Cuban
(02:01:02)
Yeah, that’s why it’s the only company I’ve ever put my name on.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:04)
It’s weird that people aren’t getting into this space. Public people, there’s not a big, you look at tech, there’s these CEOs are open and public and public and they’re pushing the company and they’re selling everything, and it’s all transparent. But you don’t see that in healthcare.
Mark Cuban
(02:01:25)
No, because it’s a big business. And most people, if I was 25 trying to start a company, I’d work in the system. If I can build it up big enough, they would just buy me and I’d make money and buy a sports team, but I don’t need that money now.

AI

Lex Fridman
(02:01:38)
Let me ask you about AI. You got a little bit of an argument about open source. I think you stepped in between Vinod Khosla and Mark Andreessen. You think AI should be open sourced?
Mark Cuban
(02:01:50)
Yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:51)
So all that discussion we’ve been having about Google and so on, one of the-
Mark Cuban
(02:01:55)
Well, they’re two different things, meaning that Meta is doing open source. That’s a good choice for them. I think that’s a smart choice, but it’s just a business decision for everybody else. I don’t think it should be forced.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:07)
Forced, yes. And even Google’s open sourcing some of the models and-
Mark Cuban
(02:02:12)
Because they’re all… That’s a very incestuous industry where the people all work together at some level. They read the same papers, they go to the same conferences. It’s like the early days of streaming and the internet where people used the same technology everywhere, and now they just try different things. And you get one smarter or a couple of smart people in one company like Anthropic, and they do things a little bit better and efficient, model efficiency gets better. So it’s just a business choice, but I don’t think it should be forced, but I think it’s a smart business decision.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:42)
Open sourcing is a smart business decision.
Mark Cuban
(02:02:44)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:44)
It’s a tricky one. I mean, Google is a pioneer in that with TensorFlow in the AI space. That’s a tricky decision to give-
Mark Cuban
(02:02:51)
It really, really is, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:02:52)
To give away the code.
Mark Cuban
(02:02:53)
Go back to historically there was digital computing, which was a dominant player, and they thought, and IBM to a certain extent thought that they wouldn’t be subject to a problem with the PC industry. And then all of a sudden, with their mainframes and everything, they had captive software they wouldn’t use off the shelf software. So for a digital equipment mainframe or an IBM mainframe, you needed software that was written for it. There was nothing off the shelf. And when the PC industry came along, it was the exact opposite. There was MS-DOS and then Windows, things that were off the shelf that every PC could use. And that changed how people thought about software. And I think the same thing will happen here where it’s going to be as models become more efficient and easier and less expensive to train, I think there’ll be more reasons to open source.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:49)
Yeah, that’s the hope. It creates more competition and a lot of different diversity of approaches in how they’re implemented deployed, what kind of products they create, all of that. Vinod compared to the danger of that to the Manhattan Project.
Mark Cuban
(02:04:04)
Yeah, I’m not buying that at all.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:06)
You don’t see the parallels between nuclear weapons and AI?
Mark Cuban
(02:04:08)
No, no. I think, I’m not an AI fatalist at all, right? I’m an AI optimist, but it’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of scary shit that can happen with it.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:21)
Yeah.
Mark Cuban
(02:04:21)
Militarily. Like I said earlier, I’m a big believer that there’s going to be millions and tens of millions of models and people will take their expertise and either get hired for it and contribute or create their own models and license. So that you see now with this thing called mixture of experts where you connect things and people can take their expertise and we’ll be able to take that expertise and retain it in a way that they want to retain it. So I don’t think there’s going to be one medical database. I told this to people at a couple of big companies that were doing healthcare initiatives. Branding is so important in the healthcare space for hospitals, the Mayo Clinics, the MD Andersons, they’re huge brands. And I don’t think they’re just going to give up their expertise to some main singular model and say, okay, whatever expertise we have is available to you in Gemini or Chat GPT or so-and-so’s version of Meta’s open source. There’s just, that would be business suicide. And so I think you’re going to see each of them have their own models and update them as they go and license them.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:40)
Yeah, and make money from the expertise.
Mark Cuban
(02:05:43)
You have to. You have to.

Advice for young people

Lex Fridman
(02:05:45)
You don’t give away messages. You have, yeah, any expertise evolves and growth and all that kind of stuff, and you want to own that growth. What advice would you give to young people? You have an exceptionally successful career. You came from little, made a lot. What advice would you give them?
Mark Cuban
(02:05:59)
Love your life. Find the things that you can enjoy. Be curious. You don’t have to have all the answers. When you’re 12, 15, I get emails from 13, 15-year-old kids, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:06:11)
What do I do?
Mark Cuban
(02:06:12)
What do I do? I feel like I’m being held back. I’m like a 15, you feel like you’re being held back? But just be curious because you don’t have to have the answers. You don’t have to know what you’re going to be when you grow up. I’m a hardcore believer that everybody has something that they’re really, really, really good at. That could be world-class, great. Every single human being on this planet. And the hard part is just finding what that is. And in some places having resources to enable it. But be curious so you can find out what it is. I took one technology class in college, Fortran programming, and I cheated on it, right?

(02:06:52)
I mean, it wasn’t until I got a job at Mellon Bank and I started learning how to program in this thing called Ramus, this scripting computing language that I realized, oh, this is interesting to me and I like it. And that’s what got me a job selling software and going on from there. You just don’t know what that’s going to be until you go out and experience different things. So for anybody young out there listening, enjoy your life. Find things to smile about, be curious, read, watch, expose yourself to as many different ideas as you can because something’s going to click at some point. You may be 15, you may be 25, you may be 55, but it can happen.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:33)
One thing to mention is sometimes it’s difficult or your parents, people around you might not be conducive or might not be of help in finding the thing you’re good at. In fact, in my own life, the society was such that, I don’t know if they’ve helped much at the thing I was good at. I’m still not sure what that is, but I think-
Mark Cuban
(02:07:56)
The interviewing done pretty well for you.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:58)
Well, it’s not even, there was a thing where I saw the beauty in people. Like I, very intensely. So you can call that empathy, all that kind of stuff.
Mark Cuban
(02:08:10)
Someone called it wokeness.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:13)
Super woke, I guess you could say, just super woke, that’s me. But in the education system I came up in, it was a very hard mathematics, science and so on, and it didn’t notice that whatever that was in me, but you have to keep the flame going. You have to try to find your way and see what that’s useful. And others around you might not always notice it. So it might take time. So it could be lonely. You can really have to find the strength to believe in yourself.
Mark Cuban
(02:08:44)
Oh, for sure. And I’ll tell you one quick story. 1992, I went to Moscow State University to teach kids how to start businesses. I had sold Micro Solutions and I wanted to travel, and I took Russian in high school. My Ruski is like [inaudible 02:09:04]-
Lex Fridman
(02:09:07)
Good enough to remember that.
Mark Cuban
(02:09:09)
Yeah, right? Yeah. But it was interesting to me, and I bring it up because they didn’t know what the word profit meant. But at the same time, I would go around and meet people, and it was as entrepreneurial right after the Soviet Union fell, entrepreneurship went through the roof. A lot of it was mafia driven, but it was, people found that spark because I think that is natural. And so you just never know when and how and when the circumstances will come together for you to be able to take advantage.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:48)
That spark is really important to comment on is in Russia and Ukraine, I think the system kind of suppresses that spark somehow. As you said you saw the natural entrepreneurship, but there’s not the entrepreneurial spirit once you grow up in both of the nations I mentioned. There is [inaudible 02:10:08]-
Mark Cuban
(02:10:08)
No, I believe it, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:10:09)
But there’s something about the system that-
Mark Cuban
(02:10:10)
Without question.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:12)
Be reasonable, be [inaudible 02:10:14]-
Mark Cuban
(02:10:14)
There would have been no reason for me to go over to do what I was doing if it was otherwise.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:18)
But, that’s the thing that really can help a country flourish.
Mark Cuban
(02:10:22)
It’s going to be interesting with Ukraine if they’re able to survive this, because as horrific as it is, as you saw across Europe after World War II, the rebuilding creates opportunities.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:35)
Rebuilding creates opportunities, but first, the war has to end. How that ends-
Mark Cuban
(02:10:39)
I don’t know either,
Lex Fridman
(02:10:40)
Is a really complex path. What gives you hope about the future of humanity?
Mark Cuban
(02:10:46)
Just looking in my kids’ eyes, just talking to them and seeing their spirit, their friends’ spirit. And obviously we’re blessed as can be, right? And it’s not the same for every kid, but I get emails that I don’t respond to all of them, but from 13, 14, 15-year-old kids around the world, because Shark Tank’s shown everywhere asking me business questions. And it’s just like they took the time. They were that curious and that interested. And I see it when I talk to schools, when I go to different groups, that spark in kids’ eyes that there’s something bigger and better and exciting out there. And that’s not to say there’s not fear. Yeah, climate and any other number of things, but that’s the beauty of kids. And I think Gen Z really embodies that. And to me, that’s just really exciting.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:43)
They dream. They dream big, they see the opportunity for making the world better. It’s cool. It’s cool to see young people in their eyes, that dream. And I could be the one to do it too, which is super powerful-
Mark Cuban
(02:11:56)
It’s funny because when I go talk to elementary school kids, one of the things I do, I said, okay, let’s look around. You see that light there one day, that light didn’t exist. Then somebody had the idea, then somebody created a product out of it, and now your school bought that. You see that chair? Chairs didn’t always look like that. Somebody had that idea. Why not you? So when you walk out and, what I make them do, ask yourself, why not me? Why can’t I be the one to change the world?
Lex Fridman
(02:12:24)
Thank you for that beautiful, hopeful message and thank you for talking today, Mark. You’re fun to follow. I’m a big fan of yours, but you’re also an important person in this world. I really appreciate everything you do.
Mark Cuban
(02:12:36)
Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for saying that, Lex, and keep on doing what you’re doing. This was great. I really enjoyed this.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:41)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Mark Cuban. To support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Oscar Wilde. Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he’s not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck | Lex Fridman Podcast #421

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #421 with Dana White.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
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Table of Contents

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Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:

Introduction

Dana White
(00:00:00)
Khabib beat Conor. Putin was on FaceTime before he even made it to the locker room. Trump sitting president, ex-president, watching all the fights calling, wants to talk about the fights. Valentina Shevchenko, every time she goes home, she meets with the president of the country. The list goes on and on and on. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, I mean, the list goes on and on and on. The most powerful people in the world are all obsessed with fighting.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:30)
The following is a conversation with Dana White, the president of the UFC, a mixed martial arts organization that revolutionized the art, the sport, and the business of fighting. And Dana is truly the mastermind behind the UFC. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Dana White. Do you remember when you saw your first fight?

Mike Tyson and early days of fighting

Dana White
(00:01:00)
I think so. I remember being at my grandmother’s house and I think it was an Ali fight, and all my uncles were going crazy during the fight, and there was just this buzz and this energy in the house that I liked at a very young age, and I’m pretty sure that was my first fight.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:17)
Ali was something special.
Dana White
(00:01:18)
Yeah, incredible. I mean, when you look around, not just here in the office, but at my house, Ali and Tyson are everywhere.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:27)
Would you put Ali as the greatest of all time boxing?
Dana White
(00:01:30)
Well, I would put Ali as the greatest of all time human being. I mean, it’s easy as a fight fan to focus on him as a fighter, but when you focus on him as a human and you think about what he meant at that time and place, the things he said, the poems he came up with, just the overall brilliance of Muhammad Ali. The guts to have the strength mentally, physically, and emotionally to go against the grain at the time that he did it. It was a very dangerous time for him to be who he was. Yet, because of how smart he was and because of his personality and how if you sat down with him, you could be the biggest racist on the planet, it’s hard to get in the room with Ali and not like Ali.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:26)
Yeah, he’s all love, humor, all of it.
Dana White
(00:02:29)
100%
Lex Fridman
(00:02:30)
And had the guts in the ring and the guts to take a stand.
Dana White
(00:02:34)
100%
Lex Fridman
(00:02:34)
When it was hard.
Dana White
(00:02:35)
He might be one of the all time greatest humans. Just an impactful, powerful human being who happened to be a great boxer.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:47)
And sometimes the right moment meets the great human being. That’s important.
Dana White
(00:02:52)
I agree with you. And he was the right guy in the right place at the right time. And he’s also a guy who used his platform for all the right things.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:03)
So that might’ve been your first fight, but when did you fall in love with fighting? The art of it? The science of it?
Dana White
(00:03:09)
Yeah, I would say I really fell in love with it, so I was a senior. It was 1987 and Hagler Leonard happened, and I watched that fight and I taped it and I watched that fight like a million times. I was a huge, huge Hagler fan, and I like Sugar Ray Leonard too, but I was a huge Hagler fan. And I just remember I watched that fight a million times because I was pissed off and I felt like Haggler got robbed in the fight. But that was really what made me start to love the sport of boxing.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:49)
The battle of it.
Dana White
(00:03:50)
Yeah. I was 17 and then after that, USA’s Tuesday Night Fights came out on television. It was on every Tuesday night. Religiously, never missed Tuesday Night Fights. I was there, watched all those fights. And a lot of the things you see in the UFC, not necessarily just the production, but I would say the feel and the style and all those things are all things that I loved about boxing and things that I hated about boxing, right down to the commentary.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:31)
You loved and hated?
Dana White
(00:04:34)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:35)
Hated the commentary.
Dana White
(00:04:36)
Certain things that I loved about boxing, I incorporated into the UFC. Things that I hated about boxing, I made sure that the UFC stayed far away from. I can’t stand Larry Merchant. Can’t stand Larry Merchant. And I used to watch HBO Boxing and mute the commentary so that I didn’t have to listen to them. Lampley too. You would spend this money for the pay-per-view to watch these people that you idolized to hear these idiots rip them apart while the fight was happening.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:09)
Oh they were criticizing them?
Dana White
(00:05:09)
100%.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:10)
Or taking them apart. I’ve gotten used to the UFC, so I’m trying to remember looking back.
Dana White
(00:05:17)
It was bad.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:17)
It was bad?
Dana White
(00:05:18)
It was really bad.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:20)
But the sweet science, the art of boxing was beautiful still.
Dana White
(00:05:24)
100%.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:25)
Like the stories you told.
Dana White
(00:05:25)
I want to do this with you right now. Hey, will you bring your cell phone over here and pull up YouTube? I want to do this for you so that you can understand this and understand where I was coming from.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:36)
For the commentary?
Dana White
(00:05:37)
Yeah, at this point in time.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:39)
I have all good memories. You’re going to ruin it for me.
Dana White
(00:05:41)
Yeah, no, there are nothing but great memories about boxing, but the presentation and a lot of the things, but how fucking weird is it that I even cared about this shit at that point in my life and that time in my life? What impact could I possibly have on it? So think about Tyson and how much everybody loved Tyson at the time, and listen to this entrance.
Speaker 1
(00:06:04)
…Of the former undisputed heavyweight champion. And here he comes, Mike Tyson, as he heads toward the same ring he made his disgraceful exit in June of ’97.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:12)
Wow.
Speaker 1
(00:06:14)
…But proud.
Dana White
(00:06:15)
One of the baddest motherfucking walk-ins of all time, by the way.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:15)
Look at that.
Dana White
(00:06:19)
So what this guy should be doing, and this is one of the Albert brothers, shut the fuck up. Stay out of the way.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:26)
Yeah, maybe build them up.
Dana White
(00:06:30)
Or that. Or don’t say anything. Just let the fans… That’s why we watch it. That’s why we paid our money.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:38)
You don’t need to say anything.
Speaker 1
(00:06:40)
Scary imposing music. Will he be able to intimidate his opponent tonight? Will it even matter? I really thought that’d be more of an explosion by the crowd here, but very mixed. Even with a win tonight, no matter how one sided, he will still have his detractors following the two fights. With Holyfield, his stock plummeted, the pundits came down hard feeling they were duped, that his knockouts were over second rate fighters. Now the crowd erupts more as he gets into the ring, but it’s certainly nothing overwhelming.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:27)
What a dick. You’re right. I don’t remember that. You’re right.
Dana White
(00:07:32)
Imagine.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:33)
You’re right.
Dana White
(00:07:34)
Imagine you paid your money to watch Mike Tyson and you got to listen to these fucking jerkoffs talk shit about him the whole way to the… First of all, one of the coolest walk-ins ever. The first time anybody had heard DMX.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:48)
Yeah, that’s right.
Dana White
(00:07:51)
He’s walking into some scary imposing music. Will it even matter? It’s just all that stuff. I literally used to analyze every ounce of the production that would happen on television and at a time when I didn’t even know why I was doing it, but-
Lex Fridman
(00:08:10)
But it was in there somewhere. You were thinking about it.
Dana White
(00:08:12)
Right? So yeah, I hated HBO commentary. I thought at the time, HBO Boxing was obviously the gold standard, but when you really think about boxing at that time, their production, the only thing that changed over 30 years was HD. I mean, even the commentators were the same for 30 years. And then you had the time when Larry Merchant gets up and literally starts fighting with Floyd Mayweather during the interview and says, “If I was 30 years younger, I’d kick your ass right now.”
Lex Fridman
(00:08:43)
Oh yeah, I remember that.
Dana White
(00:08:44)
I mean, these are the interviews that we have to listen to when we’re trying to watch a boxing match?
Lex Fridman
(00:08:49)
The level of boxing was good.
Dana White
(00:08:51)
Think about a fighter. A fighter has been gone for months away from their families and away from everything, training, cutting weight, sparring. Then they go in and they have to fight that night? And then if you watch your fight back, you got to listen to this bullshit from these guys? And then you get interviewed and your interview is this? It’s just…
Lex Fridman
(00:09:13)
And it’s not just about the pay-per-view money. It’s about these are legends of humanity.
Dana White
(00:09:18)
100%.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:18)
We should celebrate the highest form of accomplishment.
Dana White
(00:09:21)
100%.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:22)
Because these are Mike Tyson.
Dana White
(00:09:23)
So you know who goes in there and interviews fighters? Joe Rogan, who has trained and done everything and has the utmost respect for the sport and the athletes. Or you got Daniel Cormier who was a former world champion himself and has actually been through it, done it, knows. And those are the type of people that we put in the booth, people that are actually experienced in it, not these people who’ve never been in a fight in their fucking life.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:52)
But they’re also, both DC and Rogan are big kids. They love it.
Dana White
(00:09:52)
100%.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:56)
They really love it.
Dana White
(00:09:58)
Well, everybody does. I mean, it’s the difference between our commentary and what I feel their commentary was. We don’t hire paid talking heads. We hire people that have actually been in it, done it, love it, and are super passionate about the sport. And I would say that none of them that ever covered the sport back then were. I don’t know if that was Marv Albert or what Albert brother that was, but he sounded like he’s a fan of the sport or? Anyway, you got me on this, and once I get on this, I lose my mind.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:34)
Maybe we wouldn’t have a UFC if they didn’t fuck it up so bad for the Tyson walk-up.
Dana White
(00:10:39)
It would be different. You’re not wrong. You’re not wrong. It would be different. There’s no doubt about it. All those experiences growing up being a boxing fan help create what the UFC is today.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:49)
It’s interesting because humans have been fighting for millennia, and it seems like with the UFC, the rate of innovation is just insane. In these last three decades, it seems like we’ve discovered how to do unarmed combat faster and better than any time in human history.
Dana White
(00:11:09)
I agree with you 100%. The first UFC happened in 1993. Martial art versus martial art. And now over the last 30 years, martial arts has evolved faster than… And like you just said, combat sports, fighting, whatever you want to call it, martial arts, it has evolved so much in 30 years more than the last 300 years.

Jiu jitsu

Lex Fridman
(00:11:35)
What did you think when you saw UFC 1 with Hoist?
Dana White
(00:11:39)
I remember everybody talking that this fight was going to happen and there was going to be no rules and all this other stuff. And we’re like, “There’s no way. That’s bullshit.” And then we ended up at some guy’s house that night in Boston and watching it and it was happening and it was fun and it was exciting and everything else. And then I fell off after that. The first one I watched, but I was too big of a boxing fan. Plus once grappling started taking over, and by grappling meaning the wrestling and the jiu-jitsu guys had just laid there, I completely lost interest. It’s funny that I’m having this conversation with you right now because I was out last night with my friends and we were talking about, because one of my buddies who’s a host here in town, just did jiu-jitsu for the first time.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:25)
Nice.
Dana White
(00:12:25)
…Yesterday. And he was like-
Lex Fridman
(00:12:27)
Did he get his ass kicked?
Dana White
(00:12:28)
Yeah, yeah. But when you first go in, our first jiu-jitsu lesson, me, Lorenzo, and Frank was with John Lewis, and I remember thinking, “Holy shit, I can’t believe that I’m 28 years old and this is the first time I’m experiencing this, that another human being could do this to me on the ground.” It is such an eyeopening, mind blowing experience when you do it for the first time and then you become completely addicted to it. And we were training three, four days a week trying to kill each other, me and the Fertittas, and that’s how we fell in love with the sport. I think that first time that you do jiu-jitsu, it’s like the red pill and the blue pill in The Matrix. Do you want to believe that this is the world that you live in, or do you want to see what the real world looks like?
Lex Fridman
(00:13:22)
Just is a real red pill.
Dana White
(00:13:24)
It really is.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:25)
You realize, “Holy shit, all that shit talking I’ve been doing about me being a badass,” you realize you’re not. You get dominated by another human being, you realize, “No.”
Dana White
(00:13:35)
And I mean dominated. I mean completely treats you like you’re a little kid. And then we had the opportunity to roll with a lot of different guys at the time because of the whatever, and we don’t have a good relationship at all. But I’ll tell you this, Frank Shamrock came in one day and Frank Shamrock had me in side control. The pressure that this guy put on my chest made me tap. It felt like there was a car on my chest. And with zero effort from him, it was absolutely effortless. And when you train with somebody that’s at such a level when you’re not, it is the most humbling, mind blowing experience you can have, especially as a man, but as a human being.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:26)
Just for fun, do you remember what your go-to submission was?
Dana White
(00:14:30)
Yeah, so when we first started out and started doing it, I had a pretty good guillotine in the beginning. So I’d catch a lot of people in guillotines.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:37)
So you’re okay being on bottom? So the guard was pretty good?
Dana White
(00:14:40)
Yeah, I was okay with the bottom. I was comfortable there. But you know what I never liked? I never liked gi. We started fucking around with a gi in the beginning, that’s how we started. And then once I took the gi off, I felt like I had no submissions because I couldn’t grab onto anything. So after that, I went all no gi and I never wanted to wear a gi.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:01)
That’s fascinating because no gi has become big now and there’s a lot of interesting people. I got trained with Gordon Ryan, and the level there is just fascinating. It’s become the science and it looks like fighting now. It looks more like fighting as opposed to with the gi, sometimes it doesn’t quite look like fighting. And I feel like it’s transferable to actual MMA fighting, no gi stuff.
Dana White
(00:15:24)
Or street.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:25)
Street, yeah.
Dana White
(00:15:27)
I mean, if you start off in your first year you’re in a gi, man, you better hope guy’s got winter jackets on or something if something happens in the street because, I know all the jiu-jitsu fucking people are going to go crazy over this, but in my opinion, no gi is way better than gi.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:44)
That said, I also do judo. So in the street scenario, if you’re comfortable on the feet and you can clinch and you can throw, because most of us wear clothing, especially in Boston in the winter setting, so if you’re comfortable on the feet, you could still do well. The problem with jiu-jitsu is most people are not comfortable on the feet, the sports jiu-jitsu. Most people want to get to the ground as quickly as possible. So what’d you think of Hoist at that time in the early… Because it blew a lot of people’s minds that there’s more to this puzzle.
Dana White
(00:16:17)
100%, and the fact that you had these guys like Ken Shamrock that were jacked and you had all these wrestlers or the big massive guys that they had in the different weight classes, and this skinny little dude like Hoist was out there beating everybody. I mean, if you look at the way the Gracie’s played that, you couldn’t have had a better advertisement for Gracie Jiu-jitsu at the time.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:42)
But also for MMA, because there’s just a lot of surprising elements. A lot of people’s prediction was wrong. They didn’t think the skinny guy would win. And they’re like, “Oh shit, there’s more to this.”
Dana White
(00:16:56)
What’s the real beautiful thing about jiu-jitsu? It’s like when you talk about if you wanted to get your daughter into a martial art, “Should I put my daughter into karate or should I put her into this?” You put your daughter into jiu-jitsu 100% because it’s not about size or strength, it’s about technique. And you give your daughter a bunch of jiu-jitsu and a little bit of Muay Thai.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:19)
Yeah, she becomes dangerous.
Dana White
(00:17:21)
It’s like the perfect combo. Because you can put your son into anything. Your son can get into some… Boys are going to learn how to fight and they’re going to do whatever. But girls are different. And the other thing, I mean, this is the biggest selling point for jiu-jitsu for women. I mean, when a woman, no matter how big, how small can put a guy to sleep in three and a half seconds.

Origin of UFC

Lex Fridman
(00:17:39)
What’s the origin story of the UFC as it is today as you’ve created it and you and Lorenzo and Fertitta brothers built it?
Dana White
(00:17:48)
It started with John Lewis and seeing him. Frank and I were out one night at the Hard Rock and John Lewis was there and he’s like, “Oh, that’s that ultimate fighting guy.” And I was like, ” I know him.” And Frank’s like, “I’ve always wanted to learn ground fighting.” And I said, “Yeah, I’m interested in it too.” So we went over, we talked to John Lewis and we made an appointment to wrestle with him on Monday. And we told Lorenzo and Lorenzo came with us. And that was the beginning of the end. I mean, we started doing jiu-jitsu and started to meet a lot of the fighters.

(00:18:25)
At the time, there was a stigma attached to the sport that these guys were despicable, disgusting human beings, which was the furthest thing from the truth. These kids had all gone to college, had college degrees, most of them because they wrestled in college. And we started to meet some of them. We loved the different stories. You had Chuck Liddell who had this mohawk, looks like an ax murderer, but graduated from Cal Poly with honors in accounting. Then you had Matt Hughes who was this farm boy, literally lived on a farm. And so there were all these cool stories with all these good people that weren’t what people thought they were. And Lorenzo and I always felt like there’s something here. If this thing was done the right way, this could be big.

(00:19:15)
And what was crazy was I was in a contract negotiation with Bob Meyrowitz, the old owner of the UFC over Tito’s contract and Chuck Liddell. They didn’t even want Chuck Liddell in the UFC.I was trying to get Chuck in the UFC and they didn’t even want him. And we got into this contract dispute over Tito’s contract and Bob Meyrowitz said, “You know what? There is no more money, okay? I don’t even know if I’ll even be able to put on one more event.” And he flipped out. When we hung up the phone, I literally picked up the phone and called Lorenzo and I said, “Hey, I just got off the phone with Bob Meyrowitz, the owner of the UFC, I think they’re in trouble and I think we could buy it and I think we should. You should reach out to him.” So Lorenzo called Meyrowitz, and I don’t remember the timeline, but within the next two months, we ended up owning the UFC for $2 million bucks.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:07)
And you’ve said that you fought a lot of battles during that time.
Dana White
(00:20:11)
I mean, the early days of building this company and building the sport, it was the wild, wild west, man. It was crazy back then. I was literally at war every day with all different types of people. Plus traditionally, there’s bad people that are involved in fighting, man, there’s lots of bad people. And we had to sift our way through that for the first seven, eight years.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:36)
So in general, there’s corruption that people steal money. They’re thinking just about themselves, not the bigger business.
Dana White
(00:20:42)
Let me tell you about this. I mean, I want to say it was the Netherlands. I don’t remember exactly where. It could have been Amsterdam. I mean, MMA promoters were like car bombing each other, and then the other guy shot up the other guy’s house with machine guns and that’s the kind of shit that was going on. I’ll tell you the story. So Affliction, do you remember Affliction?
Lex Fridman
(00:21:04)
Yeah.
Dana White
(00:21:04)
So there was a guy, I want to say his name was Todd Beard or something like that. This guy used to text me every day when they started their MMA thing telling me he was going to kill me.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:05)
Legitimately, that’s what-
Dana White
(00:21:19)
Legitimately going to kill me. “You punk motherfucker. I’m going to fucking kill you. You don’t understand who I am and what I’ve done,” and this and that. I think this guy would get drunk or do drugs every night or whatever his deal was. This guy would call me, text me, and threaten my life every day. I used to go, “Fuck you,” and this and that.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:38)
You said, “Fuck you” to that guy?
Dana White
(00:21:39)
Oh yeah, man. Especially back then. But I mean, this is the type of shit that went on in the early days. This guy who was one of the owners of Affliction was not a good human, let’s put it that way.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:53)
What about the business side of it? It’s tough to make money in this business.
Dana White
(00:21:57)
Yeah, we weren’t making money, so trying to build this thing corrupt. The guys that worked for In Demand pay-per-view at the time were not good dudes and that thing was a fucking total monopoly. God, I wish I could remember his name right now. He used to run In Demand and he was a fucking bad guy. Then he comes over and starts running DirecTV, who we always had a great relationship with and he’s the reason we left DirecTV and said, “Fuck it. We’ll just go streaming then.” I don’t remember his name. I’d have to ask Lorenzo.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:38)
So in general, just in this whole space, there’s a lot of shady people?
Dana White
(00:22:42)
Everybody you deal with, you’re dealing with a lot of different forces and your hands are in a lot of different businesses. From the venue business to the merchandise business to the video game business, the pay-per-view business, the list goes on and on of all the different types of… The production…
Dana White
(00:23:00)
The list goes on and on of all the different types of the production business, of all these different… When I first started this, we had a production team that was the production team that was in it before we bought it. So there was this incident with Phil Baroni, where Phil Baroni, we did an interview with him, and Baroni flips out in the interview when they’re interviewing him and goes crazy. And I thought it was awesome. So I’m like, “We’re going to leave this in. We’re going to leave this interview in.” And the production guys were arguing with me. They’re like, “We can’t leave this in. This is totally unprofessional.” I said, “I don’t give a shit. This is what we’re doing. We’re going to do this and clip it like this and do it like that.”

(00:23:46)
We’re sitting in the venue that night, and I lean over to Lorenzo because the fight’s coming up. I go, wait till you see this interview with Baroni. They didn’t fucking do it. They didn’t do it. These guys were guys that were freelance guys that worked for Showtime at the time or something like that.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:03)
[inaudible 00:24:03].
Dana White
(00:24:03)
I literally got up from my fucking seat, went back there, kicked the fucking door of the truck open, and I said, “You motherfuckers. You ever do that again and I’ll fire every one of you.” Let’s just put it this way. I ended up firing every one of them anyway and going with a whole new crew. But these were the type of things that early on… There’s so much stuff. I mean, I could sit here for three days and walk you through all the stuff that used to go on back in those days. But it was the Wild Wild West, man.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:30)
But how’d you figure out, how’d you know how to deal with all this mess? First of all, to fire people, to fire people that aren’t doing a good job, all of that. How to be a leader, how to be a…
Dana White
(00:24:38)
Well, that’s the thing too.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:40)
… business leader.
Dana White
(00:24:41)
In the early days, there was two employees, me and another girl that worked for me, for my company before I started doing this, and then we slowly started to bring people on and you started to build a team. And then before you know it, we had 10 people. We used to do our Christmas parties back then too. There’d be eight to ten people at our Christmas party. But a lot of it is, you’ll learn as you go. You know what me and the Fertittas knew about production when we bought this UFC? I want to say we had two or three weeks to pull off an event. This is what we knew about production.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:15)
Really?
Dana White
(00:25:15)
Jack shit. So we had to dive in and we had to learn it. We had to figure it out, and we knew what we wanted. We knew what we liked. We knew what we were looking for. It’s just about building a good team, and I think that’s one of the things, if you want to talk about what I’ve accomplished in the last 25 years of my life, I’ve been really good at building teams.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:39)
Already have a vision of what you want the final thing to look like, and then build a team that can bring that to life.
Dana White
(00:25:43)
A hundred percent. Well, you have to have the vision. Without the vision, there’s nothing. So that’s sort of what I do. I am the vision part of this thing. We’re going to open a PI in Mexico, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. And then you build the team to come in and help execute.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:09)
A lot of people that do fighting promotions fail. You succeeded against the long odds. What’s the secret to your success, if you would, just looking back over the years?
Dana White
(00:26:20)
Well, the secret to success, I would say, first of all is passion and consistency. You have to love what you do. You have to get up every day. And I get here every day at 9:30 in the morning. When we sold in 2016, a lot of people in the company made a lot of money, and they all took off and they retired. Other than the Fertittas, I made the most money. I’m still here. I get here at 9:30 every morning. Last night I left here at 8:30. And I don’t know how late I’m going to be here tonight, but I love what I do. We get up every day and grind. I work just as hard now as I did back then.

(00:27:03)
The difference between back then and now is I don’t have to do a bunch of the that I don’t really like to do, like budget meetings. I don’t like budget meetings. I sat through enough fucking budget meetings and… Horrible budget meetings. Horrible. We’re losing millions of dollars a year, and I’m in these budget meetings. So I get to pick and choose what I do these days. Back in the early days, you don’t get to pick and choose. You have to be involved in everything.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:33)
So cost, you’re just looking at cost and stuff.
Dana White
(00:27:35)
A hundred percent. You literally go through line by line, every fucking number in the company and where did the money go and how can we save costs? How can we do this better? How can we… They are brutal, and there are multiple times a week and-
Lex Fridman
(00:27:53)
Probably helps to deeply appreciate how much this shit costs though.
Dana White
(00:27:56)
A hundred percent. Well, you have to know that. In the early days when you start your business, you have these people, who, when I hear them say, “You know what? I want to work for myself. I want to create my own schedule, and I want to do all the…” If that’s your thought process going into it, you’re never going to be successful. You have to pay attention to every single detail of the business early on. You’re involved in everything. There’s no days off, there’s no birthdays, there’s no Christmas, there’s none of that shit. I literally moved the birth of my second son for a Chuck Liddell fight. We had a Chuck Liddell fight coming up and they’re like, “Yeah, your son’s going to be born on this date.” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s not going to work. We’re going to have to take him earlier. So they literally gave my wife a C-section and took my son early.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:44)
You were all in.
Dana White
(00:28:44)
All in. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:46)
And the fascinating thing, like you said, you’ve said that you could care less about money. You’re doing this for the love of it.
Dana White
(00:28:55)
Yeah, I was doing this when I was broke, and I’m doing this now when I’m not broke. I’m doing this because I love it. And I feel like there’s so much more to do, and this is truly my passion in life. It’s like the Sphere. We’re doing the Sphere? Why? Why would I do the Sphere? It’s going to cost me a bunch of money. It’s really challenging. Most people think it can’t be pulled off, and you’re looking at weird angles, different things going on inside other than the fight and all this other stuff. But yeah, I’m doing it because it’s awesome and it’s challenging and it’s hard, and I think that if anybody can do it right, it’s us. So why not take that challenge?
Lex Fridman
(00:29:37)
It’s actually why I’m here. I’m going to the Sphere for the first time because I’m hanging out with Darren Aronofsky who put together the thing that’s in there now, and I can’t believe you’re thinking of… I don’t know how you’re going to solve that puzzle.
Dana White
(00:29:48)
There’s many puzzles to solve for this one. Many puzzles.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:53)
Can you speak to that? What are interesting challenges that you’re encountering?
Dana White
(00:29:59)
Yeah, so there’s a lot. So you have the octagon and then behind it is the world’s biggest screen, ever. So what is the theme? How do you program it? First of all, it’s super expensive to shoot, and the format for the Sphere, angles. We were talking about today. I just had a big meeting today about the Sphere this afternoon, and making sure that all my departments, all the details that I want all start to come together here in the next two weeks. I want the creative, the commercial. I have some goals. I will tell people as we get closer what I’m looking to achieve with this other than putting on one of the greatest, most unique sporting events of all time, and probably the greatest combat sporting event of all time. But yeah, there’s challenges. There’s a laundry list of challenges for this thing, and not to mention the fact that it’s on Mexican Independence Day, and we’re going to weave in the whole history of combat in Mexico-
Lex Fridman
(00:31:09)
Yeah. Nice.
Dana White
(00:31:10)
… into this event.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:12)
But the production, this is hilarious, because you were just talking about knowing nothing about production, so many years ago.
Dana White
(00:31:17)
And now tackling the Sphere, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:19)
The hardest production effort.
Dana White
(00:31:20)
Ever.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:21)
And that will be live?
Dana White
(00:31:23)
It’ll be live. It’ll be live on pay-per-view, it’ll be live in the arena, and it’ll also be in movie theaters.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:31)
Nice. So it will be shown at the Sphere later too? Will you try to create an experience?
Dana White
(00:31:37)
ESPN’s doing a doc on it.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:38)
Nice.
Dana White
(00:31:39)
The making of the Sphere. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:41)
Well, you’re feeling good about it?
Dana White
(00:31:42)
Oh, yeah. I feel incredible about it. I can’t wait. It’s going to be fun.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:47)
I can’t wait to see how you solve the puzzle.

Joe Rogan

Dana White
(00:31:50)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:50)
Another guy that I feel like could care less about the money is Joe Rogan. How important is he to the UFC, to the rise of the UFC, and what in general do you love about Joe?
Dana White
(00:32:02)
It’s a fact, he doesn’t care about money, and he did the first 13 shows for free for us. You know what I mean? That was at a time when we were hurting and he’s like, “Wait a minute, you want me to do the commentary? You’re saying that I get to sit in the best seat in the house and watch these fights for free? Yeah, I’m in.” And then obviously, when we turned things around, we made it up to Joe. But Joe is one of the things that I loved early on about…

(00:32:30)
So I’ll tell you the story. So we buy the UFC. They’re based in New York. We’re moving the corporate offices to Vegas. So I have to fly out to New York, go into the offices and start going through everything and figuring out what needs to come back to Vegas and what we can just throw away. So they literally had a VHS machine and a TV, and there were a million tapes in this place, man. So I didn’t know what tapes were these definitely we have to keep, or these we don’t need. So I had to sit there and go through every single tape. And I popped in a tape and there was an interview on the Ivory Keenen Wayans show, the oldest Wayans brother, and he had a talk show at the time, and he had Joe Rogan, the guy from Fear Factor on the show, and he was promoting Fear Factor, but all he would talk about was UFC.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:23)
Yeah, that’s Joe.
Dana White
(00:33:24)
And he was talking about how people think that these guys in the martial arts movies are tough, and he was talking about what UFC fighters would do to these martial arts guys if they ever got their hands on them. And I was like, this is exactly what I need. A guy who isn’t afraid to speak his mind and knows the sport inside and out, but more importantly, is super passionate about it and loves it.

(00:33:53)
So when you see Joe Rogan on camera, and I was talking about the paid talking heads that they had in HBO boxing that were terrible, Joe Rogan does not come off as a paid talking head. He comes off as a guy who loves this. And so early on, no media would cover us. So I had to buy my way onto radio. So we’d do these radio tours, and they would drop us in. You’d have to get up at 3:30 in the morning in Vegas, on the west coast, because they’re at 6:30 in the morning in New York and Boston and Florida and all these other places. So they drop you into these markets to do radio, and the fighters were horrible at it. Fighters getting up at 3:30 in the morning, especially leading up to a fight, never good. They sound like they’re tired, they act like they’re tired, and they definitely act like they don’t want to be on there, and it’s bad radio. What you can’t have is bad radio. So the only two people that could pull off these radio tours were me and Joe Rogan. So me and Joe Rogan would alternate doing these radio tours all over the country.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:04)
Just talking about fighting, talking about-
Dana White
(00:35:04)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:05)
… what this whole thing is,
Dana White
(00:35:06)
A hundred percent.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:07)
… getting people excited.
Dana White
(00:35:08)
Two guys that are really into it and passionate about it and love it. And it’s one of the things about Rogan too, when early on, nobody understood the ground game. Joe Rogan would walk you through what was happening literally before it would happen. He would tell you the setup, what was going to come next and everything. He’d just absolutely articulate it perfectly, brilliantly, and people at home started to understand. And the impact that Joe Rogan has had and continues to have on this sport is immeasurable. He’s the biggest podcaster in the world, and he is on the UFC pay-per-views 14 times a year, and he’s always talking about the sport. It’s immeasurable what this guy has done for this company and the sport.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:00)
Yeah, still to this day, like I’ll have dinner with him offline, he’ll just talk fighting. He just loves it.
Dana White
(00:36:05)
It’s true.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:06)
Loves every aspect of it.
Dana White
(00:36:07)
Yep. Joe Rogan is one of those guys. I saw that early on. Why would you go after the Fear Factor guy to be such a key component, to not only the company, but to the sport? I saw it in the fucking interview on Ivory Keenen Wayans.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:28)
I value loyalty a lot, and I remember there was a moment not too long ago, maybe a year ago when I was sitting with Joe and he had a phone call with you. Joe was getting canceled for something, and they didn’t want him commentating the fights, and you on the phone offered your resignation over this. I got teary-eyed over that. That’s such a… You’re a good man. You know?
Dana White
(00:36:58)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:59)
That was powerful.
Dana White
(00:37:01)
Anybody who is with me, has been with me, knows. When you’re with me, you’re with me. It’s a two-way street. It’s not a one-way street. I’m not one of these guys that is going to roll over and… It’s like going through COVID. I wasn’t laying any of these people. Some of these people have been with me for 20 years. We’re going to lay them off. This will motherfucker will burn, burn, before I would do that to my people. None of that type of stuff is ever going to happen while I’m here. I can’t say what’s going to happen when I leave, but when I’m here, the people who are with me and have been with me, they know exactly what’s up, and Joe knows what’s up. And again, it’s a two-way street. Joe Rogan has been very loyal to me, and I’m very loyal to Joe Rogan.

Lorenzo Fertitta

Lex Fridman
(00:37:57)
Lorenzo, another guy you have close friendship with, you seem to have been extremely effective together as business partners. What’s the magic behind that? How can you explain that?
Dana White
(00:38:07)
I love him. Lorenzo and I work really well together because we have two different personalities. I’m the guy that always… I’m going here. Lorenzo was always here. You could walk in a room and say, “Lorenzo, you just lost $10 million. Lorenzo, you just won $10 million.” It never changes. And I’m a guy that goes like this, right? So we almost balance each other out. There’s a lot of things that he’s really fucking good at, and there’s a lot of things that I’m really good at, and they’re both on the opposite sides of the spectrum.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:41)
So that level headed thing was useful when the UFC was losing money and it was unknown whether it’s going to survive those low points?
Dana White
(00:38:50)
Yeah. A hundred percent. What’s incredible when you think of the story of the UFC, at the time the casino business was cranking, and station casinos was killing it. And stations, their money from stations is what was funding the UFC. Then in the ’08, ‘9 crash, the UFC was killing it in ’08 and ’09, and the casino businesses were hurting. So timing on everything, the way that it all worked out couldn’t have worked out better for them, and obviously for all of us. When you think about the UFC and how big it is and how far it reaches and how many people it touches, the Fertittas Brothers made a $2 million investment, then put in another 44 million, and look at how many lives that investment has changed over the last 25 years. It’s fascinating.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:55)
And it’s also crazy. Just forget the business of it. Just the effect it has on the history of humanity in terms of this is what we do, we’re descendants of apes that fight. And this is like the organizations that catalyze the innovation in how we fight. It’s crazy.
Dana White
(00:40:13)
[inaudible 00:40:13].
Lex Fridman
(00:40:13)
You created a whole new sport.
Dana White
(00:40:15)
That people all over the world participate in now. Literally, there isn’t a place on earth that we can’t get a fighter from now.

Great fighters

Lex Fridman
(00:40:23)
You said in the UFC 299 post-fight press conference that sometimes fighters might complain that they get matched up, uneven odds, but that’s actually when legends are made. I think you gave Dustin Poirier as an example. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? What makes a legend, what makes greatness in a fight?
Dana White
(00:40:45)
So behind the scenes, fighters are a very paranoid bunch of people. They’re very paranoid, and there’s been this theme with fighters where they’re trying to get me beat, right? We don’t determine who wins and loses. If we did, we’d be the WWE, okay? You do. I’m the bells and whistles guy. I make sure that as many people that we can possibly let know that you’re fighting on Saturday know that you’re fighting on Saturday. Who you are, who you’re going against, and why people should give a shit. That’s what I do.

(00:41:26)
Then the night you show up, I put on the best live event that I possibly can, and I put on the best television show that I possibly can. Once that door shuts, it’s all up to you. You determine whether you lose or not. And if you get into a position where you become so paranoid that you think that the powers that be here are against you, and you try to steer yourself away from certain fights… That’s one of the big things that happens in these other organizations. In these other organizations, the inmates run the asylum. So if they don’t want to fight bad enough, these other companies don’t push and they don’t do this and they don’t… We put on the best possible matchups that we can make.

(00:42:22)
And in this business, you might be an older fighter, but if you’re still ranked in the top 10, there’s young guys coming for you. Killers. Young killers are coming out and they want your position. So you being the veteran that you are have to prepare yourself to go in. And everybody was saying, when we made that fight with Saint-Denis that Poirier was in big trouble, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. That’s awesome. That helps build the entire thing that Poirier, and then Poirier goes out and does what he did that night. That’s what makes fucking legends.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:06)
It’s interesting because sometimes being the underdog is a really good thing for the long-term story of who you are as a fighter.
Dana White
(00:43:13)
Especially when you’re a big name and a name that people recognize and a name that people know. And they’re like, “Oh man.” I remember Israel Adesanya and Sean Strickland. A hundred out of a hundred people knew for a fact that Israel was going to win that fight, and here comes Strickland. And we could go on for days with this. You know what I mean? That is what creates legendary moments, legendary fights, and it’s what builds stars and legends.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:42)
Arguably, Conor McGregor with Jose Aldo.
Dana White
(00:43:45)
Yep. Conor McGregor with a bunch of people in the beginning. People said he couldn’t wrestle, people said he wouldn’t be able to defend a take down, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nate Diaz against Conor McGregor, you know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
(00:43:56)
Mm-hmm. And Conor McGregor against Khabib, underdog, probably. But if he won, there’s an opportunity to win. If he won, that’s the legend forming. He’s now in the conversation for the greatest of all time without argument.
Dana White
(00:44:11)
And if you look at the way that Khabib ran through so many people, Conor hung in there-
Lex Fridman
(00:44:17)
Yeah. It could have been.
Dana White
(00:44:18)
… and made a fight of it.

Khabib vs Conor

Lex Fridman
(00:44:19)
It could have been. What do you think about that matchup? It’s one of the greats, one of the great matchups that you’ve made, Conor McGregor versus Khabib.
Dana White
(00:44:28)
Yeah. At the time, I was incredibly criticized for putting together the spot that had the scene with the bus in it. The fucking medias, but they were saying that I was pandering to the violence that happened and trying to… I’m telling you a story, telling you a story of how we got here and how big this fight is, and how bad the blood is between these guys. And I mean, I think that’s what we do the best job at, is telling the fucking stories of why.

(00:45:09)
We go into Monday. It’s fight week. We got a whole list of things that we do fight week. And then you get right down to the press conference on Thursday, the weigh-ins on Friday, and then the fights on Saturday. Now my people fly back home, they go to bed on Sunday night, and it’s Groundhog Day. We wake up again on Monday and it starts all over again. Every weekend, every Saturday, for a year. So there’s lots of stories that need to be told, there’s lots of… When you think about what I compete with, whatever takes your attention on a Saturday night is my competitor.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:47)
So you’re always trying to build a foundation for great stories, and if the fighters step up, they step up and they can together create greatness.
Dana White
(00:45:56)
That’s it. That’s exactly right. So when we are aligned, like when you get to the UFC, I mean, you just saw it with MVP, you’re going to see it with Kayla Harrison.
Dana White
(00:46:00)
You just saw it with MVP, you’re going to see it with Kayla Harrison and so many others that have come from other organizations, and they get here. They notice immediately the difference between fighting here and fighting wherever they were before. It’s not even comparable to the impact it has on you when you leave whatever organization you’re with and you come to the UFC. And I think that it gives them a sense of, holy shit. MVP when he came, I mean there were probably more people at the press conference than any fight he’d ever fought in, in Bellator. You know what I mean? And you feel that energy and you feel the difference of the impact of being here, and I think it takes a lot of these guys to another level.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:49)
Yeah. Just the aura of it.
Dana White
(00:46:51)
100%.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:51)
This is where you’re supposed to step up. Yeah, it’s the way people feel about Ted Talks, giving lectures.
Dana White
(00:46:57)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:57)
This is your moment. You get 15 minutes and you better say some interesting shit. And Kayla Harrison, by the way, is a badass. I can’t wait to see what happens there.
Dana White
(00:47:05)
She was walking around with this sleeveless shirt the night of the fights and holy shit, she’s jacked, man. It’s crazy.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:12)
Two time Olympic gold medalist.
Dana White
(00:47:13)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:14)
You don’t fuck with those people. You win a medal, you’re made of something special.
Dana White
(00:47:18)
So true. Especially in judo.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:20)
Yeah, especially in American judo where you don’t have many training partners that are great.
Dana White
(00:47:24)
That’s what I’m saying.

Jon Jones

Lex Fridman
(00:47:25)
So you better fucking work for it. Ridiculous question, but who’s in the conversation for the greatest of all time?
Dana White
(00:47:32)
Jon Jones.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:34)
You’ve talked about Jon Jones, but what are the metrics involved here?
Dana White
(00:47:38)
He’s never been beat. He destroyed everybody at light heavyweight, which at the time was the toughest weight class in the company, in the sport. And then he moved up to heavyweight, won easily at heavyweight. When you look at a guy and you look at what he was doing outside the octagon at the same time, which shouldn’t be part of it, shouldn’t be part of the equation, but when you do, wow, there’s no debate. Nobody can debate who’s the greatest of all time. It’s absolutely positively Jon Jones. He’s never lost. He’s never been beat in the octagon ever.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:21)
So that’s one of the metrics, pure sheer dominance. But there’s others. Losing sometimes is a catalyst for greatness.
Dana White
(00:48:33)
I don’t disagree. But when you’ve never lost, you’ve never lost. We’ve never found somebody. And the other thing that you have to factor in too is longevity. Because sometimes with a lot of these guys, the sport passes them by. You get younger guys that are faster, this, that, and the sport evolves. Nobody’s been able to beat Jon Jones. Oh, and the other thing that you measure is, when you said dominance, it’s true, if you’re this guy that has unbelievable power and you’re just going in and you’re just fucking knocking everybody out and nobody’s ever pulled you into the deep water before, that was when my opinion of Jon Jones started to change.

(00:49:18)
Gustafsson took him into the deep water. Gustafsson hit him with some shit he’d never been hit with. Gustafsson tested him and put Jon Jones in a place where, I bet if you sat down and interviewed John Jones, going into the deep rounds of that, Jon Jones thought he was going to die. You know what I’m saying?
Lex Fridman
(00:49:36)
And he’s willing to go there.
Dana White
(00:49:37)
And he kept going. He was willing, willing to do whatever it took to win that fight.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:44)
And it breaks my heart because he beat DC, and DC is one of the greatest of all time.
Dana White
(00:49:48)
That’s the thing too. And I believe that DC doesn’t get the credit he deserves because of the Jon Jones thing. When you look at DC and what he’s accomplished, and Jon Jones beat him twice.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:59)
Yeah.
Dana White
(00:50:00)
It’s undeniable. You can hate all you want. Jon Jones is the greatest of all time.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:05)
Do you think Habib was tested enough?
Dana White
(00:50:09)
I think that Habib had the potential to be in the running for that. He just didn’t stick around. First of all, he had injuries that he should have been where he got a lot sooner had he not had the injuries that he had and the setbacks in his career. But there’s no doubt, Habib is one of the all-time greats.

Conor McGregor

Lex Fridman
(00:50:29)
What’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of your relationship with Conor?
Dana White
(00:50:33)
There’s literally no ugly. Conor McGregor has been an incredible partner to work with. If Conor showed up to things on time, there wouldn’t be one fucking bad thing I could say about Conor. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
(00:50:45)
It’s only being late to shit?
Dana White
(00:50:46)
If you put a fucking gun to my head and said, “Don’t lie, mother-fucker. Tell me all the bad things about Conor McGregor.” I’d say the guy doesn’t show up on time. That’s it.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:57)
That’s it.
Dana White
(00:50:57)
If Conor McGregor showed up to shit on time, and sometimes he does. Sometimes he does. He’s been a great partner. If you look at what a huge superstar he became, the fights that he was involved in, let me tell you what Conor McGregor never did. We never walked in a room and said, “Conor, this guy just fell out. We want you to fight this guy.” And he was like, “No way. I’m not taking this fucking risk. I’m at this point in my career where my money, my this, my that,” he was like, “Fuck it, let’s do it.” He’d always say, “Let’s do it.”

(00:51:28)
The other thing that Conor McGregor never did, no matter how big he was or whatever it was, and we were heading into a fight, “Oh, Conor, this guy just fell out. Aldo fell out. We’re looking for another,” “Yeah, I’ll do it, but I’m going to need another 200,000. I’m going to need another $1 million.” Conor McGregor never did that chicken shit, bullshit kind of stuff. He never did any of that. Conor was as solid a guy as you could possibly work with.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:54)
Just fuck it, I’ll do it.
Dana White
(00:51:56)
I’ll do it. There’s actually a scene, because we were filming something, I don’t know if it was embedded or what we were filming at the time. Me and Lorenzo walk into his house that he rented here in Vegas, and I’m pretty sure it was when Aldo fell out, and we’re telling him this, that, and we’re looking at some options. He says, “I’m going to the gym. When I’m done working out, let me know.” He just woke up out of bed, he is in his fucking underwear, and he gets hit with this and he is like, “All right, I’m going to the gym. Let me know when I get out who I’m fighting.” Doesn’t care. Doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t want any more money. Nothing. Fucking shows up and he delivers. Conor has been incredibly successful, he’s made a lot of money, and he’s had his ups and downs outside and inside the octagon. But as for a guy who was on the dole and was a plumber, he’s actually a really smart businessman and he has been one of the best partners that I’ve ever had in the history of the sport.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:55)
And an important part of the history of the UFC.
Dana White
(00:52:57)
Big.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:58)
He opened it up to all kinds of new eyes.
Dana White
(00:53:01)
Yep. He literally set Europe, Australia, Canada, and many other parts of the world on fire, man. He was our first legit megastar.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:15)
And I personally think he doesn’t get enough credit for just how good he was as a fighter. People love to talk shit about Conor.
Dana White
(00:53:22)
So true.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:23)
I suppose that’s part of his magic.
Dana White
(00:53:25)
But it comes with success. When you’re successful, there’s always people out there that are going to talk shit. You always have a bunch of know nothing, do nothing fucking losers that love to talk shit.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:37)
You think if you were to do it all over again, Habib is the right matchup?
Dana White
(00:53:41)
Yeah. Listen, the thing that you can’t do is avoid match-ups. You know what I mean? This is what we’re talking about when you talk about being a legend. Conor McGregor needed Habib. Habib needed Conor McGregor. You can hate each other as much as you want, but you have to fight these other legendary bad mother-fuckers to yourself. Become a legend. I mean, it’s like Jon Jones needed Cyril Gun and Cyril Gun needed Jon Jones, because if Cyril could have beat Jon, the first guy, if anybody can ever figure it out and beat Jon Jones, it’s a big deal. And it’s almost like your obligation as a fighter. And when you think about Jon Jones became who he is today, and the reason I’m sitting here telling you how great he is, because all these other guys gave him the opportunity to beat them. Or they beat Jon. It’s all about giving these other guys the opportunity. Saint Denis, Poirier gave him the opportunity to come in and beat him. That’s how this all works.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:51)
It’s the two of them together, the two fighters together.
Dana White
(00:54:54)
You have to have them both. Listen, I could line up a bunch of no-name bums that Jon Jones could run through. That’s what they do in all the other organizations. We would have nothing to fucking talk about right now.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:08)
That’s why, luckily, a perfect record in the UFC is not as important as who you fought, how you fought.
Dana White
(00:55:13)
So true. But when you have a perfect record in the UFC, holy shit, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:55:21)
Yeah.
Dana White
(00:55:23)
When you can have a perfect record in the UFC, you are absolutely one of the most special athletes on planet earth.

Trump

Lex Fridman
(00:55:31)
You and Trump are friends. I just talked to Ivanka last night about her experience in the Miami event. She loves it. She’s training too. You’re talking about getting girls to train. She’s trained.
Dana White
(00:55:43)
And the kids are training, yeah. Her father’s the biggest fucking fight fan on the planet. Calls me all the time to talk about the fights. And Don Jr. said that I’m the only guy on earth that he bros out with. It’s funny when you talk about how powerful fighting is. This last Miami event, the President of Ecuador and the President of Spain both posted about the fights. Habib beat Conor. Putin was on FaceTime before he even made it to the locker room. Trump, sitting President, ex-President, watching all the fights, calling, wants to talk about the fights. Valentina Shevchenko, every time she goes home, she meets with the President of the country. The list goes on and on and on. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, the list goes on and on and on, the most powerful people in the world are all obsessed with fighting.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:42)
When did you first discover that Trump loves fighting?
Dana White
(00:56:45)
I first discovered that Trump was a big fight fan, obviously, you saw him, we were talking about how big boxing fans we were, he was a part of all the big fights back then. But when we first bought the UFC, this thing was so bad venues didn’t even want us. And we ended up doing our first event in Atlantic City at the Trump Taj Mahal. Now, think about this. At that time, Trump brand here, UFC brand, I can’t go low enough. And he had us at his venue two times, back to back, showed up for the first fight of the night, and stayed till the last fight of the night. Then after that, any good thing that would ever happen to me in my career, Trump would reach out. Whether it was, we were on the front page of the New York Times at one time and he said, “Congratulations, Dana. I always knew you guys were going to do it.” Little things like that, but that are big things and mean a lot, especially coming from a guy like him.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:44)
He saw something in you like, this is going to be…
Dana White
(00:57:46)
100%. He definitely saw it. And then comes ’15, ’16, whenever it was, I don’t remember, but he called me and he said, “Listen, if you don’t want to do this, I completely understand, but I would be honored if you would speak at the National Republican Convention for me.” And I’m not a very political guy, you know what I mean? And everybody told me not to do it. “Do not do this.” But I was like, why would I not do this? This guy’s been great to me. And I did it. And our relationship is just like, you know what I mean? I consider Donald Trump to be one of my very, very good friends.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:31)
Any favorite stories?
Dana White
(00:58:34)
There’s so many stories. Once he won the election, I’d be at work and I’d be down the hall in the matchmaking room, whatever, and my secretary would yell, “The President’s on the phone!”, fucking come running down the hallway and grab the phone, and he’d want to talk about the fight that was coming up or the fight that happened. Or I’d be in my car and I’d answer the phone and it’s like, “Hi. This is the White House. We have the President of the United States on the phone.” That’s a trip, when that first starts happening. And then just to sum him up, this is the kind of guy that you want to talk about a fighter, this is the most resilient human being I’ve ever met. If you see the shit that this guy’s going through publicly every day.

(00:59:26)
And I’ll call him on the phone as a friend and be like, “Hey, you good? How you doing?” Unfazed, unfazed like nothing’s going on. And then he’ll start talking to me about this and that and all this other. One time, there’s only been one time, I’ve never talked about this publicly, but one time I called him and he was not good. He was a mess. I’ve never heard him like that and I’ve never seen him like that. When Ivana died, the only time I’ve ever seen him fucked up. Obviously, as soon as I heard it, I reached out. And I have never, look at all the stuff that’s gone on with Trump, all the bad stuff that they say, they’re trying to attack him, they’re trying to ruin him, unfazed. I called him that day and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen that guy busted up and not good.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:25)
But that says something that that’s the only time.
Dana White
(01:00:27)
100%.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:28)
Because that that guy is, I mean, walking through fire.
Dana White
(01:00:30)
He does not get rattled. He will walk through fire. He’s an absolute savage.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:34)
You think he wins the Presidential election?
Dana White
(01:00:36)
I don’t know, man. It’s going to depend on how this whole… Politics is the most dirtiest, scummiest thing on planet earth, man, and who knows how this is all going to play out. It’s all dirty. It’s all ugly. And obviously I’m rooting for him and I’m behind him and I hope he does. But we’ll see.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:56)
What’s dirtier, the fighting game in the early days or politics?
Dana White
(01:01:01)
There’s nothing dirtier than politics, nothing. There’s literally nothing dirtier.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:05)
All right.
Dana White
(01:01:06)
It is the dirtiest thing on planet Earth.

Elon vs Zuck

Lex Fridman
(01:01:08)
I just wanted to get that on record. Another guy who doesn’t seem to be phased by the fire, I’ve gotten to know him, is Elon. I have to ask you, it’s a bit of fun. You were a part of thinking about putting together Zuck versus Elon. I trained with both. I did a phone call with Elon and you when we were training on the mat.
Dana White
(01:01:29)
I remember, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:30)
You really think that could have been a good fight?
Dana White
(01:01:32)
It would’ve been the biggest fight ever done.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:34)
The spectacle of it.
Dana White
(01:01:35)
Two of the most powerful, wealthiest men in the world. Lots of guys talk hit and go back and forth and sue each other and do all this stuff. These two guys were literally talking about facing each other in the octagon and fighting. And they’re in a business that’s looked at as geeky. You know what I mean? They’re tech nerds. They’re this, they’re that. These are two dudes that were willing to throw down and fight. And you know as well as I do, there’s a lot of public speculation about this. I was taking serious real time and working on this thing. I had projections, I had numbers. I was looking at venues. I was on the phone with the fucking coliseum in Italy. You name it, I was in it. These guys were serious. And this was something that was really going to happen. And I’ll tell you right now, in the short amount of time that it was going down, it was fun. I was having a blast with it.

Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul

Lex Fridman
(01:02:30)
What do you think about Tyson, Tyson fighting Jake Paul?
Dana White
(01:02:34)
I love Mike Tyson, and I’m not a fan of anybody fighting at our age. But he’s a grown man, obviously, and he’s going to do what he’s going to do. But at least I know, I talked to his wife a couple of days ago, and he’s taken this serious and he’s training for it. So we’ll see how it plays out.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:59)
Why do you think he fights though? What is that about? Is there a broader lesson there about fighters, about great fighters?
Dana White
(01:03:07)
I think that Mike Tyson is actually one of those unique guys who has crossed over. Any of these other boxers from his era, they have no way of making money other than fighting. Mike Tyson has made a lot of money outside of fighting. Tyson still has that aura. You could be at a restaurant and he walks in and you’re like, “Holy fuck. Mike Tyson’s here.” He still has that type of aura and energy in a room, and he makes lots of money outside of the ring. I think that he ends up getting these offers that he can’t refuse.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:44)
Oh, you think it’s financial? I mean, that’s a good question to ask. You work with a lot of fighters. For how many of them is it about money and for how many is it about the fact of the pure love of fighting?
Dana White
(01:03:58)
Well, the guys that get into it for the right reason are the guys who get into it for greatness. Because you want to be the fucking best. And when you’re in it for that reason, you love it and you want to be looked at as the best ever, and you have the talent, the money happens. Then you have other guys who get in, believe me, I’ve dealt with fighters who just wanted to be famous and just wanted to make money. You know what I mean? And listen, it is what it is. It’s your life and you live it the way that you want and do your thing. But the ones that are beloved are the guys who really want to be fucking great and they’re the ones that are remembered. When you look at Tyson in his early years, when he came up under Cus D’Amato, he was a student of the game.

(01:04:47)
He loved everything. He became completely infatuated with the fight game. Then he became such a massive superstar, it’s almost like the whole thing starts to turn on you. All the things that come at you at a young age and that kind of money, it’s tough. It’s tough to navigate and get through. You say something like that and people are like, “Oh, poor him. He had fucking $100 million and couldn’t…” At that age and with all the shit that people talk and all the things that you got to put up with and the fame, a lot of people deal with fame, some people handle it really well and some people don’t. And the perfect example of that was Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonner. They fought that unbelievable fight on the Ultimate Fighter. Everything blew up after that. Forrest dealt with fame really well and Stephan did not.

Forrest Griffin vs Stephan Bonnar

Lex Fridman
(01:05:42)
That was a special fight.
Dana White
(01:05:43)
It really was.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:44)
What do you think attracted people to that fight? That was a big leap for the UFC.
Dana White
(01:05:50)
It was everything.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:51)
It was everything.
Dana White
(01:05:52)
It was everything.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:52)
Why do you think people loved that fight? What attracted people to that fight? Why did it change everything?
Dana White
(01:05:58)
Well, what happened that night is that the rest of the show was a disaster. We had the co-main event and the main event. Diego Sanchez ran through Kenny Florian in seconds. Oh my God, that was terrible. And the fights that led up to that weren’t anything to talk about either. Then Stephan and Forrest got in there and just went toe-to-toe in this unbelievable slug fest live on free television when cable still mattered. And what I heard was at the time, you had people picking up the phone going, “Are you watching this show?” The numbers just started climbing. Then you got a razor-thin decision. Who’s going to win? You got the crowd stomping their feet. It sounded like a train was going through the place and everybody’s chanting, “One more round!” Me and the Fertitta brothers get together and we talk. We’re going to give them both contracts.

(01:06:52)
So we give them both contracts and the place erupts. It couldn’t have been a more perfect fight at the most perfect time. It all came together. It’s almost like this was meant to be. You know what I mean? Yeah. So we had so many problems with Spike TV at the time, because halfway through the season, the president of the company got fired. All the things that we thought we were going to get that year, we had this runaway hit show. And normally at that time when you would see runaway hit shows, there’d be commercials. It’d be on billboards. It’d be on the side of buses in L.A. and New York. We got none of that. We didn’t even know if we were going to get a second season coming out of that. And when that fight was over, I swear to God, I was like, “I don’t even give a fuck. We’re going to end up somewhere now after this fight.” And we didn’t even make it out of the building that night. The Spike guys did the contract with us in the alley on a fucking napkin after the fight.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:00)
So you already saw the magic of the fight itself. It captured something.
Dana White
(01:08:04)
Once that happened and all the shit, and at that time, I didn’t know the ratings, it’s not like we were streaming and we could see, we had no idea, but I knew.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:12)
You just knew this was [inaudible 01:08:13].
Dana White
(01:08:12)
I knew .
Lex Fridman
(01:08:13)
What is that? It’s just two people being willing to stand toe to toe and just go to war.
Dana White
(01:08:21)
And when you think about what was at stake. There was a car. Remember the Kia? The winner got a Kia.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:27)
I don’t even remember that.
Dana White
(01:08:28)
That’s what was the fucking. And Stefan and Forrest, the will to win, they both wanted to win that fight so bad.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:38)
It was bigger than the Kia probably.
Dana White
(01:08:40)
Forrest drove that Kia to 200,000 miles. The biggest mistake Kia ever made was not doing a fucking commercial with Forrest Griffin about that car. Forrest Griffin loved that car so much, he drove it. I think he still has it. It’s got 200,000 miles on it, that car. You couldn’t have a better fucking commercial than that. And we reached out to them too. I said, “Kia should know about this.” They fucking…
Dana White
(01:09:00)
… and we reached out to them too. I said, “Kia should know about this.” They fucking blew it. You got a bunch of… You know how those guys are in the business world. They don’t fucking get anything.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:09)
Maybe it was about the Kia then.
Dana White
(01:09:11)
It was about winning. They both wanted to win the Ultimate Fighter so bad. It’s the Kia, it’s the win, it’s the contract you get, the whole thing.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:22)
But I think at that point, you even forget all of that. When you’re in there, you probably just, there’s a primal thing where I’m not backing down.
Dana White
(01:09:31)
Listen, they’re both bad dudes. They were both real fighters at the end of the day. That’s why the fight was so great. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
(01:09:36)
They just throw all the caution to the wind and just fight. Those are some of the greatest moments in the FC too when the technique is falls apart and you’re just like, well, fuck it.
Dana White
(01:09:49)
Well, it’s because you’re in those deep rounds. You’ve been through a war now it’s all about heart and dog, who can dig deeper and who’s got it and who wants it. I mean, we all know when that moment happens in a fight, when you see that both of these guys are fucking exhausted.

(01:10:06)
And for people that are watching this, people that don’t know a lot about… Everybody thinks they know a lot about fighting. 99.9% of the people out there don’t know fucking jack shit about fighting or what it takes to do what these people do. But when you get into those later rounds and fatigue sets in, and then fatigue makes you start to fucking doubt yourself, and then you start to wonder, can I even make it through the rest of this round?

(01:10:30)
And then you start to think, am I going to fucking die right now? And these kids dig fucking deep. And they just, like you said, all the other shit flies out the window and now they’re just on fucking autopilot to fight and win. Those are definitely the best fights you’ll ever see in any combat sport.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:47)
I mean, that saying is true. The exhaustion makes cowards of us all. I mean, there’s something about… Because I’ve competed a lot in jujitsu. There’s the violence of being hit too, but even just exhaustion, it makes you question everything.
Dana White
(01:11:03)
So true.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:04)
It just takes you to some weird place where your brain starts to think you’re going to die for sure. Your brain starts to think, why am I doing this? All these excuses, all this.
Dana White
(01:11:16)
I love that shit.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:17)
And then…
Dana White
(01:11:18)
I love that shit.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:19)
The truly heroic action is to say, “Fuck it,” in that moment and just get in there.
Dana White
(01:11:24)
When you think about these fights that you see in the UFC every fucking Saturday when these men and women get to this point where they’ve been in a dog fight, yet they keep fucking going and you keep trying to win. You can’t imagine what’s going on inside their heads. Self-doubt and all these other things that come into play when exhaustion sets in and they fucking power through it.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:49)
Yeah, those moments, sometimes they don’t have a glorious knockout at the end. But your decision in the third round or the fifth round to still keep pushing forward, not running.
Dana White
(01:12:02)
100%.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:03)
That doesn’t matter what happened. That is a person winning a battle over themselves.
Dana White
(01:12:09)
So true. It’s so true, and it happens every fucking weekend. It’s so impressive. I say it all the time. The people that are involved in this sport are this much of the population. The people that make it to the top five are incredibly unique, special human beings, man. It’s fucking awesome.

Gambling

Lex Fridman
(01:12:31)
You love gambling.
Dana White
(01:12:32)
I do.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:35)
What’s the biggest win of your gambling career, maybe psychologically, if not financially?
Dana White
(01:12:42)
Well, two things. I won $1,000,000 hand one night. It’s happened one time. $1,000,000 hand one night at Mandalay Bay. And then one summer I beat Caesars for 12 million throughout the summer.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:02)
Throughout the summer.
Dana White
(01:13:03)
Yeah. Then I’m on a pretty good run right now too.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:07)
Now this is blackjack?
Dana White
(01:13:08)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:09)
What’s the biggest loss?
Dana White
(01:13:13)
The biggest loss was… Here is… I would call this the biggest loss for many different reasons. This is what you live and you learn in life and you figure things out as you go along. One night I’m over at the Rio and they got big suites over there. I go over there with some buddies and we got one of the suites and we have some dinner and we start drinking. We’re having some drinks at dinner and blah, blah, blah. Starts to ramp up, having a good time.

(01:13:48)
And I make my way down to the Thai limit room. We start gambling. And I continue to drink having a blast. I end up leaving and going home that night, and I lost 80 grand. I wake up the next morning, I’m like, fuck. Those motherfuckers got me for 80,000 last night and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

(01:14:15)
I’m at work the next day and the host over there calls me and he says, “Hey, Dana, are you coming back? Do you still need the room that you guys had where you ate and all this shit you stay?” And I said, “No, I don’t need the room, but don’t get too comfortable with my fucking 80 grand. I’m coming back for it.”

(01:14:35)
Dead fucking silence on the other end of the phone. And he’s like, “Dana, you lost $3 million last night.” I said, “What the fuck are you talking about? I only have a million and a half dollar credit line.” He goes, “Yeah, you made us call the GM of the hotel and you started calling him a fucking pussy and da, da, da, da, da.” And I went, “Yeah, no, that sounds like something I would do. Yeah.”
Lex Fridman
(01:15:06)
That’s the real number.
Dana White
(01:15:08)
That was the real number. And then there’s been a lot of cases where people are in Vegas and they’re like, “Oh, I lost all this money. And they were giving me free drinks and I drank too much, and I was taken advantage of.” No, you stupid motherfucker. Man up. You got fucking drunk. Alcohol is free, but you don’t have to fucking drink it. You know what I mean? And this was a huge learning lesson for me. I never drank again when I was playing cards after that night. But yeah, when you asked me, that’s the one that stands out…
Lex Fridman
(01:15:08)
That one came back right now.
Dana White
(01:15:50)
In my head the most as far as having a bad loss. And then of course I said, “Call the GM,” and I started calling him a pussy at three o’clock in the morning.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:00)
Of course you did.
Dana White
(01:16:00)
That is something I would absolutely do.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:03)
How do you deal with those psychologically? When you gamble, maybe this applies to fighting too, do you love winning or hate losing more?
Dana White
(01:16:14)
They go hand in hand. The way that I play is I live in Vegas, so 2024 is a war for me. I go to war in ’24. Okay. All these nights that I play are little battles inside the war that I will fight in ’24. Now, at the end of the year, we will tally up all these little battles and see where I stand on wins and losses.

(01:16:43)
And there’s lots of talk out there about my gambling, places that I’ve been kicked out of and things like that. And I do pretty well. I do pretty well, but it’s what I like to do. I don’t gamble in a way that I would ever hurt myself or hurt my family. I’m sure you’ve heard the Norm MacDonald stories. Norm MacDonald lost his entire personal wealth four times or something like that. Yeah, that’s not going to happen to me.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:20)
You manage it, but just psychologically you’re able to be even keel.
Dana White
(01:17:24)
Yeah. When I win, it’s awesome. It’s always great to win. Winning is a great feeling in business, in sports, in life, and definitely in gambling. Losing is never fun, but it’s part of the game. You know what I mean? If you want to be in the game and it’s sports, it’s business or whatever, there’s going to be wins and there’s going to be losses. And you have to take them both in stride and you have to be able to…

(01:17:54)
There’s a of people… When you gamble and you lose and you go into a deep, dark depression, I’ve seen this with guys that do it, get depressed. Gambling isn’t for you. If you are the type of person that’s on social media and people say horrible things to you and you get depressed and da, da, you shouldn’t be on social media. You know what I mean?

(01:18:17)
These are all part of being in the game. When you’re in the fucking game, great things happen and really bad things happen, and you got to take it all in stride. And you got to pick yourself up the next day, strap your fucking shoes back on and get out there and go to fucking war again. That’s how it works.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:33)
That’s some goggin shit right there. All right. I love that motivational speech.
Dana White
(01:18:38)
It’s the truth though.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:39)
Yeah, it is.
Dana White
(01:18:39)
It’s the truth though.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:41)
It’s true.
Dana White
(01:18:41)
Listen, every day when you get out of bed, life’s standing right there to kick you in the fucking face, man. Could be anything. Could be you get up and you walk downstairs, you got a fucking flat tire, and you’re late for work, and you got this and that. Life is going to throw all kinds of crazy shit at you, and you have to be ready for it, and you got to fucking deal with it. You can’t curl up into a ball. You can’t run away from it. You can’t hide. You have to take all this shit head on. You have to get up…

(01:19:06)
Every day when I get up out of bed, I strap up and I’m getting ready for fucking war. Because I know I’m coming in here. I know a bunch of bad shit’s going to happen that I’m going to have to fucking deal with. And if that’s not bad enough, when I finally get out of here, I’m probably going to go to the casino and I’m going to get into another fucking war. You know what I mean?

(01:19:24)
I thrive in chaos. I actually love chaos. Everybody talks about retiring. Fuck that shit. What am I going to do when I retire? What would I do? I like to go to war. I like to battle. I like to win. Sometimes I lose, but then I have to come back from the loss. And I love to build brands. I love to set short term and long-term goals and then knock them all down. This is just the stuff that excites me.

(01:19:53)
And whether it’s business or gambling. I like being a fan of things too. I like live music. When I find a band that I like, I get excited to go watch the band live or a Celtics game. I love the fucking Boston Celtics, and I love going to the games and watching them. This is the year. Hopefully we’re going to fucking win it this year. These are all things that make me happy and excite me in my life.

(01:20:20)
And it’s funny because there’s this post that I post maybe three, four nights a week. I also love this city. I can’t tell if the city of Las Vegas was built for me or I was built for this fucking city, but I love it. And there’s this turn on Summerlin Parkway every night, and it’s dark. And from there you can see the entire city, and it’s all fucking lights and it’s badass.

(01:20:44)
And I’m usually driving home after a fucking incredible day. This amazing day and this unbelievable fucking life I have, and I have this just moment of gratitude. Every time I take that turn and I’m like, God damn, I love this fucking city. And just every night when I go home, I’m just so happy and grateful for this life that I have.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:06)
You’re grateful, you’re celebrating. Even if the day is full of shit, full of problems, you have to solve all of this. You’re still able to put that behind you, just turn it off?
Dana White
(01:21:14)
I love that too. I love problem solving. I love taking things that seem impossible. Fucking what’s been shit on more than this company right here? Power Slap, right? This thing’s a fucking beast. It’s an absolute beast. In 13 months, that’s the most successful thing I’ve ever been a part of. And I love every fucking minute of it, especially the negativity. I love negativity.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:45)
You almost feed on it. That’s great. That’s great. You’re built for this.
Dana White
(01:21:48)
I eat that shit for breakfast, man. I love it.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:51)
What’s your favorite movie about Vegas, Casino?
Dana White
(01:21:55)
Yeah, it would have to be Casino. No doubt about it.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:57)
Yeah.
Dana White
(01:21:58)
You ever see a movie that changed your life, that actually impacted your life in some way, shape, or form?
Lex Fridman
(01:22:05)
Probably.
Dana White
(01:22:06)
Which one?
Lex Fridman
(01:22:07)
That’s a good question. I’ll have to think. Well, I have a lot, a lot. Casino could be one of them, probably taught me about women. Forrest Gump for me is a simple movie, but it was a really good movie to show. Because I’ve been really fortunate in my life over and over and over, and I don’t think I deserve any of it. I just always felt like Forrest Gump. When I finally saw it really connected with me. It was like, okay, this universe works in weird ways and stuff just materializes. And you just be good to people, put that good karma out there and it happens for you. That was a movie like that.
Dana White
(01:22:46)
I’m actually very superstitious about that. I believe that what you put out, you get back. And I believe that when you have, you should take care of other people and you should always try to bring people up with you and all that kind of stuff. But the movie that changed the whole trajectory of my life was Vision Quest.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:08)
Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. That’s a good one too. Yeah.
Dana White
(01:23:10)
Vision Quest, man, I fucking love that movie.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:11)
That’s a good one.
Dana White
(01:23:13)
It’s basically, it’s telling the story of a kid who really wasn’t anybody in high school, and nobody knew who he was. He wasn’t popular or any of that kind of shit. And he decided that that was the year that he was going to make his mark. And he was a good wrestler at 178 pounds, but he was going to move down to 160-something to take on the Shute, the scariest guy and the whatever.

(01:23:34)
But there’s all these little things in the movie that really lay out what life is all about. One of the parts is he’s in a class and the teacher’s talking about some poem. And he says, “What does this poem mean to you?” Well, this girl’s walking through the park and all the leaves are falling off the trees, and she realizes that she’s going to die someday. And that a lot of people think they have all this time so they fucking waste it, and they never go out and do what they really set out to do or accomplish or do anything great in their life. That’s one meaning.

(01:24:11)
Then he’s got the guy that he works with at work, he’s cutting weight and his nose is bleeding and all this shit. And this guy keeps going, “Why the fuck are you doing this? Pick that thing up and eat it like a fucking man. This is ridiculous. I don’t know why you’re doing this to yourself, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Then when he meets the girl and he gets to the point where he feels like he wants to quit, where does he go? He goes to that guy’s fucking apartment because he knows when he shows up at this guy’s apartment, he’s going to go, “Yeah, fuck this shit.”

(01:24:37)
No, he went to work. He went to work to talk to him, and he wasn’t at work. He took the night off. He shows up at the shitty little fucking apartment that the guy lives in and the guy’s putting a suit and tie on and shit. He’s like, “They said you called in sick. What’s going on?” He’s like, “Well, yeah. Aren’t you wrestling this guy tonight?” And he’s like, “Yeah, but why would you? You’re going to get docked a night’s pay and all this other shit.” He says, “You know what, man?” Then it all gets laid out. I get the goosebumps even telling you this fucking part of it.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:04)
Is that the Pele speech?
Dana White
(01:25:05)
Pele. Yeah. When he’s saying about, “I’m fucking cooking in an overnight hotel fucking thing, and I live in this shitty apartment. A human being can lift himself upside down and backwards and kick a ball into a fucking net, and the whole stadium goes crazy. And this guy runs around. And I’m sitting here in my fucking apartment alone and I start crying. Yeah. I start crying.”

(01:25:26)
The guy who’s been shitting on him the whole fucking time actually really respects him for what he’s done and sees what this kid is capable of doing and all this shit. This fucking movie spoke to me on so many different levels. And I think it’s probably the most underrated movie of all time when you really break down the meaning of what this movie is about. And it really fucking spoke to me.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:49)
That’s probably the greatest movie on one-on-one combat…
Dana White
(01:25:53)
I would agree.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:54)
Ever made.
Dana White
(01:25:55)
I would agree. And especially if you can really hear the messages that it’s giving you in this movie, it’s excellent. You know it’s funny. They just did the… And I saw this after the fact, which completely fucking pissed me off. They did the 25 year or the 30-year thing. It was filmed in Spokane, Washington. They showed the movie at a movie theater there, and the cast members came out and spoke about it. I would’ve fucking flown there for that. Are you shitting me? I’d have been there in fucking 30 seconds to go up there and be a part of that. That movie literally changed my life.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:30)
Yeah, I suppose me too. It made me want to wrestle. I mean, probably the reason I was… Maybe it made me fall in love with wrestling.
Dana White
(01:26:39)
Well, you know what’s funny? I wasn’t even into wrestling at all, and I didn’t have to be for that movie to…
Lex Fridman
(01:26:44)
Yeah, it’s this basic human story.
Dana White
(01:26:46)
It’s such a great movie.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:47)
I mean, that’s what fighting does. It brings out the basic, the humanity of a person really, for the people that choose to step up and step in the ring. And then chase greatness and actually do it from against the long odds. That’s why it’s a beautiful game.
Dana White
(01:27:03)
And it’s so true. I mean, when you think about, I’m 54 years old right now, like that. I mean, it just fucking flew by. And you think when you’re young that you have all this time. You have no time. There’s no time. I mean one of the quotes on the wall in the gym in there is, “There is no tomorrow,” from Rocky III. There is no tomorrow. Fuck that shit. Let’s get all this shit done today.

Mortality

Lex Fridman
(01:27:33)
Do you think about your death?
Dana White
(01:27:35)
Man, I’m not afraid of death. Not even a little bit. I’m not afraid of it. I don’t know if that’ll be the case when I’m facing it, when I’m looking down the barrel of it, laying in a hospital bed somewhere.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:49)
But for now, just squeezing as much as you can out of it.
Dana White
(01:27:52)
100%. I literally, I don’t even like to sleep. My life is so fucking awesome, I don’t even want to go to bed at night. I don’t even want to go to sleep. I want to stay up fucking, I wish I could do fucking 24 hours and never have to sleep. That’s how much I love my life.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:05)
What has watching thousands of fights over the years taught you about human nature, about us humans?
Dana White
(01:28:12)
I don’t care what color you are, what country you come from or what language you speak, we’re all human beings. Fighting’s in our DNA. We get it and we like it. And it’s true. Fighting is in our DNA. It’s a part of who we are.

(01:28:23)
And no matter where you are, if a fight breaks out, it creates this fucking energy, this buzz, this sense of fear. I mean, a lot of different emotions happen in people when fights break out. But one thing that is always the case, everybody’s watching, man. Everybody’s, fucking all of their eyes are on the fight.

(01:28:46)
I mean, we were just in Mexico, fucking fight broke out in the good seats right here with these seats that are super expensive. And security never fucking came. They just let these guys fight until they gassed out. And then everybody put their chairs back together and snapped back down and fucking. I literally got up from my table, walked over, and was watching this fight at the fights.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:09)
At the fights. I mean humans fight and humans love watching fighting.
Dana White
(01:29:14)
Absolutely. And that was my thought process going into buying the UFC, and I believe that this would work everywhere. And thank God we were right.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:23)
Well, Dana, thank you for bringing this very human thing of fighting, the art of it, the science of it, the heroic stories, the vision quest stories of it all.
Dana White
(01:29:34)
Boom.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:35)
Really appreciate you talking today, brother.
Dana White
(01:29:36)
Thank you. Pleasure, buddy. Thank you for the kind words.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:40)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dana White. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Muhammad Ali. “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in a world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact, it’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration, it’s a dare.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy | Lex Fridman Podcast #420

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #420 with Annie Jacobsen.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
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Table of Contents

Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:

Introduction

Annie Jacobsen
(00:00:00)
The United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed, meaning those weapons could launch in as little as 60 seconds and up to a couple of minutes. Some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so. Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons. Same scenario. Their weapons systems are on par with ours. That’s not to mention the 12,500 nuclear weapons amongst the nine nuclear armed nations. The sucking up into the nuclear stem, 300 mile an hour winds, you’re talking about people miles out getting sucked up into that stem. When you see the mushroom cloud, Lex, that would be people 30, 40 mile wide mushroom cloud blocking out the sun, and that speaks nothing of the radiation poisoning that follows.

(00:00:58)
In addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there’s this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that’s impossible, right? You can’t just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you’re the only one who can do that. We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon. No matter how nuclear war starts, it ends with everyone dead.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:36)
The following is a conversation with Annie Jacobsen, an investigative journalist, Pulitzer price finalist and author of several amazing books on war, weapons, government secrecy, and national security, including the books titled Area 51, Operation Paperclip, The Pentagon’s Brain, Phenomena, Surprise, Kill, Vanish, and her new book, Nuclear War. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Annie Jacobsen.

Nuclear war


(00:02:13)
Let’s start with an immensely dark topic, nuclear war. How many people would a nuclear war between the United States and Russia kill?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:02:24)
I’m coming back at you with a very dark answer and a very big number. And that number is 5 billion people.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:37)
You go second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour what would happen if the nuclear war started? There’s a lot of angles from which I would love to talk to you about this. First, how would the deaths happen in the short term and the long term?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:03:00)
To start off, the reason I wrote the book is so that readers like you could see in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be. And as you said, second by second, minute by minute. The book covers nuclear launch to nuclear winter. I purposely don’t get into the politics that lead up to that or the national security maneuvers or the posturing or any of that. I just want people to know nuclear war is insane. And every source I interviewed for this book, from Secretary of Defense, all retired, nuclear sub-force commander, STRATCOM commander, FEMA director, et cetera. On and on and on, nuclear weapons engineers. They all shared with me the common denominator that nuclear war is insane.

(00:03:58)
First millions, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of people will die in the first 72 minutes of a nuclear war. And then, comes nuclear winter where the billions happen from starvation. And so, the shock power of all of this is meant for each and every one of us to say, “Wait, what?” This actually exists behind the veil of national security. Most people do not think about nuclear war on a daily basis, and yet hundreds of thousands of people in the nuclear command and control are at the ready in the event it happens.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:43)
But it doesn’t take too many people to start one.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:04:47)
In the words of Richard Garwin, who was the nuclear weapons engineer who drew the plans for the Ivy Mike thermonuclear bomb, the first thermonuclear bomb ever exploded in 1952. Garwin shared with me his opinion that all it takes is one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal to start a nuclear war. And that’s how I begin the scenario.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:16)
What are the different ways it could start? Literally, who presses a button and what does it take to press a button?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:05:25)
The way it starts is in space, meaning the US Defense Department has a early warning system, and the system in space is called SBIRS. It’s a constellation of satellites that is keeping an eye on all of America’s enemies so that the moment an ICBM launches, the satellite in space… And I’m talking about 1/10 of the way to the moon, that’s how powerful these satellites are in geo-sync. They see the hot rocket exhaust on the ICBM in a fraction of a second after it launches, a fraction of a second.

(00:06:09)
And so, there begins this horrifying policy called Launch on Warning, right? And that’s the US counterattack. Meaning the reason that the United States is so ferociously watching for a nuclear launch somewhere around the globe is so that the nuclear command and control system in the US can move into action to immediately make a counterstrike. Because we have that policy, Launch on Warning, which is exactly like it says. It means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.

Launch procedure

Lex Fridman
(00:06:57)
So the president, as part of the Launch on Warning policy, has six minutes… I guess can’t launch for six minutes, but at six minute mark from that first warning, the president can launch.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:07:15)
And that was one of the most remarkable details to really nail down for this book when I was reporting this book, and talking to Secretary of Defenses, for example, who are the people who advise the president on this matter, right? You say to yourself, ” Wait a minute. How could that possibly be?” So, let’s unpack that. So, in addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there’s this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that’s impossible, right? You can’t just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you’re the only one who can do that. And we can get into later why that exists. I was able to get the origin story of that concept from Los Alamos, they declassified it for the book.

(00:08:08)
But the idea behind that is that nuclear war will unfold so fast only one person can be in charge. The president. He asks permission of no one. Not the Secretary of Defense, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the US Congress. So, built into that is this extraordinary speed you talk about, the six-minute window. And some people say, “That’s ridiculous. How do we know that six minute window?” Well, here’s the best hitting the nail on the head statement I can give you, which is in President Reagan’s memoirs, he refers to the six-minute window and he says… He calls it irrational, which it is. He says, “How can anyone make a decision to launch nuclear weapons based on a blip on a radar scope.” His words. “To unleash Armageddon.” And yet, that is the reality behind nuclear war.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:08)
Just imagine sitting there, one person, because a president is a human being, sitting there, just got the warning that Russia launched. You have six minutes. I meditate on my immortality every day. And here, you would be sitting and meditating, contemplating not just your own mortality, but the mortality of all the people you know, loved ones. Just imagining. What would be going through my head is all the people I know and love personally, and knowing that there’ll be no more, most likely. And if they somehow survive, they will be suffering and will eventually die.

(00:09:55)
I guess the question that kept coming up is how do we stop this? Is it inevitable that it’s going to be escalated to a full-on nuclear war that destroys everything? And it seems like it will be. It’s inevitable. In the position of the President, it’s almost inevitable that they have to respond.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:10:16)
I mean, one of the things I found shocking was how little apparently most presidents know about the responsibility that literally lays at their feet. You may think through this six-minute window, I may think through this six-minute window. But what I learned, for example, former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta was really helpful in explaining this to me because before he was SecDef, he served as the director of the CIA. And before that, he was the White House Chief of Staff. And so, he has seen these different roles that have been so close to the President. But he explained to me that when he was the White House Chief of Staff for President Clinton, he noticed how President Clinton didn’t want to ever really deal with the nuclear issue because he had so many other issues to deal with.

(00:11:15)
And that only when Panetta became Secretary of Defense, he told me, did he really realize the weight of all of this, because he knew he would be the person that the president would turn to were he to be notified of a nuclear attack. And by the way, the Launch on Warning, it’s the ballistic missile seen from outer space by the satellite. And then, there also must be a second confirmation from a ground radar system. But in that process, which is just a couple minutes, everyone is getting ready to notify the president. And one of the first people that gets notified by NORAD or by STRATCOM or by NRO, these different parties that all see the early warning data, one of the first people that’s notified is the Secretary of Defense as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because those two together are going to brief the president about, “Sir, you have six minutes to decide.”

Deterrence


(00:12:25)
And that’s where you realize the immediacy of all of this is so counter to imagining the scenario. And again, all the presidents come into office, I have learned, understanding the idea of deterrence, this idea that we have these massive arsenals of nuclear weapons pointed at one another ready to launch so that we never have nuclear war. But what we’re talking about now is, what if we did? What if we did? And what you’ve raised is this really spooky, eerie subtext of the world right now because many of the nuclear armed nations are in direct conflict with other nations. And for the first time in decades, nuclear threats are actually coming out of the mouths of leaders. This is shocking.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:24)
So deterrence, the polite, implied assumption is that nobody will launch. And if they did, we would launch back and everybody would be dead. But that assumption falls apart completely, the whole philosophy of it falls apart once the first launch happens, then you have six minutes to decide, “Wait a minute. Are we going to hit back and kill everybody on earth? Or do we turn the other cheek in the most horrific way possible?”
Annie Jacobsen
(00:13:57)
Well, when nuclear war starts, there’s no battle for New York or battle for Moscow. It’s just literally… It was called in the Cold War, push button warfare. But in essence, that is what it is. Let’s get some numbers on the table if you don’t mind, right? Because when you’re saying like, “Wait a minute. We’re just hoping that it holds.” Right? Let’s just talk about Russia and the US, the arsenals that are literally pointed at one another right now. The United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed, meaning those weapons could launch in as little as 60 seconds and up to a couple minutes. Some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so. Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons. Same scenario. Their weapons systems are on par with ours. That’s not to mention the 12,500 nuclear weapons amongst the nine nuclear armed nations.

(00:15:04)
But when you think about those kinds of arsenals of just between the United States and Russia, and you realize everything can be launched in seconds and minutes, then you realize the madness of mad, this idea that no one would launch because it would assure everyone’s destruction. Yes. But what if someone did? And in my interviews with scores of top tier national security advisors, people who advise the president, people who are responsible for these decisions if they had to be made, every single one of them said it could happen. They didn’t say this would never happen. And so, the idea is worth thinking about because I believe that it pulls back the veil on a fundamental security that if someone were to use a tactical nuclear weapon, “Well, it’s just an escalation.” It’s far more than that.

Tactical nukes

Lex Fridman
(00:16:11)
So to you, the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, maybe you can draw the line between a tactical and a strategic nuclear weapon. That could be a catalyst. That’s a very difficult thing to walk back from.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:16:23)
Oh, my God. Almost certainly. And again, every person in the national security environment will agree with that, certainly on the American side. Strategic weapons, those are big weapons systems. America has a nuclear triad. We have our ICBMs, which are the silo-based missiles that have a nuclear warhead in the nose cone, and they can get from one continent to the other in roughly 30 minutes. Then we have our bombers, B-52s and B-2s, that are nuclear capable. Those take travel time to get to another continent. Those can also be recalled. The ICBMs cannot be recalled or redirected once launched.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:09)
That one is a particularly terrifying one. So land launched missiles, rockets with a warhead, can’t be recalled.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:17:18)
Cannot be recalled or redirected. And speaking of how little the presidents generally know, as we were talking a moment ago, President Reagan, in 1983, gave a press conference where he misstated that submarine launched ballistic missiles could be recalled. They cannot be recalled. Here’s the guy in charge of the arsenal if it has to get let loose, and he doesn’t even know that they cannot be recalled. So, this is the kind of misinformation and disinformation. UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, recently said when he was talking about the conflicts rising around the world, he said, “We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon.”
Lex Fridman
(00:18:11)
So, just to linger on the previous point of tactical nukes. You were describing strategic nukes, land launched bombers, submarine launched. What are tactical nukes?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:18:23)
That’s the triad, right? And we have the triad, and Russia has the triad. Tactical nuclear weapons are smaller warheads that were designed to be used in battle. And that is what Russia is sort of threatening to use right now. That is this idea, that you would make a decision on the battlefield in an operational environment to use a tactical nuclear weapon. You’re just upping the ante. But the problem is that all treaties are based on this idea of no nuclear use, right? You cannot cross that line. And so, what would happen if the line is crossed is so devastating to even consider. I think that the conversation is well worth having among everyone that is in a power of position. As the UN Secretary General said, “This is madness.” Right? “This is madness. We must come back from the brink. We are at the brink.”
Lex Fridman
(00:19:32)
Can we talk about some other numbers? You mentioned the number of warheads. Land launched, how long does it take to travel across the ocean from the United States to Russia, from Russia to the United States, from China to the United States, approximately how long?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:19:52)
When I was writing an earlier book on DARPA, the Pentagon Science Agency, I went to a library down in San Diego, called the Geisel Library, to look at Herb York’s papers. Herb York was the first chief scientist for the Pentagon for DARPA, then called ARPA. And I had been trying to get the number from the various agencies that be to answer your… What is the exact number and how do we know it? And does it change? And as technology advances, does that number reduce? All these kinds of questions. And no one will answer that question on an official level. And so, much to my surprise, I found the answer in Herb York’s dusty archive of papers. And this is information that was jealously guarded. I mean, it’s not necessarily classified, but it certainly wasn’t out there. And I felt like, “Wow. Herb York left these behind for someone like me to find.”

(00:20:59)
He wanted to know the answer to your question as the guy in charge of it all. So, he hired this group of scientists who then, and still are in many ways, the supermen scientists of the Pentagon, and they’re called the JASON Scientists. Many conspiracies about them abound. I interviewed their founder and have interviewed many of them. But they whittled the number down to seconds specifically for Herb York. And it goes like, because this is where my jaw dropped. And I went, “Wow.” So, 26 minutes and 40 seconds from a launch pad in the Soviet Union to the East Coast. And it happens in three phases. Very simple. And interesting to remember, because then suddenly all of this makes more sense. Boost phase, mid-course phase and then terminal phase, okay?

(00:21:55)
Boost phase, five minutes. That’s when the rocket launches. So, you just imagine a rocket going off the launch pad and the fire beneath it. Again, that’s why the satellites can see it. Now it’s becoming visual, now it makes sense to me. Five minutes. And that’s where the rocket can be tracked. And then imagine learning, “Wait a minute. After five minutes, the rocket can no longer be seen from space. The satellite can only see the hot rocket exhaust.” Then the missile enters its mid-course phase, 20 minutes. And that’s the ballistic part of it, where it’s flying up at between 500 and 700 miles above the earth and moving very fast and with the earth until it gets very close to its target. And the last 100 seconds are terminal phase. It’s where the warhead re-enters the atmosphere and detonates.

(00:22:55)
26 minutes and 40 seconds. Now in my scenario, I open with North Korea launching a one megaton nuclear warhead at Washington DC. That’s the nihilistic madman maneuver. That’s the bolt out of the blue attack that everyone in Washington will tell you they’re afraid of. And North Korea has a little bit different geography. And so, I had MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol do the math, 33 minutes from a launch pad in Pyongyang to the East coast of the United States. You get the idea, it’s about 30 minutes.

(00:23:37)
But hopefully now that allows readers to suddenly see all this as a real… You almost see it as poetry, as terrible as that may sound. You can visualize it and suddenly it makes sense. And I think the sense-making part of it is really what I’m after in this book. Because I want people to understand, on the one hand, it’s incredibly simple, it’s just the people that have made it so complicated.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:05)
But it’s one of those things that can change all of world history in a matter of minutes. We just don’t, as a human civilization, have experience with that. But it doesn’t mean it’ll never happen. It can happen just like that.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:24:23)
I mean, I think what you’re after, and I couldn’t agree more with, is why is this fundamentally annihilating system, a system of mass genocide? As John Rubel in the book refers to it. Why is it still exist? We’ve had 75 years since there’ve been two superpowers with the nuclear bomb. So, that threat has been there for 75 years, and we have managed to stay alive. One of the reasons why so many of the sources in the book agreed to talk to me, people who had not previously gone on the record about all of this, was because they are now approaching the end of their lives. They spent their lives dedicated to preventing nuclear World War III. And they’ll be the first people to tell you we’re closer to this as a reality than ever before. And so, the only bright side of any of this is that the answer lies most definitely in communication.

Nuclear submarines

Lex Fridman
(00:25:35)
So, there’s a million other questions here. I think the details are fascinating and important to understand. So one, you also say nuclear submarines… You mentioned about 30 minutes, 26, 33 minutes. But with nuclear submarines, that number can be much, much lower. So, how long does it take for a warhead missile to reach the east coast of the United States from a submarine?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:26:04)
Just when you thought it was really bad, and then you realize about the submarines. I mean, the submarines are what are called second strike capacity. Submarines were described to me this way, they are as dangerous to civilization… And let me say a nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered submarine is as dangerous to civilization as an asteroid. They’re unstoppable. They are unlocatable, the former Chief of the Nuclear Submarine Forces, Admiral Michael Connor, told me it’s easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a submarine under the sea.

(00:26:48)
These things are like hell machines, and they’re moving around throughout the oceans, ours, Russia’s, China’s, maybe North Korea’s constantly. And we now know they’re sneaking up to the east and west coast of the United States within a couple hundred miles. How do we know that? Why do we know that? Well, I found a document inside of a budget that the defense department was going to Congress for more money recently and showed maps of precisely where these submarines… How close they were getting to the eastern seaboard.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:23)
Wat, wait, wait. So, nuclear subs are getting within 200 miles?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:27:27)
Couple hundred miles, yes. They weren’t precise on the number, but when you look at the map-
Lex Fridman
(00:27:27)
Couple hundred.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:27:32)
Yeah. And that’s when you’re talking about under 10 minutes from launch to strike.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:37)
Undetectable.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:27:38)
And they’re undetectable. The map making is done after the fact because of a lot of underwater surveillance systems that we have. But in real time, you cannot find a nuclear submarine. And just the way a submarine launches goes 150 feet below the surface to launch its ballistic missile. I mean, it comes out of the missile tube with enough thrust that the thrusters, the boot, they ignite outside the water and then they move into boost. And so, the technology involved is just stunning and shocking. And again, trillions of dollars spent so that we never have a nuclear war. But my God, what if we did.

Nuclear missiles

Lex Fridman
(00:28:25)
As you write, they’re called the handmaidens of the apocalypse. What a terrifying label. I mean, one of the things you also write about, so for the land launched ones, they’re presumably underground. So the silos, how long does it take to go from pressing the button to them emerging from underground for launch? And is that part detectable or it’s only the heat?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:28:55)
What’s interesting about the silos, America has 400 silos, right? We’ve had more. But we have 400, and they’re underground, and they’re called Minutemen after the Revolutionary War heroes. But the joke in Washington is they’re not called Minutemen for nothing, because they can launch in one minute. The president orders the launch of the ICBMs, ICBM stands for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. He orders the launch, and they launch 60 seconds later. And then, they take 30 some odd minutes to get to where they’re going.

(00:29:32)
The submarines take about 14 or 15 minutes from the launch command to actually launching. And that has to do, I surmise, with the location of the submarine, its depth. Some of these things are so highly classified and other details are shockingly available if you look deep enough, or if you ask enough questions, and you can go from one document to the next, to the next and really find these answers.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:03)
Not to ask top secret questions, but to what degree do you think the Russians know the locations of the silos in the US and vice versa?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:30:12)
Lex, you and I can find the location of every silo right now.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:16)
Oh, no.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:30:17)
They’re all there. And before they were there on Google, they were there in Maps because we’re a democracy and we make these things known. Now, what’s tricky is that Russia and North Korea rely upon what are called road mobile launchers. Russia has a lot of underground silos. All of the scenario takes you through these different facilities that really do exist, and they’re all sourced with how many weapons they have and their launch procedures and whatnot. But in addition to having underground silos, they have road mobile launchers, and that means you just have one of these giant ICBMs on a 22 axle truck that can move stealthily around the country so that it can’t be targeted by the US Defense Department.

(00:31:08)
We don’t have those in America, because presumably the average American isn’t going to go for the ICBM road mobile launcher driving down the street in your town or city, which is why the Defense Department will justify we need the second strike capacity capability, the submarines, because… The wonky stuff that is worth looking into, if you really dig the book and are like, “Wait a minute.” It’s all footnoted where you can learn more about how these systems have changed over time. And why, more than anything, it’s very difficult to get out of this catch-22 conundrum that we need nuclear weapons to keep us safe. That is the real enigma. Because the other guys have them, right? And the other guys have-
Annie Jacobsen
(00:32:01)
The other guys have them. And the other guys have more sinister ways of using them, or at least that’s what the nomenclature out of the Pentagon will always be when anyone tries to say, “We just need to really think about full disarmament.”
Lex Fridman
(00:32:16)
You’ve written about intelligence agencies. How good are the intelligence agencies on this? How much does CIA know about the Russian launch sites, and capabilities, and command and control procedures, and all of this and vice versa?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:32:33)
I mean, all of this, because it’s decades old, is really well known. If you go to the Federation of American Scientists, they have a team led by a guy called Hans Kristensen who runs what’s called the Nuclear Notebook. And he and his team every year are keeping track of this number of warheads on these number of weapon systems. And because of the treaties, the different signatories to the treaty all report these numbers. And of course, the different intelligence community, people are keeping track of what’s being revealed honestly and reported with transparency and what is being hidden. The real issue is the new systems that Russia is working on right now, and that will lead us… We are moving into an era whereby the threat of actually having new weapon systems that are nuclear capable is very real because of the escalating tensions around the world. And that’s where the CIA would guess is doing most of its work right now.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:38)
So most of your research is looking at the older versions of the system, and presumably there’s potentially secret development of new ones, hopefully not-
Annie Jacobsen
(00:33:50)
Which violates treaties.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:52)
Yes.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:33:52)
So yes, that is where the intelligence agencies… But at a point, it’s overkill, literally and figuratively. People are up in arms about these hypersonic weapons. Well, we have a hypersonic weapons program, Falcon. Google Blackswift. This is Lockheed’s doing. DARPA exists to create the vast weapon systems of the future. That is its job. It has been doing that since its creation in 1957. I would never believe that we aren’t ahead of everyone. Call me over- informed or naive, one or the other. That would be my position because DARPA works from the chicken or the egg scenario. That once you learn about something, once you learn Russia’s created this Typhoon submarine, which may or may not be viable, it’s too late if you don’t already have one.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:50)
We’ll probably talk about DARPA a little bit. One of the things that makes me sad about Lockheed, many things make me sad about Lockheed, but one of the things is because it’s very top secret, you can’t show off all the incredible engineering going on there. The other thing that’s more philosophical, DARPA also, is that war seems to stimulate most of our, not most, but a large percent of our exciting innovation in engineering. But that’s also the pragmatic fact of life on earth is that the risk of annihilation is a great motivator for innovation, for engineering, and so on. But yes, I would not discount the United States in its ability to build the weapons of the future, nuclear included. Again, terrifying. Can you tell me about the nuclear football, as it’s called?

Nuclear football

Annie Jacobsen
(00:35:50)
I think Americans are familiar with the football, at least anyone who follows national security concepts because it’s a satchel. It’s a leather satchel that is always with a military aide in Secret Service nomenclature. That’s the mil aide. And he’s trailing around the president 24/7, 365 days a year, and also the vice president, by the way, with the ability to launch nuclear war in that six-minute window all the time. That is also called the football, and it’s always with the president. To report this part of the book, I interviewed a lot of people in the Secret Service that are with the president and talk about this. And the Director of the Secret Service, a guy called Lou Merletti, told me a story that I just really found fascinating. He was also in charge of the president’s detail, President Clinton this was, before he was director of the Secret Service.

(00:36:51)
And he told me the story about how, he said, “The football is with the president at all times, period.” They were traveling to Syria, and Clinton was meeting with President Assad. And they got into an elevator, Clinton and the Secret Service team, and one of Assad’s guys was like, “No.” About the mil aide. And Lou said it was like a standoff because there was no way they were not going to have the president with his football in an elevator. And it sums up. For me anyways, you realize what goes into every single one of these decisions. You realize the massive system of systems behind every item you might just see in passing and glancing on the news as you see the mil aide carrying that satchel. Well, what’s in that satchel? I really dug into that to report this book.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:56)
What is in that satchel?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:37:56)
Okay. So well, okay. First of all, people always say, “It’s incredibly classified.” I mean, people talk about UFOs. “It’s incredibly…” I mean, come on, guys. That is nothing burger. You want to know what’s really classified? What’s in that football? What’s in that satchel? But the PEAD, Presidential Emergency Action Directives, those have never been leaked. No one knows what they are. What we do know from one of the mil aides who spoke on the record, a guy called Buzz Patterson, he describes the President’s orders. So if a nuclear war has begun, if the president has been told, “There are nuclear missiles, one or more, coming at the United States, you have to launch in a counterattack. The red clock is ticking. You have to get the blue impact clock ticking.” He needs to look at this list to decide what targets to strike and what weapon systems to use. And that is what is on, according to Buzz Patterson, a piece of laminated plastic. He described it like a Denny’s menu. And from that menu, the president chooses targets and chooses weapon systems.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:14)
And it’s probably super old school, like all top secret systems are, because they have to be tested over and over and over and over and over, probably-
Annie Jacobsen
(00:39:23)
Yes, and it’s non-digital.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:24)
Non-digital. It might literally be a Denny’s menu from hell.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:39:29)
Right. And meanwhile, I learned this only in reporting the book. There is a identical black book inside the STRATCOM bunker in Nebraska. So three command bunkers are involved when nuclear war begins. There’s the bunker beneath the Pentagon, which is called the National Military Command Center. Then there is the bunker beneath Cheyenne Mountain, which everyone has or many people have heard of because it’s been made famous in movies. That is a very real bunker. And then there is a third bunker, which people are not so familiar with, which is the bunker beneath Strategic Command in Nebraska.

(00:40:13)
And so it’s described to me this way, the Pentagon bunker is the beating heart, the Cheyenne Mountain bunker is the brains, and the STRATCOM bunker is the muscle. The STRATCOM commander will receive word from the president, “Launch orders.” And then directs the 150,000 people beneath him what to do from the bunker beneath STRATCOM. He gets the orders, then he has to run out of the building and jump onto what’s called the doomsday plane. We’ll get into that in a minute. Let me just finish the… I mean, but again-
Lex Fridman
(00:40:57)
No, this is good. All right.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:40:57)
… these are the details. These are the systematic sequential details that happen in seconds and minutes. And reporting them, I never cease to be amazed by what a system it is. A follows B. It’s just numerical, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:41:19)
Yeah, but as we discuss this procedure, each individual person that follows that procedure might lose the big picture of the whole thing. I mean, especially when you realize what is happening that almost out of fear, you just follow the steps.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:41:38)
Yep. Or okay, so imagine this. Imagine being the president, and you got that six minute. You’re looking at your list of strike options. You’re being briefed by your chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and your SecDef. And this other really spooky detail. In the STRATCOM bunker, in addition to the nuclear strike advisor who can answer very specific questions, if the president’s like, “Wait a minute, why are we striking that and not that?” There’s also a weather officer. And this is the kind of human detail that kept me up at night because that weather officer is in charge of explaining to the president really fast, how many people are going to die and how many people are going to die in minutes, weeks, months, and years from radiation fallout.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:38)
Because a lot of that has to do with the weather system.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:42:41)
Yes. Yes. And so these kinds of the humanness balanced out with the mechanization of it all, it’s just really grotesque.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:58)
So the doomsday plane from STRATCOM?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:43:00)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:01)
What’s that? Where’s it going? What’s on it?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:43:01)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:05)
[inaudible 00:43:05].
Annie Jacobsen
(00:43:05)
Okay, ready?
Lex Fridman
(00:43:06)
Yeah.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:43:06)
It’s going to fly in circles. That’s where it’s going. It’s flying in circles around the United States of America so that nuclear weapons can be launched from the air after the ground systems are taken out by the incoming ICBMs or the incoming submarine-launched ballistic missiles. This has been in play since the ’50s. These are the contingency plans for when nuclear war happens. So again, going back to this absurd paradox, nuclear war will never happen. Mutual assured destruction, that is why deterrence will hold. Well, I found a talk that the deputy director of STRATCOM gave to a very close-knit group where he said, “Yes, deterrence will hold. But if it fails, everything unravels.” And think about that word unravels. And the unraveling is the doomsday plane launches. The STRATCOM commander jumps in. He’s in that plane, he’s flying around the United States, and he’s making decisions because the Pentagon’s been taken out. At 9/11, by the way, Bush was in the doomsday plane.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:25)
And Bush had to make decisions quickly, but not as quickly as he would’ve needed to have done if there’s a nuclear launch.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:44:35)
I mean-
Lex Fridman
(00:44:35)
Six minutes.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:44:37)
… it basically happens in three acts. There’s the first 24 minutes, the next 24 minutes, and the last 24 minutes. And that is the reality of nuclear weapons.

Missile interceptor system

Lex Fridman
(00:44:54)
What is the interceptor capabilities of the United States? How many nuclear missiles can be stopped?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:45:02)
I was at a dinner party with a very informed person, somebody who really should have known this, and this is what I was considering writing and reporting this book. And he said to me, “Oh Annie, that would never happen because of our powerful interceptor system.” Okay. Well, he’s wrong. Let me tell you about our powerful interceptor system. First of all, we have 44 interceptor missiles total, period, full stop. Let me repeat, 44. Earlier we were talking about Russia’s 1,670 deployed nuclear weapons. How are those 44 interceptor missiles going to work? And they also have a success rate of around 50%. So they work 50% of the time.

(00:45:58)
There are 40 of them in Alaska, and there are four of them at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara. And they are responsible at about nine minutes into the scenario. After the ICBM has finished that five-minute boost phase we talked about, now it’s in mid-course phase, and the ground radar systems have identified, yes, this is an incoming ICBM. And now the interceptor missiles have to launch. It’s essentially shooting a missile with a missile. Inside the interceptor, which is just a big giant rocket, in its nose cone, it has what’s called the aptly named Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle. There’s no explosives in that thing. It’s literally just going to take out the warhead ideally with force. So one of them is going mach 20. I mean, the speeds at which these two moving objects hurtling through space are going is astonishing. And the fact that interception is even possible is really remarkable, but it’s only possible 50% of the time.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:16)
Is it possible that we only know about 44, but there could be a lot more?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:47:20)
No, impossible. That I would be willing to bet.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:24)
And how well-tested are these interceptors?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:47:26)
Well, that’s where we get the success rate that’s around 50% because of the tests. And actually the interceptor program is, are you ready for this? It’s on strategic pause right now, meaning the interceptor missiles are there, but developing them and making them more effective is on strategic pause because they can’t be made more effective. People have these fantasies that we have a system like the Iron Dome. And they see this in current events, and they’re like, “Oh, our interceptors would do that.” It’s just simply not true.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:59)
Why can’t an Iron Dome-like system be constructed for nuclear warheads?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:48:03)
We have systems I write about called the THAAD system, which is ground-based, and then the Aegis system, which is on vessels. And these are great at shooting down some rockets, but they can only shoot them one at a time. You cannot shoot the mother load as it’s coming in. Those are the smaller systems, the tactical nuclear weapons. And by the way, our THAAD systems are all deployed overseas, and our Aegis systems are all out at sea. And again, reporting that, I was like, “Wait, what? You have to really hunker down. Are we sure about this?” People really don’t want to believe this is an actual fact. After 9/11, Congress considered putting Aegis missiles and maybe even THAAD systems along the West Coast of the United States to specifically deal with the threats against nuclear-armed North Korea. But it hasn’t done so yet. And again, you have to ask yourself, “Wait a minute. This is insanity.” One nuclear weapon gets by any of these systems, and it’s full-out nuclear warfare. So that’s not the solution. More nuclear weapons is not the solution.

North Korea

Lex Fridman
(00:49:10)
I’m looking for a hopeful thing here about North Korea. How many deployed nuclear warheads does North Korea have? So does the current system, as we described it, the interceptors and so on, have a hope against the North Korean attack? The one that you mentioned people are worried about.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:49:31)
So North Korea has 50, let’s say 50 nuclear weapons right now. Some NGOs put it at more than 100. It’s impossible to know because North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has no transparency. They’re the only nuclear-armed nation that doesn’t announce when they do a ballistic missile test. Everyone else does. No one wants to start a nuclear war by accident. So if Russia is going to launch an ICBM, they tell us. If we’re going to launch one, and I’m talking test runs here, with a dummy warhead, we tell them. Not North Korea. That’s a fact. So we’re constantly up against the fear of North Korea. In the scenario, I have the incoming North Korean one-megaton weapon coming in, and the interceptor system tries to shoot it down. So there’s not enough time. And this, by the way, I ran through by all generals from the Pentagon who run these scenarios for NORAD and confirmed all of this as fact. This is the situation.

(00:50:42)
So in the scenario, I have the nuclear ICBM coming in. The interceptor missiles try to shoot down the warhead. The capability is not like what’s called shoot and look. There’s not enough time to go, “And we’re going to try to get it. We missed it. Okay, let’s go for another one.” So you have to go… So in my scenario, we fire off four, which is about what I was told, one to four, because you’re worried about the next one that’s going to come in. You’re going to use up 10% of your missile force, of your interceptor force on one, and all four miss. And that’s totally plausible.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:19)
Right. How likely are mistakes, accidents, false alarms taken as real, all this kind of stuff in this picture? So we’ve assumed the detection works correctly. How likely is it possible, anywhere? You described this long chain of events that can happen. How possible is it just to make a mistake, a stupid human mistake along the way?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:51:45)
There have been at least six known absolute, oh my God, close calls, how, thank God this happened, type scenarios. One was described to me with an actual personal participant, former Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry, and he described what happened to him in 1979. He was not yet Secretary of Defense. He was the Deputy Director of the Research and Engineering, which is a big job at the Pentagon. And the night watch fell on him essentially. And he gets this call in the middle of the night. He’s told that Russia has launched not just ICBMs, but submarine-launched ballistic missiles are coming at the United States. And he is about to notify the president that the six-minute window has to begin when he learns it was a mistake.

(00:52:41)
The mistake was that there was a training tape with a nuclear war scenario. We haven’t even begun to talk about the nuclear war scenarios that the Pentagon runs. An actual VHS training tape had been incorrectly inserted into a system at the Pentagon. And so this nuclear launch showed up at that bunker beneath the Pentagon and at the bunker beneath STRATCOM because they’re connected, as being real. And then it was like, oh, whoops. It’s actually a simulation test tape. And Perry described to me what that was like, the pause in his spirit and his mind and his heart when he realized, “I’m about to have to tell the president that he needs to launch nuclear weapons.” And he learned just in the nick of time that it was an error. And that’s one of five examples.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:36)
Can you speak to maybe is there any more color to the feelings he was feeling? What’s your sense? And given all the experts you’ve talked to, what can be said about the seconds that one feels once finding out that a launch has happened, even if that information is false information?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:54:00)
For me personally, that’s the only firsthand story that I ever heard because it’s so rare and it’s so unique. And most people in the national security system, at least in the past, have been loath to talk about any of this. It’s the sacred oath. It’s taboo. It’s taboo to go against the system of systems that is making sure nuclear war never happens. Bill Perry was one of the first people who did this. And a lot of it, I believe, at least in my lengthy conversations with him, we had a lot of Zoom calls over COVID when I began reporting this.

(00:54:40)
And he had a lot to do with me feeling like I could write this book from a human point of view and not just from the mechanized systems. Because, and I only lightly touch upon this because it’s such a fast sweeping scenario, but Perry, for example, spent his whole life dedicated to building weapons of war only later in life to realize this is madness. And he shared with me that it was that idea about one’s grandchildren inheriting these nuclear arsenals and the lack of wisdom that comes with their origin stories. When you’re involved in it in the ground up, apparently it has perhaps you’re a different kind of steward of these systems than if you just inherit them, and they are pages in a manual.

Nuclear war scenarios

Lex Fridman
(00:55:45)
People forget. You mentioned the nuclear war scenarios that the Pentagon runs. I’d love to… What do you know about those?
Annie Jacobsen
(00:55:53)
I mean, again, they are very classified. I mean, it was interesting coming across levels of classification I didn’t even know existed. ECI, for example, is exceptionally controlled information. But the Pentagon nuclear war gaming scenarios, they’re almost all still classified. One of them was declassified recently, if you can call it that. I show an image of it in the book, and it’s just basically almost entirely redacted. And then there’ll be a date, or it’ll say, “Phase one.” And that one was called Proud Prophet. But what was incredible about the declassification process of that is it allowed a couple of people who were there to talk about it, and that’s why we have that information.

(00:56:43)
And I write about Proud Prophet in the book because it was super significant in many ways. One, it was happening right… In 1983, it was an insane moment in nuclear arsenals. There were 60,000 nuclear weapons. Right now there’s 12,500. So we’ve come a long way, baby, in terms of disarmament. But there were 60,000. And by the way, that was not the ultimate high. The ultimate high was 70,000. This is insane. And Ronald Reagan was president, and he orders this war game called Proud Prophet, and everyone that mattered was involved. They were running the war game scenarios.

(00:57:25)
And what we learned from his declassification is that no matter how nuclear war starts, there was a bunch of different scenarios, with NATO involved, without NATO, all different scenarios. No matter how nuclear war starts, it ends in Armageddon. It ends with everyone dead. I mean, this is shocking when you think about that coupled with the idea that all that has been done in the 40 some odd years since is, okay, let’s just really lean in even harder to this theoretical phenomena of deterrence. Because that’s all it is, it’s just a statement, Lex. Deterrence will hold. Okay. Well, what if it doesn’t? Well, we know from Proud Prophet what happens if it doesn’t.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:20)
So almost always, so there’s no mechanisms in the human mind and the human soul that stops it in the governments that we’ve created. The procedure escalates always.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:58:31)
I mean, here’s a crazy nomenclature, jargon thing for you. Ready? Escalate to deescalate. That’s what comes out of it. Think about what I just said. Escalate to deescalate. So someone strikes you with a nuclear weapon, you’re going to escalate it. General Hyten recently said he was STRATCOM commander. He was saber-rattling with North Korea during COVID, and he said, “They need to know if they launch one nuclear weapon, we launch one. If they launch two, we launch two.” But it’s actually more than that. They launch one, we launch 80. That’s called escalate to deescalate. Pound the you know what out of them to get them to stop.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:14)
But to make a case for that, there is a reason to the madness because you want to threaten this gigantic response. But when it comes to it, the seconds before, there is still a probability that you’ll pull back.
Annie Jacobsen
(00:59:36)
Which brings us to the most terrifying facts that I learned in all of that, and that has to do with errors. Not errors of like we spoke about a minute ago with a simulation test tape. I’m talking about if one madman, one nihilistic madman were to launch a nuclear weapon as I write in this scenario, and we needed to escalate to deescalate. We needed to send nuclear weapons at, let’s say North Korea as I do in my scenario.

(01:00:08)
Well, what is completely unknown to 98% of the planet is that not only do the Russians have a very flawed satellite system so that they cannot interpret what is happening properly, but there is an absolutely existential flaw in the system, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed with me, which is that our ICBMs do not have enough range. If we launch a counterattack against, say, North Korea, our ICBMs must fly over Russia. They must fly over Russia. So imagine saying, “Oh, no, no. These 82 warheads that are going to actually strike the Northern Korean peninsula are not coming for you, Russia.” Our adversary right now that we’re saber-rattling with. “Just trust us.” And that is where nuclear war unfolds into Armageddon. And that hole in national security is shocking. And as Panetta told me, no one wants to discuss it.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:22)
And if one nuclear weapon does reach its target, I presume communication breaks down completely, or there’s a high risk of breakdown of communication.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:01:36)
Well, let’s back up. We are both presumptuous to assume that communication could even happen prior to, and let me give you a very specific example. During the Ukraine war, if perhaps you remember, I think it was in November of 2022. News reports erroneously stated that a Russian rocket, a Russian missile had hit Poland, a NATO country. It turned out to be a mistake, but for several hours, this was actually the information that was all over the news, breaking news. 36 hours later, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, gave a press conference and talked about this and admitted that he could not reach his Russian counterpart during those 36 hours. He could not reach him. How are you going to not have an absolute Armageddon-like furor with nuclear weapons in the air if people can’t get on the phone during a ground war?
Lex Fridman
(01:02:48)
I’d like to believe that there’s people in major nations that don’t give a damn about the bullshit of politics and can always just pick up the phone. Very close to the top, but not at the very top, and just cut through the bullshit of it in situations like this.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:03:09)
I hope that’s true. I doubt it is, and let me tell you why. Most, and neither you nor I are political, from what I gather. So I just write about POTUS, President of the United States. You have no idea what my politics are because they shouldn’t matter. No one should be for nuclear war, or no one should be for national insecurity. Yes, you want to have a strong nation. But once you get into politics, then you’re talking about sycophants. And the more a political leader becomes divisive, becomes polemic, the more his platform is predicated on hating the other side, either within his own country or with alleged enemy nations. The more you surround yourself, as we see in the current day with sycophants, with people who will tell you not only what they think you want-
Annie Jacobsen
(01:04:00)
… defense with people who will tell you not only what they think you want to hear, but will help them to hold onto power. So you don’t have wise decision makers. Long gone are the days where we had presidents who had advisors on both sides of the aisle. That’s really important, because you want to have differing opinions. But as things become more viperous, both here in the United States and in nuclear armed nations, all bets are off at whether your advisors are going to give you good advice.

Warmongers

Lex Fridman
(01:04:38)
Who are the people around the President of the United States that give advice in this six minute window? How many of them just, maybe you could speak to the detail of that, but also to the spirit of the way they see the world. How many of them are warmongers? How many of them are kind of big picture, peace, humanity type of thinkers?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:04:59)
Well, again, we’re talking about that six minute window, so it’s not exactly like you can, let me put a pot of coffee on and really tell me what you think and we can strategize here, right? You have your SecDef and your chairman, maybe the vice chairman.

(01:05:13)
We haven’t even begun to talk about the fact that at the same time, these advisors also have a parallel concern, and that’s called continuity of government. So while they’re trying to advise on the nuclear counterstrike in response to the incoming nuclear missile, they have to be thinking, “How are we going to keep the government functioning when the missiles start hitting, when the bombs start going off?” And that is about getting yourself out of the Pentagon, let’s say. Getting yourself to one of these nuclear bunkers that I write about at length in the book.

(01:05:50)
So how much can you ask of a human, right? Because it comes down to a human. Secretary of Defense is a human. Imagine that job while trying to advise the president. And then there’s also a really interesting term which I learned about called jamming the president, which is often understood in Washington that the military advisors would, we don’t know if this is legit, we’ve never seen it put to the test, but jamming the president means the military advisors are going to push for a really aggressive counter attack immediately.

(01:06:26)
And again, you’re the president who’s not really been paying attention to this because he has many other things to deal with. Speed is not conducive to wisdom.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:36)
Can you speak to the jamming the president? So your sense is the advisors would by default be pushing for aggressive counter attack.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:06:46)
That is a term in sort of the national security nuclear command and control historical documentation that many of the people that you might call the more dovish type people are worried about, that the more hawkish people, the military advisors, are going to be jamming the president to make these decisions about which targets. Not if, but what.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:15)
The argument will be about which targets, not about if.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:07:18)
Yes. Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:19)
I hope that even the warmongers would at this moment… Because what underlies the idea of you wanting to go to war? It’s power. It’s like wanting to destroy the enemy and be the big kid on the block. But with nuclear war, it just feels like that falls apart. Do you think warmongers actually believe they can win a nuclear war?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:07:44)
Well, you’ve raised a really important question that we looked at the historical record for that answer. Because astonishingly, all of this began, like when Russia first got the bomb in 1949, the powers that be, and I write about them in the book is in a setup for the moment of launch. It’s called How We Got Here. And you see, and I cite declassified documents from some of these early meetings where nuclear war plans were being laid out. And absolutely back in the 1950s the generals and the admirals that were running the nuclear command and control system believed that we could fight and win a nuclear war despite hundreds of millions of people dying. This was the prevailing thought. And only over time did the kind of concept come into play that no, we can never have a nuclear war. It’s the famous Gorbachev and Reagan joint statement. “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But before that, many people believed that it could be won, and they were preparing for that.

President’s cognitive ability

Lex Fridman
(01:09:07)
Not to be political and not to be ageist, but do cognitive abilities and all that kind of stuff come into play here? So if so much is riding on the president, is there tests that are conducted? Is there regular training procedures on the president that you’re aware of? Do you know?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:09:29)
I don’t think that has anything to do with ageism. I think it’s an earnest question, a really powerful one. And if people were to ask that question of themselves or their sort of dinner party guests or their family around the dinner table guests, you might come to a real good conclusion about how bad our political system is and how bad our presidential candidates are. Because why on earth there would be two candidates, one of whom has cognitive problems and the other of whom has judgment problems? These are the two biggest issues with the nuclear launch, judgment and cognition. And so where’s the young-ish, thoughtful, forward looking, wise, dedicated civil servant running for president? I know that sounds fantastical, but I wish it weren’t.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:32)
So that’s one of the things that you really think about when voting for president is this scenario that we’ve been describing, these six minutes. Imagine the man or woman sitting there six minutes waiting for the pot of coffee.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:10:47)
But I think about that issue with any war. I mean, prior to writing Nuclear War: A Scenario, I previously wrote six books on military and intelligence programs designed to prevent nuclear war. And I believe the president as commander in chief should be of the highest character possible. Because the programs, the wars that we have fought since World War II have all been… How many octogenarian sources have I interviewed? I’m talking about Nobel Laureates and weapons designers and spy pilots and engineers in general. They’ve all said to me with great pride, “We prevented World War III, nuclear World War III.”

(01:11:43)
But that idea that the commander in chief and everyone within the national security apparatus should be making really good decisions about war. It’s the oldest cliche in the world that the wars are fought by the young kids. It’s not a cliche; it’s true. And so the character part about the president should be in play whether we’re thinking about nuclear war or any war, in my opinion.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:11)
Well, I agree with you first of all, but it feels like with nuclear war, one person becomes exponentially more important. With regular war, the decision to go to war or not, advisors start mattering more. There’s judgment issues. You could start to make arguments for more leeway in terms of what kind of people we elect. It seems like with nuclear war, there’s no leeway. It’s like one person can resist the jamming the president force, the warmongers all the calculation in considering what are the errors, the mistakes, the missiles flying over Russia, the full dynamics of the geopolitics going on in the world, consider all of humanity, the history of humanity, the future of humanity, all of it just loaded in to make a decision. Then it becomes much more important that your cognitive abilities are strong and your judgment abilities against powerful wise people just as a human being are strong. So I think that’s something to really, really consider when you vote for president.

(01:13:32)
But to which degree is it really on the president versus to the people advising?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:13:37)
Oh no, it’s on the president. The president has to make the call. And that six minute window happens so fast. I mean, the president is going to be being moved for part of that time. The Secret Service is going to be up against STRATCOM. STRATCOM saying, “We need the launch orders,” and the Secret Service is going to be saying, “We need to move the president.” So it’s not as much that he’s delegating the issues; it’s more like the issue is being postponed. Because there is only one issue, for the president to say, “These targets.” For him to choose from the Denny’s like menu, “Okay, this is what we’re going to go with.”

(01:14:13)
And then this astonishing thing happens. The president takes out his wallet. He has a card in it that’s colloquially called the biscuit, and that card with the codes matches up an item in the briefcase in the football that then is received by an officer underneath the Pentagon in that bunker. It’s a call and response, Lex. It’s like alpha zeta, that’s it. And then back so that the individual in the bunker realizes they are getting the command from the president. And then that order is passed to STRATCOM. And STRATCOM, the commander of STRATCOM, and I interviewed a former commander of STRATCOM, commander of STRATCOM then follows orders, which is he delivers the launch orders to the nuclear triad, and what’s done is done.

Refusing orders

Lex Fridman
(01:15:19)
What would you do if you were the commander of STRATCOM in that situation? What would you do? Because I think my gut reaction right now, if you just throw me in there, I would refuse orders.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:15:28)
Okay, so good question. I asked that exact question to one of my very helpful sources on the book, Dr. Glen McDuff, who is at Los Alamos and who for a while was the classified… They have a museum that’s classified within the lab, and he was the historian in charge of it. He’s a nuclear weapons engineer. He worked on Star Wars during the Reagan era. And he does a lot having to do with the history of Los Alamos. By the way, because I’ve reported on nuclear weapons for 12 years now, and Oppenheimer movie had a very, to me, positive impact on Los Alamos’ transparency with people like me. They had a real willingness to share information. I think before perhaps they were on their heels feeling they needed to be on the defensive, but now they’re much more forthcoming. They were super helpful. I can tell you the origin story of the football, which they declassified for the book. But I asked this question to Dr. Glen McDuff in a different manner. I said, “Is there a chance that the STRATCOM commander would defy orders?” And he said, “Annie, you have a better chance winning Powerball.”
Lex Fridman
(01:16:54)
Why do you think? What’s his intuition behind that?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:16:58)
You don’t wind up as STRATCOM commander unless you are someone who follows orders. You follow orders.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:08)
You don’t think there’s a deep humanity there? Because his intuition is about everything we know so far, but this situation has never happened in the history of earth.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:17:19)
You’re raising a really tricky, interesting conundrum here. Because during COVID, when President Trump and the leader of North Korea were kind of locked in various relationships with one another, good, bad, threatening, non-threatening, friendly; just bananas, you might say, not presidential behavior. If you were someone watching C-span like I do, nerding out on what STRATCOM was actually saying about all this, you noticed that STRATCOM commanders were speaking out publicly to Congress more so than ever I had ever seen before. And this issue came up, would you defy presidential orders?

(01:18:07)
So the caveat I would say to McDuff’s answer of easier to win the Powerball is that if the commander of STRATCOM interpreted the president’s behavior to be unreliable, to be non-presidential, then dot dot dot. But now you’re into some really radical territory.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:40)
I mean, fundamentally, it feels like just looking at all the presidents of the United States in my lifetime, it feels like none of them are qualified for this six minutes. I could see as being the commander of STRATCOM being like, “This guy?” Basically respecting no president. I know you’re supposed to, commander in chief, but in this situation… I mean everybody, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. If I was a commander of STRATCOM, I’d be like, “What does this guy know about any of this?” I would defy orders. I mean, in this situation, when the future of human civilization hangs in the balance, to be the person that says, “Yes, launch,” no matter what, I just can’t see a human being on earth being able to do that in the United States of America. That’s a hell of a decision. Like, this is it. That’s it.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:19:49)
That’s it. Well, but now you’ve raised a great important presentation essentially, because what you’re saying is, “People, be aware.” Be aware of why you’re voting, or why certain individuals are being escalated to even being able to run for president. What does that mean? Why are people in America not more involved? As citizens do we have a responsibility for that? Because you’ve opened up the door for people to understand, okay, the ultimate thing is the nuclear launch decision. So if a person can’t be trusted with that, everything unravels from there.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:26)
Also, I want to look up who’s the commander of STRATCOM now. Speaking of which, you’ve interviewed a lot of experts for this book. Is there some commonalities about the way, you’ve talked about this a little bit, but in the way they see this whole situation? What scares them the most about this whole system and the whole possibility of nuclear war?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:20:54)
I first learned about nuclear weapons from a guy called Al O’Donnell, who appears in my earlier books, because I interviewed him for over a period of four and a half years because he was an engineer who actually wired nuclear bombs in the 1950s. He was a member of the Manhattan Project in 1946. Worked on Operation Crossroads, the first explosions of nuclear bombs after the war ended, after World War II ended, and went on to arm, wire, and fire 186 out of the 200 some odd atmospheric nuclear tests that the United States did before this was banned. I learned from him the power of these weapons. And I learned from him this very almost nationalistic idea about how important it was to have nuclear weapons. And while I learned a lot about his human side, I also saw the side of him that was very Cold War warrior. So he was kind of the first.

(01:22:04)
And then, I don’t know, there’ve been 100 people that have been directly involved in nuclear weapons along the way. Billy Waugh, who was my main sort of central figure in a book I wrote about the CIA’s paramilitary called Surprise, Kill, Vanish. And Waugh HALO jumped a tactical nuclear weapon into the Nevada test site with a small team. Almost unknown to anyone, right? Only recently declassified. And so his position was like, “Tactical nuclear weapons may end up being used.”

(01:22:41)
I’m trying to speak here to the scope of different people I have interviewed over the years. And what has happened is as I’ve gotten closer to the present day, in arrears, there seems to be a growing movement from some of these Cold warriors off the position of, “Nuclear weapons make us great and strong,” toward “Something must be done to reduce this threat.”

Russia and Putin

Lex Fridman
(01:23:17)
How much do you know, in the same way that you know about the United States, how much do you know about the Russian side? Maybe the Chinese side, India and Pakistan, all of this? How their thinking differs, perhaps?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:23:35)
Well, for that, you want to go to the experts. So for Russia, for example, there’s a guy called Pavel Podvig who is probably the West’s top expert on Russian nuclear forces. He works in parallel with the U.N. He also studied in Moscow. So my information comes from him. You do all the footwork to know what questions to ask, and then you take the very specific questions to him. And I learned from him about how the Russian command and control goes down. And it’s very similar to ours, because America and Russia have been at sort of nuclear dueling with one another for 75 years now. And so everything we have, they have, with the exception of we have a great satellite system and they have a super flawed one. Theirs is called Tundra. And even Pavel Podvig admitted that there’s serious flaws in Tundra. The Russian satellite system, for example, can mistake sunlight for flames, can mistake clouds for a nuclear launch. This is a fact.

(01:24:52)
What was interesting in interviewing him was also this recent very, very dangerous shift in Russian nuclear policy, which is this: Many Russian experts will tell you that Russia has always maintained that it never had a launch on warning policy. Now, I don’t know if I believe that’s true, but I’m just telling you what they say. And this is coming from the generals, the Cold War generals in Soviet Russia saying, “Oh, no, no, no. We would wait.” They were kind of playing the noble warrior. “We would wait to absorb a nuclear attack until we launched.” Okay? So many Americans experts will tell you that that’s just posturing and propaganda. But that was their official position, and that changed just two years ago when Putin gave a speech and he said that their position had changed, that they will no longer wait to absorb an attack. That once they learn of, how did he phrase it? He called it like the trajectory of the missiles, which is a way of, we’re talking about parody, the same way we see the missile coming over in Midcourse. Putin made that same statement, and said, “We would launch.”
Lex Fridman
(01:26:04)
What do you know of the way Putin thinks about nuclear weapons and nuclear war? Is it just something to allude to in a speech? Or do you think he contemplates the possibilities of nuclear war?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:26:18)
I don’t know, but if I had to guess it would go like this. I would look at his background, and he comes from the intelligence world. My experience in interviewing old timers who’ve spent decades working for the CIA or even NRO or NSA, I know the way they think from having spent hundreds of hours interviewing them. And then I know the way that military men think, and it’s very different. Putin’s not a military person per se; he’s an intelligence officer. So what would concern me there if I had to guess about his mindset has to do with paranoia. Most intelligence officers must have a degree of healthy paranoia, or they’re going to wind up dead. And so that’s not a great quality to have.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:11)
You would be more trigger-happy perhaps. So you would be more prone to respond to erroneous signals.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:27:19)
And you’d be suspicious, and you can see that now. There’s such a incredible distrust and sort of real conflict between Russia, between its leader and NATO, between its leader and all of the West. And then that is fueled by his closest advisors. From the statements they have made that I’ve read in translation, they seem to be fostering that same idea that NATO really has it in for Russia. America really has it in. And that is so dangerous and disheartening.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:09)
And perhaps makes it less likely that the president would pick up the phone and talk to the other president.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:28:16)
Or that the close advisors near the president would make that happen.

Cyberattack

Lex Fridman
(01:28:21)
You were talking about the procedure with the football. Is there any concern for cyber attacks? For security concerns at every level here, false signals, errors, shutting down the channels of communication through cyber attacks, all that kind of stuff?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:28:42)
To answer those questions, I interviewed a number of people, but most specifically General Touhill, who was Obama’s cyber chief. He was actually America’s first cyber chief. The nuclear command and control system and really the triad functions on analog systems. It functions on old school systems. If there’s not digital interface, you can’t hack into it. So most of the issues that I raise in the book have to do with what happens to cyber after a nuclear attack? What happens to cyber in the minutes after a bomb, a nuclear weapon strikes America, and how that impacts the ability for people to communicate with one another? That’s when chaos takes control.

Ground zero of nuclear war

Lex Fridman
(01:29:43)
Well, let’s talk about it. So God forbid if a nuclear weapon reaches its target, what happens? Perhaps you could say what you think would be the first target hit. Would it be the Pentagon?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:30:04)
I was told by many people I interviewed that the biggest fear in Washington, DC is what’s called a bolt out of the blue attack. That’s an unwarned nuclear attack against Washington, DC. The target would be the Pentagon, and that’s what I begin the scenario with. I reported in graphic, horrifying detail what happens.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:04)
Yes, you did.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:30:26)
Because I don’t know what’s worse, me writing that all out, or the fact that it’s all documented by the Defense Department. I mean, they have been documenting the effect of nuclear weapons on people and animals and things since the earliest days of the Cold War. And all of the details I pull are from these documents like The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. And again, this document was the original information, the original data, and this document come from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was all classified. And then it was built upon by those 200 some odd atmospheric nuclear weapons tests we did.

(01:31:14)
We’re talking about millimeters and inches. We’re talking about the Defense Department knowing that, oh, seven and a half miles out the upholstery on cars will spontaneously combust. The pine needles will catch on fire. They will start more fires. You have all kinds of mayhem and chaos happening based on reported facts from observations. And this is really shocking and grotesque at the same time.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:48)
So one warhead reaches the Pentagon, everybody in the Pentagon perishes.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:31:57)
180 million degrees. The fireball on a one megaton nuclear weapon is 19 football fields of fire. Think about that. Nothing remains. Nothing remains.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:13)
There’s then a radius where people die immediately, and then there’s people that are dead when found, and then there’s people that will die slowly in centric rings.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:32:31)
And again, rings defined by Defense scientists. But before that, the bomb goes off. Then there’s this blast wave that’s like several hundred miles an hour pushing out like a bulldozer, knocking everything down, bridges, buildings. I mean, you can read FEMA manuals about what the rubble will be like. You’re talking about 30 feet deep rubble as the buildings go over, 6, 7, 8, 10 miles out. That speaks nothing of the mega fires that will then ensue. So once all these people die, and third degree radiation burns. Did you even know there was such a thing as fourth degree radiation burns? We’re talking about the wind ripping the skin off people’s faces many miles out.

(01:33:25)
And then you have a sucking action. Many people are familiar with what the nuclear mushroom cloud looks like. Its stem actually creates, and again, this is from physicists who advise the Defense Department on this, the sucking up into the nuclear stem, 300 mile an hour winds. You’re talking about people miles out getting sucked up into that stem. When you see the mushroom cloud, Lex, in a nuclear war, that would be people. Those are like the remnants of people and of things in the cloud; 30, 40 mile wide mushroom cloud blocking out the sun, and that speaks nothing of the radiation poisoning that follows.

Surviving nuclear war

Lex Fridman
(01:34:14)
And then the power grid goes out. Basically everything we rely on in terms of systems in our way of life goes out. You write, “Those who somehow managed to escape death by the initial blast, shockwave, and firestorm suddenly realize an insidious truth about nuclear war, that they’re entirely on their own.” Here begins a “fight for food and water.” I mean, that is a wake-up call on top of a wake-up call that we go back to a kind of primitive fight for survival, each on their own.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:34:58)
And by the way, those details were given to me by Obama’s FEMA director, Craig Fugate. FEMA is the agency in America that plans for nuclear war. And what Fugate said to me was, “Annie, we plan for asteroid strikes. These are called low probability but high consequence events.” And FEMA is the organization that when there’s a hurricane or an earthquake or a flood, FEMA steps in and they do what’s called population protection planning. They take care of people. And what Fugate told me is after a nuclear strike, after a bolt out of the blue attack, he used those terms, there is no population protection. Everyone’s dead. And he means that metaphorically, but also kind of more literally. Because he just said at that point, “You just hope that you stocked Pedialyte.”
Lex Fridman
(01:35:57)
What do you think happens to humans? How does human nature manifest itself in-
Lex Fridman
(01:36:01)
How does human nature manifest itself in such conditions? Do you think brutality will come out? People will, just for survival, will steal, will murder, will.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:36:14)
I can’t imagine that not happening. I think that’s why people love post-apocalyptic television shows and films because they see that. And then, of course, there’s always one great charismatic person who’s trying to restore morality. These are great narratives that people like to tell themselves in the world of science fiction. But what we’re dealing with is science fact in this scenario. It is meant to terrify people into realizing, wait a minute, this is a conversation that absolutely should be had, while it can still be had, because the realities, when you have the director of FEMA telling you this, it’s a real wake-up call.

(01:36:57)
By the way, Craig Fugate was so transparently human with me, and I quote him directly in the book. But he spoke about, you asked me earlier about what would be going through the president’s mind, and we don’t know, I don’t know, but Craig Fugate told me what would be going through his mind. He said along the lines, I’m paraphrasing, it’s almost something you couldn’t even comprehend. It would just ruin you. His words are really powerful.

(01:37:29)
Of course, the FEMA director, in the scenario, is notified in that first window while the ballistic missile is on its way and no one in America yet knows. I have the FEMA director pull over to the side of the road and jump in a helicopter that’s sent for him to take him to the bunker that FEMA goes to, which is called Mount Weather. And so, Fugate was aware that, as FEMA director, you would likely be taken to a safe place, however many hours you’re going to be safe, or days or maybe weeks or maybe months.

(01:38:04)
But as I also learned from the cyber people I interviewed, that there’s a complete fallacy that these military bases can continue functioning. They run on diesel fuel, and when the fuel stops pumping, there’s no more generators.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:20)
Electricity’s gone. Communication lines are all gone. The food supply. All of it, all the supply chains is gone. It’s terrifying, and that’s just in the first few days, first few hours. In part five, you described the 24 months and beyond after this first hour we’ve been talking about. What happens to earth? What happens to humans if a full-on nuclear war happens?

Nuclear winter

Annie Jacobsen
(01:39:01)
For that, I was super privileged to talk to Professor Brian Toon, who’s one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory. That theory was published in the early 1980s. One of Professor Toon’s professors was Carl Sagan, who was sort of the most famous author of the nuclear winter theory.

(01:39:29)
There were all kinds of controversies about it when it came out, including the Defense Department saying it was Soviet propaganda, which it wasn’t. What the nuclear winter authors conceded back in the ’80s was that their modeling was just the best it could be based on what they had at the time. And so, now flash forward to where we are in 2024, and talking to Professor Toon who’s been working on this issue for all these decades since, he shared with me how the climate models today with the systems we have, the computer systems, reveal that actually nuclear winter is worse.

(01:40:13)
To answer your questions, the bombs stop falling, in my scenario, 72 minutes after they first launch. The bombs stop falling, and then the megafires begin. Each nuclear weapon will have, according to the Defense Department, a megafire that will burn between 100 and 300 square miles. 1000 weapons, 1500 weapons, think about those megafires. Everything is burning, forests, cities. Think about the pyrotoxins in all the cities. High-rises burning. All of this soot gets lofted into the air, according to Toon, some 300 billion pounds of soot. What happens? It blocks out the sun. Without sun, we have nuclear winter. We have a situation whereby ice sheets form. You’re talking about bodies of water in places like Iowa being frozen for 10 years.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:19)
So temperature drops.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:41:20)
Temperature plummets. There are all kinds of papers that have been written about this, using modern systems and the numbers vary, but the bottom line is agriculture fails.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:37)
Foods obviously dies. The agriculture system completely shuts down, so the food sources shut down. There’s no food. There’s no sun. Temperature drops completely. No electricity.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:41:52)
We haven’t even spoken of radiation poisoning because the radiation poisoning kills many people in the aftermath of the nuclear exchange. But after the nuclear freeze ends, after nuclear winter, after the sun starts to come back, let’s say eight, nine, 10 years, now you have no ozone layer or you have a severely depleted ozone layer. And so, the sun’s rays are now poisonous.

(01:42:18)
If you have people living underground and you have this great thawing, and with that great thawing comes pathogens and plague. You have this system where the small-bodied animals, the insects and whatnot, begin reproducing really fast, and the larger body animals like you and me begin to go extinct. Professor Toon said it to me this way. He said, “66 million years ago, an asteroid hit Earth, killed all the dinosaurs and wiped out 70% of the species, and nuclear war would likely do the same.” And so, here we are talking about this because there is a difference. There’s nothing you can do about an asteroid, but there is something you can do about a nuclear war.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:04)
Do you think it’s possible that some humans will survive all of this? If we look, I mean, how long would it be? Would it be decades? Would it be centuries before the earth starts to have the capacity to grow food again?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:43:25)
Carl Sagan talked about that in this amazing book that he wrote with two scientist colleagues called The Cold and the Dark. There’s a bunch of essays about exactly this. What would happen and how long would it take? It’s really interesting. It’s dated. It’s from the ’80s. But man, is it shocking. You think about that where men return to sort of the worst, most base versions of themselves. Civilization is gone, meaning civil society. There’s no rule of law. It’s just fend for yourself. There’s people fighting over what little resources there are. Man returns to a hunter-gatherer state.

(01:44:05)
To really think about this idea, I looked at the oldest known archeological site in the world in Turkey, which is called Gobekli Tepe. It’s really fascinating to me because I interviewed one of the two archeologists who first found this site in the early ’90s. The lead archeologist was a guy named Klaus Schmidt, and Michael Morsch was the young graduate student who was with him. Morsch’s description of coming upon this rumored to be site, there was something called a wishing tree on the site, which I just found so human and perfect, that it was this magical place, and it was Locatable because there was a wishing tree on a hill. It’s where people went to wish and to hope that their wishes came true. I mean, how human is that?

(01:44:57)
That is where beneath the wishing tree, in the shadow of the wishing tree, there was a tepe, which is a hill. Beneath that, there is the oldest known civilization in the world. 12,000 years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers built this site. Why? We don’t know. But I imagined through Morsch’s descriptions of coming upon. He tripped on a rock, he told me. He tripped over a stone that turned out to be the top part of a 12,000 year old sculpted man, giant pillar. He talked about coming upon that. And then, no one knows really what Gobekli Tepe was for.

(01:45:41)
That makes my mind try and answer the question you asked me internally, just as a human who’s here on earth for the amount of time I’m here. If there were a nuclear war, what would it be like? What would it be like when someone in the future, would we become archeologists one day? Would civilization rebuild? Would we develop computers? Who knows? It’s interesting to think about. I hope we never have to.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:08)
What would we remember about this time?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:46:11)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:11)
It is terrifying to think that most of it will be forgotten. Everything we assume will not be forgotten. We think maybe some of the technological developments will be forgotten, but we assume some of history won’t be forgotten. But realistically, especially us descending into primitive survival, probably everything since the industrial age will be forgotten. Everything.

(01:46:40)
Maybe some religious ideas will persist. Some stories and myths will persist. But all the wisdom we’ve gathered, higher level sort of technological wisdom would be gone. That’s terrifying to think about. Maybe even, as you touch on, the very fact of nuclear war might be forgotten. The lessons of nuclear war might be forgotten. That there are these weapons, sort of the obvious elephant in the room would be one of the things that’s completely forgotten or become so vague in the recollection of humans that our understanding will change. It’s almost as if a God descended on earth and destroyed everything. Maybe that’s how it will persist. Mythological interpretation of what nuclear weapons are. That’s terrifying because then it could repeat again.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:47:41)
But I think, for me, the idea of what is buried becomes very interesting and very human, and in a strange way, optimistic and positive because if you can visualize that wishing tree, and I have a picture of it in the book from one of the archeologists who work on that, you think, “What were they wishing? What were they wishing for?” And then, you think of your own self, what do I wish for in this world? Because I do think all things come from what happens metaphorically around the dinner table. What people put their eyes on becomes interesting and expands what people talk about. Ultimately, when you think about the long arc of time and human civilization, it does kind of make you want to communicate more with your enemies, with your adversaries. I think about the quote, what Einstein has said to have said, which is that he was asked what weapons World War III would be fought with. He said, “I don’t know, but I know that World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Alien civilizations

Lex Fridman
(01:49:05)
Let me ask you about the great filter. When you look up into our galaxy, into our universe, look up at the sky, do you think there’s other alien civilizations that are contending with some similar questions? Perhaps the reason we have not definitively seen alien civilizations is because the others have failed to find a solution to this great filter. Something like nuclear weapons.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:49:40)
I’m not sure. I’m going to have to think about that question. But what does come to mind is an answer that was given to me similarly by Ed Mitchell, who went to the moon. He was the sixth man to walk on the moon. And so, his opinion, I think, might count a little more than mine on that subject because his lens is so much greater.

(01:50:14)
Mitchell was vilified when he got back from the moon because it became known that he believed in things like extrasensory perception and this kind of mystical, metaphysical way of looking at the world. He really suffered from that. I mean, he was ridiculed and he lost a lot of his career and his friends. But what he said to me in our interview about his trip home from the moon answers that great filter question, I think, in a way I might want to adopt, which is this.

(01:50:56)
He said that as they were returning from the moon to earth, he looked down at the earth, and I’m paraphrasing him, I write all this in Phenomena, an earlier book, but the paraphrasing is that he looked down from the earth and it was 1971. He thought about all the conflict going on down below, particularly the Vietnam War where many of his friends were. And then, he looked behind him into the great vast galaxy. He had a moment, he says, that was like an epiphany. Not a near-death experience, but a sort of near-life experience where he believed that the human consciousness, which is where so much of this thoughtfulness about metaphysics and ESP perhaps come from.

(01:51:55)
Mitchell’s theory, was that human consciousness, the way to understand it, had something to do with realizing that man’s inner life and man’s outer life are deeply connected, in the same way that man is connected to the galaxy. He said it much more eloquently, but you kind of get the idea. I think it’s why humans have always loved to look up, that there’s more there. It’s like the big version of the wishing tree, what do I wish for for myself? What is maybe, perhaps, the realignment of thinking for those of us in search of happiness instead of war. What does it mean to have a conscience, to have consciousness? What does it mean to be a thinking person? What does it mean to be on this earth, to be born, to live, to die? And then, there is legacy. And so, all of those ideas are, I think, foster the kind of conversation that de-escalates conflict.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:19)
In some deep way, the mysteries of what’s out there when we look out to the stars are the same mysteries that we find when trying to understand the human mind and they’re coupled in some way.

(01:53:36)
For me, thinking about alien civilizations out there is really the same kind of question, which is, what are we? What is this? What are we doing here? How do we come here? Why does it seem to be so magical and beautiful and powerful? Now, where’s it going? Because it feels like we’re really, perhaps for the first time in history, are in a moment where we can destroy ourselves. And so, naturally you ask, well, where’s others like us? Perhaps, are we inevitably going to a place where we’ll destroy ourselves? Is it basically inevitable that we destroy ourselves? We become too powerful and insufficiently wise to know what to do with that power? But like you said, probably the answers to that are in here. We don’t need to look out there.

Extrasensory perception


(01:54:41)
I’d love to ask you about the extrasensory perception. You’ve written, like you said, the book Phenomena on the secret history of the US government’s investigations into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. What are some of the more interesting extrasensory abilities that were explored by the government, and maybe just in general, ESP. What is it? What do you know of it?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:55:08)
The book was so interesting to report because I spend so much time dealing with mechanized systems, machines, war machines, and yet the military and intelligence were and continue to be incredibly interested in the human mind, in consciousness. And so, if one is called hard science, what we’re talking about now is called squishy science. It was really interesting to delve into that world. It just couldn’t be farther from weapons and war, or could it?

(01:55:40)
And then, I really began thinking, well, before science and technology, sort of the supernatural ruled the world. The Oracle of Delphi in Greece exists before the common era rulers to go and beg to learn from the powers that be what was going to happen. All ESP programs, I think, pull from that origin story, the leader’s desire to know. And so, I really found it amazing that many people think these systems, or rather these programs, started in the ’70s. I learned they actually began right after World War II. That was because, and in my reporting, I find all things sort of always circle back to the Third Reich, to the Nazis.

(01:56:40)
The Nazis had a massive occult program, an ESP program, psychokinesis program, astrology. Both Hitler and Himmler were deeply interested in these occult concepts. After I learned from records at the National Archives that after the war, half of everything went to the Soviet Union, and I’m talking about the trove of Nazi documents from which the superpowers were then going to learn to fight future wars, and half of them went to the United States. And so, we got this trove of documents about all of this, and the Soviets got the other. And so, it set off a kind of psychic arms race, which in a weird way paralleled the nuclear arms race, which we’ve been talking about, in as much that it led one side to constantly wonder what the other side had.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:37)
Have they been able to find anything interesting in this squishy science analysis of trying to see how the human mind could be used as a weapon?
Annie Jacobsen
(01:57:50)
The CIA most definitely believed, from my reading of the documents, that there was something very legit, shall we say, about ESP. It was uncontrollable, it was unreliable, but nonetheless it existed. Being the intelligence agency that they are, they cared less about why it worked. They just wanted to know how they could use it. And then, it got into all kinds of elements of placebo effect.

(01:58:21)
When the military stepped in and got involved in the programs, that was a complete disaster, in my opinion, because the military needs to control everything in a mechanized, systematic way. And so, they started, for example, teaching people to be psychic, which is a really, really, really bad idea.

(01:58:43)
Flash forward to where we are today, these programs still exist. There’s a Navy program which is working, based on a lot of data that came back from the war on terror, with certain soldiers knowing, “Wait, don’t walk down that path. There is an IED there.” They call this the spidey sense, and they actually have a program that works from this. These things never go away. They circle around in terms of being made fun of and then taken seriously, and a little of this and of that. My biggest takeaway from writing that book was a quote that I referenced in the beginning, which is the Thomas theorem, and it says, if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:35)
I mean, placebo, as you’ve mentioned, is a fascinating concept. By the way, a short plug, I started listening to it, Andrew Huberman just released a podcast on placebo, the placebo effect.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:59:49)
Does he know the origin story of placebo? We’ll have to ask him.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:52)
We’ll have to ask him.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:59:53)
Are you ready for this?
Lex Fridman
(01:59:54)
Yes.
Annie Jacobsen
(01:59:54)
CIA. Not only that, I can tell you that Dr. Henry Beecher, Harvard, I think he was also at MIT for a bit, he came up with that term. You might even say for the CIA.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:13)
Does that trouble you that so much of this is coming from the CIA first?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:00:17)
You mean the placebo concept or the-
Lex Fridman
(02:00:19)
The placebo concept, but a lot of the sort of scientific investigations.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:00:25)
Listen, I have such mixed feelings about the CIA, as one should. I think you should have mixed feelings about anything that you cover as a reporter or as a human, and maybe change that from mixed to conflicting, because there are really positive elements of every organization within the federal government.

(02:00:46)
I mean, my first learning about the CIA came from the work I did on the Area 51 book about their aerial reconnaissance programs, which were set up again to prevent World War III, nuclear World War III. It was this idea that information was king. The U-2 spy pane was developed out at Area 51. I interviewed Hervey Stockman, the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2, gathered all this intelligence, prevented wars. Later, I wrote a book about the CIA’s paramilitary, Surprise, Kill, Vanish. Just when I was thinking, “Wow, the CIA is doing all this amazing non-kinetic activity with aerial reconnaissance, then you learn about their kill programs,” and that’s a whole different set of issues.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:38)
It turns out, as you write in that book, that the CIA assassinates people sometimes, and we’ll talk about it. But anyway, like you said, conflicting feelings.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:01:51)
I mean, I work with sources to report my books. And so, put yourself in my shoes. I interview for dozens or hundreds of hours, my primary sources. In the case of the Surprise, Kill, Vanish book, I traveled with Billy Waugh, the longest-serving CIA operator, back to the scene of the crime, back to the battle. We went to Hanoi. We went to Havana. You really get to know someone, and that’s when I say conflicting. I work with sources on a real trust basis.

(02:02:29)
Sometimes people will tell me things. They’ll say, “Annie, this is off the record. This is for you to know about me on deep background because I want you to know who I am,” and that’s powerful and a lot of times personal. It’s personal. It’s about their personal life, and it isn’t apropos to what I’m writing about, but I need to know that. That’s where it gets conflicted, in a good way, because you realize where we’re all such creatures of our personal lives. You have a professional life where national security are in your hands. I don’t know what that is like.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:11)
I wonder if you could just speak to that. You’ve interviewed so many powerful people, so many fascinating people. As you’ve spoken about, trust is fundamental to that, so they open up and really show you into their world. What does it take to do that?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:03:33)
I think willingness. We were talking about trust earlier. I have to trust that there’s a reason I find myself in a certain situation. Otherwise, it would just be a constant doubt paradox. Why am I here? What am I doing? And so, I trust that I’m going to learn something of value. And so, I’m willing to listen. I really am willing to listen. So far, it’s always proven… The expectations I might have going into something are dwarfed by the outcome because people are so interesting and because the people that I interview, because I write about war and weapons and national security and government secrets, and the people I interview are at the heart of all of this. I mean, they are really capable people, intellectually brilliant, physically capable. They go so far out on the limb to do their jobs.

(02:04:43)
By the way, the reason they’re talking to me is because they’re still alive and so many of their colleagues are dead. It gives them also a wisdom about life, about sacrifice, not in cliched sort of nationalistic jingoistic terms whatsoever. I’m talking real. What is their real truth?

(02:05:08)
When I went to Vietnam with Billy Waugh, I mean, the details are just every detail. I mean, starting with the fact that he showed up at my house with a giant suitcase and a bunch of clothes, dry cleaning, pressed clothes in plastic hangers, carrying them. I’m like, “Billy, we’re going to Vietnam and we’re going back into the jungle to find the Oscar-8 battle site. What are you carrying?” He got really mad at me, did not like anyone correcting him. I got my husband on the job, like, “Kevin, you got to sort this out.”

(02:05:49)
What transpired was that Billy Waugh had never taken a trip for personal reasons. He operated, I think, in 62 countries, every single time for the CIA. It would go like this, Billy, go to there and get to there, and that’s what he would do. When he arrived, whatever he needed, he would just get. It’s not a fashion trip. He had no idea how to pack for an overseas trip. This was like, “Oh my God, how can you not have the hugest smile on your face going into this? I’m with a guy whose 89 years old.”

(02:06:23)
He’d had eight Purple Hearts from Vietnam. I mean, he operated against Osama bin Laden 10 years before 9/11. He went after bin Laden in Afghanistan when he was 72. He went after Qaddafi during the Arab spring when he was 82, and now here he is with me going to Hanoi. The details, those human details. But my husband repacked his bag and got him a proper suitcase that was carryable and small and he wasn’t trailing the hangers, but it was the trip home in the taxi that I got at this really big reveal.

(02:07:06)
Billy reached into that small suitcase my husband had given him and pulled out a rolled up American flag. He had taken this flag, because I had tried to help him pack and he wouldn’t let me, and I just thought it was like an old guy being stubborn, but he didn’t want me to see that he was bringing an American flag to Vietnam, which is not legal. He wanted to bring that flag and take it around everywhere with him, as he explained to me later, to honor all of his friends who died there 50 years ago.

(02:07:38)
And then, when the trip was finished, he gave me that flag and it’s in my office. That’s the kind of relationship that you can develop with people as a reporter, if you’re willing to go the extra mile with them, to trust them, that they’ll tell you things of value. To me, something like that is as of value as any secret mission I’m able to get declassified, because we are a nation of people.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:03)
And…
Annie Jacobsen
(02:08:00)
… get declassified because we are a nation of people.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:03)
And probably there’s a bunch of human details that you can’t possibly express in words, things left unspoken, but you saw in the silence exchange between the two of you, the sadness, maybe you could see in his face looking back at memories of the people he’s lost, all that kind of stuff.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:08:23)
All that kind of stuff.

Area 51

Lex Fridman
(02:08:26)
You mentioned you wrote a book on Area 51. For people who don’t know, you’ve written a lot about security, the military, secrets, all of this kind of stuff. So Area 51 is one of the legendary centers of all of these kinds of topics. So high level first is what is Area 51, as you understand it, as you’ve written about the lore and the reality.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:09:01)
I think everybody wants to know about Area 51, because it’s like this American enigma. It’s like to some people, it’s the Shangri-La of test bed aerospace programs, and to others, it’s the place of captured aliens and everything in between. I had the great fortune of interviewing 75 people who lived and worked at that base for extended periods of time, mostly leading up to the ’90s because everything since then is classified. So things get declassified after decades. Not everything but some. And that allows you to piece together stories.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:39)
So you talked to a lot of people that worked there. What can you describe as the history of technological development that went on there?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:09:48)
I mean, Area 51 is huge, by the way. It’s a top secret military facility inside a top secret military facility inside the Nevada test and training range, which is this massive not secret facility. So you’re just talking about layers, talking about peeling the onion in reverse. And it began as a place to test the U-2 spy plane. And literally the CIA set up shop there to build this plane away from the public eye. And then that led to another espionage platform called the A-12 Oxcart, which is anyone who’s seen the X-Men movies knows about the SR-71. And that’s a two-seater, right? And before that, there was the A-12 Oxcart, and that was the CIA’s stealth Mach 3 spy plane. Think about that in the early 1960s. It’s astonishing. And I interviewed the pilots who flew it.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:51)
What did they say about it? What was it like?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:10:53)
Oh my God, look, I describe in detail in Area 51. But also the amazing thing, Lex, about that was that, and I just look back on that with such fondness. This is like in 2009 when I was reporting that, and many of the guys who were in their 80s and 90s were World War II heroes, like serious World War II heroes like Colonel Slater who was the commander of Area 51. He flew the U-2 on the missions called the Black Cat Missions over China in the early 1960s to see about their Lop Nur nuclear facility. So all of these things tie in when you’re reporting on military and intelligence programs. But these guys had been World War II heroes, and then were given this cushy job out at Area 51. And it just came with all these perks.

(02:11:45)
Colonel Slater told me this one perk, I just love so much. They all had a hankering for lobster one day. And here they’re in the middle of the desert in Nevada, and they have these really fast planes, and they literally called, they arranged, they didn’t take the Oxcart out for that one, but they got some lobsters from Massachusetts delivered to them in record time. They didn’t even need to put them on ice. And again, those are these details where you’re like, at least for me, “Thank God I got these details. These guys are all passed now.”

UFOs and aliens

Lex Fridman
(02:12:20)
So there’s a lot of incredible technological work going on there. So the legend, the lore, like you said, aliens, were there ever aliens in Area 51 as you understand it?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:12:33)
So I’ve interviewed hundreds of people.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:37)
That worked there.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:12:38)
Well, not just at Area 51, but in all the different national security and military intelligence and intelligence programs. And I personally have no reason to believe that aliens have ever visited Earth. That’s just me personally.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:53)
Just at an Earth, period.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:12:55)
I have no information that causes me to conclude that’s the case. Now, with that said, many of the primary players in this present day, there are aliens among us narrative, are in my phenomena book. I continue to communicate with a lot of these people. I’m talking about astrophysicists who fundamentally believe that there are aliens among us. So we beg to differ on that issue.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:28)
But for you, in terms of doing research on government agencies that do top secret military work, I mean they would know. So you have interviewed a lot of people that have, at every layer of the onion, you don’t see evidence or a reason to believe that there was ever aliens or UFOs captured from out of this world.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:14:02)
That is correct. And even perhaps more important, and perhaps this colors my thinking, but I am uniquely familiar with disinformation programs put forth by the CIA or the agency as it’s called by insiders. I’ve learned firsthand about these program or rather learned from firsthand participants in strategic deception campaigns that the CIA has engaged in beginning with Area 51. The idea that all these reports of this U-2 spy plane, this giant long-winged aircraft flying 70,000 feet up, people didn’t think airplanes could fly that high. And it’s the sun shining off of it. It looked like a UFO and all the reports coming in and the CIA opened up a UFO disinformation campaign office headed by a guy named Todos Odarenko specifically for this reason.

(02:15:03)
Now, does that mean that every UFO sighting in the world has been a U-2? No, but I come from it from that lane of thinking, and there are so many strategic deception campaigns, and as I look over the decades of how these same UFO stories, and again, this is just my opinion based on my reporting, this narrative that keeps reoccurring, it seems to me like a very large catch- all to keep the public’s attention on that, not on that.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:35)
So to you, sexy stories like UFOs are going to be leveraged by the CIA for strategic deception.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:15:47)
A hundred percent. I mean, Google Paul Bennewitz, I’m always amazed that Paul Bennewitz’s story is not more widely spoken of. And I think that’s because there’s the sort of ufologists or people who are absolutely convinced that aliens are among us, and I use that term loosely, but you know what I mean. And then there’s the quote unquote, “skeptics”. And the skeptics tend to be sort of like self-righteous, and I would never want to be self-righteous. So I’m not a skeptic, I’m just agnostic, I suppose. But Google Paul Bennewitz, and you can learn the story of that man who thought he saw a UFO in the ’70s, early ’80s, and the Air Force, because the Air Force intelligence community works hand in glove with CIA a lot. And some of the other intelligence agencies, of course, they’re 17, not just the CIA, and they destroyed Paul Bennewitz. They sent him to a mental institution by pulling a massive strategic deception campaign against him because they didn’t want him to know about the technology that he was seeing at Kirtland Air Force Base.

(02:16:56)
So look that up, and then you go, “Oh my God.” And to my eye, you can apply any of these other names substitute in Paul Bennewitz or any of the current individuals who really become convinced of X, Y, or Z, when in fact there’s a strategic deception campaign going on.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:17)
There’s a lot of incentive for the CIA and other intelligence agencies to get you to look the other way on whatever is happening. Plus, from a enemy perspective, whenever two nations are at war to try to create hysteria in the other.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:17:35)
But then you have the Thomas theorem, that becomes applicable there too. If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. So this idea of UFOs and we’re being lied to, it becomes real to many people. And then that creates a whole subset of problems to the point where things are spiraling out of control and there is no center anymore. So a lot of people that are briefed on programs maybe aren’t even aware of their position within a greater campaign, or I’m wrong, and there are aliens among us.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:21)
So I appreciate the possibility of acknowledging that you might be wrong. From everything about the US government, if there was an alien spacecraft, what do you think would happen? Would they be able to hold onto those secrets for decades? Would they want to hold onto those secrets? What would they do? What’s your sense?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:18:48)
I can’t imagine that kind of exciting situation not becoming public information. And the counter to that is this, which is, this is a very strong argument for why this is a big strategic deception campaign. Think about the Defense Department and the air… Think about how jealously they guard its airspace. I mean, you had a Chinese balloon flying over and the whole world went crazy. It was front page news. So the fact that one element, or a couple people in the defense department have made this statement, we’ve lost control of our airspace over this alleged UFO craft that they can’t explain. I don’t buy that at all. Zero.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:42)
But of course it’s possible that it is alien spacecraft if it is that. And they operate under a very different set of technological capabilities in theory.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:19:56)
In my interviews with Jacques Vallee, who is the kind of grandfather of all ufology, and he’s such an interesting person and has such a really unique origin story about how he came into all of this. And he’s such a scientist, and he is profoundly dedicated to this issue and stands completely on the opposite end of the spectrum from me, and knows a lot more and has studied this for decades more. But what he said to me is the most interesting thing, which is that it’s not a military problem, it’s an intelligence problem. Because Jacques believes that this is some kind of intelligence, which really the closest I can do to wrapping my head around that takes me to consciousness, the idea of what is consciousness. And I think that’s where it becomes very interesting. I think the government is hiding bodies and crafts is very Paul Bennewitz, read it, Google it, look into it, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:20:51)
I think this kind of flying saucer thing is a trivialization of what kind of, if there’s alien civilizations out there.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:21:00)
Trivialization. That’s a great word. Trivialization, I agree with you.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:05)
I tend to believe that there’s a very large number of alien civilizations out there, and I believe we would have trouble comprehending what that even looks like were they to visit. I tend to believe they are already here or have visited, and we’re too dumb to understand what that even means. And they certainly would not appear as flying objects that defy gravity for brief moments of time on a low resolution video. I tend to have humility about all this kind of stuff, but I think radical humility is required to even open your eyes to what an alien intelligence would actually look like. And to me, it’s beyond military applications. It’s like the basic human question of what is even this thing, like you mentioned consciousness that’s going on. Where’s this come from? Why is this so powerful? Is it unique in the universe? I tend to believe not. Of course, I hang out a bunch with other folks like Elon who believe we are alone, but I think that belief, just like you said, has power because it actually manifests itself in reality.

Roswell incident


(02:22:23)
So if you believe that we’re alone in this universe, that’s a great motivator to build rockets and become multi-planetary and save ourselves, especially in the case of nuclear war, because otherwise, whatever this special sauce, this flame of consciousness will go out if we destroy ourselves on this earth. And for people like Elon, it’s too high of a probability that we destroy ourselves on earth not to try to become multi-planetary. In your book on Area 51, you propose an explanation that I think some people have criticized at the very end that this might’ve been a disinformation campaign from, I guess Stalin, that the Roswell incident was a remotely piloted plane with a quote, “grotesque child-sized aviator”. Just looking back at all that now, years later, what’s the probability that it’s true? What’s the probability it’s not?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:23:23)
So you know I’ve never revealed to that sources.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:27)
Yes.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:23:28)
Did you know that? You want me to tell you?
Lex Fridman
(02:23:29)
The source?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:23:29)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:31)
Who is the source?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:23:33)
So before I say anything on that, let me speak to the question that you asked. So you asked me what’s the probability that that is still standing as an idea, 12, 13, 14 years later. So I continued to work with that source for years afterwards. We talked about this. Look, I mean, his whole family knew it was him, and I knew his family because I was an integral part of… I was at his house, met all his kids, grandkids.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:09)
We should say the source is the main expert advisor behind the story that it was… Maybe you can explain what the story is that you report in the book that it was disinformation campaign created by Stalin to cause mass hysteria in the United States. The very kind that we’ve been speaking about with the CIA and so on.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:24:28)
Yes, predicated on the narrative of the War of the Worlds and the War of the Worlds when it was a radio program in the United States made people go crazy. “Oh my God, we’re being invaded by aliens.” Well, the government was always interested in this story, and Joseph Stalin was too. We know that from declassified documents. And so the source told me that the reason for this program and that the real Roswell crash remains were, in fact, it was a black propaganda hoax infiltrated, or rather predicated at this idea that you were going to overwhelm America’s early warning air defense system cause mayhem and maybe be able to attack the United States. That was the plan.

(02:25:09)
And Stalin was also messing with the United States, messing with Truman, who sort of turned his back on him at Potsdam. And so this idea and the reason that the source is important, and unlike a lot of people, “I saw, I saw this, I saw that, I learned that,” was according to the source, once it was determined that this was a hoax and that Stalin was able to get a craft over the United States, and it crashed and it had people inside of it.

(02:25:43)
They were people that were sort of deformed and meant surgically altered to look like aliens. The United States government decided that it needed to know what on earth that was all about. And if it was possible for us to have the same program, this according to the source. And so it sounds preposterous, and if it was just someone saying, you might say, “Well, it’s ridiculous,” and get them onto another subject. But the difference was is this source who was very well-placed and friends with all of the other 75 people told me this as a confession, a real tearful confession. Because what he said is he was involved in the American program to do the same thing, and people died because there were human experiments that went on.

(02:26:33)
And I write about this in the last 12 pages of Area 51. It was an explosive revelation, and I felt very confident in writing this because the source wanted it written. Why? Because he said, “I’m dedicated to my country. I know about being committed to national security, and this kind of thing must never happen. And if you give people too much power, they would take advantage of it.” And he wanted it on the record. And his wife of 60 years did not know until after the book published, nor did his children. So after the book published, I was called to his house and sat there with his family and they said, “Tell us this isn’t true.” And he said, “It is true.” Now that source is Al O’Donnell, who is the nuclear weapons engineer who armed, wired, and fired 186 nuclear weapons. So if you want to talk about someone, you’re the first person I’ve told that on the record, but it’s kind of about time.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:37)
Wow. Well, you received a lot of criticism over this story, and it confused me why because given the context of everything you’ve described with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, it is reasonable that such as action would be taken.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:28:01)
And the source is extraordinarily credible. If you wanted to take the position, “Well, that person isn’t very reliable.” Then you have to ask yourself, why did they have top secret clearances that are higher than any in the United States whatsoever? Because he was responsible for arming nuclear bombs. He was called the trigger man, and by the way, he told me that I could tell the world who he was. There’s a lot of details that are really dark involving that program. And when is it appropriate? Right? Well, it feels appropriate now, first of all, because you and I have been talking for several hours. So this is what is truly a long-form conversation, and it’s the outcome of a very long time of my reporting and also being judicious about closing the loop on that because I do think it’s important for people to know that sources have revelations.

CIA assassinations

Lex Fridman
(02:29:06)
And like you said, the programs both on the Soviet side and the American side, conflicting, I think is the term we used previously, ethically, morally, on all fronts. People have done some horrible things in the name of security. In your book, Surprise, Kill, Vanish, you write about the CIA and the so-called president’s third option. So first of all, first option being diplomacy and second option being war. So when diplomacy is inadequate and war is a terrible idea, we go to the third option. And this third option is about covert action, and it’s about assassination. So how much of that does the CIA do?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:30:04)
That is open to debate. We know from the historical record that the CIA was heavily involved in assassination during the Cold War. That’s non-negotiable. Even the names of the programs that were assigned to perform assassinations are fascinating and now declassified, like Eisenhower’s, for example, was the Health Alteration Committee.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:29)
Well, at least they have a sense of humor to this dark topic.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:30:33)
Then the more modern names are targeted killing, executive action, targeted killing. I mean, drone striking is essentially assassination. And people jump up and down and say, “That’s not true.” Well, I spent quite a long time interviewing the CIA’s lead council, John Rizzo. He died recently. But Rizzo was very forthcoming with me, of course, never sharing classified information, but going up to the edge of what can legally be known. Rizzo was thrown under the bus by sort of the general public for he was the fall guy for the torture campaign. The CIA calls it enhanced interrogation. And so Rizzo had this long career. He began working under the Carter administration and was responsible for the torture memos, was responsible for legally making sure the president’s ass was covered and then got thrown under the bus. And so he was very forthcoming, not in a bitter way, but in a very earnest way about a lot of how these programs are made to be legal.

(02:31:44)
Because if the President of the United States says they’re legal, they’re legal. Executive Order 12333. It says, we don’t assassinate, but it can be overwritten by another order that’s straight out of Rizzo’s mouth. Also, really important to keep in mind is that the military operates under what’s called Title 50. It’s part of the National Security Code that gives rules and etc. How you must behave in a war theater. Well, the CIA is under no such rules. It operates under what’s called Title 50. And it’s interesting to me as reporter, because before I wrote the book and reported openly about Title 50, it was not really discussed. And now you even see operators themselves on podcasts talking about Title 50, which is kind of great because it’s like the cat’s out of the bag, guys. That’s what it’s called. And that’s how it works. It means what we say goes.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:38)
Can you elaborate on what Title 50 is? So it basically says assassination is allowed.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:32:43)
It says what the president wants the president gets, right? And so, I mean, the best example is the killing of Bin Laden. We were not at war with Pakistan, so Title 50 doesn’t apply. You can’t have a military operation in a country you’re not at war with. I mean, the lines, now they’ve really blurred, but even then they were a little more honored. And so what do you do? Well, Leon Panetta was the CIA director, and you work out a scenario whereby the SEALs, and by the way, there was a rotational on that killer capture mission, which was really just a kill mission. SEALs were practicing, Delta was practicing, and special activities division was practicing. They were all practicing at a secret facility in North Carolina. And it was just like they’re ready until they get the go order. And it just happened to be the seals.

(02:33:38)
So the SEALs operate under Title 10. So they had to get what I call sheep-dip because that’s what the insiders call it. And that is a term that comes from interestingly Area 51, the U-2 pilots who were Air Force pilots, they needed to be sheep dipped over to the CIA so they could do things that defied the law. So you can see how these all entwine and you become more and more informed, and you go, “Aha.” Right? So that’s how Title 50 worked. So the night of that mission, it was a CIA mission because the CIA is allowed to go into Pakistan and kill someone, and the military can.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:16)
That’s fascinating. So people talk about the Navy SEALs doing it, but it’s really legally speaking to get the permission to do it within the whole legal framework of the United States, it was the CIA.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:34:27)
And if you look at their uniforms that they were wearing, and now that this you’ll be, “Oh.” You’ll see, there’s no nomenclature on them. They’re just meant to be completely untraceable. Were they to be shot down and captured, it’s like, “Wait, who are these guys? Oh, a bunch of rogue guys.” And this goes back the origin story of all that is in Vietnam with MACV-SOG and these cross-border operations that I chronicle in Surprise, Kill, Vanish, which still amaze me to this day. I mean, SOG missions, they called it suicide on the ground, because that’s what it was. And these guys had no identifiable. Nothing. I mean, they were essentially in pajamas. Even their weapons were specially designed by the CIA to have no serial numbers, no nothing. So if they were captured and they became POWs, I don’t know who these guys are.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:24)
What do you think, and how much do they think at the highest levels of power about the ethics of assassination and about the role of that in geopolitics and military operations? To you maybe also, does assassination make sense as a good methodology of war?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:35:48)
I mean, again, I try to remain agnostic on the policy part of it and just report the operator’s perspective, because this is what people do and this is what people are asked to do. And it depends on the individual. I mean, Billy Waugh went on a lot of those missions. I mean, the saying is like, “Oh, Billy Waugh, he killed more people than cancer.” Did Billy Waugh ever tell me about direct assassinations? No, because they’re all classified. Did he tell me about some failed ones? Yes. I’ll give you an example. It’s really interesting.

(02:36:23)
He would show me these PowerPoints that were just fantastic. Late in his life, he was constantly being asked to go up to Fort Bragg and lecture to the young soldiers, and everybody loved him. And he would drive all night to get there, and he would create these PowerPoints, and then he would show me the PowerPoints, all unclassified. But at one point, when Hugo Chavez was in power, Billy Waugh was kind of asked, that’s how it works, of if you had to think about doing something, what would it look like? Let’s just say hypothetically. So he took me through this PowerPoint that never happened, whereby he and a group of operators, agency operators were going to HALO jump in to the palace and grab Chavez and probably kill him because he wouldn’t allow himself to be captured. And by the way, HALO jumping, for those listeners who don’t know, high altitude, low opening.

(02:37:17)
So you jump out of an aircraft and you go down like a pencil until you’re really low to the deck, like a thousand feet. You pull your parachute cord, and that way you’re not picked up on radar and you’re also not traceable when you get to the ground because it’s so fast. Billy Waugh took the second HALO jump in history into a war theater in Laos during the Vietnam War. So he’s like this famous HALO jumper. So he and the team were going to go in grab Chavez, and he said to me a very interesting thing that was kind of a one moment in time where I saw a different side of Billy Waugh where he said, “I’m so glad we didn’t do that, even though I really wanted to at the time, because can you imagine that country’s problems, where it is now? Can you imagine how we would have been blamed?” And it was an interesting rare moment for Billy Waugh to comment on the bigger picture that you’re asking me about. I think pretty much the operators I know they just stick to the mission.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:23)
So on the technical difficulty of those missions, just your big sense, how hard is it to assassinate a target on the soil of that nation?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:38:36)
I suppose that just depends. Here’s another insightful thing Billy Waugh said to me, and I’m answering the question around because I don’t know, because again, I never had anyone say to me, “Here’s how it went down,” because you can’t. First of all, those are classified, so I’m never going to receive classified information. I did hear a lot about reconnaissance missions when people would be in charge of, you have to be able to what’s called make book on the target before, and making book on the target means photographing them then that gets run up the chain of command to make sure this is really Imad Mughniyeh we’re about to kill.

(02:39:19)
But I once asked Billy when I was trying to get the question and he wouldn’t answer it, and I said, so there’s another person in my book named Rick Proto, who’s also a legendary agency guy, and so he’s like 20 years younger than Billy. And I said, “Billy, if you and Rick had to kill each other, who would win?” I was trying to imagine this hypothetical, how would that work? Who would win? And I posed the question to each of them, and of course each of them said me, then I went back to them and Billy said, “Let me tell you how I would win.” And he said, ” I’d cheat. I’d show up before the duel.”
Annie Jacobsen
(02:40:00)
I’d cheat. I’d show up before the dual, and I’d kill him.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:05)
Yeah. I have a lot of friends who were Navy SEALs. This is just guy conversation.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:40:13)
Well, you would be amazed at what the women do. Let me just tell you that. Women are part of the Special Activities Division, a big part of it.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:22)
Can you comment on that?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:40:24)
I can. Women can get a hell of a lot closer to a target. And I mean that literally.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:32)
The special operations, is this part of the CIA?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:40:35)
The Special Activities Division, now it’s called the Special Activity Center. But originally that’s the umbrella agency that has the different paramilitary organizations under it. So the most lethal one is Ground Branch. And that’s what I reported on in Surprise, Kill, Vanish. And its origins go way back to the Guerrilla warfare corps that was started in 1947 for the president.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:02)
So women are also a part of the alleged assassination?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:41:09)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:11)
And you’re saying they can at times be more effective. I am just going to leave that pause there. The reason I ask of how difficult the assassinations are, with Bin Laden, it took a long time. So I guess the reconnaissance, the intelligence for finding the target. I imagine with Mossad, maybe this now the leadership of Hamas or the military branch of Hamas is much wanted from an assassination perspective. So to me as an outside observer, it seems like it’s more difficult than you would imagine. But perhaps that’s the intelligence aspect of it, not the actual assassination of locating the person.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:42:00)
Well, I think it’s because mostly from what I understand, it’s a really dirty game and people are covering for people. And I’ll give you the example of Billy Waugh and Imad Mughniyeh, if I may. So Imad Mughniyeh was the most wanted terrorist in the world before Bin Laden. Hezbollah’s, chief of operations. And he was wanted by every, Mossad, jawn down. But no one could find him. He was missing for 20 years. There wasn’t even a photograph of him. And then he resurfaced. And of all places he resurfaced in Saudi Arabia, okay. “What?” That’s when I say it’s a dirty game. Hezbollah, Iran, Hezbollah Iran, enemies with Saudi Arabia. Why on earth was Imad Mughniyeh in Saudi Arabia? Well, that’s where he was. There was a Navy SEAL who was doing reconnaissance on him. This is according to Billy Waugh. And this is around 2005. So Billy’s in his ’80s at this point, late ’70s, ’80s.

(02:43:06)
He gets word that the SEAL who has been tracking Mughniyeh to get photographs of him, to give the photographs to Mossad and CIA so they can do a joint operation to kill him, which they did with a car bomb in Damascus. That’s the end of the story. But how we got there was, the CIA needed confirmation. You can’t kill the wrong person. So the SEAL panicked according to Billy Waugh and was just like, “I’m out of here. This is too dangerous and I do not want to wind up in a Saudi prison.” So who do you send in, Billy Waugh? He shows up, he’s there for 24 hours. He knows where Mughniyeh lives from the SEAL. He positions himself in a cafe across the street which is run by Sudanese men. And of course Waugh speaks some Sudanese because he operated in Sudan. And he’s shooting the shit with him by his own words. He had the most foul mouth that was just absolutely delightful to listen to.

(02:44:01)
And then in between him and Mughniyeh’s house is a dumpster. And Billy Waugh being Billy Waugh, who will go to any lengths to do the job, decides to conduct reconnaissance from inside the dumpster. And that is where he is when he takes the picture of Imad Mughniyeh living so comfortably in Saudi. That Mughniyeh according to Billy, came out of his apartment building with dry cleaner plastic bag hangers over his shoulder. That’s how comfortable he lived there. It was his neighborhood. Click, click, click, Billy Waugh takes the photographs, runs them to the CIA headquarters in Saudi at the embassy. Oh my God, it’s Mughniyeh. Get the hell out of here. He gets to the airport, he leaves. Those photographs get sent to the agency, and then they do the operation with Mossad and Mughniyeh is dead. Now the truth about that being a co CIA mission was not reported for many years after the fact. Mossad took credit as the CIA often likes to just give other people credit. They just want the job done.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:14)
Well, speaking of Mossad, in your understanding of all the intelligence agencies, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the different intelligence agencies out there? CIA and Mossad, MI6, SVR and FSB and Chinese intelligence, all this stuff. Is there some interesting differences, insights that you have from all of your studying FCIA?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:45:41)
That’s a really interesting question. I don’t know. And here’s why. It’s because I’ve never interviewed any intelligence officer with those other agencies. I’ve interviewed a couple of people with Shin Bet in Israel. But until I speak to an actual source whose job it was, I don’t know. So the information that I’m getting is based on perception of others which one would think would be deeply clouded by the idea that America is the greatest. We’re better than them.
Lex Fridman
(02:46:23)
Yes. Well, actually the fascinating thing is because you’ve spoken to a lot of people about the CIA. How do you know they’re telling the truth? And this actually probably applies generally to your interviews with very secretive people. How do you get past the bullshit?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:46:42)
Well, that’s just like multiple sourcing. So you find the story out and then you go to the national archives and you find the operation and then you learn all about this, and then you interview other people who were there and you put the story together to the best of your ability and you make very specific choices with “so-and-so said,” said so-and-so. And very rarely do I report on a single source as I did in the end of Area 51. And then it says essentially, look dear reader, this is what the source told me. I have no way of corroborating it. This is legit and here it is. So that’s an area to make your reader comfortable with the information that they’re being given. And then in all of my books, whether there are three or 400 pages, there’s always 100 pages of notes at the end. So you can see all the sourcing and you can begin to get an understanding of how journalism in the national security world works.

(02:47:49)
And also great opportunity for me to say, I’m often standing on the shoulders of journalists before me who did an incredible job digging into something and being able to report what they knew. Often the books are 10, 20, 30 years old, and so much more has come to light since.

Navalny

Lex Fridman
(02:48:07)
And I also would just like to say that I appreciate that you said, “Great question, I don’t know.” Not enough people say I don’t know and that’s a sign of a great journalist. But speaking about things you might not know about, let me ask you about something going on currently. So recently Alexei Navalny died in prison, perhaps was killed in prison. What’s your sense from looking at it? Do you think he died of natural causes in prison? Do you think it’s possible he was assassinated? Russia, Ukraine, Mossad, CIA, whoever has interest in this particular war.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:48:58)
For that, I look directly to the historical record. Having written about Russian assassination campaigns and programs since the earliest days of the Cold War. And Russia has a long history of assassinating, murdering dissidents. And in Surprise, Kill, Vanish, I tell the story of an actual KGB assassin named Khokhlov who knocked on the door of the man he was assigned to kill. And by the way, this all comes from a book that Khokhlov wrote later. Because he defected to the United States. He knocks on the door and the guy answers the door. And instead of killing him, he has this moment of conscious of crisis or crisis of conscience and says, “I can’t kill you, even though that’s what I’m supposed to do.” And then sits down with the guy and together decides, okay, we’re going to defect. We’re going to let the Western intelligence agencies know what we’re doing here. And the CIA got involved.

(02:50:07)
But Russian assassins were able to poison Khokhlov with polonium. What happens to him is insane and it’s a miracle he didn’t die, but he doesn’t. And then he defects to the West and he writes these books and he tells lots of incredible secrets about the Russian assassination programs and their poison labs and they’re really interesting. So to answer that question, I mean to my eye of course, I don’t know, but it certainly looks like Russia is acting in the same vein that it has always acted, taking care of dissidents that go against Mother Russia.

KGB

Lex Fridman
(02:50:43)
So in the style of KGB assassinations. Is there something you can comment on about the ways that KGB operates versus the CIA when we look at the history of the two organizations, the Cold War, after World War II and the leading up to today?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:51:06)
I mean, my feeling on that is always that there’s a thread somewhere in declassified documentation about these programs of America working to maintain assemblance of democratic ideals, however surprising that may be. In other words, always trying to, I don’t want to say fight fair because killing people isn’t fair, but versus a certain ruthlessness, a real sinister totalitarian type ruthlessness certainly from Soviet Russia. I’m far less familiar with modern day Russian assassination activities, although we certainly know on the record that they exist. Some people have done great reporting on that. But there seems to be almost a sadism about the Russian programs that I personally have not seen in the American programs.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:24)
What about on the surveillance side? It seems like America’s pretty good at mass surveillance, or at least has been revealed through NSA and all this reporting and leaks and whistleblowers. Can you comment to the degree to how much surveillance is done by the US government internally and externally?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:52:49)
If you’d asked me five years ago, I would’ve a very different answer. Because first of all, they’re looking for a needle in the haystack. They’re looking for the Bin Laden and they can’t find the needle in the haystack, but they continue to create the haystack and survey the haystack. I’m I right?
Lex Fridman
(02:53:05)
Yeah.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:53:05)
Okay. But the real problem, what has happened, and I write about this in my book, First Platoon, which is about a group of young soldiers who goes to Afghanistan and unwittingly becomes part of the defense department’s efforts to capture biometrics on 85% of the population of Afghanistan. Which by the way, China then emulated in their own biometric surveillance program. And I think this is a terrible idea. But what has happened, these biometric systems that have been created and biometrics are of course fingerprints, facial images, DNA and iris scans that allow you to tag, track and locate people.

(02:53:51)
And what has happened in the five years since this question was first on everybody’s minds about NSA surveillance is that the civilian sector companies have essentially done all the defense department’s biometric surveillance job for them by all of us sharing our facially recognizable images on Instagram and Facebook and everywhere else, X, by sharing information, by writing up narratives about ourselves. This information has become part of the database. Five years ago when I was reporting First Platoon, I was interviewing the police chief of El Segundo, which is like on the outskirts of LA. It’s right near the airport. And why it’s important is because it’s like defense contractor haven. So they have massive surveillance. And Chief Whalen, when I posed this question to him, he said to me, “Annie, let me show you something.” And he had Clearwater AI, the recognition software on his phone. And this was still when it was like quasi not supposed to, you have that for law enforcement. And he said, “I want you to go down the block and I want you to just turn the corner and come back toward me.” Which I did. And he just didn’t even hold up his phone. He just looked at his hand and his phone was on me. And he went back down and it was like the tiniest movement. And when I came back to him, he went like this and he showed me, there I was. Everything about me. Facts and figures and all images. And he knew who I was before I even got to him. So is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, we could have another three hour conversation about that alone.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:40)
So you’re saying more and more, you don’t need NSA where we’re giving over the data ourselves publicly or semi publicly.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:55:51)
Yeah. During the war on terror, people were just incensed to learn that there is a drone that’s flying at something like 20,000 feet. It’s called ARGUS-IS. And it can capture the… It’s not a license plate. It’s like it can basically capture what’s written on a golf ball from 17,000 feet, 20,000 feet up. And people went crazy over this like, “Oh my god, it’s Big Brother.” Well, one of the lead engineers on that, Pat Billkin is someone I talk to regularly because we talk about surveillance a lot because he thinks about it a lot because he has kids now. And he has given so much thoughtful, really thinks about this issue because he believes, just like you stated, that what we are turning over about ourselves actually exceeds anything that ARGUS-IS could do from above because we’re doing it willfully.

(02:56:44)
So what it’s doing is it’s creating an ability for, if someone wants to know about you, if someone, let’s say in government, wants to know about Lex Fridman, they can find out everything about you. And then that gets used for tagging, tracking and ultimately. In the war theater it was called find, fix, finish. Well, what do you think the finish is in that statement?
Lex Fridman
(02:57:07)
It’s not pleasant.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:57:08)
It’s called a drone strike. Find, find him with the biometric, fix him, meaning fix his position. We know he’s moving in a car. That’s him. Finish him. Call it in, drone strike. Boom.

Hitler and the atomic bomb

Lex Fridman
(02:57:24)
If we could return to nuclear war, you’ve briefly mentioned that a lot of things go back to the Third Reich and Hitler. If we go back to World War II, we look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dropping of the two bombs. I would love to get your opinion on whether we should or shouldn’t have done that. And also to get your opinion on what would’ve happened if Hitler and Germany built the bomb first. Do you think it was possible he could have built the bomb first?
Annie Jacobsen
(02:58:01)
In my researching Third Reich weapons for Operation Paperclip, because of course we got a lot of those scientists, after.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:11)
Which is another great book in a terrifyingly complicated operation.
Annie Jacobsen
(02:58:16)
Yes. At what point do the ends justify the means? But in looking at those programs, and we acquired Hitler’s favorite weapons designers. And I’m talking about weapons of mass destruction like chemical weapons and biological weapons. But of course, America was ahead in the nuclear program. And an interesting detail reading Albert Speer’s memoirs. Was Speer referring to a conversation he had with Hitler where Hitler said, “No, I don’t want to do that. That’s Jewish science.” So because of Hitler’s own racial ethnic prejudices, they didn’t develop the bomb. As far as should we have dropped the bombs on Hiroshima, I’ve interviewed all kinds of people with different opinions, most of them that had ended the war. The best interview and most meaningful perhaps that I ever did was with Alfred O’Donnell, who was a participant in the Battle of Okinawa, which was like this insane. Just to read stories about Okinawa, it makes your hair stand on end.

(02:59:28)
And O’Donnell like so many others, was slated to invade mainland Japan, to his almost certain death. So somebody like that, it makes sense right from the get go why he would be pro nuclear weapons. It saved his own personal life and it saved everyone that he knew that he was fighting with. And it ended the war.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:58)
Do you think it sent a signal? Like without that we wouldn’t have known perhaps about the power of the weapons. So in the long arc of that history, 70 years plus, it is the reason why deterrence has worked so far.
Annie Jacobsen
(03:00:19)
Yes. That’s an interesting thought. My thought goes to this idea of more. That everybody always wants more. It’s a very dangerous… It’s like more power, literally, just more power. And what is more confounding to me beyond the fact that we dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the war ended is that this decision was then made to develop the thermonuclear bomb. A force that is such… The degree of magnitude of that power is mind-boggling. I mean even projects within the Manhattan Project defined thermonuclear weapon, the thermonuclear weapon as the evil thing. It was evil. It’s a weapon of genocide. Atomic weapons destroy cities, thermonuclear weapons destroy civilizations.

War and human nature

Lex Fridman
(03:01:27)
You open the book with a Churchill quote, ” The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world. And before history began, murders strife was universal and unending.” Do you think there will always be war? Do you think that there is some deep human way in which we’re tending to this global war eternally?
Annie Jacobsen
(03:02:02)
Well, the optimistic answer of that would be that we could evolve beyond that. Because certainly if we look at our ancestors, they had not developed their consciousness as far as we have to be able to build the tools that we have. So the hopeful answer is we will evolve beyond this brute force, kill the other guy attitude. Certainly these are questions that will become more obvious over time. I just want to play my little part in this world that I live in as the storyteller who brings information to people so that they can have these questions with themselves, with their friends, with their families. And I think in asking that very question, what you’re really saying is, why don’t we evolve beyond war fighting?
Lex Fridman
(03:03:15)
It is very possible. And your book is such a stark and powerful reminder that human civilization, as we know it ends in this century. It’s a good motivator to get our shit together.
Annie Jacobsen
(03:03:36)
But aren’t you really saying human civilization could end, not it ends?
Lex Fridman
(03:03:42)
Could end.
Annie Jacobsen
(03:03:43)
Could end.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:46)
But the power of our weapons is growing rapidly.
Annie Jacobsen
(03:03:52)
As they say, it’s time to come back from the brink. And it’s time to have that discussion while we’re still talking.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:58)
And there’s another complexity sneaking up into the picture in the form of artificial intelligence and in cyber war, but also in hot war, the use of autonomous weapons. All of it starts becoming super complicated as we delegate some of these decisions about war, including nuclear war to more and more autonomy and artificial intelligence systems, is going to be a very interesting century. Do you just zoom out a little bit, hope that we become a multi-planetary species?
Annie Jacobsen
(03:04:36)
I’m all for adventure.
Lex Fridman
(03:04:40)
And I too while am for adventure, I’m all for backups in all forms. So I hope that human start a civilization on Mars and beyond out in space. And if you zoom on across all of it, what gives you hope about human civilization, about this whole thing we have going on here?

Hope

Annie Jacobsen
(03:05:02)
I mean, I am a fundamentally optimistic person. I must have come out of the shoot that way. Because I just am. Even though I write about really grim things, I get inspired by them because I do always believe in evolution. I also have the greatest family ever. Two kids, Jet and Finley, shout out to them. They’re Lex Fridman fans.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:28)
Oh yeah, oh you guys.
Annie Jacobsen
(03:05:29)
And my husband. So what inspires me is this idea of legacy. I think that you always want to have your eye on being a good example to the best that you can and passing on what you know and believing in the next generation. And again, that’s a sentiment echoed by all these cold warriors I’ve been talking to because they also share that idea that, wow, look at what we have done as a civilization and look where we’re going. Whether it’s exoplanetary travel or AI. It’s just that the human factor of the desire to fight, the desire to have conflict, needs to be reconfigured, because with all these new technologies that we have, the peril is growing at an accelerating pace, perhaps faster than the average human can keep up with.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:31)
Well Annie, thank you for being a wonderful example of a great journalist, a great writer, a great human being. And I’m a big fan of yours. It’s a huge honor to meet you, to talk with today. So thank you so much for talking today.
Annie Jacobsen
(03:06:46)
Thank you for having me.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:48)
Thank you for listening to this conversation with Annie Jacobsen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from John F. Kennedy. “The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, the secret oaths, and the secret proceedings.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.