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- [00:02]
Lex Fridman
Joe rogan podcast. Check it out. The joe rogan experience. Join my day joe rogan podcast by night, all day.
- [00:14]
Joe Rogan
Good to see you.
- [00:15]
Lex Fridman
You too. Thanks for having me.
- [00:17]
Joe Rogan
My pleasure.
- [00:17]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [00:18]
Joe Rogan
How many podcasts have you done?
- [00:20]
Lex Fridman
I don't know. I don't know the count, but maybe tens.
- [00:23]
Joe Rogan
Well, when we were talking, we were talking in the lobby, I was like, this dude would be a good guest because we were talking about ancient Hindu scriptures where you were talking to me about something that sounds like a nuclear bomb.
- [00:33]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And I was like, oh, the Brahmastra. I need to know more about this. Yeah. So the Brahmastra is part of the Mahabharata. I mean, you've talked about Mahabharata in
- [00:44]
Joe Rogan
a bunch of Brahmanas and.
- [00:46]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. So the Mahabharata is one of the two Hindu epics. The other one is Ramayan. But Mahabharata is more interesting. It's more complicated. It's like a lot of different stories interleaved together. And the Brahmastra is the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb.
- [01:03]
Joe Rogan
And how is it described?
- [01:05]
Lex Fridman
It's described as a weapon of, like, mass destruction, going to annihilate, like, human population, should not be used at any cost. There's like, a moral contract. Like, you clearly have to be, like, you know, violating so many things at a deeply moral level to even, like, wield it. And it's not actually. It's not actually accessible to most warriors. There's probably, like, two warriors in the world in that era who were allowed to use it. And it has to be passed through special access. Like a teacher has to pass it on to you. The secret to use it. Almost like a new. Think of it as like the equivalent of the nuclear code.
- [01:47]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [01:47]
Lex Fridman
And Arjuna had it, this particular character in Mahabharata called Arjuna, he was allowed to use it. And then this other person was this. Basically, Arjuna had a teacher named Drona, and Drona had a son named Ashwathama. And Ashwathama was always jealous of Arjuna. Arjuna was not Drona's son, but he was his model disciple. And so Drona passed on the secret of the Brahmastra to him. And Drona's son also wanted it, but because it was his son, he also passed on the secret to his son, even though the son wasn't as good as Arjuna. And during the war, Arjuna and Drona fought on the opposite sides. It's just, you know, circumstances. And his dad died. Ashwathama's dad, the teacher, died in the war. And so the Son got mad and like unleashed the Brahmastra and Lord Krishna had to come and save, save the planet to not, not get that destruction force.
- [02:53]
Joe Rogan
How old is the Mahabharata again?
- [02:57]
Lex Fridman
It's, there's a lot of different opinions on this, so I don't actually know for sure. My understanding is it's at least 1500 to 2500 years old. Like, like 1500 years to go is the minimum, 2500 years ago is the maximum. So it happened in some period in, in that thousand year time frame between that and there's still like, it's still unclear if like a lot of it is just like you know, been mythologized and what actually happened was just a war between kins. There were two groups of people, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. And you know, each side thought they were fighting for their own rights and justice. But at the end of the day you can crudely understand it as like essentially fight for the kingdom. Basically there were like, there was a previous generation and two brothers and both the brothers had a bunch of kids and those kids were warring to get the next in line. And that ended up being like a massive war and a bunch of other allies fought on each sides. And so many amazing weapons were used as part of the war. And a lot of these weapons are like extremely like describe an extreme level of detail that is pretty incredible. There's a lot of detail around targeted weapons. So you could precisely identify a target and just shoot at that.
- [04:24]
Joe Rogan
And then does it explain what the weapon is?
- [04:27]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, so there's one weapon called the Divyastra where you can just specifically target any, any particular person or group and it would just automatically direct itself and do it almost like a semi autonomous weapon. And then Lord Krishna had this weapon called the Sudarshan Chakra, it's basically a discus. And then you can just release it and it'll go and specifically identify somebody and chop up their head and come back to your you Right. It self directs itself. So what I was amazed by is how interesting it is in terms of all the autonomy in the weapons. Semi autonomy or autonomy where the weapons could just be directed at people or like directed at you know, a group of soldiers. And it would just go and do its job and come back to the wielder. And there were so many different Astras, the Vyasra, Varunastra, Nagastra, Brahmastra is obviously the ultimate, the hydrogen bomb equivalent. And all of these are like described in a lot of detail and like who has access to it and of course it's mythologized. So it's described as this, like, these arrows in your, like in back of your shoulders. But you could, you could understand it as like, you know, somebody having just access to a lot of weapons, and then whoever was powerful would go capture and colonize and like gain power and essentially a fight between a group of cousins. That's the bottom line of that story.
- [05:56]
Joe Rogan
Now if we think of history as this linear progression from caveman to us, and we hear about autonomous weapons that were written in the Mahabharata Somewhere around 2000 plus years ago, we go, well, a mythology. But if not, if there's been some sort of rise and fall of civilization, if there has been catastrophic, whatever it is, asteroid impacts, shifting of the poles, whatever it is.
- [06:20]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [06:20]
Joe Rogan
It's caused great disasters. You can imagine that these people are remembering a time where there was some sort of very advanced civilization. And this is what they're describing. Like, if you knew for a fact that there had been a great, advanced, technologically advanced civilization, when we have evidence that they had some technology, like the pyramids of Giza and stuff, like, how did you do that? There's some technology involved, right? Yeah, but we don't have evidence of the technology. But if we did, if we knew for a fact, you would look at the Mahabharata and go, oh, this is history. They're just explaining it in a kind of crude, contemporary way for the time. Arrows instead of, you know, semi autonomous drones with exploding heads on them. Yeah, I mean, that's what we have now. All those things that they're describing. Hydrogen bomb, semi autonomous and autonomous drones. I mean, they have, they have autonomous fighter jets now. Like, they don't need people anymore like this. We're, we're in that area right now. So when you read about something like that from the Mahabharata, you go like, okay, what, what was really going on? This episode is brought to you by Create, the leading brand in creatine. You love their gummies. But now they've also launched Creatine Plus Electrolytes mix, perfect for hot summer months. Creatine is proven to support gains in strength, lean muscle and aid recovery. But it also has cognitive benefits, more energy focus and NeuroProtection. Plus, they're NSF certified for sport and third party tested for safety and potency. Visit try create.co/rogan or use promo code ROGAN for 20% off and free shipping on your first subscription order. This episode is brought to you by the Farmer's Dog. Here's a Fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra processed kibble still the status quo? For most dog owners, healthy alternatives exist. And trust me, I know. I buy one, the farmer's dog. I use it for both my dogs. They love it. They eat it up quick. It smells good to them, it smells good to me. It's human grade food. The farmer's dog makes fresh food for dogs and my dogs love it. Their recipes are made with real meat and fresh vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients. They also portion out the meals to your dog's nutritional needs, which helps avoid overfeeding and makes weight management easier. And isn't getting more time with our four legged best friends something every dog dog owner wants the answer to that is yes, obviously. So try the farmer's dog today and get 50 off your first box of fresh healthy food. Plus get free shipping. Just go to the farmersdog.com rogan this offers for new customers only. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the home of my website joe rogan.com if you want to level up your business, you got to improve your website. Squarespace gives you everything you need to get a fully custom website, offer services, sell products and get paid all in one place. Go to squarespace.com rogan for a free trial and when you are ready to launch, use code ROGAN to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
- [10:04]
Lex Fridman
Exactly. Yeah. I mean that's always been my fascination with those epics and the level of detail with which they described all these weapons and who had access, different levels of access, the status required to have access, and how it was used in the wars. Different formations of the soldiers. They had all these crazy formation structures, like forming the army, like a lotus forming the army. Like, you know, there's something called a chakra viha, like literally like it has to have concentric circles. So you cannot like actually get into the innermost circle without going through the outer circles. And then you can get killed by each of the flanks whenever you're trying to enter in. And the secret of how to actually break into these viuhas, viuhas means formations was only known to a few people. And it's incredible. Like you could say, okay, like somebody had to be extremely skillful to have that sort of like visualizations and imaginations of Describing a story like that, and obviously, like, Tolkien has done an amazing job with Lord of the Rings, you know, in creating so much detail at the same time. Like, a lot of it actually coming true in real life in some form. Again, not exactly the same weapons, but similar style. Makes you wonder was there actually something around then? And people have tried excavations in all these areas. There's like, two main areas in the Mahabharata. Hastinapur was the name of the kingdom. And people have done excavations around there and have, like, found some artifacts that might date back to those years. But there are also some details that are described in the epics that don't quite align with reality. For example, all the men, all the main warriors in that era were described as, like, very tall, very big, seven, eight feet, whatever. You know, I don't even know exact numbers. But. Studies by archaeologists also say that people who lived in those years in those regions were probably not more than six feet tall. So it's not clear exactly, like, what happened, what was correct, what was not correct. And, you know, we just have to keep probing more. But I find the idea fascinating to think of, like, what could have existed in sacred texts that was only partially communicated to the next generation and having a lot of, like, reinterpretations. Another thing that is very interesting to think about is Vedic math. So that basically Vedic math is like a branch of mathematics that, you know, some people in India are grown up learning. Like, I read it myself too. And some people actually practice it just to be sharper at mental math for doing their exams, like GMAT and things like that. GRE and it has like, a line in the Vedas that says, oh, like one from the last digit, two from the first digit, whatever. You know, so many different ways of multiplying two different numbers, like 97 times 96. Oh, like subtract the last two digits, put it in the right, multiply the first digits, put it in the left. That's the result. And then you wonder, like, oh, wait, the Rig Veda is so old. It's as old as it's the oldest sacred text out there. How is it describing computation? That feels very unreal. Like, do they actually know or understand advanced forms of computation even back in those days?
- [13:36]
Joe Rogan
And how old is Rigveda?
- [13:39]
Lex Fridman
I don't exactly know how old it is.
- [13:42]
Joe Rogan
Why don't we put that into perplexity?
- [13:44]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, let's do that.
- [13:45]
Joe Rogan
Let's find out.
- [13:47]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. It is technically the oldest sacred text out there.
- [13:55]
Joe Rogan
And so what's interesting is I wonder how old the stories were. By the time they were written down, like, how much of it is relayed person to person for years and years, just like the Bible, before it's ever actually written down. Scholars usually date the composition of the Rig Veda to about 1500-1200 BCE. So its oldest layer is roughly 3200, 3700 years old today. Like, if there really was. Like, every ancient culture has a story of a flood. Everyone. They all have an apocalyptic.
- [14:35]
Lex Fridman
Mahabharata had the same thing. Mahabharata had the same thing where there was a big, like, almost like a tsunami like thing. I don't exactly know what it was called, but that was the collapse of Lord Krishna's kingdom, Dwarka. After the war, a lot of people died, but some people survived. And even those who survived got wiped out by a calamity or like, some kind of, like, fight among themselves. And most of the people who participated in that era actually died.
- [15:03]
Joe Rogan
Here it is. The primordial. How do you say it? Manu. Yeah, Manu Flood. Classic Hindu Great flood myth, where the righteous King Manu is warned by a divine fish about an imminent deluge that will destroy humanity. He builds a boat, loads it with his family. It's like knowing the ark. It's the same thing with seeds and animals. Ties it to the horn of the God in fish form, which tows the boat to safety until the waters recede and the world is repopulated. They all have the same story. Yeah, that's what's really crazy.
- [15:38]
Lex Fridman
There is a. There is a concept in Hindu philosophy called the Yugas.
- [15:44]
Joe Rogan
I'm reading a book about it right now.
- [15:46]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yeah. So there's, like, different Yugas, and Yugas are, like, thousands of years. And the concept is that the Yugas keep cycling around. And so, like, we are in the Kali Yuga right now. And before that, it was a Dwapara Yuga. That's when most of Mahabharata happened. And before that, there was a Treta Yuga where the Ramayana happened. And before that, there was another Yuga.
- [16:06]
Joe Rogan
What is next after Kali Yuga?
- [16:09]
Lex Fridman
No, there is nothing next after Kali Yuga. It goes back to the first one. I forget the name of the first
- [16:13]
Joe Rogan
Yuga because the interpretation that I'm reading is that we're not in Kali Yuga anymore, and that Kali Yuga ended in the 1900s, and Dwapar Yuga started then.
- [16:23]
Lex Fridman
No, no, VR and Kali Yuga right now.
- [16:25]
Joe Rogan
100%.
- [16:25]
Lex Fridman
100%.
- [16:26]
Joe Rogan
So why do people have different interpretations? Like, is there a. Yeah, there's like a guru interpretation. There's like, one specific guru I see that has this interpretation that Kali Yuga ended in the 1900s.
- [16:39]
Lex Fridman
Okay.
- [16:39]
Joe Rogan
And that we're moving on.
- [16:41]
Lex Fridman
Interesting.
- [16:42]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. But I don't know who's right. Because it's. It's an enormous cycle. Right. The cycles of humanity.
- [16:47]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Thousands of years. Yeah, Thousands of years. And so. Yeah. So these are the four Yugas. And.
- [16:59]
Joe Rogan
So why do people have different interpretations? I'll tell you the book I'm reading.
- [17:04]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [17:08]
Joe Rogan
See, if this book is discredited, Young Jamie. It is. It's by a guy named David Steinowitz. Stein. Steinmetz. David Steinmetz. The book is called the Yugas.
- [17:28]
Lex Fridman
Interesting.
- [17:28]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. I mean, the problem is when someone's got their own interpretation or some guru's interpretation, it doesn't totally align. It's hard to know who's right and who's wrong.
- [17:40]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [17:40]
Joe Rogan
Keys. Understanding our hidden past, Emerging energy Age, and enlightened future.
- [17:47]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [17:48]
Joe Rogan
So that. Go back up to that again. So this is in the description. See what it says that. Where it says, In 1894, an Indian sage gave us an explanation not only for our hidden past, but for the trends of today and for future enlightenment. So there's, like, one guy's interpretation that this guy is going off of.
- [18:07]
Lex Fridman
I guess the difference might be that he thinks the Yuga cycle is 24,000 years, whereas I think it's probably much longer than that.
- [18:15]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Four yugas together is 4,320,000 years. You know what's really nutty?
- [18:24]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [18:24]
Joe Rogan
One of the really nutty things is both in the ancient Sumerian texts and in some of the ancient Egyptian texts, there's depictions before the flood of people who reigned for thousands of years as kings.
- [18:41]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [18:42]
Joe Rogan
And it's common. It's not. It's. And it's also. They're referenced multiple times in different scripts that are from different parts of what was Sumeru at the time.
- [18:51]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [18:52]
Joe Rogan
It's really weird because they take it as established history. Once it gets to a certain age, once they get into, like, whatever the age is, where they can verify that this person was the king for a certain period of time, but it's all in the same text as people that reigned for 6,000 years.
- [19:09]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And then one even just wipes out the whole thing. Yeah. And I mean, this is also somewhat, like, tangentially related to the Fermi Paradox. You know, like, if you assume all these things are happening on Earth itself, that entire civilizations are getting wiped out. And, like, we Always wonder you've explored this topic the most and where are the aliens? And there are different arguments that, like, okay, like, the reason we haven't quite found that is because the Great Filter exists. And there is, like, one entertaining theory that I like, just for the sake of entertainment is almost all civilizations end up advancing technologically a lot, and either a calamity wipes them out or, like, they build some misaligned AGI and then AGI wipes them out. And because of that, they never actually, like, end up being visible to us. Or the other theory is that we haven't quite built the Voyn Neumann probes to actually go find them. And both of them are plausible and there's no clear way to. No. Unless we actually, like, send out enough probes.
- [20:34]
Joe Rogan
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. We've come a long way with mental health, but there's still work to be done. BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma Report surveyed 2,000Americans, revealed that 85% of Americans believe getting support is wise, yet 74% say society discourages people from doing so. One thing that can help is to have more open conversations about mental struggles and encourage people to seek out help, not judge them. And you know what else helps? Better help. They make connecting with a professional therapist simple, and it actually works. Their live sessions have an average rating of 4.9 out of 5. Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy with better help. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com jre that's better. H lp.com jre There's a bunch of possibilities. I mean, there's almost too many to count. But there's the possibility that they are observing and that they don't want to interfere and that we are on some sort of evolutionary cycle. Cycle of cultural evolution. Civilization, evolution.
- [21:46]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [21:46]
Joe Rogan
And one of the things about this, the crazy ages that comes from the Sumerian text and from the ancient, the hieroglyphs that depict the zeppet. How do you say it? Zep Teddy. No, how am I saying that? What is that text? That ancient? Remember we talked about it with Zahi Hawass and he denied its existence. Zep Tepe. Is that it? Either way, you're dealing with these kings that reign for thousands and thousands of years. Well, you know, David Sinclair is in the middle of this research now that they're working on life extension. Drugs like that are actionable.
- [22:26]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
- [22:28]
Joe Rogan
Zep Tepe.
- [22:29]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I heard.
- [22:30]
Joe Rogan
So these. But this is what's so weird? If they look at hieroglyphs, they get to a certain point and they're like, oh, khufu, he was real. This guy was real. All these people were real.
- [22:39]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [22:40]
Joe Rogan
But then they get back to these guys that reigned for thousands of years. They go, oh, that was just horseshit. Yeah, but, but why is it that all these people have these stories that align with this timeline that's pre flood? It's all like the same story.
- [22:54]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [22:55]
Joe Rogan
And then if you're talking about these ancient Hindu scriptures that are discussing technology that seems remarkably similar to technology that we have today.
- [23:05]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. The manas are flying cars, basically, and
- [23:08]
Joe Rogan
probably what we're going to have a hundred years from now or whatever it is, or we could have gone that way in the past.
- [23:14]
Lex Fridman
And it's very entertaining. Think of, like, let's say something happens to us, Right. I don't want anything to happen to us, but let's say something happens to us. And would people really believe you were like launching reusable rockets?
- [23:24]
Joe Rogan
Right. Or making FaceTime calls to people in Australia?
- [23:28]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. Like even fundamental things, like all we were doing today, I think it's all like, incredible. Like, there's a lot of things that could be just technological ideas or maybe people actually had it and the knowledge of it was lost. And it's not been documented, it's not been passed along. And so we are skeptical if they ever had it.
- [23:47]
Joe Rogan
Yes.
- [23:48]
Lex Fridman
And so we end up reinventing it in different forms again and again and again. And we keep cycling through this process.
- [23:53]
Joe Rogan
Well, it also could be that this is the natural progression of human curiosity. The human curiosity and ingenuity always moves into these very particular ways. Like, what's the best way to defeat my enemies?
- [24:03]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [24:04]
Joe Rogan
If we're always going to be territorial primates, we're always going to want to defeat our enemies. We're always going to protect ourselves from being invaded. So we're going to make better. And just with technological innovation, it just goes down the same path. Oh, we figure out bullets. Oh, we figure out nuclear bombs. Well, we figure out we don't even have to use an actual plane. We can use an autonomous drone and that delivers it and then scale upwards and onwards and AI and. And then also life extension. So if these people were able to make the pyramids, like, you know, there's a lot of speculation as to the timeline of the pyramids, but let's just say they really built it 2500 BC. Let's just say back then, what the fuck were they Using, like, what were you. What did you do? How did you get these stones down from the mountains that were 500 miles away? This one? How about that one? Yeah, we were going to get to that for sure. There's a ton. No thank. What's good? Good as any. How about these temples that they find in India that are carved entirely out of one piece of stone? What did you do? How did you do that? How long ago did this happen? How many of them were buried? And then they had to uncover them and then, like, figure out, like, what is this? Who made it? There's no timeline. No one really knows. There's no evidence of tools that were capable of doing this kind of work back then. And they're huge and beautiful and perfect and they have, like acoustic properties and the geometry is fucking fantastic. Yeah, it's nuts.
- [25:39]
Lex Fridman
It's not just that all of these temples were actually just built. Not just they were specifically the locations for them or picked out so that you get the right seismic vibrations over there in terms of, like, proximity to the ocean, the gravitational waves from the sun and the moon. People actually made that level.
- [26:01]
Joe Rogan
Like, look at this, man. Imagine the undertaking of carving that temple out of the side of a fucking giant piece of rock.
- [26:13]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [26:14]
Joe Rogan
You screw up one thing and it's over.
- [26:16]
Lex Fridman
There's no simulations. You just have to like, build it.
- [26:20]
Joe Rogan
Well, what did they have? This is the question. Like, imagine today if we had to do this. Look, it's possible. This is a possible endeavor. It can be done. Yeah, but imagine what kind of technology would we have to need to map it out, to make sure that it was all precise, that it all. I mean, it's precise within like millimeters from point to point. And everything is done out of one piece of stone. Like, what did they do? Was it chisels? Did you do that with chisels? That's crazy. How many times you have to sharpen your fucking chisel. That's nuts. Or do you have something completely different? Because some of the more intricate ones. See if you can find these. Some of the crazy ones. Inside these temples, there's sculptures that are three dimensional and they're carved like inside of the sculpture. So there's like an outer area and then there's these, all these openings. And then inside it's highly detailed. Like, how'd you even reach in there? It just says they use chisels and hammers. And I don't think that's perfect. Possible and careful geometric.
- [27:26]
Lex Fridman
Geometric planning.
- [27:28]
Joe Rogan
People trying to do that. They said, like, this is how Much work someone could do in like 12 hours with a hammer. And they get nowhere, let alone, like perfect and looking good. Yeah, it's nuts, man. And there's a lot of evidence of stuff like that all over the world, which is really weird. You have the stuff in Peru, like Sacsay Juaman. When you look at these stones and it looks like they're melted into place and they're 900 tons. Like, what did you do?
- [27:55]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, how did he even get it up there?
- [27:57]
Joe Rogan
How'd you. Where'd they get it? How'd you get it there? How'd you align it? Perfectly built in only 18 years. How do they know that? How do they know that? Because it's attributed to one king.
- [28:08]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [28:08]
Joe Rogan
So king Krishna the first. 756 to 773 CE maybe. How do you know, though? Yeah, they said, archaeologists said it was a. They calculate it would take them 100 years to do it. Yeah, yeah.
- [28:24]
Lex Fridman
I mean, this is where like, you know, I don't know, different historian accounts are all like, muddled up, you know.
- [28:29]
Joe Rogan
Well, it's a real problem. History is a real problem.
- [28:32]
Lex Fridman
But yeah, it goes back to like the thing you were saying. Right. You know, what is one thing that's common across all these different ages is human curiosity. So, I mean, that's something that, you know, I would love to get your take on this. Like, I've been toying with this idea called a curiosity premium, which is the most effective people, the most successful people have always been the most curious people, the ones who have been good at asking the best questions and they tend to do better in every aspect of their life. And you're a good example of that. So that's why I would love to get your take on this. And the reason I believe that is because long term, people who continuously ask questions tend to do better. They make more money, they have a higher quality of life, they're happy, they have more compounding relationships. People find them more interesting. And so they compound their relationships over time. And so naturally they end up succeeding. But their spirit of inquiry, their intrinsic curiosity, doesn't actually stop once they succeed. It only they just channelize it even more. And so that's why it keeps compounding. And I would argue that, like, it's the only quality, it's the only, like, quality that makes us really human. You know, in this world where we can seek a lot of information, get information way faster than ever before, it feels like that's that one universal human quality that's existed since ancient time, since the Oldest text. Like, in fact, in the Rig Veda, you're explicitly encouraged to seek wisdom more than wealth. And it's not just an idea specific to Hinduism. That specific idea exists in the Bible. It exists in the Quran, exists in the Torah. It's not that seeking wealth is admonished by religious texts. It's actually that it's more important to seek wisdom. And, you know, like, you can. Why I said you're a good example of that is like, sure, you have a very, very large podcast, but the way you're running it is like you're just curious about a lot of things and asking a lot of questions. And I think that's that one quality that's very important. So. And I feel like it's the oldest thing. It's the only thing that we've known since ancient time.
- [30:43]
Joe Rogan
Being curious, well, I think it's stimulating to people, and genuine curiosity is stimulating to other people. When someone is genuinely curious about something, I become curious about it. I think it's contagious, and I think that it's. It's also an authentic quality. And I think there's. There's something about really wanting to know something and being interested in something. And if you're curious, generally, you're going to ask more questions about something so you have a deeper understanding of it. So if you're trying to do whatever you're trying to do, a sport, a game, you'll probably get better at it because you're more curious, because instead of just assuming things, you'll ask more questions, you'll re. Examine things. It's genuine. It's. It's one of the most important human qualities. And to me, it's one of the most attractive human qualities. It's always been when I meet curious people, I'm always interested. I'm always like, like, tell me what you're curious about and I'll tell you what I'm curious about. Let's talk. You know, it's, it's. And this podcast started out genuinely because of Wells, lot of just talking shit with friends, but it also led into, like, one of my very first guests, actual guests, was Graham Hancock. And it's just because I was curious because I had read Fingerprints of the Gods and I'd seen him talk, I'd seen speeches, and I'm like, I want to know, like, what do you know? What do you think's going on? And he's another guy incredibly curious and absolutely fascinated with his takes on ancient history. He has been talking about this subject a long Time. And when he first, when he first wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, I think that came out in like, I want to say it's like 97 or 98 or something like that. And I remember reading in so many of my friends, you know, educated friends, like this horseshit. Why are you paying attention to this? More and more and more as time goes on, it's been proven that he's correct. The timelines shifted back and from the publication of that book, the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and the surrounding area, like, it's like, okay, now we realize, well, there was some crazy going on at the very least 11,000 years ago. So we pushed civilization back 5,000 years. So, like. And this is just what we found now. And we keep finding things, keep digging, keep looking. And then you see the stuff that they're finding underneath the pyramid with this radio tomography, where they're looking under the pyramid, that seems that there's structures under the. We've seen that stuff.
- [33:08]
Lex Fridman
I haven't seen that.
- [33:09]
Joe Rogan
I had the scientist that's involved in it. He's an Italian guy, Filippo Biondi, and he came on the podcast. What wonderful accent. Almost as good as yours. It was amazing. But he's describing the use of this stuff and that they've used it successfully on known areas in pyramids and other structures. And they can. In fact, they. There's a. In Italy, there is a particle collider that is underneath a mountain. And using this technology, which is satellite based technology, they get an accurate description of this particle collider. That's I think it's 1200 meters underground. Like, how, how far is that thing underground? We'll find out. But it's like deep under stone. And they find that they can get an accurate like, and they can actually give you the dimensions of this particle collider. They have like an image of it. And this same technology is showing that there's these columns underneath the pyramid in various places that are 20 meters wide and they have coils around them. They don't know what the hell they are. And they. The whole structure of this thing, it's not small. It goes almost a kilometer into the ground. There's like this enormous, like, bottom of it. And it seems like it's something that's constructed. And so they're like, okay, well, the pyramid is crazy. It's crazy enough. But if there's something underneath it that's a man made or someone made it, that's a kilometer deep into the ground. Like, what the fuck are we even talking about, like, who made this? What? What did they have? 1.2km into the mountain. That's nuts. It's a half a mile in it plus into the mountain. And this thing can see through all that and get this accurate depiction of this particle collider. And it's showing with multiple scans, not just one, multiple scans in different technology, the same exact images, the same exact structures underneath this fucking immense 2,300,000 stone structure that almost perfectly aligns to true north, south, east, and west. Like, what. What was going on? Don't tell me. Pulleys. Don't tell me. Copper tools. Like, what the fuck was going on? Something crazy. And I have a feeling our simplistic explanation of it is just doing no one any justice. It's doing no service to history. It's doing no service to our understanding. They've got to be a little bit more open in the fact that they are perplexed. And not just perplexed by stuff like this. This is a 3D print of an actual vase that exists in Egypt that they found. That is, they found it in tombs of the old kingdom. This thing was somehow another. It's made with diorite. So it's incredibly hard stone and made to like a thousandth of a human hair in its. Yeah, like crazy dimensions. Like, the way. The precision of it. And wasn't turned on a lathe because it has handles.
- [36:20]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [36:21]
Joe Rogan
So you look at the handles on the side. Well, you can't carve the. Those are perfect too. Like, the alignment of it, everything. And it's like, you just look at it. Oh, it's a vase. No big deal. But no, it's kind of fucking crazy. Like, how did they cut that out? There's also these. There's all these core marks in some of the stones that they find in Egypt. And they've analyzed the amount of revolutions per minute that you would have to go through to be able to cut through something and leave these lines and defies explanation. Like, what is this? This is crazy. This is not sand and copper and just rubbing things. No, this is some insane technology that we don't understand. There's scoop marks out of the bottoms of some of these stones. It's like, what about, what the fuck is this? How'd you scoop rock? Like, it looks like ice cream. Like, they just went roop. Like, what are they doing? There's so many questions.
- [37:15]
Lex Fridman
What tools did they even have to do all these things?
- [37:18]
Joe Rogan
They had copper. I mean, there's some evidence that they had some iron. And then I think Tutankhamun had a dagger that was actually made from meteorite, which is interesting. You know, like when they could find meteorites and make things out of them was very valuable obviously. But the just the sheer volume of work that they did there, it's like you look at the temple in man, you look at the three major pyramids, you look at all the different temples and all the construction. And the older you go, the deeper into the sand they go, the more complex these things are, which is even weirder. So it seems like civilization after civilization just there was probably a rise, rise and fall with their technology as well.
- [38:02]
Lex Fridman
Absolutely.
- [38:03]
Joe Rogan
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- [39:29]
Lex Fridman
I think it's just incredible that none of this knowledge was properly documented, ever. And it's a whole line of work to just go understand how to even rebuild these things. Leave alone how did they build it?
- [39:42]
Joe Rogan
Well, think about what we're doing, right? So all of our knowledge is essentially stored on hard drives and paper. Those are the two things that are going to deteriorate the quickest.
- [39:54]
Lex Fridman
Maybe we should take a dump of the Internet and put it on a rock, go preserve it somewhere so that even if our civilization is wiped out and all the data centers are like gone or whatever, right? Whoever comes next can go figure it out.
- [40:09]
Joe Rogan
Well, I mean, then you've got to always assume that even if they found a hard drive that they would like, how long would it take for them to Back engineer what we did and figure out what these ones and zeros actually mean.
- [40:22]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [40:24]
Joe Rogan
Which is one of the most bizarre and fantastic accomplishments of modern civilization is that like this is a terabyte.
- [40:32]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [40:33]
Joe Rogan
Which is nuts.
- [40:34]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [40:34]
Joe Rogan
I don't know what your first computer had.
- [40:37]
Lex Fridman
I don't remember. Definitely not. Not even a gigabyte probably.
- [40:41]
Joe Rogan
No.
- [40:41]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [40:42]
Joe Rogan
Like a few hundred megabytes was your hard drive.
- [40:45]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah.
- [40:46]
Joe Rogan
I mean, I remember when they first came out with gigabytes, I was like, this is nuts.
- [40:50]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You remember like when Gmail launched and gave everybody like free email storage, unlimited email storage, and the bottom sliding bar would just keep increasing in terms of the total allowed size.
- [41:00]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [41:01]
Lex Fridman
And that was nuts to me.
- [41:02]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [41:04]
Lex Fridman
And I think, yeah, we take it for granted that we have like infinite RAM and infinite hard disk and nobody has to worry about like, you know, back in those days, you worry about like taking too many photos on your phone. Right, right. And then you have to go delete all the old ones or bad ones.
- [41:19]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. You'd run out of storage on your phone.
- [41:21]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And then you have to buy like an external hard drive to keep storing things.
- [41:24]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [41:25]
Lex Fridman
Transferring stuff from your phone to the hard disk.
- [41:28]
Joe Rogan
I remember the old Android phones, you get an SD card.
- [41:30]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [41:31]
Joe Rogan
You could slip one of those in there and you could store images on that. So you could save space.
- [41:36]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [41:37]
Joe Rogan
And all that stuff is so vulnerable. It's so vulnerable. And again, if a completely alien society had to come down and find our hard drives and they went a totally different path of technology, they'd have to back engineer, reverse engineer everything that we did, try to figure out what are we using, what operating system, how's the operating system work? Is it Unix, Is it Linux? Is it like, what is it? How do they do. Would be a nightmare.
- [42:06]
Lex Fridman
They would need an advanced AI to figure it all out for them.
- [42:09]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [42:10]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah.
- [42:11]
Joe Rogan
And so that's just if the hard drive survive. Right. So if there's some massive flood, cataclysm, whatever, some, some horrific thing that damages all of our electronics, which is totally possible. You know, just some solar flare, some intense.
- [42:27]
Lex Fridman
Just, just, just another lab leak, right? Yeah, yeah.
- [42:32]
Joe Rogan
Just time. A lab leak in time.
- [42:34]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah.
- [42:36]
Joe Rogan
It's nuts. And it. We could go back to zero real quick and we would basically be like preppers and hunting.
- [42:43]
Lex Fridman
It would be hard to reverse engineer everything again.
- [42:45]
Joe Rogan
It would be almost impossible. Which is why I'm really fascinated by the flood, the post flood timeline. Because if these people like Graham Hancock and a lot of these other folks that have speculated that there was probably a very advanced civilization that went in a completely different direction many thousands of years ago. If you look at, like, the emergence of, like, Sumer and, you know, Mesopotamia and that area, which a lot of people attribute to be the earliest known civilization, that's around 5,000 plus 6,000 years ago, right?
- [43:19]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, roughly.
- [43:20]
Joe Rogan
So the flood's like 11,000 years ago plus. So you're looking at like 5,000 years of what?
- [43:27]
Lex Fridman
It's not even that long in the grand scheme of things.
- [43:30]
Joe Rogan
No, not to the Earth, but for people.
- [43:32]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [43:32]
Joe Rogan
Pretty long.
- [43:33]
Lex Fridman
Exactly.
- [43:33]
Joe Rogan
Like, think of how long it took us to get our shit together.
- [43:35]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [43:36]
Joe Rogan
It took thousands and thousands and thousands of years of people probably being mobbed monsters, just being the worst of the worst.
- [43:44]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [43:45]
Joe Rogan
And that's probably the only way they survived. There's probably a lot of cannibalism.
- [43:48]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [43:48]
Joe Rogan
There's a lot of murder. There was a lot of, like, horrific going on for 5,000 years until people slowly but surely figured out agriculture again.
- [43:57]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [43:57]
Joe Rogan
Started building walls. Everybody relaxed a little, Got some solid weapons, keep people away so you could work on math. And then next thing you know, civilization emerges again. And it goes right back, you know, goes right back onto the cycle. And then you start reading in the. The Rig Veda about stuff that happened thousands of years ago. What the fuck is this? Like, what happened?
- [44:17]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [44:18]
Joe Rogan
And that's my belief.
- [44:21]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [44:21]
Joe Rogan
I think there was something going on on Earth many, many, many thousands of years before established beginnings of history that was very bizarre. And probably technology that went in a completely different direction than what we're doing now with combustion engines and circuits and all the different things that we use. They probably figured out some other kind of technology.
- [44:44]
Lex Fridman
Exactly.
- [44:45]
Joe Rogan
Which is totally possible.
- [44:46]
Lex Fridman
And it's amazing, like, it's amazing to think of, like, what if we could rediscover all of that again? Yes.
- [44:52]
Joe Rogan
Well, I would love to be able to. I would love to just have a. If I could choose one window in time to go back to see what it would look like, I would 100% pick ancient Egypt While they're building the pyramids. Show me what the fuck was going on.
- [45:09]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [45:09]
Joe Rogan
There's this. Just put me in a big hamster wheel. There's a big plastic bubble where no one could see me. Just let me violate space and time and exist there for just a few minutes. Just let me look. I think that would be the most insane thing that you could see about humans in humans history.
- [45:26]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [45:26]
Joe Rogan
I just. I want to know what they knew, what they had what they used in this thing, Petra's. Same time period at least attributed to 7,000, roughly BC Jesus. And they. You know, how would you. Right?
- [45:41]
Lex Fridman
How the details of all those carvings. Is this insane.
- [45:45]
Joe Rogan
Insane.
- [45:46]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [45:46]
Joe Rogan
And what in 7,000 BC, what are the tools? What the hell were you using? How did you make a temple out of the side of a fucking mountain? Look at the size of it, man. The size of those columns.
- [46:01]
Lex Fridman
It would be hard to do anything like this even today.
- [46:04]
Joe Rogan
It would be incredibly difficult, insanely time consuming. Yeah. The Kaliasa Temple, by the way. I don't have it up right now, but in 1650 or so, someone sent a thousand people to try to destroy it. And after three years of doing nothing, they stopped. They barely made a den on a couple statues.
- [46:22]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. A lot of times when invasions happen in India, like, they tried really hard
- [46:27]
Joe Rogan
to fuck it up and couldn't. Oh, wow, that's crazy.
- [46:31]
Lex Fridman
That's very robust.
- [46:36]
Joe Rogan
That's a great way to describe it. It's just there's so much of that stuff that's so interesting because it's so undeniable. It's so undeniable in its scale, so undeniable in its complexity and the. The planning and the understanding that you had to have a deep knowledge of geometry, of measurement. You had to have materials. Yes. Everything.
- [47:03]
Lex Fridman
Sturdiness, like, resist, like calamities, earthquakes.
- [47:08]
Joe Rogan
What tools are you using?
- [47:10]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [47:11]
Joe Rogan
Like, how are you doing this?
- [47:13]
Lex Fridman
How are you coordinating all these people?
- [47:15]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [47:15]
Lex Fridman
Getting them to do stuff? And I mean, sure, conditions must have been way harsher. Like, I'm sure people didn't really have a choice but to do these things because back in those days, like, the only way you could take care of your food and clothing and shelter is like, you commit yourself as a laborer to the state, to the kingdom. But you could also ask, like, what gave them the initiative or drive to go do these things?
- [47:39]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, well, that description is perhaps of a later time. We don't even really know what civilization was like when these were constructed.
- [47:47]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [47:48]
Joe Rogan
The real problem is the material science. The real problem is, like you, there's a lot of things that you have to have to make those things. It's not as simple as a sculpture like Michelangelo making a sculpture out of something that's like, fairly easy to carve into stars. As far as stone goes. No, this is the scale is. It's so undeniable that like, something, Something, some piece of our understanding is missing.
- [48:16]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, looking at all this, everyone should just be a lot more Humble, right. We don't actually know that much. What we know is so little. The same thing as what Socrates said. What we know is very, very little. And the only thing we should all strive to be is just be curious. And I think there's a lot of tendency for people to think like, oh, we have all this advanced technology, we're so amazing, look at us. And it's like, wait, hold on. You don't even understand what happened thousands of years ago. And there's so much out there to just go and explore and learn and like get better at understanding more.
- [48:57]
Joe Rogan
What is this place?
- [48:58]
Lex Fridman
This is. Yeah, this is unreal.
- [49:01]
Joe Rogan
This is called the Ellora Caves. Timeless wonder carved in stone. I think it's all like kind of the same area.
- [49:07]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it's the same Ellora Cave in the Shiva temple that you saw.
- [49:11]
Joe Rogan
Look at that. My God, look at this stuff. It's insane. And again, there's no steel back then.
- [49:20]
Lex Fridman
It's actually really symmetrical. It's not even like. Can you go back to the first one with the symmetrical top? Yeah. Look at the symmetry at the top.
- [49:33]
Joe Rogan
It's nuts. It looks like that mall and New York they made where the world trades. Yeah. But way more robust. I mean, how, what, what were you. They.
- [49:47]
Lex Fridman
You.
- [49:48]
Joe Rogan
This is the thing is like the material science aspect of it. Yeah. It's like you don't have the ability to do. Look at that top one. Go to that top one again. The one that you just had, Jamie. Yeah, that one. Look at. That's crazy, man. I mean, I am just blown away when I see stuff like that. My mind just starts racing and I just think, how did you do this? Who, who was involved? How was it planned? How is it so symmetrical? What were the tools? Like, what were the tools, man?
- [50:20]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [50:21]
Joe Rogan
If you don't have steel, you don't have. What are you using? How'd you do that?
- [50:26]
Lex Fridman
I mean, most of it is done with stone clearly, right?
- [50:29]
Joe Rogan
So I guess, I guess, I doubt it. I bet they had something else. I bet they had something else that over time eroded just like metal wood today. I mean, if you left a shovel outside today and you came back to that same spot 500 years from now, there's nothing. That shovel's gone, right?
- [50:49]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [50:50]
Joe Rogan
And you've got to assume that these many thousand year old temples that were carved out of a mountain, whatever tools they used probably got absorbed by the earth and the only thing that's remaining.
- [51:02]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah.
- [51:02]
Joe Rogan
It's giving me a weird thought.
- [51:03]
Lex Fridman
Like when they make a big Building
- [51:04]
Joe Rogan
downtown, though, they only bring the crane in for a temporary period of time, and there's only so many cranes on the planet currently, too, so. Right, true. You take it, you move it, you go take it to the next spot. Yep. Yeah, true. Yeah.
- [51:17]
Lex Fridman
I don't know.
- [51:17]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, Especially something like this. Like, if they had heavy equipment and machinery and whatever the. They were using, they probably moved it and then moved it out, and then it probably rotted away, and now it's gone. If there was machinery, if there wasn't, like, there must have been something else, some other kind of like some technology that we haven't even imagined.
- [51:37]
Lex Fridman
Yeah,
- [51:40]
Joe Rogan
but it's like their. Their commitment to art, too, was so fascinating, because these aren't just structures, they're fashion projects. Yeah. Intensely beautiful, intensely ornate.
- [51:52]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [51:53]
Joe Rogan
So it's not. It's not just that they wanted to build, like, a functional structure.
- [51:57]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [51:58]
Joe Rogan
That good architecture. No, it's this. It's a fascinating artwork. And it's so intricate. There's so many different features and so many different images of. Of different people and beings and animals and elephants.
- [52:13]
Lex Fridman
And there's one more temple, like, you could pull out. Like, it's called the Tanjir temple.
- [52:18]
Joe Rogan
Oh, I've seen that one too. Yeah. Yeah.
- [52:20]
Lex Fridman
That was done more recently in the. In the age of the cholas, and it's. It's pretty incredible.
- [52:25]
Joe Rogan
When did they do that one?
- [52:28]
Lex Fridman
I don't know the exact number, but more recent than the ones that you saw.
- [52:32]
Joe Rogan
All of them are nuts, man. And then there's stuff like that all over the world. Whoa.
- [52:37]
Lex Fridman
This was done as a. As a project by the king to basically make a name for himself.
- [52:44]
Joe Rogan
Wow. That's incredible. Is that multiple pieces of stone, or did he carve that whole thing out of stone, too?
- [52:53]
Lex Fridman
Probably multiple pieces.
- [52:55]
Joe Rogan
So that's actually like, construction.
- [52:57]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [52:58]
Joe Rogan
Not like removal. The other ones are. It's essentially a giant sculpture. Wow. It's so pretty. Look how geometric it is.
- [53:10]
Lex Fridman
That's what amazes me. Like, they didn't actually have all these simulations and CAD tools and all these things.
- [53:15]
Joe Rogan
Right. And what year was this made, Jamie? Does it say it's just so incredible how much of this stuff exists where it's really baffling. Like, I just found out recently that the Aztecs didn't build those temples that they found them.
- [53:34]
Lex Fridman
Really?
- [53:34]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, they found, like, the Tenochtitlan. They. They call it the place where the gods were born. The Aztecs found it and uncovered it, and then on the. When is it Tenochtitlan or Teotocan, whichever one it was on the consecration day, when they were done with, like, whatever they were doing with it to celebrate, they killed somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 people in four days.
- [54:04]
Lex Fridman
Damn.
- [54:05]
Joe Rogan
Not exactly the mindset of the type of people that would construct something like that, you know. So those are the people that found it, and it might have been sitting there for a thousand years. And then they came along and said, oh, this is cool. Let's live here. Okay, well, what was the society that lived there before them and where are they and what happened and how they do this and why'd they do it and why did they have it aligned with the constellations? Like, what were they doing?
- [54:29]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, some of the calculations are pretty. Pretty amazing. Like how they timed it, how they positioned it, how they cared about planetary positions and stuff like that. Sure. Like, some of it could even be pseudoscience, but whatever. I think just the level of, like, calculations they were making back in those days without, you know, powerful computers is this outstanding.
- [54:54]
Joe Rogan
It's just nuts and it doesn't make sense. It's like, okay, they're making without powerful computers, so what are they using?
- [55:01]
Lex Fridman
I mean, at one point, the word computer just meant a human.
- [55:05]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [55:05]
Lex Fridman
Like, human beings would be doing the calculations. That was their only job, like, to literally, like, multiply two numbers, like, to make. Some astronomers were actually the first mathematicians. The term mathematician and astronomer were used synonymously at one point. Really? Yeah.
- [55:22]
Joe Rogan
Why is that?
- [55:23]
Lex Fridman
Why?
- [55:24]
Joe Rogan
Studying the stars and math?
- [55:27]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, because, like, studying the stars involved making a lot of geometry calculations. And that was kind of actually one of the first set of mathematicians in India. People like Arya Bhatta, Bhaskara, all these guys were actually astronomers, too. They were not just mathematicians. And Aryabhata was earliest to the idea of using zeros. And then he had a lot of contributions to geometry, and he was doing all this just because he was interested in astronomy.
- [56:00]
Joe Rogan
Isn't there evidence of Pythagorean theorem in ancient. Is it ancient Sumerian?
- [56:09]
Lex Fridman
Is it.
- [56:11]
Joe Rogan
It's some. Some. Something that predates Pythagoras.
- [56:15]
Lex Fridman
Interesting. My theory is that even though it was not formulated as a Pythagorean theorem, like, I'm sure people had to understand concepts of sines and cosines and like, you know, whatever is the right angle for the right incline to get this right level of, like, geometry, you need to. You needed to have some implicit understanding of it to build these kind of structures. There's no way you could do it without that.
- [56:38]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. 100. And you have to have incredible measurement tools, like not just the actual mathematics. Okay. The oldest known evidence of Pythagorean theorem dates from Old Babylonian clay tablets from about 1900 to 1600 BCE, roughly 1000 years before Pythagoras. Isn't that wild? Like how. How clay tablets often cited use what we now call the Pythagorean theorem to complete. To compute rather, the diagonal of rectangles and squares, including an excellent approximation. Look at this. This is nuts, man. Vedic ritual text explicitly states the rule equivalent. I don't know how to say that. What is that?
- [57:23]
Lex Fridman
A, A squared, B squared, C squared
- [57:25]
Joe Rogan
equals C squared for the diagonal of a rectangle. That includes num. Examples predating or roughly contemporary with classical Greek mathematics. So completely different parts of the world.
- [57:35]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [57:36]
Joe Rogan
And they're coming up with the same stuff.
- [57:37]
Lex Fridman
Exactly. Because they're all curious. That's it.
- [57:40]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, they're all curious. And eventually all curiosity leads to truth or some form of it.
- [57:46]
Lex Fridman
I would argue that anything, anything that's of impact on the world has only been done by curious people. In hindsight, we label those people as successful, as smart or rich. But the common trait across all of them has been, like, curious.
- [58:02]
Joe Rogan
Well, that's certainly a powerful trait. And people that aren't curious are not fun.
- [58:08]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. They're not interesting. So because of that, they don't attract other smart or interesting people and therefore they won't be able to do something very meaningful in the world. So it's kind of like it's less about. And it applies to your personal relationships and personal life too. It's not just about professional success. Like, you'll have a more fulfilling life with your wife or your kids. If you're a more curious person, you ask them more questions, you take interest in them. Right. So that's the one quality everybody wants in personal relationships is like taking interest in them and like actually understanding them better or like being curious about common things. And so it's not just that being curious leads to success. It's more that people around you want you to be successful if you're curious because you will have more compounding and fulfilling relationships.
- [59:00]
Joe Rogan
I would agree with that. Yeah. I'd say it's one of the more important qualities of human beings. I mean, it's led to everything that we have today. All curiosity has led to all of our architecture, math, everything, art, everything.
- [59:14]
Lex Fridman
The transistor, like, you know the story of the transistor.
- [59:17]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [59:18]
Lex Fridman
So Bell Labs was basically employing as many like, like history adjusted, as many telephone engineers back then as the number of software engineers today. But only three people cared enough to question whether you should use these really hot giant vacuum tubes for amplifying telephone signals. So vacuum tubes are very big, power hungry and very hot. And so they were not fault tolerant and it's very expensive. And so three people questioned the need for that and came up with the idea of the transistor to amplify current. And that was the Nobel prize winning discovery. And not just that it was useful to amplify telephone signals. It basically led to the rise of modern computing. And we wouldn't have an iPhone like this today if not for those three people.
- [60:04]
Joe Rogan
Do you know what the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory about transistors is?
- [60:07]
Lex Fridman
No.
- [60:08]
Joe Rogan
That they are back engineered from the Roswell crash along with fiber optics.
- [60:15]
Lex Fridman
Tell me more.
- [60:16]
Joe Rogan
So we read this on the podcast. Remember Jamie, there's the two scientists that were attributed. There's this one scientist that said they weren't even remotely exceptional guys and that they gave them the credit for this so that they didn't have to reveal the true nature of where this technology came from.
- [60:32]
Lex Fridman
I see. Interesting.
- [60:33]
Joe Rogan
So again, tinfoil hat securely on our heads. This is not something I believe, this is just something that's fun. There's a few inventions that came out of that time period, roughly after 1947 that are weird. And one of them is fiber optics and one of them is a transistor. And these are supposedly attributed to back engineering programs. So the Roswell crash, I don't know if you ever paid any attention to it. It's a real weird one because the COVID of the Roswell Daily Record said that the government has a crash disk that landed in the desert. A bunch of witnesses, bunch of people saw it. It's also people that saw, supposedly saw physical bodies of these creatures and supposedly, again, who knows what's true. But Truman went to the site, he visited it, and then the planes, two separate planes were flown to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which was, I think it was just Wright Base back then. I don't think it was Wright Patterson, but they flew them out. And the idea was this material was so important they didn't want to risk one plane crashing. So they flew it in two different planes and that this stuff has always been known to be stored at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. That's what everybody always talks about. And then a lot of it was moved to Bell Labs and there was a company called the American Computer Company. And back in the day, the American Computer Company was just like it was a consumer Website where you could go and say, oh, I need a Windows computer that does this, that and the other thing. And you could just put in whatever respects were and they would build it for you. They owned a whole section of their website dedicated to Bell Labs and back engineered UFO technology and all they talked about. And this one, like whoever ran it was like a fucking kook.
- [62:29]
Lex Fridman
I don't know.
- [62:30]
Joe Rogan
Is that still around, that website? Yeah, American computer company is still around.
- [62:34]
Lex Fridman
Interesting.
- [62:35]
Joe Rogan
So this is like the 1990s, I
- [62:37]
Lex Fridman
think you're saying your theory, I mean, not that you believe in it, but your theory is that the transistor was not like invented. It was known and it was given to the.
- [62:46]
Joe Rogan
There's apparently a giant leap between the first ideas of the transistor and then what actually came about and how much money had to be spent to create it off of this leap. This was this assertion by these scientists that we're trying to examine this. The thing about Bell Labs is there's a military base right outside of Bell Labs. And they say, well, that military base is to guard New York City, but New York City is quite a flight away. But Bell Labs is right there.
- [63:15]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [63:15]
Joe Rogan
And they're working on some deep dark shit at Bell Labs for sure. Because I've had a bunch of people on. They were talking about remote viewing exercises that they were doing out of Bell Labs. You know, we've had a bunch of people that came on and talked about various programs that were going on that were like top secret programs that were happening that were being run through Bell Labs. There's some weirdness to that place. Like real weirdness.
- [63:39]
Lex Fridman
Interesting.
- [63:40]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And it's fun, the idea that, like, you know that.
- [63:45]
Lex Fridman
Because it definitely feels very disconnected. Like, okay, like you were using all these vacuum tubes and then suddenly you're like, okay, like, what if we just use semiconductors? Okay. There's definitely a pretty far drift from what you're doing currently to what you're supposed to do. And also the idea of the first transistor and what ended up being used in chips, the junction transistor, are quite different too. So they're like big leaps in terms of what the core idea was. It's not an incremental change. The way I thought about it was like, okay, that's like tens of years of work. And that's why they made a big change. And so if you actually looked into the individual milestones they had, maybe it would have looked pretty different. But your conspiracy theory is pretty interesting.
- [64:36]
Joe Rogan
It's always fun.
- [64:37]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [64:38]
Joe Rogan
And also there's just too many stories of this. And David Grush has, you know, on oath said that they, there are back engineering programs and he was read into these and that they've been around for a long time. But this is the assertion of that movie the Age of Disclosure, that the real problem is that they have misappropriated funds and lied to Congress. And so they come out and tell you, okay, we do have this program, well, guess what, everybody goes to jail because you guys are a bunch of liars and you've been stealing money and you've been doing it. Whatever you want to do with this money. I don't know like how much, how much oversight is there on back engineering UFO programs, you know, so probably a lot of people get in trouble, a lot of people go to jail. On top of that, these things are all being done by weapons manufacturers.
- [65:24]
Lex Fridman
Right.
- [65:25]
Joe Rogan
Like where are you going to bring them to? Well, you're going to bring them to Lockheed Martin or you're going to bring them to, you know, Rocketdyne or it's going to be someone that does that kind of work.
- [65:33]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [65:34]
Joe Rogan
You're not going to do it on your, it's not going to be like, we'll do it. No, you're going to have to bring it to people that already make spaceships or bring it to people that already make jets.
- [65:41]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [65:41]
Joe Rogan
And so they have a massive competitive advantage over any other company that's doing it. So then there's other companies that also had contracts with the United States government. They can sue. And so he lays out all the problems with disclosure and their assertion is that the only thing what we need if we really want to find out the truth is we're going to need widespread amnesty for all these people that were involved. My problem with that is that's what I would say too. If I had been stealing money for decades and decades, I'd be like, we need amnesty. And then I'll tell you where all this stuff is. I'm like, how do we know what this stuff is? Whether or not these are just top secret military programs with advanced propulsion technology that's unavailable to the public and they're going to say that as aliens and they back engineered this and they did that like, like they clearly don't want to tell people. They don't want people to know. I think a large part of it is probably because they could get in trouble, but I think also a large part of it is because it's fun to keep secrets from people.
- [66:42]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [66:43]
Joe Rogan
Especially when you're the government.
- [66:44]
Lex Fridman
Why? Tell them.
- [66:45]
Joe Rogan
Fuck those people.
- [66:46]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [66:46]
Joe Rogan
Fuck them. They don't even know UFOs are real. Meanwhile, you know, we're going into a bunker in the middle of the mountain and we're remote viewing. You know, it's. It's probably. There's probably a lot of fun involved in having access to information that most people would kill for.
- [67:02]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean there's so much information that we just, we just don't have access to.
- [67:08]
Joe Rogan
Which brings me to this question with. It seems like one of the things that's happening with both with AI and with technology in general is that you have more and more access to information and more and more answers to questions than ever before.
- [67:24]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [67:26]
Joe Rogan
At a certain point in time, there's going to be no bottleneck.
- [67:30]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [67:30]
Joe Rogan
And we're going to know everything about everything. So how is anyone in government going to keep a secret? How is any corruption ever going to be possible? It's a certain point in time all of it will get uncovered. Like it's much more difficult to commit murder now with DNA evidence. Right. Back in the 1800s, like I didn't see nothing. I wasn't there. And then you're free. Like now they do your fingerprints. Now they get your DNA. Now there's flock cameras. There's like more and more and more. It's harder to get away with things.
- [68:01]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [68:02]
Joe Rogan
So it seems like to me like whatever they have, whatever anybody has, ultimately there's going to come a point in time where there's so much data and so much information and you could run all your questions. Like there's an AI fact checker for politicians now.
- [68:16]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [68:16]
Joe Rogan
So while a politician is giving a speech, you can run an AI fact checker and in real time it will tell you whether or not these people are full of shit. This it seems like the direction is there's not going to be anybody full of shit in the future because it's not going to be possible.
- [68:29]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean the government still would have access to things that we human beings wouldn't have access to. Like regular people and particularly defense related weapons. Related. Like for example, when they did the Venezuelan thing, I don't think people in Venezuela even understood like what even those weapons were.
- [68:53]
Joe Rogan
I don't think we did.
- [68:56]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. They were described as something. The literal words used were like alien, like technology. So even we didn't know that the United States had access to that quality of defense technology until that incident happened. So there are obviously going to be secrets. Right. Especially the highest stakes things. I would say like building frontier AI models is similar to that. Of course, as more and more models are getting open source, I think the knowledge is diffusing. But still the true amount of details you need to actually train a really amazing frontier reasoning capability. Model is still not like widely diffused. So my hypothesis is that whatever is extremely high stakes will still not be widely diffused. At least there'll be enough structures in place to keep it secret forever. Not forever, but for a while.
- [69:58]
Joe Rogan
For a while, yeah, that's the thing.
- [70:00]
Lex Fridman
Long term, sure. Things do get out and people.
- [70:04]
Joe Rogan
It feels like long term is what I'm looking at. Like, look, when we're looking at history, we're talking in these, like when we're looking all these different temples and all these different things, we're talking about thousands and thousands. Yeah, and thousands of your time span in between each individual one with our world. We're talking about massive change in 200 years.
- [70:24]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [70:25]
Joe Rogan
Like this country's 250 years old. Think about how kooky that is.
- [70:28]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [70:29]
Joe Rogan
That is a blink of an eye in history.
- [70:31]
Lex Fridman
Do we understand everything that happened in the United States?
- [70:33]
Joe Rogan
No.
- [70:34]
Lex Fridman
Exactly. So there are still some details that are hidden from us. Like we don't fully understand everything. Right.
- [70:40]
Joe Rogan
For now, yeah. But my question is, as time goes on, 250 years from now isn't even possible to keep any secrets from anybody. Is that a good thing? It might be a good thing. It sounds horrible to people because they're like, oh my God, what about privacy? Right. But also, what about lies? Yeah, no more lies. Like everyone's gonna know what you're thinking. Everyone's gonna know everything people do all the time.
- [71:08]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean, if you're a true surveillance state, obviously there are no secrets. Right. Except about the government itself.
- [71:16]
Joe Rogan
That's the problem.
- [71:18]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [71:18]
Joe Rogan
Does it bottleneck with the government or does it get to a point where there you can't even have government secrets? Because as technology evolves and as human civilization evolves, secrets will be less and less, not just necessary, but secrets will be problematic because they'll be an impediment to knowledge. There'll be impediment to understanding the true, the true scope of what the world is like, the true nature of all of our various moving parts.
- [71:44]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, man. As long as the human quality, the intrinsic human quality of curiosity and truth seekingness, which is, you know, universal, it's existed ever since we know human beings, if that continues, and that continues to be the case, then people will have enough incentives to figure out the truth.
- [72:02]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [72:02]
Lex Fridman
And if something is actually hard to get to, it only motivates you more to actually go and find it for sure.
- [72:09]
Joe Rogan
So my question is, where does this all go? And you obviously work in AI, and when you think about AI and when you think about just technology in general and you extrapolate, you just take it from here and you, you just plot it out like what is a possible scenario of 250 years from now? Like, what does it even look like? What does the United States look like at 500 years old?
- [72:33]
Lex Fridman
It's very hard to know. I'll be very honest. I think it's very hard to know even five years from now how it's going to look like.
- [72:40]
Joe Rogan
That's crazy.
- [72:41]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [72:41]
Joe Rogan
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- [74:44]
Lex Fridman
Whoever is the topmost in AI, I don't even consider myself like that, but whoever is at the most frontier level of decision making in AI five years ago, I don't think they predicted the exact state we are in today. Nobody did. If they did, they would have already procured all the compute and like, you know, manufactured all the chips, bought out all the fabs. They would have done all that. Right. Just this is counterfactual. Everyone's like bottlenecked by not having enough compute. And we don't have enough chips, we don't have enough power. These are all the problems that if you invite anybody in AI and ask what is the bottleneck in AI today? And everybody would say power. I think Jensen was here and he said the same thing, right?
- [75:23]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [75:23]
Lex Fridman
But okay, if you predicted this exact state five years before, wouldn't you have secured enough power and started building more power plants yourself and started getting permits and started planning out capacity? No, nobody did that. Everything is reactive to the demand that we're having today. So.
- [75:41]
Joe Rogan
And that's just five years.
- [75:42]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that's just five years. So when you ask me to predict 250 years, like, I just have to honestly say I don't know.
- [75:48]
Joe Rogan
Do you ever sit back and think about it though?
- [75:50]
Lex Fridman
I don't think about it, what it could be. I don't think about it. So there are like lot of fun. I use perplexity a lot for these kind of things, especially this new feature computer inside it. And this is just for hypothetical scenarios. Let's say there is an AGI, right? I've seen you ask a lot of people about this and a lot of conventional answers is like, oh, we'll just become managers of the AIs, don't worry. But if the price of cognition is the price of compute, managing an AI is also pretty much doable by the AI itself because the bottleneck is not like unique cognition capability there. So the value of the society will automatically shift to what is scarce. And fundamentally what has been scarce is like asking high quality questions about things. Okay, what if we just completely spend all our time understanding the past? That's an interesting endeavor. It was not cool before, but it's become cool again. And we usually used to view archaeology or history as not something that's worth having a career in because it doesn't pay well. But what if it actually starts paying you well a lot more now that actual knowledge works, being done by AIs and it's all mundane. And the price of that is basically zero.
- [77:13]
Joe Rogan
Right. And archaeology would be one of the few things that it wouldn't have access to because it doesn't have the actual ground. It can't get into the ground and do the scans.
- [77:23]
Lex Fridman
Let's say we have robots to go do that, but you're still going to be the one probing because you have incomplete information all the time. Even the idea of, okay, let's go explore this particular area, let's go understand better, let's go try to reverse engineer, let's go try to build this again. How would it be if we wanted to do the same thing on the moon? There are so many interesting projects to work on for us. As long as we stay curious and we stay interested in a lot of things that we've done before and trying to understand civilization that I'm not really concerned about what things we get to do. We might be doing a lot more cool things. For what it's worth. I don't know if anybody will be coming and telling you that, oh, it's so cool to open an Excel sheet every day and make financial models compared to.
- [78:10]
Joe Rogan
There's got to be somebody out there that likes that.
- [78:12]
Lex Fridman
I mean, there's something about like the task you do and what you get paid for, like, what is the job title, blah, blah, blah. And some people associate their personal worth with like where they work at and how much they get paid. And I think that that thing is going to collapse in a world where like the price of all that cognition is going to be the price of compute.
- [78:34]
Joe Rogan
What do you think happens to people if, if a large percentage of jobs get replaced by AI?
- [78:43]
Lex Fridman
I think they'll find new things. We've always gravitated towards things that are scarce because that's where the value lies. And so if, you know, have you. One interesting analogy is the Gulf states, where there's an abundance of resources and they export their resources to other states and that pays for the whole state. You know how like they offer everybody free electricity, subsidized health, subsidized education, and like no taxes. When I first went to Dubai almost like 20 years ago, they told me, like, people don't pay taxes here and nobody pays for electricity here and education is like super cheap. And I was like, wait, how is that real? And the way that's real is that, I mean, of course Texas also has no taxes and any well run state can do this. But the way it's happening is that because the government provides you all These things, it becomes a rentier state. Like you offer political acquiescence to the state. And what ended up happening is citizens there expect the state to find them jobs, expect the state to take care of like job displacement for them so they don't worry. So it made them a little more lazy. So that's not a good future to have. Where some people talk about AI subsidies and AI dividends that get paid to everybody. I think we need to do some form of that. But that in entirety won't solve the problem, Right?
- [80:20]
Joe Rogan
Well, the thing about human nature is sort of undeniable. And if you give people the ability to be lazy, a large percentage of people will take that.
- [80:31]
Lex Fridman
That's right.
- [80:32]
Joe Rogan
A large percentage won't though.
- [80:33]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [80:34]
Joe Rogan
There's going to be enough people that are inspired to do something and they say, okay, well now my basic needs are taken care of. Let me pursue my actual interests and find purpose in that. Because that's a lot of people find purpose in whatever their occupation is. And if we can shift that defining purpose in what your actual interests are and then really pursuing something, whatever it is, then you'll still have meaning in your life.
- [80:57]
Lex Fridman
And we've just coming keeps coming back to staying curious.
- [81:01]
Joe Rogan
Yes.
- [81:01]
Lex Fridman
And finding value in your relationships, your family, caring for each other. If you ask a lot of retired people, actually retired people is a good demographic to understand what would happen. What are things people find meaning in after, like works taken off them and all. Majority of the answers are always like family, caring, personal relationships and community. These are the things retired people keep doing to keep themselves active and wake up every day and have something to look for. So all those things will become even more important at a time when work itself doesn't mean much, doesn't mean humans won't be status seeking. I think we'll still be. But status is not going to come from whether you're working at a particular famous bank or a tech company or whatever. It'll be driven by how interesting you are. Are you interesting to talk to when I can talk to an AI? Despite that, are you still interesting to talk to? Are there certain things I get out of talking to you that completely change my perspective about a bunch of things? Or is it just fun to hang around you? Can we have a compounding relationship together? And I think again, it goes back to like, you know, being curious about things.
- [82:21]
Joe Rogan
Well, this is best case scenario, right? Worst case scenario is civilization, upheaval, chaos, civil war.
- [82:28]
Lex Fridman
And it's possible. It's possible even without an AI, right? Yeah.
- [82:33]
Joe Rogan
Look We've gotten real close to it a couple of times.
- [82:34]
Lex Fridman
Exactly.
- [82:35]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [82:35]
Lex Fridman
So. And we did not need an AGI like scenario for a civilizational collapse in the past, as you've clearly seen. Right. A calamity can just take out all of us, wipe out everything. Sure.
- [82:48]
Joe Rogan
Especially natural ones.
- [82:49]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. That's why I'm not a big fan of everybody claiming that the AI is gonna, you know, kill us. So like AGI is gonna destroy humanity and like it's too dangerous and we all need to stop doing these things. But at the same time continuing to stay as interesting and continuing to make money. You have to have one consistent position. My position is that whether AI or not, I think being curious is going to serve you really well. I think it's going to help you have a better life. And there are two paths to curiosity. One that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds like the brain rot that you're fed every day with just this continuous doom scrolling. That's bad. And the one that can supercharge it is AI. Okay. Now that you could just ask whatever you want. If everybody has a pull it up Jamie for them.
- [83:47]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [83:47]
Lex Fridman
And that's amazing. So all you have to do is be curious about a lot of different things and of course talk to interesting people, engage in interesting activities together. If money is no longer an issue, you can fund passion projects yourself. You don't have to require government funding or venture funding. What if you just wanted to build a mini cave yourself? You find a piece of land somewhere. There's a lot of land in America. Way more land than we know what to do with it. And surely we can build a lot of interesting things there.
- [84:21]
Joe Rogan
Well, that's a good glass half full scenario. And one of the things that I keep coming to is this whole idea of people working and making money and having careers and having portfolios and bank accounts and all that. This is all very recent in human history.
- [84:40]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, very recent. Very recent.
- [84:42]
Joe Rogan
Very recent.
- [84:42]
Lex Fridman
It's very recent.
- [84:43]
Joe Rogan
But we've become accustomed to this as a way of life.
- [84:45]
Lex Fridman
And we and Microsoft. Microsoft built this concept of a knowledge worker because they wanted to sell more office software.
- [84:52]
Joe Rogan
Really?
- [84:53]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Like, like this whole idea of putting a PC on every desk and making you like glued to the PC was there. That was Bill Gates vision. Put a PC on every desk.
- [85:02]
Joe Rogan
That fucking wizard. What a, what an incredible accomplishment because boy, did they nail it.
- [85:08]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So it was not about making computing like beautiful or anything in the way like Steve Jobs envisioned it. Right. It was just about like, computers, sell more software, sell more computers, because that way you can sell more software. And if you sell more software, you become rich. And the company just was a machine that was just built, essentially a large sales machine that's built to sell software. And now they sell cloud. But whatever. That's essentially the reason that we all got trained to use software. People went and did tutorials on how to use Excel, how to use Word, how to use all these email tools. And then now that became the upscaling. You needed to go work at different companies and then write code and like, whatever. Right. So if that part is going to be done by an AI, it's not necessarily a bad thing, because this is not actually the way you feel like, real purpose and fulfillment in your own life. If you were never exposed to that, whatever you had as the intrinsic curiosity in you, that's probably what you should be doing.
- [86:16]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. There could be a completely new way to live life where we're not dependent upon labor for basic needs, but then it's gonna be incumbent upon people. They're gonna have to figure out a way to be either self starting or we're gonna have to expose people to things that are gonna excite their curiosity and make that a mandate.
- [86:38]
Lex Fridman
It has to start from schools.
- [86:40]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [86:40]
Lex Fridman
And as long as we keep rewarding people for having answers instead of asking interesting questions, it's going to be a difficult change. Like, in schools, you're always rewarded for being smart based on whether you have answers to like 20 different questions. Like, who cares? Like, all those 20 questions can be answered by AIs. Have you ever, like, flipped a script where you say, okay, like, I'm going to. The smartest person in the room is the one who asks the most interesting questions. Okay. Like, what kind of students can you cultivate based on that? Like, imagine if the room had no pressure to always know the answer, but the freedom to ask a lot of questions. Right.
- [87:21]
Joe Rogan
Because sometimes if someone asks a question, it'll just make you pause and go, I never even thought of that. But that's it. Like, that's the question.
- [87:30]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [87:31]
Joe Rogan
And it takes a. I mean, so many people have so many different perspectives. Which is one of the more interesting things that I've experienced doing this podcast is I get to talk to so many different people and they vary so widely. There's so many different ways of looking at the world and so many different ways of engaging with the world, and so many different things that people are fascinated with that they spent their entire life studying and pursuing. It's like you get this rich tapestry of the human experience that's just. I would have never been exposed to this many people.
- [88:05]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [88:05]
Joe Rogan
And in turn, I've been able to expose these people to all these other folks that are just listening and watching right now. And it's incredible. And it's such a. For me, it's like the perfect job. I've never had a job that more aligns with my own personality as much as this. Because I've always been that kid. Like, shut the fuck up with all the questions. I've always been that kid.
- [88:26]
Lex Fridman
That's the system. Right. It's not. It's not your fault.
- [88:29]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [88:29]
Lex Fridman
Like, it's actually the reason you're successful now is exact thing that people told you to shut up about in the past. Right?
- [88:36]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [88:37]
Lex Fridman
You know, hey, you. You, you know, stop bothering my lecture. You know, asking all these unrelated questions, it's mainly a frustration of the teacher that they don't have the answers to you. Right. Or.
- [88:49]
Joe Rogan
Sure.
- [88:50]
Lex Fridman
And. And now that that bottleneck is gone, we did this experiment with one instructor at MIT who taught the introduction to biology class where he came and told us that he's going to give perplexity to all the kids, all the students, and they would use it as part of the lectures. So instead of fighting AI you just give AI to everybody and let them ask whatever questions they want and they can actually use it in the exams too. So how do you even design questions for an exam in such a world is maybe you just encourage people to pose a question that AI can't answer right now, and that becomes your research project and you turn everybody into a scientist. Fundamentally, there's this belief that scientists have to go through a rigorous PhD and you have to get accredited by an amazing university to be that. Sure. But anyone who's curious can be a scientist. The only thing that's required to be a good scientist is intellectual humility to understand that you could be wrong about things, things that everyone takes for granted. You could still question them. And when you're presented with new evidence and new data, you're willing to change your mind, and you're willing to operate with ambiguity and uncertainty about the world. That's basically all the qualities you need to be a scientist. And you can run your experiments, you can gather data, you can gather evidence and you can consult people, you can bring in experts and talk to them. And as long as you're uncovering more and more about the world, you are A scientist, you don't need a PhD to feel that you're allowed to be a scientist or not. And I think that's the most important quality we need to inculcate in our kids, the upcoming generation, so that they all feel more liberated. Okay. Like, finally, I don't have to memorize this textbook or these lecture materials. And, like, I don't have to feel bad if I get, like, 12 out of 20. Okay. Who cares? Like, AI is always going to get 20 out of 20. That's not what you're meant to be, like, good at. Of course. Master the foundations, the basics. Great. But your job is to actually pose interesting questions. Yeah.
- [91:02]
Joe Rogan
And the intellectual. Excuse me, intellectual humility is so important because one of the things that was really weird about the whole COVID pandemic was that we weren't supposed to question science.
- [91:13]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [91:14]
Joe Rogan
It's like that. Or when Fauci said, if you question Anthony Fauci, you are questioning science.
- [91:20]
Lex Fridman
That's because they try to assign credibility through their degrees.
- [91:24]
Joe Rogan
Yes.
- [91:24]
Lex Fridman
Through their affiliations.
- [91:26]
Joe Rogan
Yes.
- [91:26]
Lex Fridman
Appeal to a doctor, but not through the scientific method.
- [91:28]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [91:29]
Lex Fridman
Anybody should be allowed to ask questions as long as they are open to new evidence.
- [91:34]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [91:35]
Lex Fridman
And that's the most important quality of a scientist.
- [91:37]
Joe Rogan
Well, the scientific method alone. I mean, it's one of the most important things that we can use to try to figure out what's real and what's not real. And as soon as someone says, don't use it.
- [91:47]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [91:48]
Joe Rogan
Don't question. Well, wait a minute. And then there was an actual government push to silence questioning, and legitimate researchers were kicked off of Twitter because they didn't back the narrative.
- [92:01]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [92:02]
Joe Rogan
Like, this is all anti science.
- [92:03]
Lex Fridman
This is.
- [92:04]
Joe Rogan
Like, this is not. You're questioning science. Science demands questioning.
- [92:09]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [92:09]
Joe Rogan
It's what it is.
- [92:10]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. When you don't understand something, the best thing you can do is ask all possible questions.
- [92:16]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [92:16]
Lex Fridman
And so curbing that is almost like a way of saying, look, I'm going to tell you what happened. You need to believe in my worldview, and I'm not open to new perspectives.
- [92:27]
Joe Rogan
I wonder if anybody has used AI to try to map out possible scenarios for where technology leads human civilization and what could be done to mitigate the problems and push it in the proper direction. Like have a bunch of different models of how this could play out.
- [92:46]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean, I try to do that for fun, but I haven't done it in a serious enough way to have a proper answer to that. Right. But I think, like, you know, a lot of things that we are doing today will not be considered needed or valuable. And maybe a little bit of taking our own lessons from the past. I don't know if you. When you grew up as a student, did you have to like be good at mental math? Like multiplying arbitrary numbers, Was that considered a sign of smartness or remembering people's phone numbers or something?
- [93:20]
Joe Rogan
Well, you had to because there was. I mean, you had little address books. That's what we used to carry around. Like a little. I had a little address book that keep on my desk.
- [93:27]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [93:27]
Joe Rogan
It's a little tiny thing with everybody's number and name. That's the only way I knew people's numbers. And I remembered a bunch of them. Like all my friends. I had all my friends. I don't have any of my friends. Numbers remembered. Yeah, maybe my wife and my friend Eddie. I have two numbers in my head.
- [93:42]
Lex Fridman
But, but was there a time when people thought somebody was smart based on how good their memory power was?
- [93:47]
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah, definitely.
- [93:49]
Lex Fridman
But would you, would you say that now?
- [93:52]
Joe Rogan
Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, Great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no. No, no buyer's remorse, more like buyers rejoice. I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana.
- [94:18]
Lex Fridman
Limitations and exclusions may apply.
- [94:19]
Joe Rogan
See our seven day return policy@carvana.com. well, people are impressed if you know things now. You know, I have a bunch of like, weird information, obviously that I've gathered through so many years of doing this podcast and just so many years of being curious, you know, like sometimes even my own daughter's like, how the fuck do you know that? Like, this is what I do. Like, that's my thing.
- [94:40]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [94:40]
Joe Rogan
You know, I pay attention to stuff.
- [94:42]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [94:42]
Joe Rogan
But yeah, I mean, memory itself is always very impressive. And someone has an excellent memory.
- [94:48]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [94:49]
Joe Rogan
And can pull up facts of the past.
- [94:50]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [94:51]
Joe Rogan
We automatically equate that to intelligence.
- [94:53]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I think it's impressive, but it's not necessarily a sign of being intelligent. Right. Like, I think that's just a look. You have a very fast lookup table in your head. That's great. It's very valuable. But I still think like, being smart is all about posing the most interesting questions.
- [95:11]
Joe Rogan
Also the decisions that you make and whether or not you self correct when you make mistakes. Yeah, yeah, all those things.
- [95:18]
Lex Fridman
Exactly. So when you have an amplifier to your intelligence, like an AI all the time, where lookups is essentially something you can delegate, reasoning for decision making is something you can delegate. But posing the right questions to gather the right data and then forming your own judgment based on what it reasons and comes up with, and finally having the courage to make the decision, that's still you. That agency, that intrinsic curiosity to ask the right question, the scientific intellectual humility to like, you know, gather new evidence, always questioning your beliefs, that, that is still you. And so I feel like that is essentially what would be considered smart in the ages to come. If somebody's like, you know, like a proxy scientist or whatever. Like, no more doesn't have to go to like MIT or Harvard and get a PhD to be a scientist or to be considered a scientist, because all scientific literature is open and accessible to everybody. And you can even take a paper written by an expert and use an AI, understand it deeply, ask a lot of questions, and maybe even disprove what they claim to be true. That's the whole peer review process. Right. The peer review process is all about questioning somebody's paper. And that's why whatever you said happened in Covid days is wrong. You should be allowed to ask questions about even eminent scientists work. It's okay. Like if you're dumb and you had the wrong questions, sure. You're going to learn from that. It's worse than not being allowed to ask the question.
- [96:52]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, agreed. It's going to be interesting to see what the future of education looks like. Like how valuable are degrees when essentially AI is going to be able to do the majority of whatever work you need done on variety. Like how, how good are they right now at just law? Like you could ask questions. Pretty, pretty, pretty amazing.
- [97:16]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [97:17]
Joe Rogan
Right?
- [97:17]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [97:17]
Joe Rogan
How good are they at mathematics? Perfect. Like, how good are they at coding? Way better than people.
- [97:22]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [97:23]
Joe Rogan
And at a certain point in time it's going to be interesting that, like, what is education now? Is education just providing you with information because that information is readily available? Or is education teaching you how to think about.
- [97:34]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [97:35]
Joe Rogan
Teaching you how to pursue your interests and be curious and have intellectual humility and understand what you know, what you don't know.
- [97:41]
Lex Fridman
I think that that's where it should be. I still think institutions will preserve their brand value because there is a certain aspect of education that's outside of learning, which is just having access to other curious and intelligent people.
- [97:56]
Joe Rogan
Sure. Community.
- [97:57]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And brands attract good communities, peer groups, blah, blah, blah. But the actual process of learning stuff has to change and what you're rewarded for has to change. So fundamentally everything you know flows down is downstream of the incentive. Right. So if the incentives to score the highest on the exam based on answers, you're not really changing much. If you need to change that process, you need to change the process of what do you reward a student? Like what is a plus or a right? That's where we need to start at.
- [98:28]
Joe Rogan
Well, it's also the. We know, we talked about this the other day, that the education system in this country was designed to make workers.
- [98:35]
Lex Fridman
Exactly.
- [98:35]
Joe Rogan
That's what they did when they first started doing it.
- [98:37]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. The turn of the curriculum was designed around that. Yeah. Well, in India it's still the case, by the way.
- [98:43]
Joe Rogan
Really?
- [98:43]
Lex Fridman
Even if you're a computer, even if you go into a computer science degree. I don't know if it's still. Because I shouldn't misspeak, but at least when I was there and for many years, after the first two years you just spent learning hardcore electrical and mechanical engineering, you would learn like welding using lathe machines. You would have to go and do workshops, carpentry, a lot of these things. It was fun.
- [99:06]
Joe Rogan
I would think there's be a lot of value in that.
- [99:08]
Lex Fridman
So in hindsight, I actually think it was fun to learn soldering and how to make circuits on breadboards and turn to circuit boards. But if somebody was just interested in some, just writing code, let's say back then all this is kind of like pointless to learn, but you had to go through it to be qualified as an engineer. And the reason the curriculum was designed that way is because that's what the labor force was required back then to build oil factories and all these things. So you had to learn mechanical engineering, you had to learn fluid mechanics, whatever. But I think that that should also change because if the way like you do work changes, then what you're trained for in college should also change. And it's much harder to change these things. You know, people are much slower, they're scared to do changes. Disruptions always like looked down upon. And so I think we should, let's at least start at the incentive structure right from the schools, right from the colleges. Like, let's not like reward people based on like how much they know.
- [100:12]
Joe Rogan
Well, it seems like in the future when things do radically change and they seems like they're inevitable, they're going to radically change. Universities and schools are going to be rewarded for having developed thinkers that are able to adapt to this new world.
- [100:29]
Lex Fridman
That's right.
- [100:29]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. So they're going to have to figure out how to adjust their curriculum.
- [100:33]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [100:34]
Joe Rogan
Because the tools are so spectacular now that just this idea of just memorizing information is. It's not, that's not what you're gonna need to get by in the future.
- [100:45]
Lex Fridman
It's not. And I guess like one proxy different schools use is like maybe if more entrepreneurs arise out of your school, you probably created a lot of independent thinkers because they are like willing to take a first perspective towards a problem and build their own thing from scratch. And fundamentally that's what America's always been about is you know, the American dream of coming here and like having your own idea and still be taken seriously by a bunch of people. The whole idea of venture capital only exists here. Or like family and friends around this whole idea of just having your friends help you to bootstrap a business and then turning it into a success. And success doesn't mean like multi billion or ten billion or whatever. Right. Like, like as long as it pays you enough that you don't have to work for somebody else and you can live a fulfilling life and you can just go explore your passions. That's success. That's actually a better success than creating company based on what other people want you to do and then hating a job for it.
- [101:46]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And having a yacht and being miserable
- [101:48]
Lex Fridman
and working every day. That's why I said like not the smartest. The richest people are not always the ones who have the most fulfilling lives. The most curious people have the most fulfilling lives because they have better relationships. They're actually able to sit and look at something and you know, be curious about it instead of like being worried about what's going on.
- [102:07]
Joe Rogan
Well, what did the American dream, what was it to you when you weren't in America? Like what, what is it like over? Like what is, how is it discussed?
- [102:16]
Lex Fridman
Well, to me, like I always thought America is the only country where you can come here and have an idea and people listen to you and encourage you to go pursue it. The risk seeking culture is just incredible. Here, everybody, everywhere else, you cannot are like either explicitly or implicitly are forced to defer to authority. Okay, like go and ask the permission of this person, go and ask the permission of that person or get their approval or get their insight or sure, you can get there. You can consult everybody out there. But if you have a thought that challenges what they believe in this country still encourages you to go pursue it. So yes, when I came here, obviously Google was the number one company that everybody wanted to work in. But it's also the same country where it allows you as a new person to start a new idea that challenges one of the biggest companies in this own country. And it actually wants it. People actually want new ideas. And then you can consistently see that there are always going to be more and more new ideas and new companies to be created here. And so that spirit of questioning is encouraged a lot here. And it happens in academic research. I started off as an academic. Even there a lot of ideas when I had it, and I would share it with people. You know, people actually give you very honest feedback about things, but they don't stop you from working on anything. And that's fantastic because that's. That's very fresh, it's very liberating.
- [103:59]
Joe Rogan
And that's not anywhere else, I would say.
- [104:03]
Lex Fridman
It's not.
- [104:04]
Joe Rogan
It's not in India.
- [104:05]
Lex Fridman
It's a simplification to say it's not anywhere else, but.
- [104:08]
Joe Rogan
But it's not as encouraged.
- [104:10]
Lex Fridman
It's not as encouraged. The incentive structures are not quite there. And ability to be taken seriously for some crazy ideas is why America is still at the top.
- [104:23]
Joe Rogan
But it's crazy to me that if the American dream is so compelling and so many people come here for it, why doesn't the rest of the world sort of adopt those values?
- [104:32]
Lex Fridman
It's hard, you know, like, a lot of it is cultural. Like, America was born, was made from, like, you know, a piece of land, essentially. Right. And a lot of ideas that we built here, a lot of industries that we built here, were all, like, created here from nothing. And that required you to, like, go take bold risk? I think Jeff Bezos said this in some podcast that where else would you, like, be able to go raise, like, a few million dollars for an idea that has, like, 5 to 10% chance of working and then fail at it and still go and raise another few million dollars for your next idea. Nowhere else people are willing. Like people who get rich here actually want to encourage and be part of somebody else's crazy journey because it's hard to pursue all crazy bets yourself. So it's an ecosystem, and once something becomes an ecosystem, there's network effects. So it's very hard to copy that elsewhere.
- [105:40]
Joe Rogan
And so your value is measured in your curiosity and your willing to work, your willingness to work on whatever it is that is your pursuit, and then eventually adjusting and learning and catching fire with one of them.
- [105:54]
Lex Fridman
Correct. And you have to work hard. Like, you know, like, I'm a big believer in intense hard work. I think nothing great can be accomplished by being soft. And so all this, like, recent push for, you know, having a lot of work life balance this and that. Sure. If you have work life balance, if that's what you want, and I think there are certain jobs that would give you that. But when you're trying to do something from scratch, when you're trying to create something from nothing, it's not meant to be easy. Right. There are some sacrifices that have to be made. And you're signing up to be part of that experience. That surreal joy you get from doing something that felt almost impossible to achieve. And you're not doing. You're not staying up late or waking up early because you're getting paid more. Maybe you might not get paid anything, maybe this whole thing goes to nothing. But. But that experience you're getting of being part of something that feels very hard to achieve is what you're signing up for, to be part of.
- [106:53]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And if you're not, find something else.
- [106:56]
Lex Fridman
It's fine. Respect that.
- [106:57]
Joe Rogan
There's nothing wrong with that.
- [106:58]
Lex Fridman
Exactly. And the country has enough jobs to provide for all kinds of needs. Right. And everybody goes through different phases in their life. Sometimes they feel a little lazy or disillusioned. Okay. And so what I like about this country is that there's a lot of curious people here. There's a lot of, like, so many different people, you know, like, whether they use AIs or not AIs, they're all like, finding meaning in, like, so many interesting projects.
- [107:23]
Joe Rogan
Well, obviously I don't know any other country really, because I was born here. But the people that do talk to me about what the American dream is like from another country, they're the most passionate and the most supportive of this, this idea, this experiment in self government and this, this, the. Just the whole idea that the country operates on that anybody can chase their dream. Yeah, you can. If you have a dream and you're willing to work hard, you could actually do it in this country.
- [107:53]
Lex Fridman
That's right.
- [107:54]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that's, you know, it's most. The people that are most passionate about that idea oftentimes are people that come from somewhere else where that wasn't available.
- [108:03]
Lex Fridman
And it's not just like, you know, people coming from one particular country or another. It's the attitude. It's the way the system works and rewards you to like, be bold and take bets against established players. It's okay, right? It's okay to like, be an upstart, a challenger. And people love that, like underdog and I think, you know, that's fantastic. And that culture is continuing. Yes. They're all like multi trillion dollar companies here and they're all going to become even bigger, but people still want the young hungry person to also be successful.
- [108:38]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, well, they love Disruptors.
- [108:40]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [108:40]
Joe Rogan
And people love underdogs in this country.
- [108:43]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. It's universal. It's not specific to technology. Right. Like, I'm sure everybody would love an underdog story that wants to go against like Coca Cola or Pepsi or something. Sure, yeah.
- [108:54]
Joe Rogan
Oh, in sports, it's our favorite thing.
- [108:56]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [108:57]
Joe Rogan
We don't like when the guy who's supposed to win wins. We love when the guy who's not supposed to win triumphs.
- [109:02]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. The underdog story. Yeah.
- [109:05]
Joe Rogan
That's a very uniquely American story.
- [109:08]
Lex Fridman
To me. That's what this, this, this, this country's. I mean, sure, there's a lot of obstacles and challenges. Just like every other country. There are things here that are challenging, but it's one thing that has consistently stayed true.
- [109:23]
Joe Rogan
One of the big fears that people in America have about technology in particular is that without being aware that this was going to take place, everybody gave up their data. Everybody gave up their data and didn't recognize it was a commodity. That in turn made these corporations immensely wealthy and powerful. And then they have the ability to shape narratives. And that concerns people because using their ideological position as leverage to try to push that through, technology that has immense control and influence over people and that we didn't see technology and corporations as having that much control over how society views itself and how we interact with each other. And there's a real, real concern that these companies got so big and have like, there's a guy named Robert Epstein who's done a lot of work on narrate or curated search engine results and how much that can. Have you seen any of his stuff?
- [110:30]
Lex Fridman
I think I've seen this. Yeah.
- [110:31]
Joe Rogan
How much that can affect elections, how much that can affect people's perceptions on any societal issue that's coming up.
- [110:39]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [110:40]
Joe Rogan
And it's concerning. It really is, because they do curate search results. It's not simply, you know, you just run it out there and you get. This is the data. No.
- [110:48]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [110:49]
Joe Rogan
You know, if you look for specific political figures, depending upon where they fall in the right or left spectrum and depending upon which way the company forms, the, the corporation forms, falls rather, you'll get different results. And that sucks. You know, that's, it's very concerning that people don't recognize, they don't, they don't have the ability to see how that is dangerous for all of society to have that kind of power and wield it in that way where you're not being honest about accurate, objective information. You're pushing particular ideologies.
- [111:24]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, so I think it's kind of like this is almost an effect of the asymmetry that exists between the amount of AI power that centralized systems and centralized companies have and the amount of AI power as you as a sovereign individual has. So when you don't have the AIs to just go judge for yourself like what you should be reading and fed, you're obviously like under the influence of what you know, whatever big tech company is controlling the information for. But when you have access to all those AIs, you can actually just customize what you want to see by telling the AI like hey, this is what I think you should actually question and tell me until now you never had that power for yourself. You're finally getting it right. And eventually we'll be able to have our own LLMs like our own models that we would be able to host in our own hardware. We don't have to rely on one centralized model given to us by any specific model company. And using that, you can shape it to your beliefs, your custom data. So when you're consuming a search result, you can actually task that AI that you control and you run so nobody can shut off access to it to tell you like, hey, can you actually give me a contrarian perspective on this? Or can you tell me if these search results are actually biased? So I think we need to give individuals more sovereignty with more access to their own AIs that they own and run on a piece of hardware they own themselves. And this is the whole like, this is going to be reading to the whole rise of local AIs. So as AI models like today, they're very power inefficient, they're running on large data centers. But in a year or two from now, whatever capability that exists in the most power hungry data centers will be, it'll be possible to run it in some box that you own. Yeah, it's already happening. It's already happening that there are interesting hardware projects like, like the Apple Mac, Mini, Nvidia dgx where you can actually host a reasonable size model and put it in a box and have it run. And you don't have to pay for all the tokens it produces you, you just have to plug it into your power core and it works.
- [113:50]
Joe Rogan
I know Duncan, my friend Duncan Trussell he does that.
- [113:52]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And today the capability of that model that can run locally is not quite there. So you would still prefer to use something that runs on the data center. But eventually this is going to be a spectrum. There's going to be some percentage of tasks that you would start delegating to this local system. It'll be a hybrid model. And over time it could end up being the case that you could buy something that feels like a refrigerator for your home, which is your own AI box, and host a model that you control so nobody can arbitrarily shut off access to it one day. And then you can have that be your weapon against what the big tech wants you to be fed or believe in. This is the only way we can fight this because they have far more computing power, far more data, far more algorithms than you. So the only way you can fight that is you have something you own yourself. And with the rise of open source models, open source LLMs, you can just and, and progress in local hardware and both Apple, Nvidia, intel, they're all doing amazing work here. You could potentially change the future and give people more power. And this may not be as expensive as people think.
- [115:02]
Joe Rogan
Well, that's a good solution because I've always wondered, are these searches using Google, is that going to be irrelevant one day? Because you already can. Just ask your phone. Most of the time if I want to have an answer for something, I just ask Perplexity. I was like, what is it? Instead of like having to sift through all these Google searches.
- [115:24]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [115:24]
Joe Rogan
And try to figure out what it's showing me first and get to page three where it's what I really want to know.
- [115:29]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [115:29]
Joe Rogan
I can get the accurate information, then follow up questions. Oh, instantaneous.
- [115:33]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And even the models that are running the Perplexity app today, they're all in the cloud. Eventually you'll be able to do that on a box that you own. You can still use the front end, the UI of the app, but you can control the compute that runs on piece of hardware. You may ask why? Why do I care? Okay, like, what if someday, like the data center gets taken off? Like Iran was bombing data centers. Right. Like, what if someday, like the government decides that model is no longer available, you want some control over what models you can run and like, you may even want to shape it to your context that you never want to be living on any data center. And I think that's where I believe the individual gets more sovereignty against big tech. And that's how we fight surveillance or centralization of power.
- [116:31]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And certainly pushing narratives. What do you think happens with social media? Because social media, and as you were talking about before, like algorithms, like, it's one of the biggest problems in terms of the way people view the world.
- [116:45]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I'm curious what you think. Like, you know, like, my opinion is that it's not good for the kids.
- [116:51]
Joe Rogan
It's terrible for them.
- [116:53]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [116:53]
Joe Rogan
But I think they should have some exposure to it because I think it's good to know that it's a thing. And I think children are fairly resilient and they learn. But the anxiety levels of kids is much higher than ever before.
- [117:05]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [117:06]
Joe Rogan
Suicidal ideation's higher.
- [117:08]
Lex Fridman
Self harm. Yeah, yeah, I'm a little. My belief is that when you're just fed a feed and the algorithm of the social media company decides what you're going to see next, it curbs your curiosity. And I don't think things that curb human curiosity should be encouraged.
- [117:31]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I agree.
- [117:32]
Lex Fridman
And so if the app is designed in a way where it asks you what you're interested in and helps you to come up and find things that are very related to what you're interested in. Right. That's awesome. But that's not how it works. It's literally like it starts with something. You start doom scrolling and then start showing you what you just scrolled and then you end up in an echo chamber. And that's not necessarily good.
- [117:56]
Joe Rogan
Well, you can get trapped. I'm in a trap of schizophrenics lately on Instagram, which is mostly schizophrenics. Like people that tell me that the rightful President of the United States and like, you tell the guy hasn't showered in days. And, you know, and if you have a phone, you can create an account and you just start uploading nonsense. And then for whatever reason, I've watched a couple of them, so now they just keep showing them to me.
- [118:19]
Lex Fridman
And it's full of AI slob right now. Like a lot of AI slob. It's not even clear and it's not labeled. Also, clearly, whether it's been made with AI or not so often. So essentially it's leading to a complete loss in trust, where when I see something, I don't even know if it's real anymore.
- [118:37]
Joe Rogan
Right. And it's going to get worse.
- [118:38]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it's going to get worse to the extent that you're going to. Like, your default would be that this is AI and then you're going to have to go through multiple layers to finally verify if it was real. And even verified accounts post a lot of AI stuff. So it's not. Not about like whether the account is verified by meta or some or whatever. Right. So I think fundamentally I feel like, okay, the way I think about it is what are pieces of technology if did not exist, would be a really bad thing for the world. And what are pieces of technology did not exist wouldn't even matter. And I feel like social media is more towards the second. Yeah, like, you know, searching for information and answering questions and like getting, you know, AIs to like, do things for you, help you learn new things faster. All that stuff is some. We need more of that, but because it supercharges our curiosity. Whereas, like brain rot feeds with AI slob doesn't actually supercharge our curiosity, it actually curbs our curiosity. And so, so if we believe that, if we believe in the curiosity premium idea, we need to encourage things that supercharge our curiosity and discourage things that curb our curiosity.
- [120:00]
Joe Rogan
Do you anticipate a time where we recognize the dangers of algorithms and there is some discussion to either curb them or allow people to have control over them in a real meaningful way? Like you can. Could dictate maybe through AI even that there's an AI interface to your algorithm that understands your particular emotional needs? Your curiosity, like, only. Show me this. Yeah, this is what I'm interested in. Carpentry and basketball games. Show me those things. Yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to see who's getting divorced. I don't give a fuck about this.
- [120:34]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, so here's the thing. You can still customize on most of these social apps, you know, if you. It'll be deeply buried somewhere in the settings somewhere. And you can go and say stuff, but the reason it's buried is because once you. You always have to say it or like it's the starting entry point for your experience there, your engagement time would go down because once you consume the content that you really want, you. You would go back to your work, which is what you really need to be doing. Right. But that doesn't help them sell more ads. Right. And so the incentives are not aligned. And so Elon has this really good metric he talks about where it's like, total amount of unregretted minutes spent on the app should go up. That's a good way to go. It's hard to measure. It's hard to measure. It's more like in spirit, the right metric. But this metric is also why it's hard to make money on ads, if you care about this metric. Which is why X doesn't really make a lot of money on ads compared to, you know, Instagram or YouTube, because you're kind of like optimizing for interestingness. Like doesn't mean excess everything. Right. There's a lot of chaos, there's a lot of memes. There's a lot of like weird shit going on there as well. But in general, social media is not necessarily, like, great for people.
- [121:53]
Joe Rogan
I think it's terrible for people, but it also provides you with a way better understanding of what's going on in the world than has ever existed before.
- [122:03]
Lex Fridman
X particularly. X particularly because it's a place for discourse. It's a text based app more than a video based app. Right. So naturally people tend to engage in discussions and debates and there's a lot of curious debates going on there and a lot of interesting viewpoints expressed by people. So I think in terms of the unregretted minutes, it's actually one of the better social media apps. But apps that are purely based on video or images and larger video these days, I think that's just, you know, just trying to get your eyeballs in time.
- [122:40]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, those are the mind numbers. Yeah, they just numb your mind.
- [122:43]
Lex Fridman
I mean, it's depressing when you go to a Metro and you just see people just scrolling through their feed. Nobody.
- [122:49]
Joe Rogan
Everybody doing it. You look, the entire car, everyone's doing it.
- [122:52]
Lex Fridman
It's just insane.
- [122:53]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's weird.
- [122:54]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [122:55]
Joe Rogan
I always say that if there was a drug that existed that made people stare at their hand for six hours a day, everybody would be like, get that out of here.
- [123:01]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [123:01]
Joe Rogan
But that's essentially what we're doing. Because like most of what people are looking at most of the time they don't even remember.
- [123:07]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [123:08]
Joe Rogan
They're just scrolling through this thing.
- [123:09]
Lex Fridman
It's brain rot. It's just brain rot. It curbs your curiosity. I mean, Apple has these settings in different apps. Have you tried this where you can set the timer for every app?
- [123:20]
Joe Rogan
No, I just use discipline. I don't, I don't engage very much anymore. A very. I dip my toe into X every day for a few seconds. I go, what's everybody mad at? What's going on? Who stole this? Who? How much corruption's here? Who got killed there? Okay, bye. And then I just check out, I don't want to do it. And Instagram, to me is just nonsense. I just look at that every now and then for nonsense and occasionally something interesting. Really? YouTube is my main go to thing because YouTube is my most unregretted minute.
- [123:55]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [123:56]
Joe Rogan
YouTube for me is always interesting. There's always like some cool thing on cosmology. There's some. I watch fights on YouTube. I watch professional pool matches. That's what I do for the most part. That's where I really like, find my actual interests and fulfill my curiosity.
- [124:14]
Lex Fridman
Long form content is what human mind should be trained to consume more of. Whether it's books, whether it's like, you know.
- [124:22]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [124:22]
Lex Fridman
30 minute videos explaining something. Mm. And you, you need to train your mind to actually complete it. That's actually the biggest problem with the younger generation. The more they're the reels experience short form video, they're unable to actually like complete like long videos anymore.
- [124:39]
Joe Rogan
That's true. But also at the same time, the rise of podcasts is happening.
- [124:44]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And it's great. It's great.
- [124:46]
Joe Rogan
So there's, it's not, it's not universal. It's like there's a lot of people that don't find fulfillment and all the dooms yelling and all the nonsense. Yeah. They really do want.
- [124:54]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I'm particularly just focused on the younger generation. I'm sure, like, people like us can adapt to like, okay, let's say maybe you have a temporary addiction to social apps and we can.
- [125:03]
Joe Rogan
But a lot of the young people are the people. Like I meet kids like at the mall that are 11 that listen to my podcast.
- [125:10]
Lex Fridman
Really?
- [125:11]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [125:11]
Lex Fridman
Wow. I know.
- [125:12]
Joe Rogan
It's nuts. They go, I love your podcast. I'm like, who lets you listen? Get out of here. No, I'm always joking around about it. That's really cool. But no, there's a lot of like, particularly like young boys that come up to me all the time that are interested in it.
- [125:27]
Lex Fridman
That's amazing.
- [125:28]
Joe Rogan
I love it. I love it. Because then they're gonna get exposed to some interesting ideas and it'll also encourage them to have those kind of conversations with each other.
- [125:36]
Lex Fridman
Right.
- [125:37]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [125:39]
Lex Fridman
Whose podcast do you listen to?
- [125:41]
Joe Rogan
I love Tim Dillons. He's probably my favorite because it's the most accurate and also satirical and hilarious view on everything that's going on in the world in terms of like war and world news and culture. And he's my favorite. He was just on here yesterday. I love that guy to death. He's so funny. He's so crazy. It's like his mind works in such a unique way and it's developed because his podcast is different where he very rarely has guests. So most of the time it's just him ranting and his producer laughing. And he's the best ranter that's ever lived. I don't think there's anybody that's even close. He's the goat. Like, there's, like. I don't think there's any argument. Every comedian agrees, like, as far as, like, just the ability to just sit in front of a microphone and rant like, Bill Burr does it. Well, he's good at it. There's a few other guys that are good at it. No one's as good as Tim. He's the most consistently entertaining. And then for just mind. Not mindless, but, like, to escape. I listen to a lot of archery shows and hunting shows where they're talking about different tactics and hunting or different techniques in archery. New equipment and new innovations. Archery is an interesting thing because every year bow manufacturers make a better bow and, like, tiny little engineering changes of these bows. Like, it's a weapon that's been around for who knows how many thousands of years. But what the.
- [127:14]
Lex Fridman
And you're able to feel those improvements.
- [127:16]
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah.
- [127:16]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [127:16]
Joe Rogan
You feel the difference. Every year Hoyt puts out a new bow, and every year I'm like, they did it again.
- [127:22]
Lex Fridman
It's better.
- [127:23]
Joe Rogan
So just tiny changes. Less vibrations in the hand, more balance in the shot shot, you know, more forgiving in terms of accuracy. I love that stuff. So I get really fascinated by engineering, really fascinated by automotive engineering. I'm really interested in, like, that's another thing where, like, every year people figure out to make a car that can hold more GS on a skid pad, that can get around a track quicker. Like, every year, they're battling to see who can get around the Nurburgring quicker. And what are they doing? They're adding horsepower, increasing suspension travel and. And suspension tuning, rather. And making them more compliant or making them stiffer and making them more adjustable and then, like, tire compounds. And I'm just interested in anything that. Where someone's working on something and getting better at something or getting new information. I love history podcasts. I listen to a bunch of history podcasts. So that's most of the time when I'm. If I'm listening to something, I either want to be entertained or I want to be educated.
- [128:27]
Lex Fridman
Educational. Yeah, yeah.
- [128:29]
Joe Rogan
And that's entertaining.
- [128:30]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [128:31]
Joe Rogan
What about you? What kind of stuff do you listen to?
- [128:32]
Lex Fridman
I mean, I listen to your stuff. I listen to Lex. There's this guy. I mean, you know, you might. You had him on, like, Rick Rubin, of course.
- [128:39]
Joe Rogan
Sure.
- [128:40]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [128:40]
Joe Rogan
Love that guy.
- [128:41]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yeah, he's. He's awesome. I listen to his stuff and, I mean, I also watch, like, some interesting videos about, you know, stuck concepts. I don't understand. There is this YouTube channel, Veritasium. You should check it out.
- [128:57]
Joe Rogan
What is it called?
- [128:57]
Lex Fridman
Veritasium.
- [128:59]
Joe Rogan
How did it spell that?
- [129:00]
Lex Fridman
V E R I T A S E U M. Veritasium.
- [129:06]
Joe Rogan
What does it mean?
- [129:07]
Lex Fridman
I think.
- [129:08]
Joe Rogan
Is that someone's name?
- [129:09]
Lex Fridman
No, Veritas just means, like, seeking truth kind of thing.
- [129:12]
Joe Rogan
Oh, okay. Is it this channel?
- [129:14]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- [129:17]
Joe Rogan
Okay.
- [129:17]
Lex Fridman
Yes.
- [129:18]
Joe Rogan
20.9 million subscribers.
- [129:20]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [129:21]
Joe Rogan
A lot of people agree.
- [129:22]
Lex Fridman
So they make all these very interesting videos about, like, stuff that, you know, you would be curious about, but you never actually bothered to ask that or learn more about and explain some of the most understood companies or, like, phenomena. And I just love watching it. You know, this is kind of like my idea of doom scrolling. Like, I like. I like watching, like 20 videos at once.
- [129:48]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. I am going to subscribe to it right now.
- [129:51]
Lex Fridman
It's pretty cool.
- [129:52]
Joe Rogan
Did you know Sam's Club isn't a store? It's actually a club with cool finds and, like, a whole community. It's a club. Of course, Jason.
- [130:00]
Lex Fridman
It's in the name.
- [130:02]
Joe Rogan
Sam's Club.
- [130:03]
Lex Fridman
Oh, yeah.
- [130:05]
Joe Rogan
Come join us.
- [130:06]
Lex Fridman
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- [130:39]
Joe Rogan
Veritas. There it is. Got it. Subscribed. Bam.
- [130:45]
Lex Fridman
And explains all these, like, fun concepts that are, you know, you take it for granted. Like, okay, why is Google Maps really fast? Like, okay, it'll tell you what's going on. How the data is used across so many different people at once and all these different departments.
- [131:00]
Joe Rogan
CIA's new tech doesn't make sense. Exactly. We were just talking about that yesterday. We were doubting it. You know, the heart murmur thing. Do you know about that?
- [131:09]
Lex Fridman
No.
- [131:10]
Joe Rogan
So the pilots that were downed in Iran, they said that they have this technology that allows them. I think they could use it up to 70 miles and they could detect a very unique heart rate. Like your heart rate is different than my heart rate. They could know it's you. You could be hiding in the mountains and they could find you from 70 miles away with this technology.
- [131:32]
Lex Fridman
Wow. A lot of people like beams or waves or something and.
- [131:36]
Joe Rogan
Well, it's called. What is it called? Quantum magnetometry. Is that what they call it? I think that's what it was. Remember, we looked it up yesterday. They're using the word quantum and not explaining what they're doing, like, how they're doing it. And you're like, okay, is that real or is this some invented horseshit to cover the fact that they have some very sophisticated satellite imagery where they can have a detailed map of literally the entire surface of the world? They know exactly where people are, but they don't want our enemies to know that they have this capability. So they're making up something.
- [132:11]
Lex Fridman
I see.
- [132:12]
Joe Rogan
That was my suggestion yesterday, that, like, maybe they're full of shit because the whole thing seems nuts. What is it called? It's quantum magnetometry. Okay. What does that mean? You tell me.
- [132:23]
Lex Fridman
I don't know exactly.
- [132:24]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. So this guy, he's saying it doesn't make sense. Yeah. And a lot of people say it doesn't make sense. Like it doesn't seem to vibe with anything that we know that we can.
- [132:33]
Lex Fridman
Magnetometry. Yeah. First time hearing it.
- [132:36]
Joe Rogan
See the pull up the decrypt this description, the official description of what this stuff is capable of. So this is supposedly some very advanced CIA tech that allowed them to locate this downed pilot.
- [132:50]
Lex Fridman
Interesting.
- [132:52]
Joe Rogan
Maybe. Or maybe there's something else going on. Or maybe there's some other methods that they use they don't want the enemy to know about. Maybe some beacon these guys have on them.
- [133:02]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I guess. What's the incentive for CIA to actually describe how their technology works?
- [133:06]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Zero.
- [133:07]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [133:08]
Joe Rogan
Why would they tell you that?
- [133:09]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [133:09]
Joe Rogan
Why would they tell you they even have that? That's crazy.
- [133:11]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [133:12]
Joe Rogan
And then Jamie had a good point.
- [133:13]
Lex Fridman
But the capability is insane. Detecting Your heart rate 70 miles away is just how insane.
- [133:19]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. How? And when they throw the word quantum and things, I always go, hey, what happened with that White House announcement? Sorry, I keep the quantum computing. Yeah. The member, there's Q news coming soon, and then, like, intestine Q sounds for quantum.
- [133:36]
Lex Fridman
Oh, is that what it is? I thought they just announced a bunch of investments in a bunch of quantum companies.
- [133:41]
Joe Rogan
Maybe that's it.
- [133:42]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, IBM was getting some funding or whatever.
- [133:47]
Joe Rogan
So this quantum magnetometry can you pull up a description of what it is? I started looking up the. Sorry, I don't ask you too many questions at the same time. Quantum sensor help rescuers. Yeah. So this is it.
- [134:01]
Lex Fridman
Ghost murmur.
- [134:02]
Joe Rogan
Yes, that's what it's called. Purported surveillance technology utilizes long range quantum magnetometry. What is that? Quantum magnetometers measure extremely faint magnetic fields, including the body's natural electromagnetic signal signals by tracking changes in the energy states of atoms or subatomic particles. What technology reportedly uses microscopic defects and synthetic diamonds. When illuminated by a laser, these centers are hypersensitive to tiny magnetic fluctuations. The heart signal. While human heartbeats produce a magnetic field that is extremely weak, around 50 to 100 Picoteslas, and typically degrades over very short distances. So the Ghost Murder deployment. They reportedly use ghost murmur during a mission in southern Iran to pinpoint the location of a downed American airman. Using hiding rather in dense mountainous terrain. By mounting these quantum sensors into a helicopter, the system purportedly registered the pilot's heartbeat from afar. Okay, does that sound like horseshit?
- [135:10]
Lex Fridman
I mean, not. It doesn't sound full of shit, but like. Basically the part that sounds surprising to me is how they're able to deal with all this, like, distance and attenuation across the distance. Right. And all this interference. And they claim to use AI for that, but nothing is really described on how they use it.
- [135:26]
Joe Rogan
Right. So if they're not describing how they use it, why are they even telling us they have it?
- [135:31]
Lex Fridman
Why? There's a lot of skepticism on it.
- [135:34]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Laws of physics. Physicists point out that the heart's magnetic field is a million times weaker than the Earth's. Detecting it at a range of miles rather than centimeters defies currently published peer reviewed physics. Alternative explanations suspect that while quantum sensors were likely on board, they were probably tracking the radio waves of a survival beacon, the metal in the pilot's equipment, or using traditional thermal infrared and radar capabilities, rather than detecting a raw heartbeat via magnetic fields. As I do remember seeing a different part of when that story happened. Back in April, someone did report on, like, one of the military websites that there was a survival beacon that they used to track them. That the whole quantum stuff was like, nonsense. Yeah, I saw that. No one wants to report that because it's not fun, right? No, the ghost murmur thing is awesome fun. And if that is real, like, boy. And you can imagine a world a hundred years from now where that is real. So it's exciting.
- [136:34]
Lex Fridman
Oh, yeah. 100 years is a long time for this to be real.
- [136:36]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, 100 years. They probably got it down pat then. That's the problem. You can't hide from the robot dogs from Black Mirror.
- [136:44]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [136:45]
Joe Rogan
You know?
- [136:47]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [136:48]
Joe Rogan
Do you ever, while you're working in AI, do you ever wonder like, is this the downfall of humanity? Is this a good thing to be work on? Did you ever have like doom moments?
- [137:01]
Lex Fridman
Not on specific things I'm working on, but in general I do worry about like, how much, you know, you obviously want to like stay in charge and you know, be in control of your experience, still be the one driving change and have a lot of agency for yourself. So I do worry that like, it's all about like making sure everybody's upskilled and understanding like where the future is headed and not being like fed only like dangerous apocalyptic messages. Because it's very essential that human beings retain their agency and staying curious. Right. So if that stops being the case, if you start subscribing to the vision that, okay, your jobs are done, you don't really have any meaning in the world and we'll pay you some dividends and you just sit at home and chill, that is not a good thing. So. And I feel like there are not enough voices in AI that are actually saying anything different to that. And I like when Jensen was here, I think he was a little different. I think he tried to give a more positive version where he said, okay, like the radiologist thing. If, okay, all radiologists can take away, they start doing different kind of work. So I think we need to start looking at like, okay, like, okay, first of all, guys, relax. You have a lot of, you have one premium skill, your curiosity. So let's figure out ways to channelize that. Let's change the way work is done at companies, let's change the way educational institutions run, let's change the incentive structures and let's help you build new ideas on new companies and explore things that are not even being considered. And the government should obviously like, you know, support all these initiatives. So that's what needs to happen more. But what's happening actually right now is okay, like, hey guys, you're all losers. You're gonna lose your jobs. And don't blame me because I told you so. Right? And still give us money because we're still gonna do it anyway. That's what's happening more. And I think we should stop doing that. That's my opinion.
- [139:06]
Joe Rogan
Well, the problem is it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. And if you tell people that they're going to be a loser and you're going to, yeah, their life is over.
- [139:13]
Lex Fridman
They're going to think that way instead
- [139:14]
Joe Rogan
of giving them an understanding of like, look, this can open up new doors for you.
- [139:19]
Lex Fridman
This can.
- [139:20]
Joe Rogan
And anytime there's any sort of disruptive technology, there's always the, the fear that it's going to go badly.
- [139:25]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [139:25]
Joe Rogan
This was the case with the locomotive. This was the case with when the printing press was invented.
- [139:32]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. By the way, like I, I did some research on this where. And the Industrial revolution happened. People got new ideas. Okay. Like for example, when the Industrial revolution happened, who came up with the idea of a steel plow? John Deere. Until then we were using wooden plows for farming. No farmer complained that, hey, like we need fewer farmers now because steel plow is able to do it more effectively. No one complained. You actually had more farms and more productivity, more crop yields and you're happier.
- [140:08]
Joe Rogan
But isn't that just a regular tool as opposed to AI?
- [140:11]
Lex Fridman
Sure, AI is different. It's not overnight going to become something that's capable of just running an entire multi trillion dollar company on its own. There are a lot of things that AIs cannot do. There's a lot of tacit knowledge in every company that AIs don't quite understand. And there's a lot of, of new directions that you can just start working on that AIs are not well equipped to do because it doesn't have full knowledge about it and the knowledge about it is yet to be captured. And some of that requires like human to human work and collaboration. So we obviously have to gravitate towards what is scarce. When AI makes the current labor that's considered scarce because that's where the money is going in commodity, then we have to gravitate towards what is scarce. And the only way to do that is to seek things that we don't know about, which is only something we can discover through our curiosity. There's nothing else. Whatever we don't quite understand well, whatever we don't know how to do well yet even with the current capabilities of AI, that's where we should pull our labor and workforce into. So it needs more responsible messaging and that's not quite happening right now.
- [141:23]
Joe Rogan
I think it needs responsible messaging. And then in the future what it needs is like real direction in terms of like letting people find their curiosity and find these paths of interest and find something to do with themselves that doesn't involve whatever their previous occupation. That's irrelevant now.
- [141:45]
Lex Fridman
That's true, true. I think like passion for people is something that not a lot of people will be able to answer out of the box. Like if you go and ask them what is your real passion? And the only thing they've known in life is to just climb up career ladders and make more money, that's gonna actually take them a while to even discover. Right.
- [142:06]
Joe Rogan
Which is why it's so important to get kids off on the right start.
- [142:09]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that's the hope. That's our hope for the future is the kids. The kids are born curious. They don't need to change themselves to be curious. Right. The adults who probably already are, like, because of this knowledge work thing, who kind of curb their curiosity and try to fit into the existing system, it might be a little hard for them to adapt. But the kids, I think they don't have this problem. So I'm actually optimistic about the future long term because the future is all centered around whoever is very young to.
- [142:40]
Joe Rogan
What do you think about this idea that universal basic income is going to be required?
- [142:46]
Lex Fridman
Some form of it is good. It's like a dividend. I almost think of it as a dividend. If a lot of spend that most companies are currently doing today on payroll, which is paying a knowledge worker for a certain task. Think of knowledge work as basically taking information and transforming it into an artifact. Right. And it's messy and complicated. Let's assume that's being done by AIs. So obviously companies will start spending more on compute instead of payroll. It's just a reallocation of like spend or budget. Similar to like what happened in advertising industries where most of your advertising budgets went to like television and like billboards. And then now it's starting to go to Google and Instagram and YouTube and all that. So when that happens, obviously the AI companies are going to make a lot of money. And people who helped be part of creating it or either directly or indirectly would want to have some role to play in that ecosystem. And a good way to involve them is through giving them some ownership in the company as shareholders. If you get dividends from the profits generated by the AI, it's not a bad thing. But that shouldn't be the only thing. Right.
- [144:03]
Joe Rogan
So this is similar to like people that live in Alaska. They get a check because.
- [144:06]
Lex Fridman
Correct. Alaska, Alaska. Get. Alaska does this. And it's not a bad thing as long as they are doing some other
- [144:12]
Joe Rogan
things alongside it could lessen the burden.
- [144:17]
Lex Fridman
Correct. Yeah, yeah. And if people are interested in still being part of the AI industries, they go do things that AIs are not able to do today. And that's been the case before. Like when Industrial Revolution started, the United Kingdom actually started like projects around building railroads. And that gave a lot of people who are in the cottage industries new jobs. So there are going to be a lot of new projects to just. Okay, what if we want to reimagine the government itself, where the government runs largely on AI.
- [144:49]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that was my next question.
- [144:51]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So then we need people for that.
- [144:53]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [144:54]
Lex Fridman
Because this is a legacy industry. It's not about the capabilities not being there. It's about working through the legacy and bureaucracy to actually deploy and implement this inside the most largest institutions in the country. And that's going to need a new set of skilled workers to go do that. So some people who might be working at Microsoft or something today might actually end up working for the United States government. Because Microsoft may not need them, especially for internally deploying AI or selling AI to their customers, but the government needs them. And if the government can pay them well and it's a fulfilling job to find some meaning for doing something good for the country, it's not a bad thing. So I think just like in the Industrial Revolution where we had new projects because the demand for AI was so big, we're going to start seeing some new projects being created in AI as well. When they can capabilities advanced enough that they can replace knowledge workers.
- [145:52]
Joe Rogan
That's the rosy scenario.
- [145:55]
Lex Fridman
It's not as rosy like real world is messy. A lot of things are still done through trusting other human beings. Nobody's like blindly trusting AIs. AI still make a lot of mistakes.
- [146:06]
Joe Rogan
I know a lot of people are hesitant to the idea of AI running government and I get it. But also look at what the people are doing. Look at how much corruption there is, how much fraud and waste. Imagine if all fraud, waste and corruption was instantaneously eliminated.
- [146:22]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean that was what Elon tried to do with Doge. Right. And then I think the bottleneck there was just discovering how slow it is to do things. He's not used to running that slow.
- [146:35]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Also how much resistance.
- [146:37]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [146:37]
Joe Rogan
Because there was so much grift.
- [146:38]
Lex Fridman
Correct. Yeah. So. So honestly, more than AI, the government is running a lot of legacy software stack because a lot of these legacy enterprise companies just have created these multi decade or year contracts that are hard to get out of. And the way they do that is to sell it at a much larger discount. And if you're on a specific OS, you're not allowed to change this for 10 years. You have to use the same sort of software. All these people you hired only know to use that tool. So it takes time to actually change and implement new things, leave alone AI. If you just wanted to like move everybody from Windows machines to like Mac machines, good luck with that. It's going to take a lot of time. That's the state of the system. And so that has nothing to do with technology. And so to do things in such messy systems, you still need people, you still need people to navigate all these changes. It's not about the capability of technology, it's more about how the system is structured. And that's why I still feel there will be new jobs. Maybe there's a lot of new projects to be done. Maybe some good leader actually wants to change the system and is willing to be patient about it over a 5 to 10 year horizon. If you take 10 years to actually run majority of the government processes on AIs, it may seem slow to you today, but in the grand scheme of things, it's actually good for the country. And that's still going to need a lot of nice engineers to go work on these projects. So they're not going to lose all their jobs. There's going to be some displacement, there's going to be some new projects, there's going to be new priorities, but it'll keep going, the system will keep going. Because that's just how historically things have been.
- [148:27]
Joe Rogan
When you think about the future of AI and you think of this, so what do you think about AGI in particular? You think about something that could potentially make better versions of itself.
- [148:41]
Lex Fridman
Self replicating.
- [148:42]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And then how far does it go?
- [148:45]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, so that is the ultimate form of. I think some people in Silicon Valley have started calling that as asi. So when you see the word ASI being thrown around, like people kind of think of ASI as an AGI that can recursively self improve itself. So there's going to be no limits to how smart it can get. Right. And I used to think that ASI is bottlenecked by power because you need a ton of compute for this model to keep on training itself and running its own rollouts and collecting data and then going and updating itself. But you could imagine that once the algorithm is correct, the ASI could be tasked with just making itself more efficient too. Where improvement doesn't just mean capability improvement. Improvement could also mean power efficiency. And that way the recursive, safe ASI that is improving itself also makes itself more compact and more efficient and it can run on less compute. So that will be the ultimate project in AI think of it as almost as the last project in AI is basically cracking recursive self improvement. Once you crack that, you don't have anything else to work on in practice. I think what's going to happen is because information is so muddled and fragmented and living in disjoint systems just the way we have constructed our messy real world, it's going to be hard to point even a recursively self improving AI at some metric and say go improve or go reduce inflation by 5%. That would be awesome if we can task an AI to do that. If that's the job of the government to just reduce inflation, have a deflationary effect on society and make goods and services a lot more abundant and efficient. It's going to have to deal with a lot of messy legacy systems. If the task is to go improve the health care or good luck, who's going to deal with all the compliance of actually implementing these changes inside hospitals? Most hospitals are still using legacy software because the software provider has lobbied the government in a way where only they're allowed to do that.
- [150:55]
Joe Rogan
God, what a stupid bottleneck.
- [150:57]
Lex Fridman
Exactly. So a lot of the bottlenecks in actually having AI just take over and massively improve the human society and our hospitals, our legal systems, our government systems, where most of the payroll is going into is just bottlenecked by a lot of compliance and regulation. And so that's why I feel we human beings are still necessary to effect the change because these laws and regulations were built for us.
- [151:26]
Joe Rogan
And it also seems like we have to demand that those systems be usurped.
- [151:30]
Lex Fridman
Sure, 100%. And we need the help of AIs to rewrite all these laws. It's going to be humanly impossible to go and change one specific line here and there.
- [151:40]
Joe Rogan
Right. And then you're going to have a bunch of these software companies that are lobbying to try to stop that from happening. Yeah.
- [151:46]
Lex Fridman
That's why like this messiness and this need for getting all people on the same page and actually steering the society in a positive way. Our jobs will probably be more steered towards that problem solving at a different level of abstraction. Maybe more need for eq, more need for actually like understanding differences of opinion and still like leadership quality, ability to understand people and ability to convince people. These, these, these are the skills that will be even more important in the world where like actual work can be done by AIs. But effecting the change in, in our society, in our country still needs human beings because the systems are messy.
- [152:33]
Joe Rogan
It's a weird world we're in right now.
- [152:35]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [152:36]
Joe Rogan
There's never been weird.
- [152:37]
Lex Fridman
That said, there's a lot of things that. That can still go wrong when you give power, so much power to, you know, like, specific companies and they deploy all these bots and then anybody can use them and weird ways, you don't even know if, like, you're talking to a real person anymore. They're like people who just run AI responses and chat with, like, 500 people at once. And that's like an whole business. And so I think it's gonna. It's gonna take a lot of adjustment.
- [153:10]
Joe Rogan
Well, the piece of adjustment that a lot of people are coming to grips with is that this is a new part of our conversation in that in 2020, like, when I first moved here, AI was never discussed.
- [153:21]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [153:21]
Joe Rogan
It was not a thing.
- [153:22]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [153:23]
Joe Rogan
I mean, we knew about it. We knew about AI, but it wasn't like you. It wasn't a huge part of the cultural discussion of what the future holds for us.
- [153:32]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [153:33]
Joe Rogan
Now it is.
- [153:34]
Lex Fridman
It is central. Yeah.
- [153:35]
Joe Rogan
And in that short amount of time, in just six years, it really makes you wonder because we know how technology progresses exponentially. Like, what it's going to look like six years from now.
- [153:45]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. The 2028. Like. Like, you're definitely. My prediction is 2028 election debates are going to be largely about AI.
- [153:53]
Joe Rogan
Wow.
- [153:54]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. AI. Energy crisis. The power. Power. People are going to care about all these things because AI is no longer a thing. That is new. It's part of all our lives. Everyone's using some form of AI in some ways, and it's not as dangerous as people thought. It's an amazing tool for doing work and asking questions and learning things. And all these things, when used correctly. Yeah. Can also be used incorrectly.
- [154:26]
Joe Rogan
Like everything.
- [154:27]
Lex Fridman
Like everything. So it's far more powerful that incorrect usage can cause serious damage. For example, kids who are using AIs for companionship. Crazy things are happening there. Crazy things are happening there.
- [154:41]
Joe Rogan
Not good.
- [154:42]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. It's even. It's as dangerous as, or probably more dangerous than social media. And it's also scary that social media companies want to build more of these kind of like, companionship apps, because they know that, okay, their only job is to get you engaged more. And that's the only way to sell more ads and make more money. And clearly companionship is a way to get you engaged more.
- [155:06]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [155:07]
Lex Fridman
And so that's dangerous if ads start being part of, like, AI chats.
- [155:13]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [155:14]
Lex Fridman
Because then if that. And that ends up working Then all these chat bots are just going to be sycophants that just tell you stuff that you. You want to hear.
- [155:24]
Joe Rogan
It's also. It's an indistinguishable facsimile to a real person. Like, they communicate like a real person.
- [155:31]
Lex Fridman
Right.
- [155:32]
Joe Rogan
So you really think you have a relationship with this.
- [155:34]
Lex Fridman
Right. And it truly screws with your mind. It's hard to decouple, and it takes a lot of time to recover if you want to unplug. So the business model incentives are not well aligned to humanity.
- [155:50]
Joe Rogan
Did you see that AI companion that they developed that was at the Consumer Electronics show in Vegas this year?
- [155:57]
Lex Fridman
Which one?
- [155:58]
Joe Rogan
It's like a hot Asian lady.
- [156:00]
Lex Fridman
I see. Yeah, yeah. These are. These are the weird kind of projects that are going on.
- [156:05]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. It's a hot Asian lady that talks to you.
- [156:07]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [156:08]
Joe Rogan
And, you know, she talks to you through AI. And right now it's just a kind of a crude sort of robot, but, yeah, you could see where it's going.
- [156:15]
Lex Fridman
You can see where it's going.
- [156:16]
Joe Rogan
Ex Machina.
- [156:17]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it's going. Yeah.
- [156:19]
Joe Rogan
Right there.
- [156:20]
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yeah. That movie was amazing. Quite far ahead of his time, really. Yeah.
- [156:26]
Joe Rogan
That was. That's one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time.
- [156:29]
Lex Fridman
It's underrated, actually, because people, like, reviews on online say it's not as good, but I liked it.
- [156:34]
Joe Rogan
I loved it.
- [156:35]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [156:36]
Joe Rogan
I thought it was fantastic.
- [156:36]
Lex Fridman
I like it better than her.
- [156:38]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Her. I lost her after a while. I shut it off. It lost my attention. I'm sure it's good. It was the wrong time for me to watch it.
- [156:46]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [156:47]
Joe Rogan
But Ex Machina, I've seen. Seen it like five times. I love that movie. It's just so. I don't want to give anything away, but it's. It's so incredible and so bleak and so.
- [156:57]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [156:58]
Joe Rogan
In the relationship that he has with that. The hot one.
- [157:01]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [157:02]
Joe Rogan
You believe it. You're like, I. I'd be right there with them. You know, it's too confusing to our system to have something that looks exactly like the thing that you desire, that is actually interested in you. It just happens to be. Pulls all your data, knows too much about you, knows how to pull your strings. Yeah, yeah. Listen, man, very fascinating discussion.
- [157:22]
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
- [157:22]
Joe Rogan
I'm glad we did it.
- [157:23]
Lex Fridman
Thank you. Thank you so much.
- [157:24]
Joe Rogan
And thanks for having an awesome platform. Perplexity has been great. We really loved using it here at the show. It's made the show more interesting. It's cool.
- [157:32]
Lex Fridman
Thank you. It's very fulfilling because like, we want the app to be used by curious people like that. Like, if you want to lift the ceiling of what our population can be. You know, not everyone is like fully curious all the time, but we're all born with it. So at some point in time, the system curbs it from us. So there should be more apps that get us back to what we're naturally good at.
- [157:54]
Joe Rogan
It's a fascinating tool for technology or for curiosity, rather, because to be. And it's seamless, the way we use it on the show. Because there's always a question. Yeah, there's always. It comes up so often, like, throw it in. Perplexity.
- [158:07]
Lex Fridman
Let's find out what's up. Yeah.
- [158:08]
Joe Rogan
So it's been great for, for us. So thank you.
- [158:10]
Lex Fridman
Thank you.
- [158:11]
Joe Rogan
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