Michael Stevens: Vsauce | Lex Fridman Podcast #58

The following is a conversation with Michael Stevens, the creator of Vsauce, one of the most popular educational YouTube channels in the world, with over 15 million subscribers and over 1.7 billion views. His videos often ask and answer questions that are both profound and entertaining, spanning topics from physics to psychology. Popular questions include, what if everyone jumped at once? Or what if the sun disappeared? Or why are things creepy? Or what if the earth stopped spinning? As part of his channel, he created three seasons of Mind Field, a series that explored human behavior. His curiosity and passion are contagious and inspiring to millions of people. And so as an educator, his impact and contribution to the world is truly immeasurable. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. I recently started doing ads at the end of the introduction. I'll do one or two minutes after introducing the episode and never any ads in the middle that break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. I personally use Cash App to send money to friends, but you can also use it to buy, sell, and deposit Bitcoin in just seconds. Cash App also has a new investing feature. You can buy fractions of a stock, say $1 worth, no matter what the stock price is. Brokerage services are provided by Cash App Investing, a subsidiary of Square and member SIPC. I'm excited to be working with Cash App to support one of my favorite organizations called FIRST, best known for their FIRST Robotics and LEGO competitions. They educate and inspire hundreds of thousands of students in over 110 countries and have a perfect rating on Charity Navigator, which means the donated money is used to maximum effectiveness. When you get Cash App from the App Store, Google Play, and use code LEXPODCAST, you'll get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, which again is an organization that I've personally seen inspire girls and boys to dream of engineering a better world. And now, here's my conversation with Michael Stevens. One of your deeper interests is psychology, understanding human behavior. You've pointed out how messy studying human behavior is and that it's far from the scientific rigor of something like physics, for example. How do you think we can take psychology from where it's been in the 20th century to something more like what the physicists, theoretical physicists are doing, something precise, something rigorous? Well, we could do it by finding the physical foundations of psychology, right? If all of our emotions and moods and feelings and behaviors are the result of mechanical behaviors of atoms and molecules in our brains, then can we find correlations? Perhaps like chaos makes that really difficult and the uncertainty principle and all these things. We can't know the position and velocity of every single quantum state in a brain, probably. But I think that if we can get to that point with psychology, then we can start to think about consciousness in a physical and mathematical way. When we ask questions like, well, what is self-reference? How can you think about your self-thinking? What are some mathematical structures that could bring that about? There's ideas of, in terms of consciousness and breaking it down into physics, there's ideas of panpsychism where people believe that whatever consciousness is, is a fundamental part of reality. It's almost like a physics law. Do you think, what's your views on consciousness? Do you think it has this deep part of reality or is it something that's deeply human and constructed by us humans? Start nice and light and easy. Nothing I ask you today has actually proven answer, so we're just hypothesizing. So yeah, I mean, I should clarify, this is all speculation and I'm not an expert in any of these topics and I'm not God. But I think that consciousness is probably something that can be fully explained within the laws of physics. I think that our bodies and brains and the universe and at the quantum level is so rich and complex, I'd be surprised if we couldn't find a room for consciousness there. And why should we be conscious? Why are we aware of ourselves? That is a very strange and interesting and important question. And I think for the next few thousand years, we're going to have to believe in answers purely on faith. But my guess is that we will find that within the configuration space of possible arrangements of the universe, there are some that contain memories of others. Literally Julian Barber calls them time capsule states where you're like, yeah, not only do I have a scratch on my arm, but also this state of the universe also contains a memory in my head of being scratched by my cat three days ago. And for some reason, those kinds of states of the universe are more plentiful or more likely. When you say those states, the ones that contain memories of its past or ones that contain memories of its past and have degrees of consciousness? Just the first part, because I think the consciousness then emerges from the fact that a state of the universe that contains fragments or memories of other states is one where you're going to feel like there's time. You're going to feel like, yeah, things happened in the past. And I don't know what will happen in the future because these states don't contain information about the future. For some reason, those kinds of states are either more common, more plentiful, or you could use the anthropic principle and just say, well, they're extremely rare, but until you are in one or if you are in one, then you can ask questions like you're asking me on this podcast. Why questions? Yeah, it's like, why are we conscious? Well, because if we weren't, we wouldn't be asking why we were. You've kind of implied that you have a sense, again, hypothesis, theorizing that the universe is deterministic. What's your thoughts about free will? Do you think of the universe as deterministic in a sense that it's unrolling a particular, like it's operating under a specific set of physical laws and when you have set the initial conditions, it will unroll in the exact same way in our particular line of the universe every time? That is a very useful way to think about the universe. It's done us well. It's brought us to the moon. It's brought us to where we are today, right? I would not say that I believe in determinism in that kind of an absolute form or actually I just don't care. Maybe it's true, but I'm not going to live my life like it is. What in your sense, because you've studied kind of how we humans think of the world, what's in your view is the difference between our perception, like how we think the world is and reality? Do you think there's a huge gap there? Like we delude ourselves that the whole thing is an illusion, just everything about human psychology, the way we see things and how things actually are. All the things you've studied, what's your sense? How big is the gap between reality? Well, again, purely speculative. I think that we will never know the answer. We cannot know the answer. There is no experiment to find an answer to that question. Everything we experience is an event in our brain. When I look at a cat, I'm not even – I can't prove that there's a cat there. All I am experiencing is the perception of a cat inside my own brain. I am only a witness to the events of my mind. I think it is very useful to infer that if I witness the event of cat in my head, it's because I'm looking at a cat that is literally there and has its own feelings and motivations and should be pet and given food and water and love. I think that's the way you should live your life. But whether or not we live in a simulation on the brain in a vat, I don't know. Do you care? I don't really – well, I care because it's a fascinating question and it's a fantastic way to get people excited about all kinds of topics, physics, psychology, consciousness, philosophy. At the end of the day, what would the difference be? If you – The cat needs to be fed at the end of the day. Otherwise, it would be a dead cat. Right. But if it's not even a real cat, then it's just like a video game cat. And right, so what's the difference between killing a digital cat in a video game because of neglect versus a real cat? It seems very different to us psychologically. I don't really feel bad about, oh my gosh, I forgot to feed my Tamagotchi, right? But I would feel terrible if I forgot to feed my actual cats. So can you just touch on the topic of simulation? Do you find this thought experiment that we're living in a simulation useful, inspiring, or constructive in any kind of way? Do you think it's ridiculous? Do you think it could be true? Or is it just a useful thought experiment? I think it is extremely useful as a thought experiment because it makes sense to everyone, especially as we see virtual reality and computer games getting more and more complex. You're not talking to an audience in like Newton's time where you're like, imagine a clock that has mechanics in it that are so complex that it can create love. And everyone's like, no. But today, you really start to feel, man, at what point is this little robot friend of mine going to be like someone I don't want to cancel plans with? And so it's a great thought experiment of do we live in a simulation? Am I a brain in a vat that is just being given electrical impulses from some nefarious other beings so that I believe that I live on Earth and that I have a body and all of this? And the fact that you can't prove it either way is a fantastic way to introduce people to some of the deepest questions. So you mentioned a little buddy that you would want to cancel an appointment with. So that's a lot of our conversations. That's what my research is. It's artificial intelligence. I apologize, but you're such a fun person to ask these big questions with. Well, I hope I can give some answers that are interesting. Well, because of you've sharpened your brain's ability to explore some of the most, some of the questions that many scientists are actually afraid of even touching, which is fascinating. I think you're, in that sense, ultimately a great scientist through this process of sharpening your brain. Well, I don't know if I am a scientist. I think science is a way of knowing, and there are a lot of questions I investigate that are not scientific questions. On my field, we have definitely done scientific experiments and studies that had hypotheses and all of that. But not to be too precious about what does the word science mean, but I think I would just describe myself as curious, and I hope that that curiosity is contagious. So to you, the scientific method is deeply connected to science because your curiosity took you to asking questions. To me, asking a good question, even if you feel, society feels that it's not a question within the reach of science currently, to me, asking the question is the biggest step of the scientific process. The scientific method is the second part, and that may be what traditionally is called science, but to me, asking the questions, being brave enough to ask the questions, being curious and not constrained by what you're supposed to think is just true, what it means to be a scientist. It's certainly a huge part of what it means to be a human. If I were to say, you know what, I don't believe in forces. I think that when I push on a massive object, a ghost leaves my body and enters the object I'm pushing, and these ghosts happen to just get really lazy when they're around massive things, and that's why F equals MA. Oh, and by the way, the laziness of the ghost is in proportion to the mass of the object, so boom, proved me wrong. Every experiment, well, you can never find the ghost. And so none of that theory is scientific, but once I start saying, can I see the ghost, why should there be a ghost, and if there aren't ghosts, what might I expect, and I start to do different tests to see is this falsifiable, are there things that should happen if there are ghosts, or are there things that shouldn't happen, and do they, you know, what do I observe? Now I'm thinking scientifically. I don't think of science as, wow, a picture of a black hole. That's just a photograph. That's an image. That's data. That's a sensory and perception experience. Science is how we got that and how we understand it and how we believe in it and how we reduce our uncertainty around what it means. But I would say I'm deeply within the scientific community and I'm sometimes disheartened by the elitism of the thinking, sort of not allowing yourself to think outside the box. So allowing the possibility of going against the conventions of science, I think, is a beautiful part of some of the greatest scientists in history. I don't know. I'm impressed by scientists every day and revolutions in our knowledge of the world occur only under very special circumstances. It is very scary to challenge conventional thinking and risky because, let's go back to elitism and ego, right? If you just say, you know what, I believe in the spirits of my body and all forces are actually created by invisible creatures that transfer themselves between objects. If you ridicule every other theory and say that you're correct, then ego gets involved and you just don't go anywhere. But fundamentally, the question of, well, what is a force, is incredibly important. We need to have that conversation but it needs to be done in this very political way of like, let's be respectful of everyone and let's realize that we're all learning together and not shutting out other people. And so when you look at a lot of revolutionary ideas, they were not accepted right away. And Galileo had a couple of problems with the authorities and later thinkers, Descartes was like, all right, look, I kind of agree with Galileo but I'm going to have to not say that. I'll have to create and invent and write different things that keep me from being in trouble, but we still slowly made progress. Revolutions are difficult in all forms and certainly in science. Before we get to AI, on topic of revolutionary ideas, let me ask, on a Reddit AMA, you said that is the earth flat is one of the favorite questions you've ever answered. Speaking of revolutionary ideas. So your video on that, people should definitely watch, is really fascinating. Can you elaborate why you enjoyed answering this question so much? Yeah, well, it's a long story. I remember a long time ago, I was living in New York at the time, so it had to have been like 2009 or something. I visited the flat earth forums and this was before the flat earth theories became as sort of mainstream as they are. Sorry to ask the dumb question, forums, online forums. Yeah. Flat earth society, I don't know if it's.com or.org, but I went there and I was reading their ideas and how they responded to typical criticisms of, well, the earth isn't flat because what about this? And I could not tell, and I mentioned this in my video, I couldn't tell how many of these community members actually believe the earth was flat or were just trolling. And I realized that the fascinating thing is how do we know anything and what makes for a good belief versus a maybe not so tenable or good belief. And so that's really what my video about earth being flat is about. It's about, look, there are a lot of reasons. The earth is probably not flat, but a flat earth believer can respond to every single one of them. But it's all in an ad hoc way. And all of their rebuttals aren't necessarily going to form a cohesive, non-contradictory whole. And I believe that's the episode where I talk about Occam's razor and Newton's flaming laser sword. And then I say, well, you know what, wait a second, we know that space contracts as you move. And so to a particle moving near the speed of light towards earth, earth would be flattened in the direction of that particle's travel. So to them, earth is flat. Like we need to be really generous to even wild ideas because they're all thinking. They're all the communication of ideas. And what else can it mean to be a human? Yeah. And I think I'm a huge fan of the flat earth theory, quote unquote, in the sense that to me feels harmless to explore some of the questions of what it means to believe something, what it means to explore the edge of science and so on. It's because it's a harm, it's to me, nobody gets hurt whether the earth is flat or round, not literally, but I mean, intellectually when we're just having a conversation. That said, again, to elitism, I find that scientists roll their eyes way too fast on the flat earth. The kind of dismissal that I see to this even notion, they haven't like sat down and say, what are the arguments that are being proposed? And this is why these arguments are incorrect. So that should be something that scientists should always do, even to the most sort of ideas that seem ridiculous. So I like this, it's almost my test when I ask people what they think about flat earth theory to see how quickly they roll their eyes. Well, yeah, I mean, let me go on record and say that the earth is not flat. It is a three-dimensional spheroid. However, I don't know that and it has not been proven. Science doesn't prove anything. It just reduces uncertainty. Could the earth actually be flat? Extremely unlikely, extremely unlikely. And so it is a ridiculous notion if we care about how probable and certain our ideas might be. But I think it's incredibly important to talk about science in that way and to not resort to, well, it's true. It's true in the same way that a mathematical theorem is true. And I think we're kind of like being pretty pedantic about defining this stuff. But like, sure, I could take a rocket ship out and I could orbit earth and look at it and it would look like a ball, right? But I still can't prove that I'm not living in a simulation, that I'm not a brain in a vat, that this isn't all an elaborate ruse created by some technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization. So there's always some doubt and that's fine. That's exciting. And I think that kind of doubt, practically speaking, is useful when you start talking about quantum mechanics or string theory. It helps, to me, that kind of little, adds a little spice into the thinking process of scientists. So, I mean, just as a thought experiment, your video kind of, okay, say the earth is flat, what would the forces when you walk about this flat earth feel like to the human? That's a really nice thought experiment to think about. Right, because what's really nice about it is that it's a funny thought experiment, but you actually wind up accidentally learning a whole lot about gravity and about relativity and geometry. And I think that's really the goal of what I'm doing. I'm not trying to convince people that the earth is round. I feel like you either believe that it is or you don't and that's, how can I change that? What I can do is change how you think and how you are introduced to important concepts like, well, how does gravity operate? Oh, it's all about the center of mass of an object. So right, on a sphere, we're all pulled towards the middle, essentially the centroid, geometrically, but on a disc, ooh, you're gonna be pulled at a weird angle if you're out near the edge. And that stuff's fascinating. Yeah, and to me, that particular video opened my eyes even more to what gravity is. It's just a really nice visualization tool of, because you always imagine gravity with spheres, with masses that are spheres. Yeah. And imagining gravity on masses that are not spherical, some other shape, but in here, a plate, a flat object is really interesting. It makes you really kind of visualize in a three-dimensional way the force of gravity. Even if a disc the size of earth would be impossible, I think anything larger than like the moon basically needs to be a sphere because gravity will round it out. So you can't have a teacup the size of Jupiter, right? There's a great book about a teacup in the universe that I highly recommend. I don't remember the author. I forget her name, but it's a wonderful book. So look it up. I think it's called Teacup in the Universe. Just to link on this point briefly, your videos are generally super, people love them, right? If you look at the sort of number of likes versus dislikes, this measure of YouTube, right, is incredible and as do I. But this particular flat earth video has more dislikes than usual. What do you, on that topic in general, what's your sense, how big is the community, not just who believes in flat earth, but sort of the anti-scientific community that naturally distrust scientists in a way that's not an open-minded way, like really just distrust scientists like they're bought by some, it's the kind of mechanism of some kind of bigger system that's trying to manipulate human beings. What's your sense of the size of that community? You're one of the sort of great educators in the world that educates people on the exciting power of science. So you're kind of up against this community. What's your sense of it? I really have no idea. I haven't looked at the likes and dislikes on the flat earth video. And so I would wonder if it has a greater percentage of dislikes than usual, is that because of people disliking it because they think that it's a video about earth being flat and they find that ridiculous and they dislike it without even really watching much, do they wish that I was more dismissive of flat earth theories? I know there are a lot of response videos that kind of go through the episode and are pro-flat earth, but I don't know if there's a larger community of unorthodox thinkers today than there have been in the past. And I just want to not lose them. I want them to keep listening and thinking. And by calling them all idiots or something, that does no good because how idiotic are they really? I mean, the earth isn't a sphere at all. We know that it's an oblate spheroid. And that in and of itself is really interesting. And I investigated that in which way is down, where I'm like, really, down does not point towards the center of the earth. It points in different direction depending on what's underneath you and what's above you and what's around you. The whole universe is tugging on me. And then you also show that gravity is non-uniform across the globe. Like if you, this is I guess thought experiment, if you build a bridge all the way across the earth and then just knock out its pillars, what would happen? Can you describe how it'd be like a very chaotic, unstable thing that's happening because gravity is non-uniform throughout the earth? Yeah. In small spaces, like the ones we work in, we can essentially assume that gravity is uniform, but it's not. It is weaker the further you are from the earth. And it also is going to be, it's radially pointed towards the middle of the earth. So a really large object will feel tidal forces because of that non-uniformness. And we can take advantage of that with satellites, right? Gravitational induced torque. It's a great way to align your satellite without having to use fuel or any kind of engine. So let's jump back to it. Artificial intelligence. What's your thought of the state of where we are at currently with artificial intelligence? And what do you think it takes to build human level or superhuman level intelligence? I don't know what intelligence means. That's my biggest question at the moment. And I think it's because my instinct is always to go, well, what are the foundations here of our discussion? What does it mean to be intelligent? How do we measure the intelligence of an artificial machine or a program or something? Can we say that humans are intelligent? Because there's also a fascinating field of how do you measure human intelligence? Of course. But if we just take that for granted, saying that whatever this fuzzy intelligence thing we're talking about, humans kind of have it. What would be a good test for you? So Turing developed a test that's natural language conversation. Would that impress you? A chat bot that you'd want to hang out and have a beer with for a bunch of hours or have dinner plans with? Is that a good test? Natural language conversation? Is there something else that would impress you? Or is that also too difficult to think about? I'm pretty much impressed by everything. I think that if- Roomba? If there was a chat bot that was incredibly, I don't know, really had a personality and I didn't, the Turing test, right? If I'm unable to tell that it's not another person, but then I was shown a bunch of wires and mechanical components and it was like, that's actually what you're talking to. I don't know if I would feel that guilty destroying it. I would feel guilty because clearly it's well-made and it's a really cool thing. It's like destroying a really cool car or something, but I would not feel like I was a murderer. So yeah, at what point would I start to feel that way? And this is such a subjective psychological question. If you give it movement or if you have it act as though, or perhaps really feel pain as I destroy it and scream and resist, then I'd feel bad. Yeah, it's beautifully put. And let's just say, act like it's a pain. So if you just have a robot that not screams, just like moans in pain, if you kick it, that immediately just puts it in a class that we humans, it becomes, it anthropomorphizes it. It almost immediately becomes human. So that's a psychology question as opposed to sort of a physics question. Right. I think that's a really good instinct to have. If the robot- Screams? Screams and moans, even if you don't believe that it has the mental experience, the qualia of pain and suffering, I think it's still a good instinct to say, you know what? I'd rather not hurt it. The problem is that instinct can get us in trouble because then robots can manipulate that. And there's different kinds of robots. There's robots like the Facebook and the YouTube algorithm that recommends the video and they can manipulate it in the same kind of way. Well, let me ask you just to stick on artificial intelligence for a second. Do you have worries about existential threats from AI or existential threats from other technologies like nuclear weapons that could potentially destroy life on earth or damage it to a very significant degree? Yeah, of course I do. Especially the weapons that we create. There's all kinds of famous ways to think about this. And one is that, wow, what if we don't see advanced alien civilizations because of the danger of technology? What if we reach a point, and I think there's a channel, Thotty2. Jeez, I wish I remembered the name of the channel. But he delves into this kind of limit of maybe once you discover radioactivity and its power, you've reached this important hurdle. And the reason that the skies are so empty is that no one's ever managed to survive as a civilization once they have that destructive power. And when it comes to AI, I'm not really very worried because I think that there are plenty of other people that are already worried enough. And oftentimes these worries are just, they just get in the way of progress. And they're questions that we should address later. And I think I talk about this in my interview with the self-driving autonomous vehicle guy as I think it was a bonus scene from the Trolley Problem episode. And I'm like, wow, what should a car do if this really weird contrived scenario happens where it has to swerve and save the driver but kill a kid? And he's like, well, what would a human do? And if we resist technological progress because we're worried about all of these little issues, then it gets in the way. And we shouldn't avoid those problems, but we shouldn't allow them to be stumbling blocks to advancement. So the folks like Sam Harris or Elon Musk are saying that we're not worried enough. So worry should not paralyze technological progress, but we're sort of marching, technology is marching forward without the key scientists, the developing the technology, worrying about the overnight having some effects that would be very detrimental to society. So to push back on your thought of the idea that there's enough people worrying about it, Elon Musk says there's not enough people worrying about it. So that's the kind of balance is, you know, it's like folks who really focus on non-nuclear deterrence are saying there's not enough people worried about nuclear deterrence, right? So it's an interesting question of what is a good threshold of people to worry about these? And if it's too many people that are worried, you're right, it'll be like the press would over report on it and there'll be technological, halt technological progress. If not enough, then we can march straight ahead into that abyss that human beings might be destined for with the progress of technology. Yeah. I don't know what the right balance is of how many people should be worried and how worried should they be, but we're always worried about new technology. You know, we know that Plato was worried about the written word. He's like, we shouldn't teach people to write because then they won't use their minds to remember things. There have been concerns over technology and its advancement since the beginning of recorded history. And so, you know, I think, however, these conversations are really important to have because again, we learn a lot about ourselves. If we're really scared of some kind of AI like coming into being that is conscious or whatever and can self replicate, we already do that every day. It's called humans being born. They're not artificial. They're humans, but they're intelligent and I don't want to live in a world where we're worried about babies being born because what if they become evil? Right. What if they become mean people? What if they're thieves? Maybe we should just like, what, not have babies born? Maybe we shouldn't create AI. It's like, you know, we will want to have safeguards in place in the same way that we know, look, a kid could be born that becomes some kind of evil person. But we have laws, right? And it's possible that with advanced genetics in general, be able to, you know, it's a scary thought to say that, you know, this, my child, if born would be, would have an 83% chance of being a psychopath, right? Like being able to, if it's something genetic, if there's some sort of, and what to use that information, what to do with that information is a difficult ethical. Yeah. I'd like to find an answer that isn't, well, let's not have them live. You know, I'd like to find an answer that is, well, all human life is worthy. And if you have an 83% chance of becoming a psychopath, well, you still deserve dignity and you still deserve to be treated well. You still have rights. At least at this part of the world, at least in America, there's a respect for individual life in that way. That's well, to me, but again, I'm in this bubble is a beautiful thing, but there's other cultures where individual human life is not that important, where a society, so I was born in Soviet Union, where the strength of nation and society together is more important than the, any one particular individual. So it's an interesting also notion, the stories we tell ourselves, I like the one where individuals matter, but it's unclear that that was what the future holds. Well, yeah. And I mean, let me even throw this out. Like what is artificial intelligence? How can it be artificial? I really think that we get pretty obsessed and stuck on the idea that there is some thing that is a wild human, a pure human organism without technology. But I don't think that's a real thing. I think that humans and human technology are one organism. Look at my glasses. Okay. If an alien came down and saw me, would they necessarily know that this is an invention, that I don't grow these organically from my body? They wouldn't know that right away. And the written word and spoons and cups, these are all pieces of technology. We are not alone as an organism. And so the technology we create, whether it be video games or artificial intelligence that can self replicate and hate us, it's actually all the same organism. When you're in a car, where do you end in the car begin? It seems like a really easy question to answer, but the more you think about it, the more you realize, wow, we are in this symbiotic relationship with our inventions. And there are plenty of people who are worried about it and there should be. But it's inevitable. And I think that even just us think of ourselves as individual intelligences may be silly notion because it's much better to think of the entirety of human civilization, all living organisms on earth as a single living organism, as a single intelligent creature, because you're right, everything's intertwined. Everything is deeply connected. So we mentioned Elon Musk, so you're a curious lover of science. What do you think of the efforts that Elon Musk is doing with space exploration, with electric vehicles, with autopilot, sort of getting into the space of autonomous vehicles, with boring under LA and Neuralink trying to communicate brain machine interfaces, communicate between machines and human brains? Well, it's really inspiring. I mean, look at the fandom that he's amassed. It's not common for someone like that to have such a following. And so it's- Engineering nerd. Yeah. So it's really exciting, but I also think that a lot of responsibility comes with that kind of power. So like if I met him, I would love to hear how he feels about the responsibility he has when there are people who are such a fan of your ideas and your dreams and share them so closely with you. You have a lot of power. And he didn't always have that. He wasn't born as Elon Musk. Well, he was, but well, he was named that later. But the point is that I want to know the psychology of becoming a figure like him. Well, I don't even know how to phrase the question right, but it's a question about what do you do when you're following, your fans become so large that it's almost bigger than you? And how do you responsibly manage that? And maybe it doesn't worry him at all, and that's fine too, but I'd be really curious. And I think there are a lot of people that go through this when they realize, whoa, there are a lot of eyes on me. There are a lot of people who really take what I say very earnestly and take it to heart and will defend me. And that can be dangerous and you have to be responsible with it. Both in terms of impact on society and psychologically for the individual, just the burden psychologically on Elon? Yeah, yeah. How does he think about that part of his persona? Well, let me throw that right back at you, because in some ways you're just a funny guy that's gotten a humongous following, a funny guy with a curiosity. You've got a huge following. How do you psychologically deal with the responsibility? In many ways, you have a reach in many ways bigger than Elon Musk. What is the burden that you feel in educating, being one of the biggest educators in the world where everybody's listening to you and actually everybody, most of the world that uses YouTube for educational material trusts you as a source of good, strong scientific thinking? It's a burden and I try to approach it with a lot of humility and sharing. I'm not out there doing a lot of scientific experiments. I am sharing the work of real scientists and I'm celebrating their work and the way that they think and the power of curiosity. But I want to make it clear at all times that, look, we don't know all the answers and I don't think we're ever going to reach a point where we're like, wow, and there you go. That's the universe. It's this equation, you plug in some conditions or whatever and you do the math and you know what's going to happen tomorrow. I don't think we're ever going to reach that point. But I think that there is a tendency to sometimes believe in science and become elitist and become, I don't know, hard, when in reality it should humble you and make you feel smaller. I think there's something very beautiful about feeling very, very small and very weak and to feel that you need other people. So I try to keep that in mind and say, look, thanks for watching. Vsauce is not, I'm not Vsauce, you are. When I start the episodes, I say, hey, Vsauce, Michael here. Vsauce and Michael are actually a different thing in my mind. I don't know if that's always clear, but yeah, I have to approach it that way because it's not about me. Yeah, so it's not even, you're not feeling responsibility. You're just sort of plugging into this big thing that is scientific exploration of our reality and you're a voice that represents a bunch, but you're just plugging into this big Vsauce ball that others, millions of others are plugged into. Yeah. So I try to encourage curiosity and responsible thinking and an embracement of doubt and being okay with that. So next week, talking to Christos Goudreau, I'm not sure if you're familiar who he is, but he's the VP of engineering, head of the quote unquote YouTube algorithm or the search and discovery. So let me ask first high level, do you have a question for him that if you can get an honest answer that you would ask, but more generally, how do you think about the YouTube algorithm that drives some of the motivation behind, no, some of the design decisions you make as you ask and answer some of the questions you do, how would you improve this algorithm in your mind in general? So just what would you ask him? And outside of that, how would you like to see the algorithm improve? Well, I think of the algorithm as a mirror. It reflects what people put in and we don't always like what we see in that mirror. From the individual mirror to the individual mirror to the society. Both. In the aggregate, it's reflecting back what people on average want to watch. And when you see things being recommended to you, it's reflecting back what it thinks you want to see. And specifically, I would guess that it's not just what you want to see, but what you will click on and what you will watch some of and stay on YouTube because of. I don't think that this is all me guessing, but I don't think that YouTube cares if you only watch like a second of a video as long as the next thing you do is open another video. If you close the app or close the site, that's a problem for them because they're not a subscription platform. They're not like, look, you're giving us 20 bucks a month no matter what. So who cares? They need you to watch and spend time there and see ads. So one of the things I'm curious about, whether they do consider longer term sort of develop you, your longer term development as a human being, which I think ultimately will make you feel better about using YouTube in the long term and allowing you to stick with it for longer. Because even if you feed the dopamine rush in the short term and you keep clicking on on cat videos, the eventually you sort of wake up like from a drug and say, I need to quit this. So I wonder how much you're trying to optimize for the long term. Because when I look at the, you know, your videos aren't exactly sort of no offense, but they're not the most clickable. They're both the most clickable and I feel I watched the entire thing and I feel a better human after I watched it. So like they're not just optimizing for the clickability. So my thought is, how do you think of it? And does it affect your own content? Like how deep you go, how profound you explore the directions and so on? I've been really lucky in that I don't worry too much about the algorithm. I mean, look at my thumbnails. I don't really go too wild with them. And with Minefield, where I'm in partnership with YouTube on the thumbnails, I'm often like let's pull this back. Let's be mysterious. Usually I'm just trying to do what everyone else is not doing. So if everyone's doing crazy Photoshop, what kind of thumbnails? I'm like, what if the thumbnails just align? Yeah. And what if the title is just a word? And I kind of feel like all of the Vsauce channels have cultivated an audience that expects that. And so they would rather Jake make a video that's just called stains than one called I explored stains. Shocking. Yeah. But there are other audiences out there that want that. And I think most people kind of want what you see the algorithm favoring, which is mainstream traditional celebrity and news kind of information. I mean, that's what makes YouTube really different than other streaming platforms. No one's like, what's going on in the world? I'll open up Netflix to find out. But you do open up Twitter to find that out. You open up Facebook. You can open up YouTube because you'll see that the trending videos are like what happened amongst the traditional mainstream people in different industries. That's what's being shown. And it's not necessarily YouTube saying we want that to be what you see. It's that that's what people click on. When they see Ariana Grande reads a love letter from like her high school sweetheart, they're like, I want to see that. And when they see a video from me that's got some lines in math and it's called law and causes, they're like, well, I mean, I'm just on the bus. Like I don't have time to dive into a whole lesson. So, you know, before you get super mad at YouTube, you should say, really, they're just reflecting back human behavior. Is there something you would improve about the algorithm? Knowing of course that as far as we're concerned, it's a black box, so we don't know how it works. Right. And I don't think that even anyone at YouTube really knows what it's doing. They know what they've tweaked, but then it learns. I think that it learns and it decides how to behave. And sometimes they're the YouTube employees are left going, I don't know, maybe we should like change the value of how much it worries about watch time and maybe it should worry more about something. I don't know. But I mean, I would like to see, I don't know what they're doing and not doing. Well, is there a conversation that you think they should be having just internally, whether they're having it or not? Is there something, should they be thinking about the long-term future? Should they be thinking about educational content and whether that's educating about what just happened in the world today, news or educational content, like what you're providing, which is asking big sort of timeless questions about how the way the world works. Well, it's interesting. What should they think about? Because it's called YouTube, not our tube. And that's why I think they have so many phenomenal educational creators. You don't have shows like Three Blue One Brown or Physics Girl or Looking Glass Universe or Up and Atom or Brain Scoop or I mean, I could go on and on. They aren't on Amazon Prime and Netflix and they don't have commissioned shows from those platforms. It's all organically happening because there are people out there that want to share their passion for learning, that want to share their curiosity. And YouTube could promote those kinds of shows more. But like, first of all, they probably wouldn't get as many clicks and YouTube needs to make sure that the average user is always clicking and staying on the site. They could still promote it more for the good of society. But then we're making some really weird claims about what's good for society because I think that cat videos are also an incredibly important part of what it means to be a human. I mentioned this quote before from Unumuno about, look, I've seen a cat like estimate distances and calculate a jump, you know, more often than I've seen a cat cry. And so things that play with our emotions and make us feel things can be cheesy and can feel cheap. But like, man, that's very human. And so even the dumbest vlog is still so important that I don't think I have a better claim to take its spot than it has to have that spot. It puts a mirror to us, the beautiful parts, the ugly parts, the shallow parts, the deep parts. You're right. But what I would like to see is, you know, I miss the days when engaging with content on YouTube helped push it into my subscribers timelines. It used to be that when I liked a video, say from Veritasium, it would show up in the feed on the front page of the app or the website of my subscribers. And I knew that if I liked a video, I could send it 100,000 views or more. That no longer is true. But I think that was a good user experience. When I subscribe to someone, when I'm following them, I want to see more of what they like. I want them to also curate the feed for me. And I think that Twitter and Facebook are doing that in also some ways that are kind of annoying. But I would like that to happen more. And I think we would see communities being stronger on YouTube if it was that way. Instead of YouTube going, well, technically, Michael liked this Veritasium video, but people are way more likely to click on Carpool Karaoke. So I don't even care who they are. Just give them that. Not say anything against Carpool Karaoke. That is a extremely important part of our society, what it means to be a human on earth. But I'll say it sucks. But a lot of people would disagree with you, and they should be able to see as much of that as they want. And I think even people who don't think they like it should still be really aware of it because it's such an important thing and such an influential thing. But yeah, I just wish that like new channels I discover and that I subscribe to, I wish that my subscribers found out about that. Because especially in the education community, a rising tide floats all boats. If you watch a video from Numberphile, you're just more likely to want to watch an episode from me, whether it be on Vsauce1 or Ding. It's not competitive in the way that traditional TV was, where it's like, well, if you tune into that show, it means you're not watching mine because they both air at the same time. So helping each other out through collaborations takes a lot of work. But just through engaging, commenting on their videos, liking their videos, subscribing to them, whatever, that I would love to see become easier and more powerful. So a quick and impossibly deep question, last question, about mortality. You've spoken about death as an interesting topic. Do you think about your own mortality? Yeah, every day. It's really scary. So what do you think is the meaning of life that mortality makes very explicit? So why are you here on earth, Michael? What's the point of this whole thing? What does mortality in the context of the whole universe make you realize about yourself? Just you, Michael Stevens. Well, it makes me realize that I am destined to become a notion. I'm destined to become a memory. And we can extend life. I think there's really exciting things being done to extend life, but we still don't know how to protect you from some accident that could happen, some unforeseen thing. Maybe we could save my connectome and recreate my consciousness digitally. But even that could be lost if it's stored on a physical medium or something. So basically, I just think that embracing and realizing how cool it is that someday I will just be an idea. And there won't be a Michael anymore that can be like, no, that's not what I meant. It'll just be what people – they have to guess what I meant. They'll remember me and how I live on as that memory will maybe not even be who I wanted to be. But there's something powerful about that and there's something powerful about letting future people run the show themselves. I think I'm glad to get out of their way at some point and say, all right, it's your world now. And you, the physical entity, Michael, have ripple effects in the space of ideas that far outlives you in ways that you can't control, but it's nevertheless fascinating to think. I mean, especially with you, you can imagine an alien species when they finally arrive and destroy all of us would watch your videos to try to figure out what were the questions that these people – But even if they didn't, I still think that there will be ripples. When I say memory, I don't specifically mean people remember my name and my birth date and there's a photo of me on Wikipedia. All that can be lost, but I still would hope that people ask questions and teach concepts in some of the ways that I have found useful and satisfying. Even if they don't know that I was the one who tried to popularize it, that's fine. But if Earth was completely destroyed, like burnt to a crisp, everything on it today, what would – the universe wouldn't care. Jupiter is not going to go, oh, no. And that could happen. So we do, however, have the power to launch things into space to try to extend how long our memory exists. And what I mean by that is we are recording things about the world and we're learning things and writing stories and all of this and preserving that is truly what I think is the essence of being a human. We are autobiographers of the universe and we're really good at it. We're better than fossils. We're better than light spectrum. We're better than any of that. We collect much more detailed memories of what's happening, much better data. And so that should be our legacy. And I hope that that's kind of mine too in terms of people remembering something or me having some kind of effect. But even if I don't, you can't not have an effect. That's the thing. This is not me feeling like I hope that I have this powerful legacy. It's like no matter who you are, you will. But you also have to embrace the fact that that impact might look really small and that's okay. One of my favorite quotes is from Tess of the D'Urbervilles and it's along the lines of the measure of your life depends on not your external displacement but your subjective experience. If I am happy and those that I love are happy, can that be enough? Because if so, excellent. I think there's no better place to end it, Michael. Thank you so much. It was an honor to meet you. Thanks for talking to me. Thank you. It was a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Michael Stevens and thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App. Download it. Use code LEXPODCAST. You'll get $10 and $10 will go to FIRST, a STEM education nonprofit that inspires hundreds of thousands of young minds to learn, to dream of engineering our future. If you enjoyed this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter. And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Albert Einstein. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.


Noam Chomsky: Language, Cognition, and Deep Learning | Lex Fridman Podcast #53

The following is a conversation with Noam Chomsky. He's truly one of the great minds of our time and is one of the most cited scholars in the history of our civilization. He has spent over 60 years at MIT and recently also joined the University of Arizona, where we met for this conversation. But it was at MIT about four and a half years ago when I first met Noam. My first few days there, I remember getting into an elevator at Stata Center, pressing the button for whatever floor, looking up and realizing it was just me and Noam Chomsky riding the elevator. Just me and one of the seminal figures of linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, and political thought in the past century, if not ever. I tell that silly story because I think life is made up of funny little defining moments that you never forget for reasons that may be too poetic to try and explain. That was one of mine. Noam has been an inspiration to me and millions of others. It was truly an honor for me to sit down with him in Arizona. I traveled there just for this conversation. And in a rare heartbreaking moment, after everything was set up and tested, the camera was moved and accidentally the recording button was pressed, stopping the recording. So I have good audio of both of us, but no video of Noam. Just the video of me and my sleep deprived but excited face that I get to keep as a reminder of my failures. Most people just listen to this audio version for the podcast, as opposed to watching it on YouTube. But still, it's heartbreaking for me. I hope you understand and still enjoy this conversation as much as I did. The depth of intellect that Noam showed and his willingness to truly listen to me, a silly looking Russian in a suit. It was humbling and something I'm deeply grateful for. As some of you know, this podcast is a side project for me where my main journey and dream is to build AI systems that do some good for the world. This latter effort takes up most of my time, but for the moment has been mostly private. But the former, the podcast, is something I put my heart and soul into. And I hope you feel that even when I screw things up. I recently started doing ads at the end of the introduction. I'll do one or two minutes after introducing the episode and never any ads in the middle that break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you. It doesn't hurt the listening experience. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. This show is presented by Cash App. The number one finance app in the App Store. I personally use Cash App to send money to friends, but you can also use it to buy, sell, and deposit Bitcoin in just seconds. Cash App also has a new investing feature. You can buy fractions of a stock, say $1 worth, no matter what the stock price is. Brokerage services are provided by Cash App Investing, a subsidiary of Square, a member of SIPC. I'm excited to be working with Cash App to support one of my favorite organizations called the Digital Capital Fund. It's called The First, best known for their FIRST Robotics and LEGO competitions. They educate and inspire hundreds of thousands of students in over 110 countries, and have a perfect rating on Charity Navigator, which means the donated money is used to maximum effectiveness. When you get Cash App from the App Store, Google Play, and use code LEXPODCAST, you'll get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, which again is an organization that I've personally seen inspire girls and boys to dream of engineering a better world. And now, here's my conversation with Noam Chomsky. I apologize for the absurd philosophical question, but if an alien species were to visit Earth, do you think we would be able to find a common language or protocol of communication with them? There are arguments to the effect that we could, in fact, one of them was Marvin Minsky's. Back about 20 or 30 years ago, he performed a brief experiment with a student of his, Dan Bobrow. They essentially ran the simplest possible Turing machines, just free to see what would happen. And most of them crashed, either got into an infinite loop or stopped. The few that persisted essentially gave something like arithmetic. And his conclusion from that was that if some alien species developed higher intelligence, they would at least have arithmetic. They would at least have what the simplest computer would do. And in fact, he didn't know that at the time, but the core principles of natural language are based on operations which yield something like arithmetic in the limiting case and the minimal case. So it's conceivable that a mode of communication could be established based on the core properties of human language and the core properties of arithmetic, which maybe are universally shared. So it's conceivable. What is the structure of that language, of language as an internal system inside our mind versus an external system as it's expressed? It's not an alternative. It's two different concepts of language. Different. It's a simple fact that there's something about you, a trait of yours, part of the organism, you, that determines that you're talking English and not Tagalog, let's say. So there is an inner system. It determines the sound and meaning of the infinite number of expressions of your language. It's localized. It's not on your foot, obviously. It's in your brain. If you look more closely, it's in specific configurations of your brain. And that's essentially like the internal structure of your laptop, whatever programs it has are in there. Now, one of the things you can do with language, it's a marginal thing, in fact, is use it to externalize what's in your head. Actually, most of your use of language is thought, internal thought. But you can do what you and I are now doing. We can externalize it. Well, the set of things that we're externalizing are an external system. They're noises in the atmosphere. And you can call that language in some other sense of the word. But it's not a set of alternatives. These are just different concepts. So how deep do the roots of language go in our brain? Our mind? Is it yet another feature like vision, or is it something more fundamental from which everything else springs in the human mind? Well, in a way, it's like vision. There's something about our genetic endowment that determines that we have a mammalian rather than an insect visual system. And there's something in our genetic endowment that determines that we have a human language faculty. No other organism has anything remotely similar. So in that sense, it's internal. Now, there is a long tradition, which I think is valid, going back centuries to the early scientific revolution, at least, that holds that language is the core of human cognitive nature. It's the source. It's the mode for constructing thoughts and expressing them. That is what forms thought. And it's got fundamental creative capacities. It's free, independent, unbounded, and so on. And undoubtedly, I think the basis for our creative capacities and the other remarkable human capacities that lead to the unique achievements and not-so-great achievements of the species. The capacity to think and reason, do you think that's deeply linked with language? Do you think the way we, the internal language system is essentially the mechanism by which we also reason internally? It is undoubtedly the mechanism by which we reason. There may also be other, there are undoubtedly other faculties involved in reasoning. We have a kind of scientific faculty. Nobody knows what it is. But whatever it is that enables us to pursue certain lines of endeavor and inquiry and to decide what makes sense and doesn't make sense and to achieve a certain degree of understanding of the world, that uses language but goes beyond it. Just as using our capacity for arithmetic is not the same as having the capacity. The idea of capacity, our biology, evolution, you've talked about it defining, essentially, our capacity, our limit, and our scope. Can you try to define what limit and scope are? And the bigger question, do you think it's possible to find the limit of human cognition? Well, that's an interesting question. It's commonly believed, most scientists believe, that human intelligence can answer any question, in principle. I think that's a very strange belief. If we're biological organisms, which are not angels, then our capacities ought to have scope and limits, which are interrelated. Can you define those two terms? Well, let's take a concrete example. Your genetic endowment determines that you can have a male and visual system, arms and legs and so on, but it, and therefore, become a rich, complex organism. But if you look at that same genetic endowment, it prevents you from developing in other directions. There's no kind of experience which would yield the embryo to develop an insect visual system, or to develop wings instead of arms. So the very endowment that confers richness and complexity also sets bounds on what can be attained. Now, I assume that our cognitive capacities are part of the organic world, therefore they should have the same properties. If they had no built-in capacity to develop a rich and complex structure, we would have, understand nothing. Just as if your genetic endowment did not compel you to develop arms and legs, you would just be some kind of a random amoeboid creature with no structure at all. So I think it's plausible to assume that there are limits, and I think we even have some evidence as to what they are. So for example, there's a classic moment in the history of science. At the time of Newton, there was a, from Galileo to Newton, modern science, developed on a fundamental assumption, which Newton also accepted, namely that the world, the entire universe, is a mechanical object. And by mechanical, they meant something like the kinds of artifacts that were being developed by skilled artisans all over Europe, the gears, the levers, and so on. And their belief was, well, the world is just a more complex variant of this. Newton, to his astonishment and distress, proved that there are no machines, that there's interaction without contact. His contemporaries like Leibniz and Huygens just dismissed this as returning to the mysticism of the neo-scholastics. And Newton agreed. He said it is totally absurd. No person of any scientific intelligence could ever accept this for a moment. In fact, he spent the rest of his life trying to get around it somehow, as did many other scientists. That was the very criterion of intelligibility for, say, Galileo or Newton. Theory did not produce an intelligible world unless you could duplicate it in a machine. He showed you can't. There are no machines, any. Finally, after a long struggle, took a long time, scientists just accepted this as common sense. But that's a significant moment. That means they abandoned the search for an intelligible world. And the great philosophers of the time understood that very well. So, for example, David Hume, in his encomium to Newton, wrote that, who was the greatest thinker ever, and so on, he said that he unveiled many of the secrets of nature, but by showing the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy, mechanical science, he left us with, he showed that there are mysteries which ever will remain. And science just changed its goals. It abandoned the mysteries. It can't solve it. We'll put it aside. We only look for intelligible theories. Newton's theories were intelligible. It's just what they described wasn't. Well, Locke said the same thing. I think they're basically right. And if so, that showed something about the limits of human cognition. We cannot attain the goal of understanding the world, of finding an intelligible world. This mechanical philosophy, Galileo to Newton, there's a good case that can be made that that's our instinctive conception of how things work. So, if say infants are tested with things, if this moves, then this moves, they kind of invent something that must be invisible that's in between them that's making them move. Yeah, we like physical contact. Something about our brain seeks. Makes us want a world like that, just like it wants a world that has regular geometric figures. So, for example, Descartes pointed this out that if you have an infant who's never seen a triangle before, and you draw a triangle, the infant will see a distorted triangle, not whatever crazy figure it actually is. Three lines not coming quite together, or one of them a little bit curved, and so on. We just impose a conception of the world in terms of a perfect geometric object. It's now been shown that it goes way beyond that. That if you show on a tachistoscope, let's say a couple of lights shining, you do it three or four times in a row, what people actually see is a rigid object in motion, not whatever's there. We all know that from a television set, basically. So that gives us hints of potential limits to our cognition. I think it does, but it's a very contested view. If you do a poll among scientists, it's impossible we can understand anything. Let me ask, and give me a chance with this. So I just spent a day at a company called Neuralink, and what they do is try to design what's called the brain computer interface. So they try to do thousands readings in the brain, be able to read what the neurons are firing, and then stimulate back, so two-way. Do you think their dream is to expand the capacity of the brain to attain information, sort of increase the bandwidth at which we can search Google kind of thing? Do you think our cognitive capacity might be expanded, our linguistic capacity, our ability to reason might be expanded by adding a machine into the picture? It can be expanded in a certain sense, but a sense that was known thousands of years ago. A book expands your cognitive capacity. Okay, so this could expand it, too. But it's not a fundamental expansion. It's not totally new things could be understood. Well, nothing that goes beyond their native cognitive capacities. Just like you can't turn the visual system into an insect system. Well, I mean, the thought is perhaps you can't directly, but you can map. You could, but we know that without this experiment. You could map what a bee sees and present it in a form so that we could follow it. In fact, every bee scientist does that. But you don't think there's something greater than bees that we can map and then all of a sudden discover something, be able to understand a quantum world, quantum mechanics, be able to start to be able to make sense. Students at MIT study and understand quantum mechanics. But they always reduce it to the infant, the physical. I mean, they don't really understand. Oh, you don't, there's things, that may be another area where there's just a limit to understanding. We understand the theories, but the world that it describes doesn't make any sense. So, you know, the experiment, Schrodinger's cat, for example, can understand the theory, but as Schrodinger pointed out, it's an unintelligible world. One of the reasons why Einstein was always very skeptical about quantum theory. He described himself as a classical realist, in one's intelligibility. He has something in common with infants in that way. So, back to linguistics. If you could humor me, what are the most beautiful or fascinating aspects of language, or ideas in linguistics, or cognitive science that you've seen in a lifetime of studying language and studying the human mind? Well, I think the deepest property of language and puzzling property that's been discovered is what is sometimes called structure dependence. We now understand it pretty well, but it was puzzling for a long time. I'll give you a concrete example. So, suppose you say, the guy who fixed the car carefully packed his tools. That's ambiguous, he could fix the car carefully or carefully pack his tools. Suppose you put carefully in front. Carefully, the guy who fixed the car packed his tools. Then it's carefully packed, not carefully fixed. And in fact, you do that even if it makes no sense. So, suppose you say, carefully, the guy who fixed the car is tall. You have to interpret it as carefully he's tall. Even though that doesn't make any sense. And notice that that's a very puzzling fact because you're relating carefully not to the linearly closest verb, but to the linearly more remote verb. A linear closeness is an easy computation, but here you're doing a much more, what looks like a more complex computation. You're doing something that's taking you essentially to the more remote thing. It's now, if you look at the actual structure of the sentence, where the phrases are and so on, turns out you're picking out the structurally closest thing, but the linearly more remote thing. But notice that what's linear is 100% of what you hear. You never hear structure, can't. So, what you're doing is, and incidentally, this is universal, all constructions, all languages. And what we're compelled to do is carry out what looks like the more complex computation on material that we never hear. And we ignore 100% of what we hear and the simplest computation. By now there's even a neural basis for this that's somewhat understood. And there's good theories by now that explain why it's true. That's a deep insight into the surprising nature of language with many consequences. Let me ask you about a field of machine learning, deep learning. There's been a lot of progress in neural networks based, neural network based machine learning in the recent decade. Of course, neural network research goes back many decades. What do you think are the limits of deep learning, of neural network based machine learning? Well, to give a real answer to that, you'd have to understand the exact processes that are taking place. And those are pretty opaque. So it's pretty hard to prove a theorem about what can be done and what can't be done. But I think it's reasonably clear. I mean, putting technicalities aside, what deep learning is doing is taking huge numbers of examples and finding some patterns. Okay, that could be interesting. In some areas it is. But we have to ask here a certain question. Is it engineering or is it science? Engineering in the sense of just trying to build something that's useful. Or science in the sense that it's trying to understand something about elements of the world. So it takes a Google parser. We can ask that question. Is it useful? Yeah, it's pretty useful. You know, I use a Google translator. So on engineering grounds, it's kind of worth having, like a bulldozer. Does it tell you anything about human language? Zero. Nothing. And in fact, it's very striking. It's from the very beginning, it's just totally remote from science. So what is a Google parser doing? It's taking an enormous text, let's say the Wall Street Journal corpus, and asking how close can we come to getting the right description of every sentence in the corpus. Well, every sentence in the corpus is essentially an experiment. Each sentence that you produce is an experiment which is, am I a grammatical sentence? The answer is usually yes. So most of the stuff in the corpus is grammatical sentences. But now ask yourself, is there any science which takes random experiments which are carried out for no reason whatsoever and tries to find out something from them? Like if you're, say, a chemistry PhD student, you wanna get a thesis, can you say, well, I'm just gonna do a lot of, mix a lot of things together, no purpose, just, and maybe I'll find something. You'd be laughed out of the department. Science tries to find critical experiments, ones that answer some theoretical question. Doesn't care about coverage of millions of experiments. So it just begins by being very remote from science, and it continues like that. So the usual question that's asked about, say, a Google parser, is how well does it do, or some parser, how well does it do on a corpus? But there's another question that's never asked. How well does it do on something that violates all the rules of language? So for example, take the structure dependence case that I mentioned. Suppose there was a language in which you used linear proximity as the mode of interpretation. These deep learning would work very easily on that. In fact, much more easily than an actual language. Is that a success? No, that's a failure. From a scientific point of view, it's a failure. It shows that we're not discovering the nature of the system at all, because it does just as well, or even better, on things that violate the structure of the system. And it goes on from there. It's not an argument against doing it. It is useful to have devices like this. So yes, so neural networks are kind of approximators that look, there's echoes of the behavioral debates, right, behavioralism. More than echoes. Many of the people in deep learning say they've vindicated. Terry Sanyoski, for example, in his recent book says, this vindicates Skinnerian behaviors. It doesn't have anything to do with it. Yes, but I think there's something actually fundamentally different when the data set is huge. But your point is extremely well taken. But do you think we can learn, approximate that interesting complex structure of language with neural networks that will somehow help us understand the science? It's possible. I mean, you find patterns that you hadn't noticed, let's say, could be. In fact, it's very much like a kind of linguistics that's done, what's called corpus linguistics. When you, suppose you have some language where all the speakers have died out, but you have records. So you just look at the records and see what you can figure out from that. It's much better than, it's much better to have actual speakers where you can do critical experiments. But if they're all dead, you can't do them. So you have to try to see what you can find out from just looking at the data that's around. You can learn things. Actually, paleoanthropology is very much like that. You can't do a critical experiment on what happened two million years ago. So you're kind of forced just to take what data's around and see what you can figure out from it. Okay, it's a serious study. So let me venture into another whole body of work and philosophical question. You've said that evil in society arises from institutions, not inherently from our nature. Do you think most human beings are good, they have good intent? Or do most have the capacity for intentional evil that depends on their upbringing, depends on their environment, on context? I wouldn't say that they don't arise from our nature. Anything we do arises from our nature. And the fact that we have certain institutions, not others, is one mode in which human nature has expressed itself. But as far as we know, human nature could yield many different kinds of institutions. The particular ones that have developed have to do with historical contingency, who conquered whom, and that sort of thing. They're not rooted in our nature in the sense that they're essential to our nature. So it's commonly argued that these days that something like market systems is just part of our nature. But we know from a huge amount of evidence that that's not true. There's all kinds of other structures. It's a particular fact about a moment of modern history. Others have argued that the roots of classical liberalism actually argue that what's called sometimes an instinct for freedom, an instinct to be free of domination by illegitimate authority is the core of our nature. That would be the opposite of this. And we don't know. We just know that human nature can accommodate both kinds. If you look back at your life, is there a moment in your intellectual life or life in general that jumps from memory that brought you happiness, that you would love to relive again? Sure. Falling in love, having children. What about, so you have put forward into the world a lot of incredible ideas in linguistics, in cognitive science. In terms of ideas that just excites you when they first came to you, you would love to relive those moments. Well, I mean, when you make a discovery about something that's exciting, like say, even the observation of structure dependence and on from that, the explanation for it. But the major things just seem like common sense. So if you go back to take your question about external and internal language, you go back to say the 1950s, almost entirely language is regarded an external object, something outside the mind. It just seemed obvious that that can't be true. Like I said, there's something about you that determines you're talking English, not Swahili or something. But that's not really a discovery, that's just an observation which is transparent. You might say it's kind of like the 17th century, the beginnings of modern science, 17th century. They came from being willing to be puzzled about things that seemed obvious. So it seems obvious that a heavy ball of lead will fall faster than a light ball of lead. But Galileo was not impressed by the fact that it seemed obvious. So he wanted to know if it's true. He carried out experiments, actually thought experiments, never actually carried them out, which showed that it can't be true. And out of things like that, observations of that kind, why does a ball fall to the ground instead of rising, let's say? Seems obvious until you start thinking about it. Because why does steam rise? And I think the beginnings of modern linguistics, roughly in the 50s, are kind of like that, just being willing to be puzzled about phenomena that looked, from some point of view, obvious. And for example, a kind of doctrine, almost official doctrine of structural linguistics in the 50s was that languages can differ from one another in arbitrary ways, and each one has to be studied on its own without any presuppositions. In fact, there were similar views among biologists about the nature of organisms, that each one's, they're so different when you look at them that almost anything, you could be almost anything. Well, in both domains, it's been learned that that's very far from true. There are very narrow constraints on what could be an organism or what could be a language. But these are, that's just the nature of inquiry. Science in general, yeah, inquiry. So one of the peculiar things about us human beings is our mortality. Ernest Becker explored it in general. Do you ponder the value of mortality? Do you think about your own mortality? I used to when I was about 12 years old. I wondered, I didn't care much about my own mortality, but I was worried about the fact that if my consciousness disappeared, would the entire universe disappear? That was frightening. Did you ever find an answer to that question? No, nobody's ever found an answer, but I stopped being bothered by it. It's kind of like Woody Allen in one of his films, you may recall, he starts, he goes to a shrink when he's a child and the shrink asks him, what's your problem? He says, I just learned that the universe is expanding. I can't handle that. And then another absurd question is, what do you think is the meaning of our existence here, our life on Earth, our brief little moment in time? That's something we answer by our own activities. There's no general answer. We determine what the meaning of it is. The action determined the meaning. Meaning in the sense of significance, not meaning in the sense that chair means this, but the significance of your life is something you create. Noam, thank you so much for talking today. It was a huge honor. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Noam Chomsky and thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App. Download it, use code LEXPODCAST, you'll get $10 and $10 will go to FIRST, a STEM education non-profit that inspires hundreds of thousands of young minds to learn and to dream of engineering our future. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcast, support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.


20,000 Push-ups and Pull-ups in 30 Days Challenge (featuring David Goggins)

A few days ago, I tweeted, I will do as many pushups and pull-ups next 30 days as this tweet gets likes, retweets, and comments. No number is too high. Bring it. It got 20,000. So thank you, internet friends, for the love and the suffering. It was probably about four or more times the amount that I was mentally preparing myself for. In the name of health, I decided to spread that around across multiple bodyweight exercises, including pushups and pull-ups, but also squats, ab rollers, and running. One mile of running equals 42 pushups. Flex math. And all happy with myself, I wrote to David Goggins asking for his advice, thoughts on this challenge. If you don't know David Goggins, he, to me, is one of the toughest, most inspiring humans on the planet. Retired Navy SEAL, ultra marathon runner, former record holder for the most pull-ups in 24 hours, author of the book Can't Hurt Me that I highly recommend, especially the audio book. Anyway, I asked him a few questions about this challenge, and he was kind enough to respond. I'll interleave the clips into the video. So the first thing I did is I explained to him the challenge and the way I spread it around across multiple bodyweight exercises, and just asked him for his thoughts about what I'm doing. Well I think it's a pretty good damn workout. But this is the issue right there, man. I believe that you told people on, I think it was Twitter, I'm not quite for sure, I think it was Twitter, that you would do pushups and pull-ups for the number of week retweets that you had. Now I'm hearing running, I'm hearing squats, I'm hearing, I am hearing pushups, I'm hearing pushups and pull-ups, I'm hearing all kinds of different other exercises. And you also told people that, guess what, bring it. No number's too high. But now you're other exercises, so that must mean that there is a number too high. So be careful what you wish for, my friend. So that being said, I would have stuck with the damn pushups and pull-ups, and challenge yourself to the umpteenth degree of pain and suffering, and that would have really taught you a humongous lesson about yourself and everything else. But what you have here is also amazing. But it's nothing compared to what you had previously talked about. There you have it. When David Goggins calls you out on your bullshit, you gotta step up. So I'm going to do what I originally promised, which is the 20,000 pushups and pull-ups. And on top of that, I'll do my best to do also the other bodyweight exercises, really for the sake of health. So we're talking about squats, ab rollers, and running. The whole goal I wanted to do here is something that's healthy, but still pushes me to my limits physically and mentally, and allows me to build up a habit of doing some efficient exercises every day. You know, something that takes less than an hour, but keeps me in pretty sharp, hard shape. That's what I'm going to do here. Certainly, with 20,000 pushups and pull-ups, that's a whole other level. I don't know what's going to happen, but I will learn something about myself for sure. So I want to mention some of the reasons, some of the motivations of why I'm doing this challenge. So first is, I didn't think too much about it. I just dived right in. I was actually just laying in bed and tweeted it out. I think some of the craziest, most fun, some of the most ambitious things we can take on in life sometimes can be just on a whim. So I'm decided on a whim, but I'm going to take it to completion. Also I wanted to do an exercise program that I've done often in the past that takes very little effort. So like being busy is not an excuse. It can take 20, 30 minutes a day just to get a hard workout in. You can do it at home. There's no excuse not to do it. The other thing is that travel is not an excuse because it's body weight. You can basically do it anywhere. You probably heard me talk a lot about it before, but I'm a huge believer in habits because habits remove the need for day-to-day motivations that can go up and down. I have a lot of research, work-related habits that are part of my life, but I wanted to get exercise as part of a daily routine in my life. I think especially in these times of the coronavirus and all the madness that's going on in the world, being healthy, making sure you're strengthening your immune system with good diet, good sleep, good exercise is really important for everybody. Everybody's kind of locked up and it's easy to slack on the exercise. I wanted to motivate others perhaps to join me on getting their exercise back on, getting back out there, getting a little bit of movement every single day. And also I wanted to harden up that muscle of doing a thing you don't want to do for that long period of time and getting it done. So I actually asked David, what should I do when things get tough? This is a good fucking question, man, because it's going to get fucking difficult. Day after day after day. That's the thing about what you're doing right now that's challenging is a lot of motherfuckers can sign up for the fucking one day event. A lot of people do. A lot of these CEOs, a lot of these people who don't want to suffer as a living, who don't want to suffer as making it a habit. What they do is they go out and they recruit these people to put them through a two day, three day fucking challenge. Anybody can do that shit because your mind can process two or three fucking days of suck. What you're doing, my friend, is going to be damn near a month of suck. So basically you're going to have a lot of days, especially in the morning time. The mornings when you wake up and your body says, go fuck yourself because I don't fucking feel like doing this today. And you're going to look at, because you're running six miles a day, I believe, which you know what's going to happen to your fucking ass is you're going to wake up in the morning and you're going to fucking do what I do. People think, oh, David Goggins just wakes the fuck up and he just gets his shit on. He gets his fuck ass. No, I don't. I don't get up and get after it. I look at my shoes sometimes for hours. I pass them. I go, I get stuff to drink. I go to the bathroom. I watch TV. I'll start doing some work and I look at those fucking shoes because why my body's saying go fuck yourself. So you have to be able to win the morning. You have to be able to not allow that to get too deep in your brain. And when things get really tough for you, when you're out there on like day 17 and your knees are hurting and your back is hurting, your shoulders are hurting, your elbow tendonitis and all kinds of shit going on, you got to start remembering your resume. A lot of people don't remember what the fuck they've accomplished in life. And at that time of suffering, you have to be able to fucking go through and pull up that fucking who the fuck I am resume and say, oh, for you, I'm sure you studied your fucking ass off for hours and days and years to get where you're at. I guarantee you did shit harder than this. And that's basically what you have to go back to. But it's hard to do because in that moment of suffering, all you can fucking think about is getting the fuck out of it. So you got to take that one second to pull yourself out of that suffering, to have a clear fucking thought. It's hard to have clear thoughts in the midst of extreme pain and suffering. Find that clear thought. Remind yourself of what you've been through back in the past, back in the day to get to where you're at today. So that's what I do is a counselor reminder. And then through that process, I guarantee you your mind and body will say, oh, we got this. We've we've been here before. Maybe not in that kind of pain and suffering, but we've been here before in the demons of your own mind. So that's the best reminder in the world. All right. So what I'm going to attempt, I'm going to do is 20,000 push ups and pull ups combined. And on top of that, I'm also going to do squats, ab rollers and run six miles every day. So the routine is this. Run six miles and then do 34 rounds of the following 15 push ups, five pull ups, five ab rollers and 10 squats just over and over 34 times a day. I might split it up three times a day. I might do it twice a day. I might do it just one in a day. My plan is to do the hardest one early on in the day, try to get as much done as possible, most likely about 14 rounds and then do another 10 and 10 later on in the day. The goal is for each round like that to take about two minutes. So for 34 rounds, that's 68 minutes. So the start is tomorrow, Wednesday, June 10th, going on for 30 days after that. So let me quickly do a round to give you a sense of the form and then talk about it. So there you have it. That's one round. The hope for that is to take about a minute and the total is two minutes. You get a break of about a minute between each session. Obviously good form is important. There's always going to be a keyboard warrior out there. I'm looking at you with some sweatpants in their mom's basement with Cheetos all over the place, way out of shape. Who's going to comment about the fact that the pushups aren't all the way down or aren't all the way up and the same with the pull-ups, so on and so forth. None of that matters. Good form in this case for a pushup and a pull-up is something that minimizes the risk of injury. I think this whole thing is a tough workout to be honest. Yesterday and the day before I did over 400, which was I was trying to see, is this even possible? Can I do 680 total pushups and pull-ups in a day? It seems like an insane number to me. I did 400 and it was tough, but doable. I think if 400 is doable, then 680 is too. I think I can certainly with a little bit of suffering do it for a few days. If I can be fortunate enough to avoid injury, the rest of the month is just mental. That's where the battle is. That's where all the good lessons are to be learned. I also asked David, by the way, there's a laptop over here, that's why I'm looking over here. I also asked David about the fact that some people might join in on this challenge in whatever capacity they can and what he recommends for me and for others to stay injury-free while still pushing their body and their mind to the limit. This challenge, you're going to get injured. If you don't have a good base, like for instance, if you don't do a lot of pull-ups, a lot of push-ups, what you do for both is you're utilizing these elbows, which you get tendonitis severely bad, and your shoulders. With the push-up, you're here, this is your hinge part. Yeah, you are using your chest, using your triceps, but this hinge is being used an awful lot, this elbow hinge. These shoulders are being used an awful lot. Even the pull-up motion is being used an awful lot. Basically, what happens is you're going to get injured. For a lot of you, I would definitely suggest doing a lot more squats, do a lot more abs, doing things like that. Even abs, you can injure abs, but going from zero to hero, you will have some injuries. You got this isom, try to get your body to recover as fast as possible, taking in proteins, taking in aminos, things like that, getting as much rest as you can, but you're going to get overused training issues with your body. That just comes with the, it's just nature of the beast. Like I said, those of you who start to get injured, start making those squats your go-to because your legs can handle so much. When I was doing the pull-up record, people wondered why that was so hard for me. First of all, I had a jacked up body when I was doing it, a very, I guess, out of alignment body, but your only contact point is your hands. There's been times in 200 mile races where I tore my quad, completely tore my quad. I was able to bandage it up and walk it out. I was able to walk 75 miles. That's the thing. Your legs can handle a lot of abuse, a lot of abuse. So when you start hurting, go to your legs. So there you have it. Don't use any kind of injury as an excuse to stop moving, stop exercising, just find an alternative exercise that doesn't hurt. I'm going to really try to stick to the push-up and pull-up and do everything I can to remain injury free. For me, a part of avoiding injury is stretching really well, also doing good warmup. For me, I'm doing the six mile run before doing the body weight exercises. Also, obviously, nutrition is important. Everybody has their own journey. I've dieted my whole life all kinds of ways, did combat sports my whole life, so cutting weight and performing optimally was always important. For me, whatever you think about it, the main diet that I've come to enjoy is either keto or carnivore, so primarily a meat-based diet, meat and fat, very low carb. So mostly for me, that just means ground beef, sometimes steak, and keto-friendly, low carb snacks here and there. Nutrition-wise, it's pretty basic, but I do take some stuff. So I take sodium in my food. So I put quite a bit of salt in there, magnesium. Also take fish oil in pill form, not much, like two or three fish oil pills a day and an emaldi vitamin. That's it. It would be, of course, awesome if other folks, if you decided to join in on this challenge at whatever level you want, it would just be fun to do pushups and pull-ups together or any kind of difficult exercise activity that will challenge you. Do it every single day. If you haven't ramped up to it, you haven't done it much, what I would recommend is to start very low to where almost you're comfortable and then increase it day by day to when you quickly become uncomfortable. But give your body time to adjust. That's really important. Again, the point here is to do a difficult exercise, but really is to do it for 30 days. And what I'm doing, and I hope you do as well, it's not just for 30 days. It's for 30 days you do something difficult, but you form that habit and you stick to it for months to come. Especially in these times, exercise is just so important for staying healthy and staying sane. So I'd love it if you joined in on the challenge. I'll have a spreadsheet linked in the description where I'll keep track of the reps that I'm doing on a daily basis just so you can follow along. You can also just copy that spreadsheet and use it for yourself to track your own numbers, share it with me on any of the social platforms. I'd love to see your progress. I'll also maybe go live on one of the platforms, Instagram, YouTube, on our Discord server, Twitter. I don't know. I don't know if there's interest in that. I'll be honest. I tried Instagram live a couple of days ago to work out, and it was a little weird for me to work out while other people watched, so I'm not sure. But maybe if there's interest, let me know. Maybe I can take a few questions about the challenge. I'll probably record video throughout the month and just publish it at the end. So with that, I'd like to thank David Goggins. I follow him on Instagram, and he's a constant reminder that I need to push myself to my limit mentally. I asked him, of course, whether he'd want to be a guest on the podcast. Let's see what he had to say. No problem, man. I love what you do. I've seen some of your work. You're an extremely intelligent guy, so your intelligence, and I see that you're willing to go the next mile. So you're willing to be a guy that is just not... All right, so for instance, I was in the military. They said, you better be real smart, or you better fucking be real hard. So I was the real hard guy, and I had to develop the smarts. I see that you're a really smart guy, and you're developing the hard. So I think that we can really have a good podcast together. It'd be a really interesting conversation. So there you have it. It's on. I think I'm recording this video, but most of this journey is quiet. It's on my own. It's with myself. It's a quiet journey of suffering. So yes, it's a way to get exercise back into my life, but it's really a chance to rediscover myself by doing something really, really difficult for a prolonged period of time. No matter what, I'll be a different, and I think a better human being on the other end. If you join me on this in your own parallel journey, great. Either way, stay healthy and stay hard.