Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #218

The following is a conversation with Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, visual artist, philosopher, writer, futurist, musician, and the founder of the field of virtual reality. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. As a side note, you may know that Jaron is a staunch critic of social media platforms. Him and I agree on many aspects of this, except perhaps I am more optimistic about it being possible to build better platforms. And better artificial intelligence systems that put long-term interests and happiness of human beings first. Let me also say a general comment about these conversations. I try to make sure I prepare well, remove my ego from the picture, and focus on making the other person shine as we try to explore the most beautiful and insightful ideas in their mind. This can be challenging when the ideas that are close to my heart are being criticized. In those cases, I do offer a little pushback, but respectfully, and then move on, trying to have the other person come out looking wiser in the exchange. I think there's no such thing as winning in conversations, nor in life. My goal is to learn and to have fun. I ask that you don't see my approach to these conversations as weakness. It is not. It is my attempt at showing respect and love for the other person. That said, I also often just do a bad job of talking, but you probably already knew that. So please give me a pass on that as well. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Jaron Lanier. You're considered the founding father of virtual reality. Do you think we will one day spend most or all of our lives in virtual reality worlds? I have always found the very most valuable moment in virtual reality to be the moment when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed and you perceive physicality afresh, as if you were a newborn baby, but with a little more experience. So you can really notice just how incredibly strange and delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world is. So the magic is and perhaps forever will be in the physical world. Well, that's my take on it. That's just me. I mean, I think I don't get to tell everybody else how to think or how to experience virtual reality, and at this point, there have been multiple generations of younger people who've come along and liberated me from having to worry about these things. But I should say also, even in what, well, I called it mixed reality, back in the day, and these days, it's called augmented reality, but with something like a HoloLens, even then, like one of my favorite things is to augment a forest, not because I think the forest needs augmentation, but when you look at the augmentation next to a real tree, the real tree just pops out as being astounding. You know, it's interactive, it's changing slightly all the time if you pay attention, and it's hard to pay attention to that, but when you compare it to a tree, all of a sudden, you do. And even in practical applications, my favorite early application of virtual reality, which we prototyped going back to the 80s when I was working with Dr. Joe Rosen at Stanford Med, near where we are now, we made the first surgical simulator, and to go from the fake anatomy of the simulation, which is incredibly valuable for many things, for designing procedures, for training, for all kinds of things, then to go to the real person, boy, it's really something. Like, surgeons really get woken up by that transition. It's very cool. So I think the transition is actually more valuable than the simulation. That's fascinating. I never really thought about that. It's almost, it's like traveling elsewhere in the physical space can help you appreciate how much you value your home once you return. Well, that's how I take it. I mean, once again, people have different attitudes towards it, all are welcome. What do you think is the difference between the virtual world and the physical meat space world that you are still drawn, for you personally, still drawn to the physical world? Like, there clearly then is a distinction. Is there some fundamental distinction, or is it the peculiarities of the current set of technology? In terms of the kind of virtual reality that we have now, it's made of software, and software is terrible stuff. Software is always the slave of its own history, its own legacy. It's always infinitely arbitrarily messy and arbitrary. Working with it brings out a certain kind of nerdy personality in people, or at least in me, which I'm not that fond of. And there are all kinds of things about software I don't like, and so that's different from the physical world. It's not something we understand, as you just pointed out. On the other hand, I'm a little mystified when people ask me, well, do you think the universe is a computer? And I have to say, well, I mean, what on earth could you possibly mean if you say it isn't a computer? If it isn't a computer, it wouldn't follow principles consistently, and it wouldn't be intelligible, because what else is a computer ultimately? And we have physics, we have technology, so we can do technology, so we can program it. So I mean, of course it's some kind of computer, but I think trying to understand it as a Turing machine is probably a foolish approach. Right, that's the question, whether it performs, this computer we call the universe, performs the kind of computation that can be modeled as a universal Turing machine, or is it something much more fancy, so fancy, in fact, that it may be beyond our cognitive capabilities to understand. Turing machines are kind of, I'd call them teases in a way, because if you have an infinitely smart programmer with an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of memory, and an infinite clock speed, then they're universal. But that cannot exist, so they're not universal. And they actually are, in practice, a very particular sort of machine within the constraints, within the conservation principles of any reality that's worth being in probably. And so I think universality of a particular model is probably a deceptive way to think, even though at some sort of limit, of course, it's something like that's gotta be true at some sort of high enough limit, but it's just not accessible to us, so what's the point? Well, to me, the question of whether we're living inside a computer or a simulation is interesting in the following way. There's a technical question is here. How difficult is it to build a machine, not that simulates the universe, but that makes it sufficiently realistic that we wouldn't know the difference, or better yet, sufficiently realistic that we would kinda know the difference, but we would prefer to stay in the virtual world anyway. I wanna give you a few different answers. I wanna give you the one that I think has the most practical importance to human beings right now, which is that there's a kind of an assertion sort of built into the way the question's usually asked that I think is false, which is that suggestion that people have a fixed level of ability to perceive reality in a given way. And actually, people are always learning, evolving, forming themselves. We're fluid, too. We're also programmable, self-programmable, changing, adapting, and so my favorite way to get at this is to talk about the history of other media. So for instance, there was a peer-reviewed paper that showed that an early wire recorder playing back an opera singer behind a curtain was indistinguishable from a real opera singer. And so now, of course, to us, it would not only be distinguishable, but it would be very blatant because the recording would be horrible. But to the people at the time, without the experience of it, it seemed plausible. There was an early demonstration of extremely crude video teleconferencing between New York and DC in the early 20th century, in the 30s, I think so, that people viewed as being absolutely realistic and indistinguishable, which to us would be horrible. And there are many other examples. Another one, one of my favorite ones, is in the Civil War era, there were itinerant photographers who collected photographs of people who just looked kind of like a few archetypes. So you could buy a photo of somebody who looked kind of like your loved one to remind you of that person because actually photographing them was inconceivable and hiring a painter was too expensive and you didn't have any way for the painter to represent them remotely anyway. How would they even know what they looked like? So these are all great examples of how in the early days of different media, we perceived the media as being really great, but then we evolved through the experience of the media. This gets back to what I was saying. Maybe the greatest gift of photography is that we can see the flaws in a photograph and appreciate reality more. Maybe the greatest gift of audio recording is that we can distinguish that opera singer now from that recording of the opera singer on the horrible wire recorder. So we shouldn't limit ourselves by some assumption of stasis that's incorrect. So that's my first answer, which is I think the most important one. Now, of course, somebody might come back and say, oh, but technology can go so far. There must be some point at which it would surpass. That's a different question. I think that's also an interesting question, but I think the answer I just gave you is actually the more important answer to the more important question. That's profound, yeah. But can you, the second question, which you're now making me realize is way different. Is it possible to create worlds in which people would want to stay instead of the real world? Well. Like en masse, like large numbers of people. What I hope is, as I said before, I hope that the experience of virtual worlds helps people appreciate this physical world that we have and feel tender towards it and keep it from getting too fucked up. That's my hope. Do you see all technology in that way? So basically technology helps us appreciate the more sort of technology-free aspect of life. Well, media technology. You can stretch that. I mean, you can, let me say, I could definitely play McLuhan and turn this into a general theory. It's totally doable. The program you just described is totally doable. In fact, I will psychically predict that if you did the research, you could find 20 PhD theses that do that already. I don't know, but they might exist. But I don't know how much value there is in pushing a particular idea that far. Claiming that reality isn't a computer in some sense seems incoherent to me, because we can program it. We have technology. It seems to obey physical laws. What more do you want from it to be a computer? I mean, it's a computer of some kind. We don't know exactly what kind. We might not know how to think about it. We're working on it. Sorry to interrupt, but you're absolutely right. That's my fascination with the AI as well, is it helps, in the case of AI, I see it as a set of techniques that help us understand ourselves, understand us humans. In the same way, virtual reality, and you're putting it brilliantly, it's a way to help us understand reality. Sure. Appreciate and open our eyes more richly to reality. That's certainly how I see it. And I wish people who become incredibly fascinated, who go down the rabbit hole of the different fascinations with whether we're in a simulation or not, or there's a whole world of variations on that. I wish they'd step back and think about their own motivations and exactly what they mean. I think the danger with these things is, so if you say, is the universe some kind of computer broadly? It has to be, because it's not coherent to say that it isn't. On the other hand, to say that that means you know anything about what kind of computer, that's something very different. And the same thing is true for the brain. The same thing is true for anything where you might use computational metaphors. We have to have a bit of modesty about where we stand. And the problem I have with these framings of computation as these ultimate cosmic questions is that it has a way of getting people to pretend they know more than they do. Can you maybe, this is a therapy session, psychoanalyze me for a second. I really like the Elder Scrolls series. It's a role-playing game. Skyrim, for example. Why do I enjoy so deeply just walking around that world? And then there's people you could talk to, and you can just like, it's an escape, but my life is awesome. I'm truly happy. But I also am happy with the music that's playing in the mountains and carrying around a sword. And just that, I don't know what that is. It's very pleasant though to go there. And I miss it sometimes. I think it's wonderful to love artistic creations. It's wonderful to love contact with other people. It's wonderful to love play and ongoing, evolving meaning and patterns with other people. I think it's a good thing. I'm not like anti-tech, and I'm certainly not anti-digital tech. I'm anti, as everybody knows by now, I think the manipulative economy of social media is making everybody nuts and all that. So I'm anti that stuff. But the core of it, of course I worked for many, many years on trying to make that stuff happen because I think it can be beautiful. Like, why not? And by the way, there's a thing about humans, which is we're problematic. Any kind of social interaction with other people is gonna have its problems. People are political and tricky. And I love classical music, but when you actually go to a classical music thing and it turns out, oh, actually this is like a backroom power deal kind of place and a big status ritual as well. And that's kind of not as fun. That's part of the package. The thing is, it's always going to be, there's always gonna be a mix of things. I don't think the search for purity is gonna get you anywhere. So I'm not worried about that. I worry about the really bad cases where we're making ourselves crazy or cruel enough that we might not survive. And I think the social media criticism rises to that level. But I'm glad you enjoy it. I think it's great. And I like that you basically say that every experience is both beauty and darkness, as in with classical music. I also play classical piano, so I appreciate it very much. But it's interesting. I mean, every, and even the darkest, it's a man's search for meaning with Viktor Frankl in the concentration camps. Even there, there's opportunity to discover beauty. And so it's, that's the interesting thing about humans is the capacity to discover beautiful in the darkest of moments. But there's always the dark parts too. Well, I mean, it's, our situation is structurally difficult. We are- Yeah. Um. Structurally difficult. No, it is, it's true. We perceive socially, we depend on each other for our sense of place and perception of the world. I mean, we're dependent on each other. And yet, there's also a degree in which we're inevitably, we inevitably let each other down. We are set up to be competitive as well as supportive. I mean, it's just, our fundamental situation is complicated and challenging. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Okay, let's talk about one of the most challenging things. One of the things I unfortunately am very afraid of. Being human, allegedly. You wrote an essay on death and consciousness in which you write a note, certainly the fear of death has been one of the greatest driving forces in the history of thought and in the formation of the character of civilization. And yet it is under acknowledged. A great book on the subject, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker deserves a reconsideration. I'm Russian, so I have to ask you this. I'm Russian, so I have to ask you about this. What's the role of death in life? See, you would have enjoyed coming to our house because my wife is Russian and we also have, we have a piano of such spectacular qualities you wouldn't, you would have freaked out. But anyway, we'll let all that go. So the context in which, I remember that essay sort of, this was from maybe the 90s or something. And I used to publish in a journal called the Journal of Consciousness Studies because I was interested in these endless debates about consciousness and science, which certainly continue today. And I was interested in how the fear of death and the denial of death played into different philosophical approaches to consciousness. Because I think on the one hand, the sort of sentimental school of dualism, meaning the feeling that there's something apart from the physical brain, some kind of soul or something else, is obviously motivated in a sense by a hope that whatever that is will survive death and continue. And that's a very core aspect of a lot of the world religions, not all of them, not really, but most of them. The thing I noticed is that the opposite of those, which might be the sort of hardcore, no, the brain's a computer and that's it, in a sense, we're motivated in the same way with a remarkably similar chain of arguments, which is, no, the brain's a computer and I'm gonna figure it out in my lifetime and upload myself and I'll live forever. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. That's interesting. Yeah, that's like the implied thought, right? Yeah, and so it's kind of this, in a funny way, it's the same thing. It's peculiar to notice that these people who would appear to be opposites in character and cultural references and their ideas actually are remarkably similar. And to an incredible degree, the sort of hardcore computationalist idea about the brain has turned into medieval Christianity. Like there's the people who are afraid that if you have the wrong thought, you'll piss off the super AIs of the future who will come back and zap you and all that stuff. It's really turned into medieval Christianity all over again. So the Ernest Becker's idea that death, the fear of death is the warm at the core, which is like, that's the core motivator of everything we see humans have created. The question is if that fear of mortality is somehow core, is like a prerequisite. So what you just, you just moved across this vast cultural chasm that separates me from most of my colleagues in a way, and I can't answer what you just said on the level without this huge deconstruction. Should I do it? Yes, what's the chasm? Okay. Let us travel across this vast chasm. Okay, I don't believe in AI. I don't think there's any AI. There's just algorithms, we make them, we control them. Now, they're tools, they're not creatures. Now, this is something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and don't I know it. When I was young, my main mentor was Marvin Minsky, who's the principal author of the computer as creature rhetoric that we still use. He was the first person to have the idea at all, but he certainly populated AI culture with most of its tropes, I would say, because a lot of the stuff people will say, oh, did you hear this new idea about AI? And I'm like, yeah, I heard it in 1978, sure. Yeah, I remember that. So Marvin was really the person, and Marvin and I used to argue all the time about this stuff because I always rejected it. And of all of his, I wasn't formally his student, but I worked for him as a researcher, but of all of his students and student-like people of his young adoptees, I think I was the one who argued with him about this stuff in particular, and he loved it. Yeah, I would have loved to hear that conversation. It was fun. Did you ever converse to a place? Oh, no, no. So the very last time I saw him, he was quite frail. And I was in Boston, and I was going to the old house in Brookline, his amazing house, and one of our mutual friends said, hey, listen, Marvin's so frail. Don't do the argument with him. Don't argue about AI. And so I said, but Marvin loves that. And so I showed up, and he was frail, and he looked up, and he said, are you ready to argue? He's such an amazing person. So it's hard to summarize this, because it's decades of stuff. The first thing to say is that nobody can claim absolute knowledge about whether somebody or something else is conscious or not. This is all a matter of faith. And in fact, I think the whole idea of faith needs to be updated, so it's not about God, but it's just about stuff in the universe. We have faith in each other being conscious. And then I used to frame this as a thing called the circle of empathy in my old papers. And then it turned into a thing for the animal rights movement, too. I noticed Peter Singer using it. I don't know if it was coincident, but anyway, there's this idea that you draw a circle around yourself, and the stuff inside is more like you, might be conscious, might be deserving of your empathy, of your consideration, and the stuff outside the circle isn't and outside the circle might be a rock, or I don't know. And that circle is unknowingly based on faith. Well, it's not only. Your faith in what is and what isn't. The thing about the circle is it can't be pure faith. It's also a pragmatic decision, and this is where things get complicated. If you try to make it too big, you suffer from incompetence. If you say, I don't wanna kill a bacteria, I will not brush my teeth, I don't know, what do you do? There's a competence question where you do have to draw the line. People who make it too small become cruel. People are so clannish and political and so worried about themselves ending up on the bottom of society that they are always ready to gang up on some designated group, and so there's always these people who are being tried, we're always trying to shove somebody out of the circle. And so. So aren't you shoving AI outside the circle? Well, give me a second. All right. So there's a pragmatic consideration here, and so the biggest questions are probably fetuses and animals lately, but AI is getting there. Now, with AI, I think, and I've had this discussion so many times, people would say, but aren't you afraid if you exclude AI, you'd be cruel to some consciousness? And then I would say, well, if you include AI, you make yourself, you exclude yourself from being able to be a good engineer or designer, and so you're facing incompetence immediately. So I really think we need to subordinate algorithms and be much more skeptical of them. Your intuition, you speak about this brilliantly with social media, how things can go wrong. Isn't it possible to design systems that show compassion, not to manipulate you, but give you control and make your life better if you so choose to? Like grow together with systems in the way we grow with dogs and cats, with pets, with significant others, in that way, that grow to become better people. I don't understand why that's fundamentally not possible. You're saying oftentimes you get into trouble by thinking you know what's good for people. Well, look, there's this question of what frame we're speaking in. Do you know who Alan Watts was? So Alan Watts once said, morality is like gravity, that in some absolute cosmic sense, there can't be morality because at some point it all becomes relative, and who are we anyway? Like morality is relative to us tiny creatures. But here on Earth, we're with each other, this is our frame, and morality is a very real thing. Same thing with gravity. At some point, you get into interstellar space and you might not feel much of it, but here we are on Earth. And I think in the same sense, I think this identification with a frame that's quite remote cannot be separated from a feeling of wanting to feel sort of separate from and superior to other people or something like that. There's an impulse behind it that I really have to reject. And we're just not competent yet to talk about these kinds of absolutes. Okay, so I agree with you that a lot of technologies sort of lack this basic respect, understanding, and love for humanity. There's a separation there. The thing I'd like to push back against, it's not that you disagree, but I believe you can create technologies and you can create a new kind of technologist, engineer, that does build systems that respect humanity, not just respect, but admire humanity, that have empathy for common humans, have compassion. It's not impossible. No, no, no. I think, yeah, I mean, I think musical instruments are a great example of that. Musical instruments are technologies that help people connect in fantastic ways. And that's a great example. My invention or design during the pandemic period was this thing called Together Mode, where people see themselves seated sort of in a classroom or a theater instead of in squares. And it allows them to semi-consciously perform to each other as if they have proper eye contact, as if they're paying attention to each other non-verbally. And weirdly, that turns out to work. And so it promotes empathy so far as I can tell. I hope it is of some use to somebody. The AI idea isn't really new. I would say it was born with Adam Smith's invisible hand, with this idea that we build this algorithmic thing and it gets a bit beyond us, and then we think it must be smarter than us. And the thing about the invisible hand is absolutely everybody has some line they draw where they say, nah, nah, nah, we're gonna take control of this thing. They might have different lines, they might care about different things, but everybody ultimately became a Keynesian because it just didn't work. It really wasn't that smart. It was sometimes smart and sometimes it failed. And so if you really, people who really, really, really wanna believe in the invisible hand as infinitely smart screw up their economies terribly. You have to recognize the economy as a subservient tool. Everybody does when it's to their advantage. They might not when it's not to their advantage. That's kind of an interesting game that happens. But the thing is, it's just like that with our algorithms. You can have a sort of a Chicago economic philosophy about your computer and say, no, no, no, my thing's come alive. It's smarter than anything. I think that there is a deep loneliness within all of us. This is what we seek. We seek love from each other. I think AI can help us connect deeper. This is what you criticize social media for. I think there's much better ways of doing social media that doesn't lead to manipulation. That instead leads to deeper connection between humans, leads to you becoming a better human being. And what that requires is some agency on the part of AI to be almost like a therapist, I mean, a companion. It's not telling you what's right. It's not guiding you as if it's an all-knowing thing. It's just another companion that you can leave at any time. You have complete transparency and control over. There's a lot of mechanisms that you can have that are counter to how current social media operates that I think is subservient to humans, or no, deeply respects human beings and is empathetic to their experience and all those kinds of things. I think it's possible to create AI systems like that. And I think they, I mean, that's a technical discussion of whether they need to have something that looks like more like AI versus algorithms, something that has an identity, something that has a personality, all those kinds of things. AI systems, and you've spoken extensively how AI systems manipulate you within social networks. And that's the biggest problem. Isn't necessarily that there's advertisement that social networks present you with advertisements that then get you to buy stuff, that then get you to buy stuff. That's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is they then manipulate you. They alter your human nature to get you to buy stuff or to get you to do whatever the advertiser wants. Maybe you can correct me. Yeah, I don't see it quite that way, but we can work with that as an approximation. Sure, so my- I think the actual thing is even sort of more ridiculous and stupider than that, but that's okay. So my question is, let's not use the word AI, but how do we fix it? Oh, fixing social media. That diverts us into this whole other field in my view, which is economics, which I always thought was really boring, but we have no choice but to turn it to economists if we want to fix this problem, because it's all about incentives. But I've been around this thing since it started, and I've been in the meetings where the social media companies sell themselves to the people who put the most money into them, which are usually the big advertising holding companies and whatnot, and there's this idea that I think is kind of a fiction, and maybe it's even been recognized as that by everybody, that the algorithm will get really good at getting people to buy something, because I think people have looked at their returns and looked at what happens, and everybody recognizes it's not exactly right. It's more like a cognitive access blackmail payment at this point. Just to be connected, you're paying the money. It's not so much that the persuasion algorithms. So Stanford renamed its program, but it used to be called Engage Persuade. The Engage part works. The Persuade part is iffy, but the thing is that once people are engaged, in order for you to exist as a business, in order for you to be known at all, you have to put money into the- That's dark. It doesn't work, but they have to- But it's a giant cognitive access blackmail scheme at this point. Because the science behind the Persuade part, it's not entirely a failure, but it's not what... We play make-believe that it works more than it does. The damage doesn't come... Honestly, as I've said in my books, I'm not anti-advertising. I actually think advertising can be demeaning and annoying and banal and ridiculous and take up a lot of our time with stupid stuff. Like there's a lot of ways to criticize advertising that's accurate, and it can also lie and all kinds of things. However, if I look at the biggest picture, I think advertising, at least as it was understood before social media, helped bring people into modernity in a way that overall actually did benefit people overall. And you might say, am I contradicting myself because I was saying you shouldn't manipulate people? Yeah, I am probably here. I mean, I'm not pretending to have this perfect airtight worldview without some contradictions. I think there's a bit of a contradiction there. Well, looking at the long arc of history, advertisement has, in some parts, benefited society because it funded some efforts that perhaps- Yeah, I mean, I think there's a thing where sometimes I think it's actually been of some use. Now, where the damage comes is a different thing, though. Social media, algorithms on social media have to work on feedback loops where they present you with stimulus, they have to see if you respond to the stimulus. Now, the problem is that the measurement mechanism for telling if you respond in the engagement feedback loop is very, very crude. It's things like whether you click more or occasionally if you're staring at the screen more, if there's a forward-facing camera that's activated, but typically there isn't. So you have this incredibly crude back channel of information, and so it's crude enough that it only catches the more dramatic responses from you, and those are the fight-or-flight responses. Those are the things where you get scared or pissed off or aggressive or horny. These are these ancient, the sort of, what are sometimes called the lizard brain circuits or whatever, these fast-response, old, old, old evolutionary business circuits that we have that are helpful in survival once in a while, but are not us at our best. They're not who we wanna be, they're not how we relate to each other. They're this old business. So then just when you're engaged using those intrinsically, totally aside from whatever the topic is, you start to get incrementally, just a little bit, more paranoid, xenophobic, aggressive. You get a little stupid and you become a jerk. And it happens slowly. It's not like everybody's instantly transformed, but it does kinda happen progressively where people who get hooked kinda get drawn more and more into this pattern of being at their worst. Would you say that people are able to, when they get hooked in this way, look back at themselves from 30 days ago and say, I am less happy with who I am now, or I'm not happy with who I am now versus who I was 30 days ago. Are they able to self-reflect when you take yourself outside of the lizard brain? Sometimes. I wrote a book about people, suggesting people take a break from their social media to see what happens, and maybe even, actually, the title of the book was just arguments to delete your account. Yeah, 10 arguments. 10 arguments. Although I always said, I don't know that you should. I can give you the arguments, it's up to you. I'm always very clear about that. But I get, I don't have a social media account, obviously, and it's not that easy for people to reach me. They have to search out an old-fashioned email address on a super crappy, antiquated website. Like, it's actually a bit, I don't make it easy. And even with that, I get this huge flood of mail from people who say, oh, I quit my social media, I'm doing so much better, I can't believe how bad it was. But the thing is, what's, for me, a huge flood of mail would be an imperceptible trickle from the perspective of Facebook, right? And so, I think it's rare for somebody to look at themselves and say, oh boy, I sure screwed myself over. It's a really hard thing to ask of somebody. None of us find that easy, right? It's just hard. The reason I ask this is, is it possible to design social media systems that optimize for some longer-term metrics of you being happy with yourself, personal growth? Well, see, I don't think you should try to engineer personal growth or happiness. I think what you should do is design a system that's just respectful of the people and subordinates itself to the people and doesn't have perverse incentives, and then at least there's a chance of something decent happening. Like- You have to recommend stuff, right? So, you're saying, like, be respectful. What does that actually mean, engineering-wise? People, yeah, curation, people have to be responsible. Algorithms shouldn't be recommending. Algorithms don't understand enough to recommend. Algorithms are crap in this era. I mean, I'm sorry, they are. And I'm not saying this as somebody as a critic from the outside. I'm in the middle of it. I know what they can do, I know the math, I know what the corpora are. I know the best ones. Our office is funding GPT-3 and all these things that are at the edge of what's possible. And they do not have yet, I mean, it still is statistical emergent pseudo-semantics. It doesn't actually have deep representation emerging of anything. It's just not, like, I mean, that, I'm speaking the truth here and you know it. Well, let me push back on this. There's several truths here. So one, you're speaking to the way certain companies operate currently. I don't think it's outside the realm of what's technically feasible to do. There's just not incentive, like, companies are not, why fix this thing? I am aware that, for example, the YouTube search and discovery has been very helpful to me. And there's a huge number of, there's so many videos that it's nice to have a little bit of help. Have you done- But I'm still in control. Let me ask you something. Have you done the experiment of letting YouTube recommend videos to you, either starting from a absolutely anonymous, random place where it doesn't know who you are, or from knowing who you or somebody else is, and then going 15 or 20 hops? Have you ever done that and just let it go, top video recommend and then just go 20 hops? No, I have not. I've done that many times now. I have, because of how large YouTube is and how widely it's used, it's very hard to get to enough scale to get a statistically solid result on this. I've done it with high school kids, with dozens of kids doing it at a time. Every time I've done an experiment, the majority of times, after about 17 or 18 hops, you end up in really weird, paranoid, bizarre territory. Because ultimately, that is the stuff the algorithm rewards the most, because of the feedback crudeness I was just talking about. So, I'm not saying that the video never recommends something cool, I'm saying that its fundamental core is one that promotes a paranoid style, that promotes increasing irritability, that promotes xenophobia, promotes fear, anger, promotes selfishness, promotes separation between people. And I would, the thing is, it's very hard to do this work solidly. Many have repeated this experiment, and yet, it still is kind of anecdotal. I'd like to do a large citizen science thing sometime and do it, but then I think the problem with that is YouTube would detect it and then change it. Well, yes, I definitely, I love that kind of stuff in Twitter. So, Jack Dorsey has spoken about doing healthy conversations on Twitter, or optimizing for healthy conversations. What that requires within Twitter are most likely citizen experiments of what does healthy conversations actually look like, and how do you incentivize those healthy conversations? You're describing what often happens and what is currently happening. What I'd like to argue is it's possible to strive for healthy conversations, not in a dogmatic way of saying, I know what healthy conversations are, and I will tell you. I think one way to do this is to try to look around at social, maybe not things that are officially social media, but things where people are together online and see which ones have more healthy conversations, even if it's hard to be completely objective in that measurement, you can kind of, at least crudely, agree. You could do subjective annotation, like have a large crowd-sourced annotation. Yeah, one that I've been really interested in is GitHub, because it could change. I'm not saying it'll always be, but for the most part, GitHub has had a relatively quite low poison quotient, and I think there's a few things about GitHub that are interesting. One thing about it is that people have a stake in it. It's not just empty status games. There's actual code, or there's actual stuff being done, and I think as soon as you have a real-world stake in something, you have a motivation to not screw up that thing, and I think that that's often missing, that there's no incentive for the person to really preserve something if they get a little bit of attention from dumping on somebody's TikTok or something. They don't pay any price for it, but you have to kind of get decent with people when you have a shared stake, a little secret. So GitHub does a bit of that. GitHub is wonderful, yes, but I'm tempted to play the germ back at you, which is that GitHub is currently amazing, but the thing is, if you have a stake, then if it's a social media platform, they can use the fact that you have a stake to manipulate you because you wanna preserve the stake. So like, so like. Right, well, this is why, all right, this gets us into the economics. So there's this thing called data dignity that I've been studying for a long time. I wrote a book about, an earlier version of it, called Who Owns the Future? And the basic idea of it is that, once again, this is a 30-year conversation. It's a fascinating topic. Let me do the fastest version of this I can do. The fastest way I know how to do this is to compare two futures, all right? So future one is then the normative one, the one we're building right now, and future two is gonna be data dignity, okay? And I'm gonna use a particular population. I live on the Hill in Berkeley, and one of the features about the Hill is that as the climate changes, we might burn down, and I'll lose our houses or die or something. Like, it's dangerous, you know, and it didn't used to be. And so who keeps us alive? Well, the city does. The city does some things. The electric company, kind of, sort of, maybe, hopefully, better. Individual people who own property take care of their property. That's all nice, but there's this other middle layer, which is fascinating to me, which is that the groundskeepers who work up and down that Hill, many of whom are not legally here, many of whom don't speak English, cooperate with each other to make sure trees don't touch to transfer fire easily from lot to lot. They have this whole little web that's keeping us safe. I didn't know about this at first. I just started talking to them because they were out there during the pandemic, and so I'd try to just see who are these people? Who are these people who are keeping us alive? Now, I want to talk about the two different faiths for those people under Future One and Future Two. Future One, some weird, like, kindergarten paint job van with all these, like, cameras and weird things, drives up, observes what the gardeners and groundskeepers are doing. A few years later, some amazing robots that can shimmy up trees and all this show up, all those people are out of work, and there are these robots doing the thing, and the robots are good, and they can scale to more land, and they're actually good, but then there are all these people out of work, and these people have lost dignity, they don't know what they're gonna do, and then some people say, well, they go on basic income, whatever, they become wards of the state. My problem with that solution is every time in history that you've had some centralized thing that's doling out the benefits, that thing gets seized by people because it's too centralized and it gets seized. This happened to every communist experiment I can find. So I think that turns into a poor future that will be unstable. I don't think people will feel good in it. I think it'll be a political disaster with a sequence of people seizing this central source of the basic income. And you'll say, oh, no, an algorithm can do it. Then people will seize the algorithm. They'll seize control. Unless the algorithm is decentralized, and it's impossible to seize the control. Yeah, but- Very difficult. 60-something people own a quarter of all the Bitcoin. Like the things that we think are decentralized are not decentralized. So let's go to future two. Future two, the gardeners see that van with all the cameras and the kindergarten paint job, and they say, the groundskeepers, and they say, hey, the robots are coming. We're gonna form a data union. And amazingly, California has a little baby data union law emerging in the books. Yes. That's interesting. And so they say, we're gonna form a data union, and we're gonna, not only are we gonna sell our data to this place, but we're gonna make it better than it would have been if they were just grabbing it without our cooperation. And we're gonna improve it. We're gonna make the robots more effective. We're gonna make them better, and we're gonna be proud of it. We're gonna become a new class of experts that are respected. And then here's the interesting, there's two things that are different about that world from future one. One thing, of course, the people have more pride. They have more sense of ownership, of agency, but what the robots do changes. Instead of just like this functional, like we'll figure out how to keep the neighborhood from burning down, you have this whole creative community that wasn't there before thinking, well, how can we make these robots better so we can keep on earning money? There'll be waves of creative groundskeeping with spiral pumpkin patches and waves of cultural things. There'll be new ideas like, wow, I wonder if we could do something about climate change mitigation with how we do this. What about fresh water? Can we make the food healthier? What about, all of a sudden, there'll be this whole creative community on the case. And isn't it nicer to have a high-tech future with more creative classes than one with more dependent classes? Isn't that a better future? But future one and future two have the same robots and the same algorithms. There's no technological difference. There's only a human difference. And that's second future two, that's state of dignity. The economy that you're, I mean, the game theory here is on the humans, and then the technology is just the tools that enable the possibilities. I mean, I think you can believe in AI and be in future two. I just think it's a little harder. You have to do more contortions. It's possible. So in the case of social media, what does data dignity look like? Is it people getting paid for their data? Yeah, I think what should happen is in the future, there should be massive data unions for people putting content into the system. And those data unions should smooth out the results a little bit, so it's not winner-take-all. But at the same time, and people have to pay for it too. They have to pay for Facebook the way they pay for Netflix with an allowance for the poor. There has to be a way out too. But the thing is, people do pay for Netflix. It's a going concern. People pay for Xbox and PlayStation. There's enough people to pay for stuff they want. This could happen too. It's just that this precedent started that moved it in the wrong direction. And then what has to happen, the economy's a measuring device. If it's an honest measuring device, the outcomes for people form a normal distribution, a bell curve. And then so there should be a few people who do really well, a lot of people who do okay. And then we should have an expanding economy reflecting more and more creativity and expertise flowing through the network. And that expanding economy moves the result just a bit forward. So more people are getting money out of it than are putting money into it. So it gradually expands the economy and lifts all boats. And the society has to support the lower wing of the bell curve too, but not universal basic income. It has to be for the, because if it's an honest economy, there will be that lower wing and we have to support those people. There has to be a safety net. But see what I believe, I'm not gonna talk about AI, but I will say that I think there'll be more and more algorithms that are useful. And so I don't think everybody's gonna be supplying data to groundskeeping robots, nor do I think everybody's gonna make their living with TikTok videos. I think in both cases, there'll be a rather small contingent that do well enough at either of those things. But I think there might be many, many, many, many of those niches that start to evolve as there are more and more algorithms, more and more robots. And it's that large number that will create the economic potential for a very large part of society to become members of new creative classes. Do you think it's possible to create a social network that competes with Twitter and Facebook that's large and centralized in this way? Not centralized, sort of large, large. How do we get, all right, so I gotta tell you how to get from what I'm talking, how to get from where we are to anything kind of in the zone of what I'm talking about is challenging. I know some of the people who run, like I know Jack Dorsey, and I view Jack as somebody who's actually, I think he's really striving and searching and trying to find a way to make it better, but it's kind of like, it's very hard to do it while in flight, and he's under enormous business pressure too. So Jack Dorsey to me is a fascinating study because I think his mind is in a lot of good places. He's a good human being, but there's a big Titanic ship that's already moving in one direction. It's hard to know what to do with it. I think that's the story of Twitter. I think that's the story of Twitter. One of the things that I observe is that if you just wanna look at the human side, meaning like how are people being changed? How do they feel? What is the culture like? Almost all of the social media platforms that get big have an initial sort of honeymoon period where they're actually kind of sweet and cute. Like if you look at the early years of Twitter, it was really sweet and cute, but also look at Snap, TikTok. And then what happens is as they scale and the algorithms become more influential instead of just the early people, when it gets big enough that it's the algorithm running it, then you start to see the rise of the paranoid style, and then they start to get dark. And we've seen that shift in TikTok rather recently. But I feel like that scaling reveals the flaws within the incentives. I feel like I'm torturing you. I'm sorry. It's not torturing, no, because I have hope for the world with humans, and I have hope for a lot of things that humans create, including technology. And I just, I feel it is possible to create social media platforms that incentivize different things than the current. I think the current incentivization is around like the dumbest possible thing that was invented like 20 years ago, however long. And it just works, and so nobody's changing it. I just think that there could be a lot of innovation for more, see, you kind of push back this idea that we can't know what long-term growth or happiness is. If you give control to people to define what their long-term happiness and goals are, then that optimization can happen for each of those individual people. Well, I mean, imagine a future where probably a lot of people would love to make their living doing TikTok dance videos, but people recognize generally that's kind of hard to get into. Nonetheless, dance crews have an experience that's very similar to programmers working together on GitHub. So the future is like a cross between TikTok and GitHub, and they get together, and they have their, they have rights. They're negotiating, they're negotiating for returns. They join different artist societies in order to soften the blow of the randomness of who gets the network effect benefit, because nobody can know that. And I think an individual person might join 1,000 different data unions in the course of their lives, or maybe even 10,000. I don't know, but the point is that we'll have like these very hedged, distributed portfolios of different data unions we're part of, and some of them might just trickle in a little money for nonsense stuff where we're contributing to health studies or something. And, but I think people will find their way. They'll find their way to the right GitHub-like community in which they find their value in the context of supplying inputs and data and taste and correctives and all of this into the algorithms and the robots of the future. And that is a way to resist the lizard brain-based funding mechanisms. It's an alternate economic system that rewards productivity, creativity, value as perceived by others. It's a genuine market. It's not doled out from a center. There's not some communist person deciding who's valuable. It's actual market. And the money is made by supporting people and by supporting that instead of just grabbing people's attention in the cheapest possible way, which is definitely how you get the lizard brain. Yeah, okay. So we're finally at the agreement. But I just think that, so yeah, I'll tell you how I think to fix social media. There's a few things. So one, I think people should have complete control over their data and transparency of what that data is and how it's being used if they do hand over the control. Another thing they should be able to delete, walk away with their data at any moment, easy, like with a single click of a button, maybe two buttons. I don't know. Just easily walk away with their data. The other is control of the algorithm, individualized control of the algorithm for them. So each one has their own algorithm. Each person has their own algorithm. They get to be the decider of what they see in this world. And to me, that's, I guess, fundamentally decentralized in terms of the key decisions being made. But if that's made transparent, I feel like people will choose that system over Twitter of today, over Facebook of today, when they have the ability to walk away, to control their data and to control the kinds of things they see. Now, let's walk away from the term AI. You're right. In this case, you have full control of the algorithms that help you if you want to use their help, but you can also say F you to those algorithms and just consume the raw, beautiful waterfall of the internet. I think that, to me, that's not only fixes social media, but I think it would make a lot more money. So I would like to challenge the idea. I know you're not presenting that, but that the only way to make a ton of money is to operate like Facebook is. I think you can make more money by giving people control. Yeah, I mean, I certainly believe that. We're definitely in the territory of wholehearted agreement here. I do want to caution against one thing, which is making a future that benefits programmers versus people, like this idea that people are in control of their data. So years ago, I co-founded an advisory board for the EU with a guy named Giovanni Bottarelli who passed away, it's one of the reasons I wanted to mention it. A remarkable guy who'd been, he was originally a prosecutor who was throwing mafioso in jail in Sicily. So he was like this intense guy who was like, I've dealt with death threats, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't scare me, whatever. So we worked on this path of saying, let's make it all about transparency and consent. And it was one of the theaters that led to this huge data privacy and protection framework in Europe called the GDPR. And so therefore, we've been able to have empirical feedback on how that goes. And the problem is that most people actually get stymied by the complexity of that kind of management. They have trouble, and reasonably so. I don't, I'm like a techie, I can go in and I can figure out what's going on. But most people really do. And so there's the problem that it differentially benefits those who kind of have a technical mindset and can go in and sort of have a feeling for how this stuff works. I kind of still want to come back to incentives. And so if the incentive for whoever's, if the commercial incentive is to help the creative people of the future make more money because you get a cut of it, that's how you grow an economy. Not the programmers. Well, some of them will be programmers. It's not anti-programmer. I'm just saying that it's not only programmers. So yeah, you have to make sure the incentives are right. I mean, I like control is an interface problem to where you have to create something that's compelling to everybody, to the creatives, to the public. I mean, there's, I don't know, Creative Commons, like the licensing, there's a bunch of legal speak just in general, the whole legal profession. It's nice when it can be simplified in the way that you can truly simply understand. Everybody can simply understand the basics. In that same way, it should be very simple to understand how the data is being used and what data is being used for people. But then you're arguing that in order for that to happen, you have to have the incentives like the program. I mean, a lot of the reason that money works is actually information hiding and information loss. Like one of the things about money is a particular dollar you get might have passed through your enemy's hands and you don't know it. But also, I mean, this is what Adam Smith, if you wanna give the most charitable interpretation possible to the invisible hand, is what he was saying, is that like there's this whole complicated thing and not only do you not need to know about it, the truth is you'd never be able to follow it if you tried. And it's like, let the economic incentives solve for this whole thing. And that in a sense, every transaction is like a neuron in a neural net. If he'd had that metaphor, he would have used it and let the whole thing settle to a solution and don't worry about it. I think this idea of having incentives that reduce complexity for people can be made to work. And that's an example of an algorithm that could be manipulative or not, going back to your question before about can you do it in a way that's not manipulative. And I would say a GitHub-like, if you just have this vision, GitHub plus TikTok combined, is it possible? I think it is. I really think it is. I'm not gonna be able to unsee that idea of creatives on TikTok collaborating in the same way that people on GitHub collaborate. I like that kind of version. Why not? I like it, I love it. I just, like right now when people use, by the way, father of teenage daughter, so. It's all about TikTok, right? So, you know, when people use TikTok, there's a lot of, it's kind of funny, I was gonna say cattiness, but I was just using the cat as this exemplar of what we're talking about. I contradict myself, but anyway, there's all this cattiness where people are like, ee, this person, and I just, what about people getting together and kind of saying, okay, we're gonna work on this move, we're gonna get a better, can we get a better musician? And they do that, but that's the part that's kind of off the books right now. You know, that should be like right there. That should be the center. That's where the, that's the really best part. Well, that's where the invention of Git, period, the versioning is brilliant. And so some of the things you're talking about, technology, algorithms, tools can empower. And that's the thing for humans to connect, to collaborate, and so on. Can we upset more people a little bit? You already. Maybe, we'd have to try. No, no, can we, can I ask you to elaborate? Because my intuition was that you would be a supporter of something like cryptocurrency and Bitcoin because it is fundamentally emphasizes decentralization. What do you, so can you elaborate? Yeah, okay, look. Your thoughts on Bitcoin. It's kind of funny. I wrote, I've been advocating some kind of digital currency for a long time. And when the, when Bitcoin came out and the original paper on blockchain, my heart kind of sank because I thought, oh my God, we're applying all of this fancy thought and all these very careful distributed security measures to recreate the gold standard. Like it's just so retro, it's so dysfunctional. It's so useless from an economic point of view. So it's always, and then the other thing is using computational inefficiency at a boundless scale as your form of security is a crime against the atmosphere, obviously. A lot of people know that now, but we knew that at the start. Like the thing is when the first paper came out, I remember a lot of people saying, oh my God, this thing scales. It's a carbon disaster, you know? And I just like, I'm just mystified, but that's a different question than when you asked, can you have a cryptographic currency or at least some kind of digital currency that's of a benefit? And absolutely, like I'm, and there are people who are trying to be thoughtful about this. You should, if you haven't, you should interview Vitalik Buterin sometime. Yeah, I've interviewed him twice. Okay, so like there are people in the community who are trying to be thoughtful and trying to figure out how to do this better. It has nice properties though, right? So one of the nice properties is that like government centralized, it's hard to control. And then the other one, to fix some of the issues that you're referring to, I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here, is there's lightning network, there's ideas how you build stuff on top of Bitcoin, similar with gold, that allow you to have this kind of vibrant economy that operates not on the blockchain, but outside the blockchain, and uses Bitcoin for like checking the security of those transactions. So Bitcoin's not new, it's been around for a while. I've been watching it closely. I've not seen one example of it creating economic growth. There was this obsession with the idea that government was the problem. That idea that government's the problem, let's say government earned that wrath honestly, because if you look at some of the things that governments have done in recent decades, it's not a pretty story. Like after a very small number of people in the US government decided to bomb and landmine Southeast Asia, it's hard to come back and say, oh, government's this great thing. But then the problem is that this resistance to government is basically resistance to politics. It's a way of saying, if I can get rich, nobody should bother me. It's a way of not having obligations to others. And that ultimately is a very suspect motivation. But does that mean that the impulse that the government should not overreach its power is flawed? Well, I mean, what I wanna ask you to do is to replace the word government with politics. Like our politics is people having to deal with each other. My theory about freedom is that the only authentic form of freedom is perpetual annoyance, all right? So annoyance means you're actually dealing with people because people are annoying. Perpetual means that that annoyance is survivable, so it doesn't destroy us all. So if you have perpetual annoyance, then you have freedom. If you don't- And that's politics. That's politics. If you don't have perpetual annoyance, something's gone very wrong, and you've suppressed those people, and it's only temporary, it's gonna come back and be horrible. You should seek perpetual annoyance. I'll invite you to a Berkeley City Council meeting so you can know what that feels like, what perpetual annoyance feels like. But anyway, so freedom is being, the test of freedom is that you're annoyed by other people. If you're not, you're not free. If you're not, you're trapped in some temporary illusion that's gonna fall apart. Now, this quest to avoid government is really a quest to avoid that political feeling, but you have to have it, you have to deal with it. And it sucks, but that's the human situation, that's the human condition. And this idea that we're gonna have this abstract thing that protects us from having to deal with each other is always an illusion. The idea, and I apologize, I overstretched the use of the word government. The idea is there should be some punishment from the people when a bureaucracy, when a set of people or a particular leader, like in an authoritarian regime, which more than half the world currently lives under, if you, like if they become, they stop representing the people, it stops being like a Berkeley meeting and starts being more like a dictatorial kind of situation. And so the point is, it's nice to give people, the populace in a decentralized way, power to resist that kind of, like government becoming over authoritarian. Yeah, but people see this idea that the problem is always the government being powerful is false. The problem can also be criminal gangs. The problem can also be weird cults. The problem can be abusive clergy. The problem can be infrastructure that fails. The problem can be poisoned water. The problem can be failed electric grids. The problem can be a crappy education system that makes the whole society less and less able to create value. There are all these other problems that are different from an overbearing government. Like you have to keep some sense of perspective and not be obsessed with only one kind of problem because then the others will pop up. But empirically speaking, some problems are bigger than others. So like some, like groups of people, like governments or gangs or companies lead to problems. Are you a US citizen? Yes. Has the government ever really been a problem for you? Well, okay. So first of all, I grew up in the Soviet Union. Yeah, my wife did too. So I have seen, you know. Sure. And has the government bothered me? I would say that that's a really complicated question, especially because the United States is such, it's a special place. And like a lot of other countries. My wife's family were refuseniks. And so we have like a very, and her dad was sent to the Gulag. For what it's worth, on my father's side, all but a few were killed by a pogrom in a post-Soviet pogrom in Ukraine. So I- I would say, because you did a little trick of, eloquent trick of language that you switched to the United States to talk about government. So I believe, unlike my friend, Michael Malice, who's an anarchist, I believe government can do a lot of good in the world. That is exactly what you're saying, which is it's politics. The thing that Bitcoin folks and cryptocurrency folks argue is that one of the big ways that government can control the populace is centralized bank, like control the money. That was the case in the Soviet Union too. There's, inflation can really make poor people suffer. And so what they argue is, this is one way to go around that power that government has of controlling the monetary system. So that's a way to resist. That's not actually saying government bad. That's saying some of the ways that central banks get into trouble can be resisted through centralized- So let me ask you on balance today in the real world, in terms of actual facts, do you think cryptocurrencies are doing more to prop up corrupt, murderous, horrible regimes or to resist those regimes? Where do you think the balance is right now? I know exactly, having talked to a lot of cryptocurrency folks, what they would tell me, right? It's hard. I'm asking it as a real question. There's no way to know the answer perfectly. There's no way to know the answer perfectly. However, I gotta say, if you look at people who've been able to decode blockchains, and they do leak a lot of data, they're not as secure as is widely thought. There are a lot of unknown Bitcoin whales from pretty early and they're huge. And if you ask, who are these people? There's evidence that a lot of them are quite, not the people you'd wanna support, let's say. And I just don't, I think empirically this idea that there's some intrinsic way that bad governments will be disempowered and people will be able to resist them more than new villains or even villainous governments will be empowered. There's no basis for that assertion. It just is kind of circumstantial. And I think in general, Bitcoin ownership is one thing, but Bitcoin transactions have tended to support criminality more than productivity. Of course, they would argue that was the story of its early days, that now more and more Bitcoin is being used for legitimate transactions. But- That's a different, I didn't say for legitimate transactions. I said for economic growth, for creativity. I think what's happening is people are using it a little bit for buying, I don't know, maybe somebody's companies make it available for this and that, they buy a Tesla with it or something. Investing in a startup, hard, it might've happened a little bit, but it's not an engine of productivity, creativity, and economic growth. Whereas old-fashioned currency still is. And anyway, look, I think something, I'm pro the idea of digital currencies. I am anti the idea of economics wiping out politics as a result. I think they have to exist in some balance to avoid the worst dysfunctions of each. In some ways, there's parallels to our discussion of algorithms and cryptocurrency is you're pro the idea, but it can be used to manipulate, you can be used poorly by aforementioned humans. Well, I think that you can make better designs and worse designs. And I think, and you know, the thing about cryptocurrency that's so interesting is how many of us are responsible for the poor designs because we're all so hooked on that Horatio Alger story on like, I'm gonna be the one who gets the viral benefit. You know, way back when all this stuff was starting, I remember it would have been in the 80s, somebody had the idea of using viral as a metaphor for network effect. And the whole point was to talk about how bad network effect was, that it always created distortions that ruined the usefulness of economic incentives, that created dangerous distortions. Like, but then somehow, even after the pandemic, we think of viral as this good thing because we imagine ourselves as the virus, right? We wanna be on the beneficiary side of it. But of course, you're not likely to be. There is a sense because money is involved, people are not reasoning clearly always because they want to be part of that first viral wave that makes them rich. And that blinds people from their basic morality. I had an interesting conversation. I don't, I sort of feel like I should respect some people's privacy, but some of the initial people who started Bitcoin, I remember having an argument about like, it's intrinsically a Ponzi scheme. Like, you know, the early people have more than the later people. And the further down the chain you get, the more you're subject to gambling-like dynamics, where it's more and more random and more and more subject to weird network effects and whatnot, unless you're a very small player, perhaps, and you're just buying something. But even then you'll be subject to fluctuations because the whole thing is just kind of, like as it fluctuates, it's gonna wave around the little people more. And I remember the conversation turned to gambling because gambling is a pretty large economic sector. And it's always struck me as being non-productive. Like somebody goes to Las Vegas, they lose money. And so one argument is, well, they got entertainment. They paid for entertainment as they lost money. So that's fine. And Las Vegas does up the losing of money in an entertaining way, so why not? It's like going to a show. So that's one argument. The argument that was made to me was different from that. It's that, no, what they're doing is they're getting a chance to experience hope. And a lot of people don't get that chance. And so that's really worth it, even if they're gonna lose. They have that moment of hope, and they need to be able to experience that. And it's a very interesting argument. That's so heartbreaking, because I've seen it. But I've seen that. I have that a little bit of a sense. I've talked to some young people who invest in cryptocurrency. And what I see is this hope. This is the first thing they gave them, hope. And that's so heartbreaking to me, that you've gotten hope from, so much is invested. It's like hope from somehow becoming rich, as opposed to something, to me, I apologize, but money is in the long-term not going to be a source of that deep meaning. It's good to have enough money, but it should not be the source of hope. And it's heartbreaking to me, how many people it's the source of hope. Yeah. You've just described the psychology of virality, or the psychology of trying to base a civilization on semi-random occurrences of network effect peaks. And it doesn't really work. I mean, I think we need to get away from that. We need to soften those peaks. And accept Microsoft, which deserves every penny, but in every other case. Well, you mentioned GitHub. I think what Microsoft did with GitHub was brilliant. I was very happy. Okay, if I can give a, not a critical, but on Microsoft, because they recently purchased Bethesda, so Elder Scrolls is in their hands. I'm watching you, Microsoft, do not screw up my favorite game. So. Yeah, well, look, I'm not speaking for Microsoft, I have an explicit arrangement with them where I don't speak for them, obviously. Like, that should be very clear. I do not speak for them. I am not saying, I like them. I think Satya's amazing. The term data dignity was coined by Satya. Like, so, you know, we have, it's kind of extraordinary, but you know, Microsoft's this giant thing, it's gonna screw up this or that. You know, it's not, I don't know. It's kind of interesting, I've had a few occasions in my life to see how things work from the inside of some big thing. And you know, it's always just people kind of, it's, I don't know, there's always like, coordination problems, and there's always. There's always human problems. Oh my God. And there's some good people, there's some bad people, it's always. I hope Microsoft doesn't screw up your game. And I hope they bring Clippy back. You should never kill Clippy, bring Clippy back. Oh, Clippy, but Clippy promotes the mainstream. Clippy, but Clippy promotes the myth of AI. Well, that's why, this is why I think you're wrong. How about if we, all right, could we bring back Bob instead of Clippy? Which one was Bob? Oh, Bob was another thing. Bob was this other screen character who was supposed to be the voice of AI. Cortana, would Cortana do it for you? Cortana is too corporate. I like it, it's fine. There's a woman in Seattle who's like the model for Cortana, did Cortana's voice and was that. There was like, we had, we had her as a, she used to walk around if you were wearing HoloLens for a bit. I don't think that's happening anymore. I think, I don't think you should turn a software into a creature. I think, get a cat, just get a cat. You and I, well, get a dog, get a dog. Or a dog, yeah. Yeah, you're a. Or a hedgehog. A hedgehog. Yeah. You co-authored a paper, you mentioned Lee Smolin, titled The Autodidactic Universe, which describes our universe as one that learns its own physical laws. That's a trippy and beautiful and powerful idea. What are, what would you say are the key ideas in this paper? Okay, well, I should say, that paper reflected work from last year and the project, the program has moved quite a lot. So it's a little, there's a lot of stuff that's not published that I'm quite excited about. So I have to kind of keep my frame in that last year's thing. So I have to try to be a little careful about that. We can think about it in a few different ways. The core of the paper, the technical core of it, is a triple correspondence. One part of it was already established and then another part is in the process. The part that was established was, of course, understanding different theories of physics as matrix models. The part that was fresher is understanding those as machine learning systems, so that we could move fluidly between these different ways of describing systems. And the reason to wanna do that is to just have more tools and more options, because, well, theoretical physics is really hard and a lot of programs have kind of run into a state where they feel a little stalled, I guess. I wanna be delicate about this, because I'm not a physicist. I'm the computer scientist collaborating. So I don't mean to diss anybody. So this is almost like gives a framework for generating new ideas in physics. As we start to publish more about where it's gone, I think you'll start to see there's tools and ways of thinking about theories that I think open up some new paths that will be of interest. There's the technical core of it, which is this idea of a correspondence to give you more facility. But then there's also the storytelling part of it. And this is something Lee loves stories and I do. And the idea here is that a typical way of thinking about physics is that there's some kind of starting condition and then there's some principle by which the starting condition evolves. And the question is like, why the starting condition? Like how, oh, the starting condition has to get kind of, there's this, it has to be fine-tuned and all these things about it have to be kind of perfect. And so we were thinking, well, look, what if we could push the storytelling about where the universe comes from much further back by starting with really simple things that evolve and then through that evolution explain how things got to be how they are through very simple principles, right? And so we've been exploring a variety of ways to push the start of the storytelling further and further back, which, and it's an interesting, it's really kind of interesting because like for all of his, Lee is sometimes considered to be, to have a radical quality in the physics world, but he still is like, no, this is gonna be like the kind of time we're talking about in which evolution happens is the same time we're now, and we're talking about something that starts and continues. And I'm like, well, what if there's some other kind of time that's time-like and it sounds like metaphysics, but there's an ambiguity, you know, like it has to start from something and it's kind of an interesting, so there's this, a lot of the math can be thought of either way, which is kind of interesting. So push this so far back that basically all the things we take for granted in physics start becoming emergent. I really wanna emphasize this is all super baby steps. I don't wanna overclaim. It's like, I think a lot of the things we're doing, we're approaching some old problems in a pretty fresh way, informed. There's been a zillion papers about how you can think of the universe as a big neural net, or how you can think of different ideas in physics as being quite similar to, or even equivalent to some of the ideas in machine learning. And that actually works out crazy well. Like, I mean, that is actually kind of eerie when you look at it. Like there's probably two or three dozen papers that have this quality, and some of them are just crazy good. And it's very interesting. What we're trying to do is take those kinds of observations and turn them into an actionable framework where you can then start to do things with landscapes of theories that you couldn't do before, and that sort of thing. So in that context, or maybe beyond, how do you explain us humans? How unlikely are we, this intelligent civilization? Or is there a lot of others, or are we alone in this universe? Yeah. You seem to appreciate humans very much. Yeah. I've grown fond of us. We're okay. We have our nice qualities. I like that. I mean, we're kind of weird. We sprout this hair on our heads, and then we're, I don't know, we're sort of weird animals. That's the feature, not a bug, I think, the weirdness. I hope so. I hope so. I think if I'm just gonna answer you in terms of truth, the first thing I'd say is we're not in a privileged enough position, at least as yet, to really know much about who we are, how we are, what we're really like in the context of something larger, what that context is. Like all that stuff, we might learn more in the future. Our descendants might learn more, but we don't really know very much, which you can either view as frustrating or charming, like that first year of TikTok or something. All roads lead back to TikTok, I like it. Well, lately. But in terms of, there's another level at which I can think about it where I sometimes think that if you are just quiet and you do something that gets you in touch with the way reality happens, and for me it's playing music, sometimes it seems like you can feel a bit of how the universe is, and it feels like there's a lot more going on in it, and there is a lot more life and a lot more stuff happening and a lot more stuff flowing through it. I'm not speaking as a scientist now. This is kind of a more my artist side talking, and it's, I feel like I'm suddenly in multiple personalities with you. Well, Kerouac, Jack Kerouac said that music is the only truth. What do you, it sounds like you might be at least in part. There's a passage in Kerouac's book, Dr. Sax, where somebody tries to just explain the whole situation with reality and people in a paragraph, and I couldn't reproduce it for you here, but it's like, yeah, there are these bulbous things that walk around and they make these sounds, you can sort of understand them, but only kind of, and then there's like this, and it's just this amazing, just really quick, like if some spirit being or something was gonna show up in our reality and hadn't knew nothing about it, it's like a little basic intro of like, okay, here's what's going on here. An incredible passage. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a one or two sentence summary in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right, of what this. Mostly harmless. Mostly harmless. Yeah. Do you think there's truth to that, that music somehow connects to something that words cannot? Yeah, music is something that just towers above me. I don't, I don't, I don't feel like I have an overview of it, it's just the reverse. I don't fully understand it, because on one level it's simple, like you can say, oh, it's a thing people evolved to coordinate our brains on a pattern level or something like that. There's all these things you can say about music, which are, you know, some of that's probably true. It's also, there's kind of like this, this is the mystery of meaning. Like, there's a way that just, instead of just being pure abstraction, music can have like this kind of substantiality to it that is philosophically impossible. I don't know what to do with it. Yeah. The amount of understanding I feel I have when I hear the right song at the right time is not comparable to anything I can read on Wikipedia. Anything I can understand, read through in language. The music does connect us to something. There's this thing there, yeah. There's some kind of a thing in it. I've never ever, I've read across a lot of explanations from all kinds of interesting people, like that it's some kind of a flow language between people or between people and how they perceive and that kind of thing. And that sort of explanation is fine, but it's not quite it either. Yeah. There's something about music that makes me believe that panpsychism could possibly be true, which is that everything in the universe is conscious. It makes me think, or makes me be humble in how much or how little I understand about the functions of our universe, that everything might be cautious. Most people interested in theoretical physics eventually land in panpsychism, but I'm not one of them. I still think there's this pragmatic imperative to treat people as special, so I will proudly be a dualist. Without playing- People and cats, people and cats. Yeah, I'm not quite sure where to draw the line or why the line's there or anything like that, but I don't think I should be required to all the same questions are equally mysterious for no line, so I don't feel disadvantaged by that. So I shall remain a dualist, but if you listen to anyone trying to explain where consciousness is in a dualistic sense, either believing in souls or some special thing in the brain or something, you pretty much say, screw this, I'm gonna be a panpsychist. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Fair enough, well put. Is there moments in your life that happen that were defining in the way that you hope others, your daughters might have- I gotta say, the moments that defined me were not the good ones. The moments that defined me were often horrible. I've had successes, but if you ask what defined me, my mother's death, being under the World Trade Center and the attack, the things that have had an effect on me were the most real-world terrible things, which I don't wish on young people at all. And this is the thing that's hard about giving advice to young people, that they have to learn their own lessons and lessons don't come easily. And a world which avoids hard lessons will be a stupid world. And I don't know what to do with it. That's a little bundle of truth that has a bit of a fatalistic quality to it. This is like when I was saying that freedom equals eternal annoyance. There's a degree to which honest advice is not that pleasant to give. And I don't want young people to have to know about everything. I think they- You don't wanna wish hardship on them. Yeah, I think they deserve to have a little grace period of naivety that's pleasant. I mean, I do, if it's possible, if it's... Ah, these things are, this is tricky stuff. I mean, if you... Okay, so let me try a little bit on this advice thing. I think one thing, any serious broad advice will have been given a thousand times before for a thousand years. So I'm not going to claim originality. But I think trying to find a way to really pay attention to what you're feeling fundamentally, what your sense of the world is, what your intuition is, if you feel like an intuitive person, what your... Like to try to escape the constant sway of social perception or manipulation, whatever you wish. Not to escape it entirely, that would be horrible. But to find cover from it once in a while, to find a sense of being anchored in that, to believe in experience as a real thing. Believing in experience as a real thing is very dualistic. That goes with my philosophy of dualism. I believe there's something magical. And instead of squirting the magic dust on the programs, I think experience is something real and something apart, something mystical. Your own personal experience that you just have. And then you're saying, silence the rest of the world enough to hear that, like whatever that magic dust is in that experience. Find what is there. And I think that's one thing. Another thing is to recognize that kindness requires genius, that it's actually really hard. That facile kindness is not kindness. And that it'll take you a while to have the skills, to have kind impulses, to want to be kind, you can have right away. To be effectively kind is hard. To be effectively kind, yeah. It takes skill, it takes hard lessons. You'll never be perfect at it. To the degree you get anywhere with it, it's the most rewarding thing ever. Let's see, what else would I say? I would say when you're young, you can be very overwhelmed by social and interpersonal emotions. You'll have broken hearts and jealousies. You'll feel socially down the ladder instead of up the ladder. It feels horrible when that happens. All of these things. And you have to remember what a fragile crust all that stuff is. And it's hard, because right when it's happening, it's just so intense. And if I was actually giving this advice to my daughter, she'd already be out of the room. So this is for some hypothetical teenager that doesn't really exist, that really wants to sit and listen to my voice. For your daughter 10 years from now. Maybe. Can I ask you a difficult question? Yeah, sure. You talked about losing your mom. Yeah. Do you miss her? Yeah, I mean, I still connect to her through music. She was a young prodigy piano player in Vienna, and she survived the concentration camp and then died in a car accident here in the US. What music makes you think of her? Is there a song that connects you? Well, she was in Vienna, so she had the whole Viennese music thing going, which is this incredible school of absolute skill and romance bundled together and wonderful on the piano, especially. I learned to play some of the Beethoven sonatas for her, and I played them in this exaggerated drippy way. I remember when I was a kid. Exaggerated meaning too full of emotion? Yeah, like just like. Isn't that the only way to play Beethoven? I mean, I didn't know there's any other way. That's a reasonable question. I mean, the fashion these days is to be slightly Apollonian even with Beethoven, but one imagines that actual Beethoven playing might've been different. I don't know. I've gotten to play a few instruments he played and tried to see if I could feel anything about how it might've been for him. I don't know really. I was always against the clinical precision of classical music. I thought a great piano player should be like in pain, like emotionally, like truly feel the music and make it messy sort of. Sure. Maybe play classical music the way, I don't know, blues pianist plays blues. It seems like they actually got happier and I'm not sure if Beethoven got happier. I think it's a different kind of concept of the place of music. I think the blues, the whole African-American tradition was initially surviving awful, awful circumstances. You could say there was some of that in the concentration camps and all that too. And it's not that Beethoven's circumstances were brilliant, but he kind of also, I don't know, this is hard. Like, I mean, it would seem to be his misery was somewhat self-imposed maybe through, I don't know. It's kind of interesting. Like I've known some people who loathed Beethoven, like the composer, late composer Pauline Oliveros, wonderful modernist composer. I played in her band for a while and she was like, oh, Beethoven, that's the worst music ever. It's like all ego, it completely, it turns information, I mean, it turns emotion into your enemy. And it's ultimately all about your own self-importance, which has to be at the expense of others, what else could it be? And blah, blah, blah. So she had, I shouldn't say, I don't mean to be dismissive, but I'm just saying like her position on Beethoven was very negative and very unimpressed, which is really interesting for me. The man or the music? I think, I don't know. I mean, she's not here to speak for herself, so it's a little hard for me to answer that question. But it was interesting because I'd always thought of Beethoven as like, whoa, this is like, Beethoven is like really the dude, and she's like, ah, Beethoven, Schmadovan, it's like not really happening. Yeah, still, even though it's cliche, I like playing personally just for myself, Moonlight Sonata, I mean, I just. Moonlight's amazing, you know, I, you know, you're talking about comparing the blues and that sensibility from Europe is so different in so many ways. One of the musicians I play with is John Batiste, who has the band on Colbert's show, and he'll sit there playing jazz and suddenly go into Moonlight, he loves Moonlight. And what's kind of interesting is he's found a way to do Beethoven, and by the way, he can really do Beethoven. Like he went through Juilliard, and one time he was at my house, he was saying, hey, do you have the book of Beethoven's sonatas? I said, yeah, I want to find one I haven't played, and he sight-read through the whole damn thing perfectly. And I'm like, oh God, I just need to get out of here, I can't even deal with this. But anyway. Yeah. But anyway, the thing is, he has this way of with the same persona and the same philosophy moving from the blues into Beethoven that's really, really fascinating to me. It's like, I don't want to say he plays it as if it were jazz, but he kind of does. It's kind of really, and he talks, well, he was sight-reading, he talks like Beethoven's talking to him. Like he's like, oh yeah, here, he's doing this, I can't do John, but you know. It's like, it's really interesting, like it's very different. Like for me, I was introduced to Beethoven as like almost like this godlike figure, and I presume Pauline was too, that was really kind of oppressed but hard to deal with. And for him, it's just like- The conversation he's having. He's playing James P. Johnson or something. It's like another musician who did something and they're talking and it's very cool to be around. It's very kind of freeing to see someone have that relationship. I would love to hear him play Beethoven. That sounds amazing. He's great. We talked about Ernest Becker and how much value he puts on our mortality and our denial of our mortality. Do you think about your mortality? Do you think about your own death? You know, what's funny is I used to not be able to, but as you get older, you just know people who die and there's all these things and it just becomes familiar and more ordinary, which is what it is. But are you afraid? Sure, although less so. And it's not like I didn't have some kind of insight or revelation to become less afraid. I think I just, like I say, it's kind of familiarity. It's just knowing people who've died. And I really believe in the future. I have this optimism that people or this whole thing of life on earth, this whole thing we're part of, I don't know where to draw that circle, but this thing is going somewhere and has some kind of value. And you can't both believe in the future and wanna live forever. You have to make room for it. You know, like you have to, that optimism has to also come with its own humility. You have to make yourself small to believe in the future. And so it actually in a funny way comforts me. Wow, that's powerful. And optimism requires you to kind of step down after time. Yeah, I mean, that said, life seems kind of short, but you know, whatever. Do you think there's- I've tried to find, I can't find the complaint department. You know, I really wanna bring this up, but the customer service number never answers and like the email bounces. One way. So yeah. Do you think there's meaning to it, to life? Ah, well, see, meaning's a funny word. Like we say all these things as if we know what they mean, but meaning, we don't know what we mean when we say meaning. Like we obviously do not. And it's a funny little mystical thing. I think it ultimately connects to that sense of experience that dualists tend to believe in. Because there are why, like if you look up to the stars and you experience that awe-inspiring, like joy at whatever, when you look up to the stars, I don't know, like for me, that's kind of makes me feel joyful, maybe a little bit melancholy, just some weird soup of feelings. And ultimately the question is like, why are we here in this vast universe? That question, why? Have you been able in some way to connect or have you been able in some way, maybe through music, answer it for yourself? My impulse is to feel like it's not quite the right question to ask, but I feel like going down that path is just too tedious for the moment and I don't wanna do it, but. The wrong question. Well, just because, I don't know what meaning is. And I think, I do know that sense of awe. I grew up in Southern New Mexico and the stars were so vivid. I've had some weird misfortunes, but I've had some weird luck also. One of our near neighbors was the head of optics research at White Sands and when he was young, he discovered Pluto. His name was Clyde Tombaugh. And he taught me how to make telescopes, grinding mirrors and stuff. And my dad had also made telescopes when he was a kid, but Clyde had like backyard telescopes that would put to shame a lot of, I mean, he really, he did his telescopes, you know? And so I remember he'd let me go and play with them and just like looking at a globular cluster and you're seeing the actual photons and with a good telescope, it's really like this object. Like you can really tell this isn't coming through some intervening information structure. This is like the actual photons and it's really a three-dimensional object. And you have even a feeling for the vastness of it. And it's, I don't know. So I definitely, I was very, very fortunate to have a connection to the sky that way when I was a kid. To have had that experience, again, the emphasis on experience. It's kind of funny. Like I feel like sometimes, like I've taken, when she was younger, I took my daughter and her friends to like a telescope. There are a few around here that our kids can go and use and they would like look at Jupiter's moons or something. I think like Galilean moons. And I don't know if they quite had that because it's like too, it's been just too normalized. And I think maybe when I was growing up, screens weren't that common yet. And maybe it's like too confusable with the screen. I don't know. You know, somebody brought up in conversation to me somewhere, I don't remember who, but they kind of posited this idea that if humans, early humans weren't able to see the stars, like if earth atmosphere was such that it was cloudy, that we would not develop human civilization. There's something about being able to look up and see a vast universe is like, that's fundamental to the development of human civilization. I thought that was a curious kind of thought. That reminds me of that old Isaac Asimov story where there's this planet where they finally get to see what's in the sky once in a while. And it turns out they're in the middle of a globular cluster and there are all these stars. I forget what happens exactly. God, that's from when I was the same age as a kid. I don't really remember. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. It might be right. I'm just thinking of all the civilizations that grew up under clouds. I mean, like the Vikings needed a special diffracting piece of mica to navigate because they could never see the sun. They had this thing called a sunstone that they found from this one cave. Do you know about that? So they were in this like, they were trying to navigate boats, you know, in the North Atlantic without being able to see the sun because it was cloudy. And so they used a chunk of mica to diffract it in order to be able to align where the sun really was because they couldn't tell by eye and navigate. So I'm just saying, there are a lot of civilizations that are pretty impressive that had to deal with a lot of clouds. The Amazonians invented our agriculture and they were probably under clouds a lot. I don't know. I don't know. To me personally, the question of the meaning of life becomes most vibrant, most apparent when you look up at the stars because it makes me feel very small. That we're not small. But then you ask, it still feels that we're special. And then the natural question is like, well, if we are as special as I think we are, why the heck are we here in this vast universe? That ultimately is the question of the meaning of life. I mean, look, there's a confusion sometimes in trying to set up a question or a thought experiment or something that's defined in terms of a context to explain something where there is no larger context. And that's a category error. If we want to do it in physics, or in computer science, it's hard to talk about the universe as a Turing machine because a Turing machine has an external clock and an observer and input and output. There's a larger context implied in order for it to be defined at all. And so if you're talking about the universe, you can't talk about it coherently as a Turing machine. Quantum mechanics is like that. Quantum mechanics has an external clock and has some kind of external context depending on your interpretation. That's either the observer or whatever. And they're similar that way. So maybe Turing machines and quantum mechanics can be better friends or something because they have a similar setup. But the thing is, if you have something that's defined in terms of an outer context, you can't talk about ultimates with it because obviously it's not suited for that. So there's some ideas that are their own context. General relativity is its own context. It's different. That's why it's hard to unify. And I think the same thing is true when we talk about these types of questions. Like meaning is in a context. And to talk about ultimate meaning is therefore a category error. It's not a resolvable way of thinking. It might be a way of thinking that is experientially or aesthetically valuable because it is awesome in the sense of awe-inspiring. But to try to treat it analytically is not sensible. Maybe that's what music and poetry are for. Yeah, maybe. I think so. I think music actually does escape any particular context. That's how it feels to me, but I'm not sure about that. That's once again, crazy artist talking, not scientist. Well, you do both masterfully, Jaron. And like I said, I'm a big fan of everything you've done, of you as a human being. I appreciate the fun argument we had today that will, I'm sure, continue for 30 years as it did with Mark Minsky. Honestly, I deeply appreciate that you spend your really valuable time with me today. It was a really great conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jaron Lanier. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Jaron Lanier himself. A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.