Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
george hotz a.k.a
geohot his second time on the podcast
he's the founder of comma ai an
autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle
technology company
that seeks to be to tesla autopilot what
android is
to the ios they sell the
comma two device for one thousand
dollars that when installed
in many of their supported cars can keep
the vehicle centered in the lane
even when there are no lane markings it
includes
driver sensing that ensures that the
driver's eyes are on the road
as you may know i'm a big fan of driver
sensing i do believe tesla autopilot and
others
should definitely include it in their
sensor suite also
i'm a fan of android and a big fan of
george for many reasons
including his non-linear out of the box
brilliance
and the fact that he's a superstar
programmer
of a very different style than myself
styles make
fights and styles make conversations so
i
really enjoyed this chat i'm sure we'll
talk many more times on this podcast
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by some thoughts related to the episode
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note
let me say that my work at mit on
autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles
led me to study the human side of
autonomy enough
to understand that it's a beautifully
complicated and interesting problem
space
much richer than what can be studied in
the lab
in that sense the data that comma ai
tesla autopilot
and perhaps others like cadillac super
crews are collecting
gives us a chance to understand how we
can design safe
semiautonomous vehicles for real human
beings
in real world conditions i think this
requires bold innovation
and a serious exploration of the first
principles of the driving task
itself if you enjoy this thing subscribe
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twitter at lex friedman
and now here's my conversation with
george
hotz so last time we started talking
about the simulation
this time let me ask you do you think
there's intelligent life out there in
the universe
i've always maintained my answer to the
fermi paradox i think there
has been intelligent life elsewhere in
the universe
so the intelligent civilizations existed
but they've blown themselves up so your
general intuition is that intelligent
civilizations quickly like there's that
parameter
in in the drake equation your senses
they don't last very long
yeah how are we doing on that like have
we lasted pretty
pretty good i don't know we do oh yeah
i mean not quite yet
well what telly has your caskey the iq
required to destroy the world falls by
one point every year
okay so technology democratizes
the destruction of the world when can a
meme destroy the world
it kind of is already right somewhat
i don't think i don't think we've seen
anywhere near the worst of it yet
world's going to get weird well maybe a
mu can save the world
you thought about that the meme lord
elon musk fighting on the side of good
versus the uh the meme lord of the
darkness which is uh not saying anything
bad about donald trump
but he is the the lord of the meme on
the dark side he's a darth vader of
memes
i think in every fairy tale
they always end it with and they lived
happily ever after and i'm like please
tell me more about this happily ever
after i've heard
50 percent of marriages end in divorce
uh why doesn't your marriage end up
there you can't just say happily ever
after so
it's the thing about destruction is it's
over after the destruction
um we have to do everything right in
order to avoid it
and uh one thing wrong i mean actually
that's what i really like about
cryptography
cryptography it seems like we live in a
world where the defense wins
um versus like nuclear weapons the
opposite is true
it is much easier to build a warhead
that splits into 100 little warheads
than to build something that can
you know take out 100 little warheads uh
the offense has the advantage there
um so maybe our future is in crypto but
uh so cryptography right the goliath is
the
the defense and then all the different
hackers
are the uh are the davids and that
equation is flipped for nuclear war
because there's so many like one nuclear
weapon destroys everything
essentially yeah and it is much easier
to uh
attack with a nuclear weapon than it is
to like the technology required to
intercept and destroy
a rocket is much more complicated than
the technology required to just you know
orbital trajectory send a rocket to
somebody
so okay your intuition that the there
were intelligent
civilizations out there but it's very
possible that they're
no longer there that's kind of a sad
picture they
enter some steady state they all
wirehead themselves
what's wirehead um stimulate stimulate
their pleasure centers
uh and just you know live forever in
this kind of stasis
they become well i mean i think the
reason i believe this is because where
are they
if there's some reason they stopped
expanding
because otherwise they would have taken
over the universe the universe isn't
that big or at least you know
let's just talk about the galaxy right
70 000 light years across
uh i took that number from star trek
voyager i don't know how true it is but
um
uh yeah that's not big right 70
000 light years is nothing for some
possible technology that you can imagine
that could leverage like wormholes or
something like that
you don't even need wormholes just a von
neumann probe is enough a von
neumann probe and a million years of
sublight travel and you'd have taken
over the whole universe
that clearly uh didn't happen so
something stopped it
so you mean if you right for for like a
few million years
if you sent out probes that travel close
what's sublight
meaning close to the speed of light
let's it just spreads
interesting actually that's an
interesting calculation
huh so what makes you think that would
be able to uh communicate with them
like uh yeah what what's
why do you think we would able to be
able to comprehend
intelligent lives that are out there
like
even if they were among us kind of thing
like
or even just flying around well
i mean that's possible it's possible
that there is some sort of prime
directive
uh that'd be a really cool universe to
live in um and there's some reason
they're not making themselves visible to
us
but it makes sense that they would use
the same
well at least the same entropy well
you're implying the same laws of physics
i don't know what you mean by entropy
in this case oh yeah i mean if entropy
is the scarce resource in the universe
so what do you think about like stephen
wolfram and everything is a computation
and then what if they are traveling
through this world of computation so
if you think of the universe as just
information processing
then uh what you're referring to with
with entropy
and then these these pockets of
interesting complex computations
swimming around
how do we know they're not already here
how do we know that this like all the
different
amazing things that are full of mystery
on earth
are just like little footprints of
intelligence from
light years away maybe i mean
i tend to think that as civilizations
expand they use more and more energy
uh and you can never overcome the
problem of waste heat so where is their
waste heat
so we'd be able to with our crude
methods be able to see like there's a
whole lot of
energy here but it could be something
we're not i mean we don't understand
dark energy right dark matter
it could be just stuff we don't
understand at all or they could have a
fundamentally different physics
you know like that that we just don't
even compromise well i think
okay i mean it depends how far out you
want to go i don't think physics is very
different on the other side of the
galaxy
i would suspect that they have i mean if
they're in our
universe they have the same physics well
yeah that's the assumption we have
but there could be like super trippy
things like
like our cognition
only gets to a slice oh and all the
possible instruments that we can design
only get to a particular slice of the
universe and there's something much
like weirder maybe we can try a thought
experiment
um would people from the past
be able to detect the remnants of our
uh we would be able to detect our modern
civilization i think the answer is
obviously yes
you mean past from 100 years ago well
let's even go back further let's go to a
million years ago
right the humans who were lying around
in the desert probably didn't even have
maybe they just barely had fire uh
they would understand if a 747 flew
overhead
in in in this vicinity but not um
if the if a 747 flew on mars
because they wouldn't be able to see far
because we're not actually communicating
that well
with the rest of the universe we're
doing okay we're just sending out random
like
50s tracks of music true
and yeah i mean they'd have to you know
the we've only been broadcasting radio
waves for
um 150 years and well there's your light
cone
so yeah okay what do you make about all
the
i recently came across this uh having
talked to
david fravor i don't know if you caught
what the
the videos that pentagon released and
uh the new york times reporting of the
ufo sightings
so i kind of looked into it quote
unquote and
there's actually been like
hundreds of thousands of ufo sightings
right
and a lot of it you can explain away in
different kinds of ways
so one is it could be interesting
physical phenomena
two it could be people wanting to
believe
and therefore they conjure up a lot of
different things that just you know when
you see different kinds of lights some
basic physics phenomena
and then you just conjure up ideas of
possible
out there mysterious worlds but you know
it's also possible like you have a case
of
david fravor who is a navy pilot
who's you know as legit as a guest in
terms of
humans who are able to perceive
things in the environment and make
conclusions whether those things are a
threat or not
and he and several other pilots saw
a thing i don't know if you followed
this but they saw a thing that they've
since then called tick tock that moved
in all kinds of weird ways
they don't know what it is it could be
technology developed by by the united
states
and they're just not aware of it and the
surface level from the navy right it
could be
different kind of lighting technology or
drone technology all that kind of stuff
it could be the russians and then
chinese all that kind of stuff
and of course their mind our mind
can also venture into the possibility
that it's from another world
have you looked into this at all what do
you think about it
i think all the news is a psyop
i think that the most closing is real
yeah i listened to the uh i think it was
bob lazar
um on joe rogan and like i believe
everything this guy is saying and then i
think that it's probably just some like
mk ultra kind of thing you know
uh what do you mean like they they uh
you know they made some weird thing and
they called it an alien spaceship you
know maybe it was just to like
stimulate young physicist minds we'll
tell them it's alien technology and
we'll see what they come up with right
do you find any conspiracy theories
compelling like have you
pulled at the string of the of the rich
complex world of conspiracy theories
that's out there
i think that uh i've heard a conspiracy
theory that conspiracy theories were
invented by the cia
in the 60s to discredit true things yeah
um so you know you can go to ridiculous
conspiracy theories like flat earth and
pizzagate
and uh you know these things are almost
to hide like
conspiracy theories that like you know
remember when the chinese like locked up
the doctors who discovered coronavirus
like i tell people this and i'm like
no no that's not a conspiracy theory
that actually happened
do you remember the time that the money
used to be backed by gold and now it's
backed by nothing this is not a
conspiracy theory this actually
happened that's one of my worries
today with the idea of fake news is that
when nothing is real
then like you dilute the possibility of
anything being true by
conjuring up all kinds of conspiracy
theories and then you don't know what to
believe and then
like the idea of truth of objectivity is
lost completely
everybody has their own truth so you
used to control information by censoring
it
then the internet happened and
governments are like oh we can't
censor things anymore
i know what we'll do you know it's the
old story
of uh the story of like tying a flag
where the leprechaun tells you the gold
is buried
and you tie one flag and you make the
leprechaun swear to not remove the flag
and you come back to the field later
with a shovel and there's flags
everywhere
that's one way to maintain privacy right
is like
in order to protect the contents of this
conversation for example we could just
generate like millions of deep fake
conversations where you and i talk
and say random things yeah so this is
just one of them and nobody knows which
one was the real one
this this could be fake right now
classic steganography technique
okay another absurd question about
intelligent life because uh
you know you're you're an incredible
programmer outside of everything else
we'll talk about just as a programmer
uh do you think intelligent beings out
there the civilizations that were out
there
had computers and programming
did they do we naturally have to develop
something where we engineer machines
and are able to encode both
knowledge into those machines and
instructions that
process that knowledge process that
information to to make decisions and
actions and so on
and with those programming languages if
you think they exist
be at all similar to anything we've
developed
so i don't see that much of a difference
between
quote-unquote natural languages and
programming languages
um yeah i think there's so many
similarities so
when asked the question what do alien
languages look like
i imagine they're not all that
dissimilar from ours
and i think translating in and out of
them
uh wouldn't be that crazy well it's
difficult to compile
like dna to python and then to see
i mean there is a little bit of a gap in
in the kind of languages we use for
for uh touring machines and the kind of
languages
nature seems to use a little bit maybe
that's just
we just haven't cr we haven't understood
the kind of language that nature uses
well
yet dna is a cad model
it's not quite a programming language it
has no sort of
serial execution it's not quite a
yeah it's a cad model um so i think in
that sense
we actually completely understand it the
problem is um you know
well simulating on these cad models i
played with it a bit this year
is super uh computationally intensive if
you want to go down to like the
molecular level
um where you need to go to see a lot of
these phenomena like protein folding
um so yeah it's not that it's it's not
it's not that we don't understand it it
just requires a whole lot of compute to
kind of
compile it for our human minds it's
inefficient both for the pro
for the data representation and for the
programming yeah it runs well on raw
nature
it runs well in raw nature and when we
try to build uh emulators or simulators
for that
uh well then manslaughter and i've tried
it
it runs in yeah you've commented
elsewhere
i don't remember where that uh
one of the problems is simulating nature
is tough
and if you want to sort of deploy a
prototype
i forgot how you you put it but it made
me laugh but animals or humans would
need to be involved
in order to in order to try to run some
prototype code on um
like if we're talking about covid and
viruses and so on yeah
if you were trying to engineer some kind
of defense mechanisms
like a vaccine uh against coven or
all that kind of stuff that doing any
kind of experimentation like you can
with like autonomous vehicles would be
very
technically cost technically and
ethically costly i'm not sure about that
i think you can do tons of
uh crazy biology and in test tubes i
think
my bigger complaint is more all the
tools are so bad
like literally you mean like like i'm
not libraries and i'm not pipetting
like you're handing me a i gotta no no
no no there has to be some
like automating stuff and like the
yeah but human biology is messy like it
seems like
look at those toronto's videos they were
a joke it's like it's like a little
gantry it's like a little xy gantry high
school science project with the pipette
i'm like
really gotta be something better you
can't build like nice microfluidics and
i can program the you know
computation to bio interface i mean this
is going to happen
but like right now if you are asking me
to pipette
50 milliliters of solution amount
this is so crude yeah okay
let's get all the crazy out of the way
uh so a bunch of people ask me
since we talked about the simulation
last time we talked about hacking the
simulation
do you have any updates any insights
about how we might be able to go about
hacking simulation if we indeed do live
in a simulation
i think a lot of people misinterpreted
the point of that south by talk
the point of the south by talk was not
literally to hack the simulation
uh i think that this
we this is this is an idea is literally
just i think theoretical physics i think
that's the whole
you know the whole goal
right you want your grand unified theory
but then okay build a brand new five
theory search for exploits
right i think we're nowhere near
actually there yet
my hope with that was just more to like
like are you people kidding me with the
things you spend time thinking about
do you understand like kind of how small
you are
you are you are bites and god's computer
really and the things that people get
worked up about and
you know so basically it was more
a message of uh we should humble
ourselves
that we we get to uh like what
what are we humans in this bite code
yeah
and not just just humble ourselves but
like like i'm not trying to like make
you feel guilty or anything like that
i'm trying to say like literally
look at what you are spending time on
right what are you referring to you're
referring to the kardashians what are we
talking about
from twitter to no the kardashians see
everyone knows that's kind of
fun i'm referring more to like the
economy
you know this idea that
we gotta up our stock price like
or or what is what is the goal function
of humanity
you don't like the game of capitalism
like you don't like the games we've
constructed for ourselves as humans
i'm a big fan of of capitalism i don't
think that's really the game we're
playing right now i think we're playing
a
a different game where the rules are
rigged
look at which games are interesting to
you that we humans have constructed and
which aren't
which are productive and which
are not actually maybe that's the real
point of the
of the talk it's like stop playing these
fake human games there's a real game
here
we can play the real game the real game
is you know nature wrote the rules
this is a real game there still is a
game to play
but if you look at sergeant drop i don't
know if you've seen the instagram
account nature is metal
the game that nature seems to be playing
is a lot
a lot more cruel than we humans want to
put up with or
at least we see it as cool it's like the
bigger
thing eats the smaller thing and uh
does it to impress another big thing
so it can mate with that thing and
that's it that
seems to be the entirety of it well
there's no art there's no music there's
no
comma ai there's no comma one no comma
two no george
hotz with his brilliant talks at south
by southwest
see i disagree though i disagree that
this is what nature is i think nature
just provided basically a uh
open world and mmorpg and um
you know here it's open world i mean if
that's the game you want to play you can
play that game but
isn't that isn't that beautiful i know
if you play diablo they used to have uh
i think cow level
where it's
so everybody will go just they figured
out this like the best way to gain
like experience points is to just
slaughter cows over and over and over
and uh so they figured out this little
sub game within the bigger game that
this is the most efficient way
to get experience points and everybody
somehow agreed that getting experience
points in
rpg context where you always want to be
getting more stuff
more skills more levels keep advancing
that seems to be good
so might as well spend sacrifice
actual enjoyment of playing a game
exploring a world
and spending like hundreds of hours of
your time in cow level i mean
the number of hours i spent in cow level
i'm not like the most impressive person
because people have probably thousands
of hours there but it's ridiculous
so that's a little absurd game that
brought me joy in some weird dopamine
drug kind of way
yeah so you you don't like those games
you don't
you don't think that's us humans failing
the the yeah nature i think so
and that was the point of the talk yeah
so how do we hack it then
well i want to live forever and wait
i want to live forever and this is like
the goal well that's a game against
nature
yeah immortality is the good objective
function to you
i mean start there and then you can do
whatever else you want cause you got a
long time
what if mortality makes the game just
totally not fun
i mean like why do you assume
immortality
is uh somehow uh it's not
a good objective function it's not
immortality that i want a true
immortality where i could not die
i would prefer what we have right now um
but i want to choose my own death of
course
i don't want nature to decide when i die
i'm going to win i'm going to be you
and then at some point if you choose
commit suicide
like how long you think you'd live
until i get bored see i don't think
people
like in like brilliant people like you
that really
ponder living a long time
are really considering how
how meaningless life becomes well i want
to know everything and then i'm ready
to die
as long as why do you want isn't it
possible that you want to know
everything because
it's finite like the reason you want to
know quote unquote everything is because
you don't have enough time to know
everything
and once you have unlimited time then
you realize like
why do anything like why learn anything
i want to know everything and i'm ready
to die so you have yeah
well it's not it's not a like it's a
terminal value it's not
it's not in service of anything else i'm
conscious of the possibility this is not
a certainty
but the possibility is of that engine of
curiosity that you're speaking to
is actually a
a symptom of uh the finiteness of life
like
without that finiteness
your curiosity would vanish like like a
like a morning fog
all right cool then you talked about
love like that then um
let me solve immortality let me change
the thing in my brain that reminds me of
the fact that i'm immortal tells me that
life is finite maybe i'll have it
tell me that life ends next week
right i'm okay with some self
manipulation like that i'm okay with
with deceiving oh change
oh rico changing the code if that's the
problem right if the problem is that i
will no longer have that
that curiosity i'd like to have backup
copies of myself
uh which yeah well which i check in with
occasionally to make sure they're okay
with the trajectory and they can kind of
override it
maybe a nice like i think of like those
wavenets those like logarithmic go back
to the copies yeah but sometimes it's
not reversible like uh
sure i've done this with video games
when once you figure out the cheat code
or like you look up
how to cheat old school like single
player
it ruins the game for you absolutely i
know that feeling but again
that just means our brain manipulation
technology is not good enough yet remove
that cheat code from your brain
what if we all so it's also possible
that if we figure out immortality
that all of us will kill ourselves
before we advance
far enough to uh to be able to revert to
change
i'm not killing myself till i know
everything so
that's what you say now because your
life is finite
you know i think yes self-modifying
systems gets
comes up with all these hairy
complexities and can i promise that i'll
do it perfectly no but i think i can put
good safety structures in place
so that talk in your thinking here is
not literally
referring to uh a simulation in that our
our universe is a kind of computer
program running in a computer
that's more of a thought experiment um
do you also think of the potential of
the sort of uh
bostrom elon musk
and others that talk about an actual
program
that simulates our universe oh i don't
doubt that we're in a simulation i just
think that it's not
quite that important i mean i'm
interested only in simulation theory as
far as like it gives me power
over nature uh if it's totally
unfalsifiable then
who cares i mean what do you think that
experiment would look like like somebody
uh
on twitter asked ask george what signs
we would look for to know whether or not
we're in the simulation
which is exactly what you're asking is
like
the step that precedes the step of
knowing how to get more power
from this knowledge is to get an
indication that there is some power to
be gained so
get an indication that there you can
discover
and exploit cracks in the simulation or
it doesn't
you know in the physics of the universe
yeah
show me i mean like a memory leak would
be cool
like some scrying technology you know
what what kind of technology
scrying what's that oh that's a weird uh
this crying is the
is the uh paranormal ability to uh
like like remote viewing like being able
to see somewhere where you're not
um so you know i don't think you can do
it by chanting in a room but um
if we could find as a memory leak
basically
yeah you're able to access parts you're
not supposed to yeah yeah yeah and
thereby discover shortcut
yeah maybe memory leak means the other
thing as well but i mean like yeah like
an ability to read arbitrary memory
yeah right and that one's not that
horrifying right the the right ones
start to be horrifying
read right so the the reading is not the
problem yeah
it's like heartbleed for the universe oh
boy the writing is a big big problem
it's a big problem it's the moment you
can write anything even if it's just
random noise that's terrifying
i mean even without even without that
like even some of the you know the
nanotech stuff that's coming i think is
i don't know if you're paying attention
but actually eric weinstein came out
with the theory of everything
i mean that came out he's been working
on a theory of everything in the physics
world
called geometric community and then for
me from computer science person
like you stephen wolfram's theory of
everything of like hypographs is super
interesting and beautiful
but not from a physics perspective but
from a computational perspective i don't
know have you paid attention
to any of that so again like what would
make me pay attention and like why like
i hate string theory is okay make a
testable prediction
right i'm only interested in i'm not
interested in theories for their
intrinsic beauty i'm interested in
theories that give me power over the
universe
so if these theories do i'm very
interested um can i just say how
beautiful that
is because a lot of physicists say i'm
interested in experimental validation
and they skip out the part
where they say to give me more power in
the universe
i just love the um yo i want i want i
want the clarity of that
i want 100 gigahertz processors i want
transistors that are smaller than atoms
i want like
power
that's uh that's true and that's where
people
from aliens to this kind of technology
where people are worried that
governments like who owns that power
is it george hearts is it thousands of
distributed hackers across the world
is it governments you know is it mark
zuckerberg
there's a lot of people that uh
i don't know if anyone trusts any one
individual with power so they're always
worried
it's the beauty of blockchains that's
the beauty of blockchains
which we'll talk about on twitter
somebody pointed me to a story uh
a bunch of people pointed me to a story
a few months ago
where you went into a restaurant in new
york and you can correct me fame this is
wrong
and ran into a bunch of folks from a
company in a
crypto company who are trying to scale
up ethereum
and they had a technical deadline
related to a solidity to ovm compiler
so these are all ethereum technologies
so
you stepped in they recognized you uh
pulled you aside explained their problem
and you stepped in and helped them solve
the problem
uh thereby creating legend status
story so uh can you uh
tell me the story the little more detail
it seems kind of incredible
this did this happen yeah yeah it's a
true story it's a true story i mean they
wrote a very flattering
account of it um they
so optimism is the spin the company's
called optimism
spin-off of plasma they're trying to
build l2 solutions on ethereum
so right now uh
every ethereum node has to run every
transaction
on the ethereum network um and this kind
of doesn't scale right because if you
have n computers
well you know if that becomes two n
computers you actually still get the
same amount of compute
right this is this is like like o of one
scaling
um because they all have to run it okay
fine you get more
blockchain security but like the
blockchain's already so secure
can we trade some of that off for speed
uh so that's kind of what these l2
solutions are
they built this thing which kind of um
kind of sandbox
uh for ethereum contracts so they can
run it in this l2 world and it can't do
certain things in l world
in l1 i can ask you for some definitions
what's l2
oh l2 is layer 2. so l1 is like the base
ethereum chain
and then layer two is like a
computational layer that runs
um elsewhere but still is kind of
secured by layer one
and i'm sure a lot of people know but
ethereum is a cryptocurrency probably
one of the most popular cryptocurrencies
second to bitcoin
and a lot of interesting technological
innovations there
maybe you can also slip in
whenever you talk about this any things
that are exciting to you in the
ethereum space and why ethereum well i
mean
bitcoin uh is not turn complete
well ethereum is not technically a
terrain complete with a gas limit but
close enough
well the gas limit what's the gas limit
resources
yeah i mean no computers actually turn
complete right right
you're fine at ram you know what if i
can actually solve this gas limit you
just have so many brilliant
words i'm not even gonna ask but that's
what that's no that's not my word that's
ethereum's word
gasoline ethereum you have to spend gas
per instruction
so like different op codes use different
amounts of gas and you
buy gas with ether to prevent people
from basically ddosing the network
so uh bitcoin is proof of work and then
what's ethereum it's also proof of work
uh they're working on some
proof-of-stake ethereum 2.0 stuff but
right now it's
it's proof of work usually a different
hash function from bitcoin that's more
asic resistance because you need ram
so we're all talking about ethereum 1.0
yeah so what uh
what were they trying to do to scale
this whole process so they were like
well
if we could run contracts elsewhere um
and then only save the results of that
computation
uh you know well we don't actually have
to do the computer on the chain we can
do the compute off chain and just post
what the results are
now the problem with that is well
somebody could lie about what the
results are
so you need a resolution mechanism and
the resolution mechanism can be really
expensive
uh because you know you just have to
make sure that like
the person who is saying look i swear
that this is the real computation
i'm staking ten thousand dollars on that
fact and
if you prove it wrong yeah it might cost
you three thousand dollars in gas fees
to prove wrong
but you'll get the ten thousand dollar
bounty so you can secure
using those kind of systems um
so it's effectively a sandbox which runs
contracts
uh and like just like any kind of normal
sandbox you have to like replace
syscalls with um you know calls into the
hypervisor
uh sandbox this calls hypervisor what do
these things mean
uh as long as it's interesting to talk
about yeah i mean you can take like the
chrome
is maybe the one to think about right so
the chrome process that's doing a
rendering
uh can't for example read a file from
the file system yeah
it has if it tries to make an open
syscall in linux the open system
you can't make it open says call no no
no uh you have to request
from the kind of uh hypervisor process
or
like i don't know what's called in
chrome but um
the canoe hey could you open this file
for me and then it does all these checks
and then it passes the file handle back
in if it's approved
um so that's yeah uh so what's the in
the context of ethereum
what are the boundaries of the sandbox
that we're talking about um well like
one of the calls that you
actually reading and uh writing any
state to the ethereum contract
to the ethereum blockchain um
writing state is one of those calls that
you're going to have to sandbox
in layer two because if you let layer
two just
arbitrarily right to the ethereum
blockchain um
so layer two is except is really sitting
on top of
layer one so you're gonna have a lot of
different kinds of ideas that you can
play with
yeah and they're all they're not
fundamentally changing
the source code level of ethereum
well you have to replace a bunch of
calls
with calls into the hypervisor so
instead of doing the syscall directly
you you replace it with a call to the
hypervisor
so originally they were doing this by
first running the so solidity is the
language that most ethereum contracts
are written in
it compiles to a byte code and then they
wrote this thing they called the
transpiler and the transpiler took the
byte code
and it transpiled it into ovm safe
bytecode
basically bytecode that didn't make any
of those restricted syscalls and added
the calls to the hypervisor
this transpiler was a 3000 line mess
and it's hard to do it's hard to do if
you're trying to do it like that because
you have to kind of like deconstruct the
byte code
change things about it and then
reconstruct it
and i mean as soon as i hear this i'm
like why don't you just change the
compiler
right why not the first place you build
the bytecode just do it in the compiler
uh so yeah you know i asked them how
much they wanted it
uh of course measured in dollars and i'm
like well okay
um and yeah and you wrote the compiler
yeah i modified i wrote a 300 line diff
to the compiler
uh it's open source you can look at it
yeah it's yeah i looked at the code last
night
[Laughter]
yeah exactly cute good is a good word
for it
uh and it's um c plus plus
see if it's lost yeah so when
asked how you were able to do it you
said
you just gotta think and then do it
right
so can you break that apart a little bit
what's what's your process of uh
one thinking and two doing it right
you know they they the people i was
working for are amused that i said that
it doesn't really mean anything
okay i mean is there some
deep profound insights to draw from like
how you problem solve from that because
this is always what i say i'm like do
you want to be a good programmer do it
for 20 years
yeah there's no shortcuts yeah
what are your thoughts on crypto in
general so would
what what parts technically or
philosophically do you find especially
beautiful maybe
oh i'm extremely bullish on crypto long
term not any specific crypto project
but this idea of
well two ideas one um
the nakamoto consensus algorithm is
i think one of the greatest innovations
of the 21st century
this idea that people can reach
consensus you can reach a group
consensus
using a relatively straightforward
algorithm
um is wild and
like you know satoshi nakamoto people
always ask me who i look up to it's like
whoever that is who do you think it is i
mean
elon musk is it you it is definitely not
me and i do not think it's elon musk
but yeah this idea of uh
groups reaching consensus in a
decentralized yet formulaic way
is one extremely powerful idea from
crypto
maybe the second idea is this idea of
smart contracts
when you write a contract between two
parties
any contract um this contract
if there are disputes it's interpreted
by lawyers
lawyers are just really shitty overpaid
interpreters
imagine you had let's talk about them in
terms of a in terms of like let's
compare a lawyer to python
right so lawyer well okay that's really
oh i never thought of it that way it's
hilarious
so python i'm paying i'm paying um
you know even 10 cents an hour i'll use
the nice azure machine i can run python
for 10 cents an hour
lawyers cost a thousand dollars an hour
so python is is is
10 000 x uh better on that axis um
lawyers don't always return the same
answer
um python almost always does
uh cost
yeah i mean just just cost reliability
everything about python is so much
better than lawyers um so if you can
make smart contracts
this whole concept of code is law
i i love and i would love to live in a
world where everybody accepted that fact
so so maybe uh you can talk about what
smart contracts
are so let's say um
let's say you know we have a uh
even something as simple as a safety
deposit box
right safety deposit box that holds a
million dollars
i have a contract with the bank that
says two out of these three parties
uh must uh be present to open the safety
deposit box and get the money out
so that's a contract for the bank and
it's only as good as the bank and the
lawyers right
let's say you know somebody dies and now
oh we're going to go through a big legal
dispute about whether oh well was it in
the will was it not in the well
what like it's just so messy and the
cost
to determine truth is so expensive
versus a smart contract which just uses
cryptography to check if two out of
three keys are present
well i can look at that and i can have
certainty
in the answer that it's going to return
that's what all businesses want
certainty you know they say businesses
don't care viacom youtube
youtube's like look we don't care which
way this lawsuit goes
just please tell us so we can have
certainty yeah i wonder how many
agreements in this world because we're
talking about financial transactions
only in this case correct the smart the
smart contracts oh you can go to you can
go to anything
you can go you could put a prenup in the
theorem blockchain
a married smart contract sorry divorce
lawyers sorry you're going gonna be
replaced by
python uh
okay so that's uh
so that's that's another beautiful idea
do you think
there's something that's appealing to
you about any one specific
implementation
so if you look 10 20 50 years down the
line
do you see any like bitcoin ethereum
any of the other hundreds of
cryptocurrencies winning out is there
like what's your intuition about the
space are you just sitting back and
watching the chaos and look who cares
what emerges
oh i don't i don't speculate i don't
really care i don't really care which
one of these projects wins
i'm kind of in the bitcoin as a meme
coin camp i mean why does bitcoin have
value
it's technically kind of you know
what yeah not great like the block size
debate or
when i found out what the block size
debate was i'm like are you guys
kidding what's the block size debate
you know what it's really it's too
stupid to even talk about people
people people can look it up but i'm
like wow you know ethereum seems the
governance of ethereum seems much better
um i've come around i've been on proof
of stake ideas
uh you know very smart people thinking
about some things yeah
you know governance is interesting it
does feel like uh
vitalik it could just feel like an
open in even in these distributed
systems leaders and
are helpful because they kind of
help you drive the mission and the
vision
and they put a face to a project it's a
weird thing about us humans
geniuses are helpful like mattel right
yeah
brilliant
leaders are not necessarily yeah
so you think the reason he's uh he's the
face
of a theorem is because he's a genius
that's interesting
i mean that was um
it's interesting to think about that we
need to create systems
in which uh the quote unquote leaders
that emerge
are the geniuses in the system i mean
that's
arguably why the current state of
democracy is broken is the people who
are
emerging as the leaders are not the most
competent are not the superstars of the
system
and it seems like at least for now in
the crypto world oftentimes
the leaders are the superstars imagine
at the debate they asked
what's the sixth amendment what are the
four fundamental forces in the universe
right what's the integral of two to the
x
yeah i i'd love to see those questions
asked and that's what i want as our
leader
it's it's a little bit of a bayes rule
yeah i mean even oh wow you're hurting
my brain
it's that my standard was even lower but
i would have loved to see just this
basic
brilliance like i've talked to
historians there's just these
they're not even like they don't have a
phd or even education history they just
like a dan carlin type character who
just like
holy how did all this information
get into your head
they're able to just connect uh genghis
khan to
the entirety of the history of the 20th
century they
they know everything about every single
battle that happened
and they know the the the like
the game of thrones of the of the
different power plays and all that
happened there
and they know like the individuals they
know all the documents involved
and it's and that they integrate that
into their regular life it's not like
they're ultra history nerds they're just
they know this information that's what
competence looks like yeah
because i've seen that with programmers
too right that's what great programmers
do
but yeah it would be uh it's really
unfortunate that those kinds of people
aren't emerging as as our leaders but
for
now at least in the crypto world that
seems to be the case
i don't know if that always uh you could
imagine that in a hundred years that's
not the case right the crypto world has
one very powerful idea going for it and
that's the idea of forks
right i mean
you know imagine uh
we'll use a less controversial example
um this was actually in my joke
uh app in 2012 i was like barack obama
mitt romney let's let him both be
president right like imagine we could
fork america
and just let them both be president and
then the americas could compete
and you know people could invest in one
pull their liquidity out of one put it
in the other
you have this in the crypto world
ethereum forks into ethereum and
ethereum classic
and you can pull your liquidity out of
one and put it in another
and people vote with their dollars um
which forks companies should be able to
fork
i'd love to fork nvidia you know
yeah like different business strategies
and yeah and then try them out and see
see what works like even take uh
uh yeah take comedy i that closes its
source
and then take one that's open source and
see what works
take one that's purchased by gm and one
that remains
android renegade and all these different
versions and see the beauty of comma ai
is someone could actually do that
yeah please take come ai and fork it
that's right
that's the beauty of open source so
you're i mean
we'll talk about autonomous vehicle
space but it does seem that
you're really knowledgeable about
a lot of different topics so the natural
question a bunch of people ask this
which is
uh how do you keep learning new things
do you have
like practical advice if you were to
introspect
like taking notes allocate time
or do you just mess around and just
allow your curiosity to drive i'll write
these people a self-help book and i'll
charge 67
for it and i will i will write i will
write chapter one i will write on the
cover of the self-help
book all of this advice is completely
meaningless you're gonna be a sucker and
buy this book anyway
yeah and the one lesson that i hope they
take away from the book
is that i can't give you a meaningful
answer to that
that's interesting let me translate that
is you haven't really thought about what
it is you do
systematically because you could reduce
it and there's some people i mean i've
met
brilliant people that this is really
clear with athletes
some are just you know the best in the
world that's something
and they they have zero interest in
writing like a self-help book
but or how to master this game and then
there's
some athletes who become great coaches
and they love the analysis
perhaps the over analysis and you right
now at least at your age
which isn't interesting you're in the
middle of the battle you're like the
warriors that have zero interest in
writing books
uh so you're in the middle of the battle
so you have yeah
this is this is a fair point i do think
i have a certain aversion
to um this kind of deliberate
intentional way of living life
here eventually the hilarity of this
especially
since this is recorded
it will reveal beautifully the absurdity
when you finally do publish this book
and i guarantee you you will the story
of comma ai
would be maybe it'll be a biography
written about you
they'll be they'll be better i guess and
you might be able to learn some cute
lessons if you're starting a company
like comma ai from that book
but if you're asking generic questions
like how do i be good at things
dude i don't know well learn i mean the
interesting do them a lot
i do them a lot but the interesting
thing here is
learning things outside
of your current trajectory which is what
it feels like from an outsider's
perspective i mean that
uh you know that i don't know if there's
an advice on that
but it is an interesting curiosity when
you become really busy
you're running a company
part time yeah
but like there's a natural inclination
and
trend like just the the the momentum of
life
carries you into a particular direction
of wanting to focus and this kind of
dispersion that curiosity can lead to
gets harder and harder with time because
you're
you get really good at certain things
and it sucks
trying things that you're not good at
like trying to figure them out
you do this with your live streams
you're on the
fly figuring stuff out you don't mind
looking dumb
you just figured out figure it out
pretty quickly sometimes i try things
and i don't figure them out
my chest rating is like a 1400 despite
putting like
a couple hundred hours in it's pathetic
i mean to be fair i know that i could do
it better if i did it better like don't
play you know don't play five-minute
games play 15-minute games at least like
i know these things but it just doesn't
it doesn't stick nicely in my knowledge
tree
all right let's talk about comma ai
what's the mission of the company
let's like look at the biggest picture
oh i have an exact statement
solve self-driving cars while delivering
shippable intermediaries
so long-term vision is have
fully autonomous vehicles and make sure
you're making money along the way
i think it doesn't really speak to money
but i can talk i can talk about what
solve self-driving cars means
solve self-driving cars of course means
um
you're not building a new car you're
building a person replacement
uh that person can sit in the driver's
seat and drive you anywhere a person can
drive
with a human or better level of safety
speed quality comfort
and what's the second part of that
delivering shippable intermediaries
um is well it's a way to fund the
company that's true but it's also a way
to keep us honest
uh if you don't have that it is very
easy
with this technology to think you're
making progress when you're not
i've heard it best described on hacker
news as
you can set any arbitrary milestone
meet that milestone and still be
infinitely far away from solving
self-driving cars
so it's hard to have like real deadlines
when you're like
cruz or waymo
when uh you don't have uh revenue
is that i mean is revenue essentially
the thing we're talking about here
revenue is
is capitalism is based around consent
capitalism the way that you get revenue
is kind of
real capitalism commas in the real
capital is in camp there's definitely
scams out there but
real capitalism is based around consent
it's based around this idea that like if
we're getting revenue
it's because we're providing at least
that much value another person when
someone buys a thousand dollar comment
two from us
we're providing them at least a thousand
dollars of value where they wouldn't buy
it brilliant
so can you give a whirlwind overview of
the products that come i
provides like uh throughout its history
and today
i mean yeah the past ones aren't really
that interesting it's kind of just been
refinement of the same idea uh
the real only product we sell today is
the comma two which is a piece of
hardware
with cameras um so the comet to
i mean you can think about it kind of
like a person uh you know when future
hardware will probably be even more and
more person-like
um so it has uh you know eyes
ears a mouth a brain
uh and a way to interface with the car
does it have consciousness
just kidding that was a trick question
because i don't have consciousness
either
me and the common two are the same
they're the same i have a little more
compute than it
it only has like the same computer
interesting b
uh you know you're more efficient energy
wise
for the compute you're doing far more
efficient energy-wise
huh 20 paid flaps 20 watts crazy you
lack consciousness
sure do you fear death you do you want
immortality
does comey i fear death i don't think so
of course it does it very much fears
while it fears negative loss
oh yeah okay
so come a comma two when did that come
out that that was a year ago
no two uh early this year
wow time it feels like yeah
2020 feels like uh it's taken 10 years
to get to the end it's a long year
it's a long year so um
what uh what's the sexiest thing about
comma
too feature-wise so i mean maybe you can
also link on like
what is it like what's its purpose
because there's a hardware there's a
software component
you've mentioned the sensors but also
like what is of its features and
capabilities
i think our slogan summarizes it well uh
comma slogan is make driving chill
i love it okay yeah i mean it is
you know if you like cruise control
imagine cruise control but much much
more
so it can uh do adaptive cruise control
things which is like slow down for cars
in front of it maintain a certain speed
and you can also do lane keeping so
staying in the lane
and doing it better and better and
better over time that's very much
machine learning based
so this camera is there's a driver
facing camera
too that's
um what else is there what am i thinking
so the hardware versus software so
open pilot versus the actual hardware of
the device
what's can you draw that distinction
what's one what's the other i mean the
hardware is pretty much
a cell phone with a few additions a cell
phone with a cooling system
and with a car interface connecting to
it
and as by cell phone you mean uh like
qualcomm snapdragon
uh yeah the current hardware is a
snapdragon 821
uh it has wi-fi radio it has an lte
radio it has a screen
uh we use every part of the cell phone
and then the interface of the car is
specific to the car so you keep
supporting more and more cars
um yeah so the interface to the car i
mean the device itself just has four can
buses
has four cam interfaces on it that are
connected through the usb port to the
phone
um and then yeah on those four can buses
uh you connect it to the car and there's
a little harness to do this
cars are actually surprisingly similar
so can is the the protocol by which cars
communicate
and then you're able to read stuff and
write stuff to be able to control the
car
depending on the car so what's the
software side what's open pilot
um so i mean open pilot is the hardware
is pretty simple compared to open pilot
open pilot is
uh well
so you have a machine learning model
which it's an open pilot it's a
you know it's a blob it's just a blob of
weights it's not like people are like oh
it's closed source i'm like it's a blob
of weights what do you expect
um you know primarily neural network
based
ul open pilot is all the software kind
of around that neural network that if
you have a neural network that says
here's where you want to send the car
openpilot actually goes and executes all
of that
it cleans up the input to the neural
network it cleans up the output and
executes on it so it connects
it's the glue that connects everything
together runs the sensors does a bunch
of calibration for the neural network
does you know deals with like you know
if the car is on a banked road
uh you have to counter steer against
that and the neural network can't
necessarily know that by looking at the
picture
so you do that with with other sensors
infusion and localizer
openpilot also is responsible for
sending the data up to our servers so we
can learn from it
logging it recording it running the
cameras thermally managing the device
managing the disk space on the device
managing all the resources of the device
so what um since we last spoke i don't
remember when maybe a year ago maybe a
little bit longer
how uh has open pilot improved we did
exactly what i promised you
i promised you that by the end of the
year you'd be able to remove the lanes
um the lateral policy is now
uh almost completely end to end you can
turn the lanes off and it will drive
drive slightly worse on the highway if
you turn the lanes off but you can turn
the lanes off and it will drive
well trained completely end to end on
user data
um and this year we hope to do the same
for the longitudinal policy so that's
the interesting thing
is you're not doing you don't appear to
be you can correct me you don't appear
to be doing lean
detection or lane marking detection or
kind of the segmentation task or
any kind of object detection task you're
doing what's
traditionally more called like
end-to-end learning
so and trained on actual behavior of
drivers
when they're driving the car manually
and this is hard to do you know it's not
supervised learning
yeah but uh so the nice thing is there's
a lot of data so it's hard and easy
right it's uh we have a lot of high
quality data yeah
like more than you need in the senate
well we way more than we do we have way
more data than we need
i mean it's it's an interesting question
actually because
in terms of amount you have more than
you need
but the you know driving is full of edge
cases so how do you
select the data you train on
i i think this is an interesting open
question like what's
what's the cleverest way to select data
that's the question tesla is probably
working on
uh that's i mean the entirety of machine
learning can be they don't seem to
really care they just kind of select
data but i feel like that
if you want to solve if you want to
create intelligent systems you have to
pick data well
right and so would you have any hints
ideas of how to do it well
so in some ways that is the definition i
like of reinforcement learning versus
supervised learning
in supervised learning the weights
depend on the data
right um and this is obviously true but
the
uh in reinforcement learning the data
depends on the weights
yeah right and actually both ways that's
that's poetry
so it's brilliant how does it know what
data to turn on well let it pick
we're not there yet but that's the
eventual so you're thinking this
almost like a reinforcement learning
framework we're going to do rl on the
world
every time a car makes a mistake user
disengages we
train on that and do our all in the
world ship out a new model that's an
epoch right
and uh for now you're not
doing the elon style promising that it's
going to be fully autonomous you really
are sticking to level two
and like it's supposed to be supervised
oh it is definitely supposed to be
supervising reinforced the fact that
it's supervised
um we look at our rate of improvement
in disengagements um open pilot now has
an unplanned engagement about every 100
miles
this is up from 10 miles like
maybe maybe uh
maybe a year ago yeah so maybe we've
seen 10x improvement in a year but
a hundred miles is still a far cry from
the hundred thousand you're going to
need
so you're going to somehow need to get
um
three more 10xs in there and your
what's your intuition uh you're
basically hoping that there's
exponential improvement built into the
baked into the cake somewhere well
that's even like i mean 10x improvement
that's already assuming exponential
right there's definitely exponential
improvement and i think when elon talks
about exponential like
these things these systems are going to
exponentially improve
just exponential doesn't mean you're
getting 100 gigahertz processors
tomorrow
right like it's going to still take a
while because the gap
between even our best system and humans
is still large
so that's an interesting distinction to
draw so if you look at the way tesla's
approaching the problem
and the way you're approaching the
problem which is very different than the
rest of the
self-driving car world so let's put them
aside
is you're treating most the driving task
is a machine learning problem
and the way tesla is approaching it is
with the multi-task learning
where you break the task of driving into
hundreds of different desks
and you have this multi-headed neural
network that's very good at
performing each task and there there's
presumably something on top that's
stitching stuff together in order to uh
make controlled decisions policy
decisions about how you move the car
but what that allows you there's a
brilliance to this because it allows you
to
um master each task like
lane detection uh stop sign detection
traffic light detection uh drivable area
segmentation
uh you know vehicle bicycle pedestrian
detection
uh there's some localization tasks in
there
also predicting of
like yeah predicting how the the
entities in the scene are going to move
like everything is basically a machine
learning task well there's a
classification
segmentation prediction and
it's nice because you can have this
entire engine data engine that's mining
for edge cases
for each one of these tasks and you can
have people like engineers that are
basically masters of that task
like becoming the best person in the
world that uh as you talk about the cone
guy
for uh for for waymo the good old phone
guy
the the becoming the best person in the
world at uh at uh
at cone detection i i so that's a
compelling notion from a supervised
learning perspective
automating much of the process of
educates discovery and retraining neural
network for each of the individual
perception tasks and then you're looking
at the machine learning
in a more holistic way basically doing
end-to-end learning
on the driving task supervised trained
on the data of the actual
driving of people that use comma ai
like actual human drivers do manual
control plus the
moments of disengagement that uh
maybe with some labeling could indicate
the failure of the system so you have
the
you have a huge amount of data for
positive
control of the vehicle like successful
control of the vehicle
both maintaining the lane as as i think
you're also working on
longitudinal control of the vehicle and
then failure cases where the vehicle
does something
wrong that needs disengagement
so like what why do you think you're
right and tesla is wrong
on this and do you think do you think
you'll come around the tesla way do you
think tesla will come around
to your way if you were to start a chess
engine company
would you hire a bishop guy see we have
uh this is monday morning quarterbacking
as uh yes probably
[Laughter]
so oh oh our rook guy oh we stole the
rook guy from that company oh we're
gonna have real good
rooks well there's not many pieces right
you can uh yeah there's not many
guys and gals to hire you just have a
few that work on the bishop a few that
work in the rook
but is that not ludicrous today to think
about in in the world of alpha zero
but alpha zero is jessica so the the
fundamental question
is how hard is driving compared to chess
because so long term end to end
will be the right solution the question
is how many years away is that
end-to-end is going to be the only
solution for level five for the only way
we can
of course and of course tesla's gonna
come around to my way and if you're a
rook guy out there i'm sorry
the cone guy i don't know we're gonna
specialize each task we're gonna really
understand
rook placement yeah i understand the
intuition you have
i mean that
that uh is very compelling notion that
we can learn the task and to end
like the same compelling notion you
might have for natural language
conversation
i'm not sure
because one thing you sneaked in there
is the assertion that
it's impossible to get to level five
without this kind of approach
i don't know if that's obvious i don't
know if that's obvious either i don't
actually uh mean that i think that it is
much easier
to get to level five with an end-to-end
approach i think that the other approach
is
doable but the magnitude of the
engineering challenge may exceed what
humanity is capable of
so but what do you think of the tesla
data engine approach which to me is an
active learning task is kind of
fascinating
is breaking it down into these multiple
tasks and
mining their data constantly for like
edge cases
for these different tasks but the tasks
themselves are not being learned this is
feature engineering
yeah i mean it's it's a it's a higher
abstraction level of feature engineering
for the different tasks
it's task engineering in a sense it's
slightly better feature engineering but
it still fundamentally is feature
engineering
and anything about the history of ai has
taught us anything
it's that feature engineering approaches
will always be replaced and lose
to end to end now to be fair i cannot
really make promises on timelines
but i can say that when you look at the
code for stockfish and the code for
alpha zero
one is a lot shorter than the other a
lot more elegant required a lot less
programmer hours to write
yeah but there was a lot more murder
of bad uh
agents on the uh alpha zero side
by murder i mean uh agents that played a
game and failed miserably
yeah oh in simulation that failure is
less costly yeah in in real world it's
wait do you mean in practice like alpha
zero has lost games miserably
no well i haven't seen that no but i
know but the the
the the requirement for alpha zero is a
simulator
to be able to like evolution human
evolution
not human evolution biological evolution
of life on earth from the origin of life
has murdered trillions upon trillions of
organisms
on the path to us humans yeah so the
question is can
can we uh stitch together a human-like
object without having to go through the
entirety process of evolution
well no but do the evolution in
simulation yeah that's the question can
we simulate so do you have a sense
that's possible to simulate some
mu zero is exactly this mu zero is
is the solution to this mu zero i think
is going to look be looked back
as the canonical paper and i don't think
deep learning is everything i think that
there's still a bunch of things missing
to get there
but mu zero i think is going to be
looked back as the kind of cornerstone
paper
um of this whole deep learning era
and mu zero is the solution to
self-driving cars you have to make a few
tweaks to it
but mu0 does effectively that it does
those roll outs
and those murdering in in a learned
simulator in a learned dynamics model
it's interesting it doesn't get enough
love i was blown away when i i was blown
away when i read that paper i'm like
you know okay i've always had a comma
i'm gonna sit and i'm gonna wait for the
solution to self-driving cars to come
along
this year i saw it it's me zero yeah
so uh sit back and let the winning roll
in
so your sense just to elaborate a little
bit
to link on the topic your senses in your
networks will solve driving
yes like we don't need anything else i
think the same way chess was maybe the
chess and maybe google are the pinnacle
of like
search algorithms and things that look
kind of like a star
um the pinnacle of
this era is going to be self-driving
cars
but on the path of that you have to
deliver products
and it's possible that the path to full
self-driving cars
will take decades i doubt it so how long
would you put on it
like what what are we you're chasing it
tesla's chasing it what are we talking
about five years 10 years
50 years in the 2020s in the 2020s
the later part of the 2020s
with the neural network well that would
be nice to see and on the path to that
you're delivering products
which is a nice l2 system that's what
tesla's doing a nice l2 system i'm just
going to do better every time
l2 the only difference between l2 and
the other levels is who takes liability
and
i'm not a liability guy i want to take
liability level 2 forever
now on that little transition i mean
how do you make the transition work is
uh is this where driver sensing
comes in like how do you make the
because you said
100 miles like is is there some
sort of human factor psychology thing
where people start to over trust the
system all those kinds of
effects once it gets better and better
and better and better they get lazier
and lazier and lazier
is that like how do you get that
transition right first off our
monitoring is already adaptive
our monitoring is already seen adaptive
driver monitoring
is this the camera that's looking at the
driver you have an infrared camera
in the our policy for
how we enforce the driver monitoring is
scene adaptive what's that mean
well for example in one of the extreme
cases um
if you uh if the car is not moving we do
not
uh actively enforce driver monitor right
um if you are going through a
uh like a 45 mile an hour road with
lights
um and stop signs and potentially
pedestrians we enforce a very tight
driver monitoring policy
if you are alone on a perfectly straight
highway
um and this is it's all machine learning
none of that is hand coded
actually the stop is hand coded but so
there's some kind of machine learning
estimation of risk yes yeah i mean i've
always been a huge fan of that that
that's uh because it's difficult to do
every step into that direction
is a worthwhile step to take it might be
difficult to do really well like us
humans are able to
estimate risk pretty damn well whatever
the hell that is
that feels like one of the nice features
of us humans
uh because like we humans are really
good drivers when we're really like
tuned in and we're good at estimating
risk like when are we supposed to be
tuned in
yeah and you know people are like oh
well you know why would you ever make
the driver monitoring policy
less aggressive why would you always not
keep it at its most aggressive
because then people are just going to
get fatigued from it yes when they get
annoyed
you want them yeah you they want you
want the experience to be pleasant
obviously i want the experience to be
pleasant but even just from a straight
up safety perspective
if you alert people when they look
around and they're like
why is this thing alerting me there's
nothing i could possibly hit right now
people will just learn to tune it out
people will just learn to tune it out to
put weights on the steering wheel to do
whatever to overcome it
and remember that you're always part of
this adaptive system so
all i can really say about you know how
this scale is going forward is yeah
something we have to monitor for
we don't know this is a great psychology
experiment at scale like we'll see
yeah it's fascinating track it and
making sure you have a good
understanding of attention is a very key
part of that psychology problem
yeah i think i mean you and i probably
have a different come to it differently
but to me
it's an it's a fascinating psychology
problem to explore something much deeper
than just driving
it's a it's such a nice way to explore
human
attention and human behavior
which is why again we've probably both
criticized
mr elon musk on this one topic from
different
avenues uh so both offline and online i
had little chats with elon and
like i love human beings as a as a
as a computer vision problem as an ai
problem it's fascinating
he wasn't so much interested in that
problem
it's like in order to solve driving the
whole point is you want to remove the
human from the picture
and it seems like you can't do that
quite yet eventually yes but
you can't quite do that yet so
this is the moment where and you can't
yet say
i told you so uh to tesla
but it's getting there because i don't
know if you've seen this there's some
reporting that they're in fact starting
to do
drive them off yeah they ship the model
in shadow mode
uh without uh i believe only a visible
light camera it might even be fisheye
uh it's like a low resolution low
resolution visible light
i mean to be fair that's what we have in
the eon as well our last generation
product
this is the one area where i can say our
hardware's ahead of tesla the rest of
our hardware way way behind but our
driver monitoring camera
do you think uh i think on the
third row tesla podcast or somewhere
else i've heard you say that
obviously eventually they're gonna have
driver monitoring
i think what i've said is elon will
definitely ship driver monitoring before
he ships level five the beautiful level
and i'm willing to about 10 grand on
that and you better ground on that
uh i mean now i want to take the bet but
before maybe someone would have i should
have got my money
yeah that's an interesting bet i think i
i think you're right i'm actually
on a human level because he's been
he's made the decision like he said that
driver monitoring is the wrong way to go
but like you have to think of as a human
as a ceo
i think that's the right thing to say
when like
sometimes you have to say things
publicly they're different than when you
actually believe
because when you're producing a large
number of vehicles
and the decision was made not to include
the camera like what are you supposed to
say
yeah like our cars don't have the thing
that i think is right to have
uh it's an interesting thing but like on
the other side as a ceo i mean something
you could probably speak to
as a leader i think about me as a human
to publicly change your mind on
something how hard is that
well especially when like
george haas say i told you so
all i will say is i am not a leader and
i am happy to change my mind
um and i think elon will
yeah i do i think he'll come up with a
good way to
make it psychologically okay for him
well
it's such an important thing man
especially for a first principles
thinker because he made a decision
that uh driver monitoring is not the
right way to go and i could see that
decision
and i i could even make that decision
like i was on the fence
too like i'm not driving monitoring
is such an obvious simple solution to
the problem of attention
it's not obvious to me that just by
putting a camera there you solve
things you have to create an
incredible compelling experience just
like you're you're talking about
and i don't know if it's easy to do that
it's not at all easy to do that in fact
i think
so as a creator of a car that's trying
to
create a product that people love which
is what tesla tries to do right
it's not obvious to me that uh you know
as a design decision whether adding a
camera
is a good idea from a safety perspective
either like
in the human factors community everybody
says
that like you should obviously have
driver sensing driving monitoring
but like that
that's like saying it's obvious as
parents you shouldn't let your kids go
out at night
but okay but like
they're still gonna find ways to do
drugs
yeah you have to also be good parents so
like it's it's much more complicated
than just like
you need to have drive and monitoring i
totally disagree on
okay if you have a camera there and the
camera's watching the person
but never throws an alert they'll never
think about it
right the the driver monitoring policy
that you choose to how you choose to
communicate with the user is
entirely separate from the data
collection perspective right
right so you know like
there's one thing to say like you know
tell your teenager they can't do
something
there's another thing to like you know
gather the data so you can
make informed decisions that's really
interesting but you have to make that
that's the interesting thing about cars
uh but even true with com ai
like you don't have to manufacture the
thing into the car
is you have to make a decision that
anticipates
the right strategy long term so like you
have to start collecting the data
and start making decisions starter date
started it three years ago
i believe that we have the best driver
monitoring solution in the world
um i think that when you compare it to
well supercruise is the only other one
that i really know that shipped
and ours is better what uh
what do you like and not like about
super coos um i mean i had a few
super crews uh the sun would be shining
through the window
would blind the camera and it would say
i wasn't paying attention when i was
looking completely straight
i couldn't reset the attention with a
steering wheel touch and supercrews
would disengage
like i was communicating to the car i'm
like look i'm here i'm paying attention
why are you really gonna force me to
disengage and
it did um so it's it's a constant
conversation with the user and yeah
there's no way to ship a system like
this if you can ota
right we're shipping a new one every
month sometimes we we
balance it with our users on discord
like when sometimes we make the driver
monitoring a little more aggressive and
people complain
sometimes they don't you know we want it
to be as aggressive as possible where
people
don't complain it doesn't feel intrusive
so being able to update the system over
the air is an essential component
i mean that's probably to me you
mentioned uh
i mean to me that is the biggest
innovation of tesla
that it it made it people realize that
over-the-air updates
is essential yeah i mean
yeah was that not obvious from the
iphone the iphone was the first real
product that ota'ed i think
was it actually that's that's brilliant
you're right i mean the game consoles
used to not right
the game consoles are maybe the second
thing that did well i didn't really
think about
one of the amazing features of a
smartphone
isn't just like the touchscreen isn't
the thing
it's the ability to constantly update
yeah
get better it gets better
i love my ios 14. uh
one thing that i probably disagree with
you on on driving monitoring
is you've said that it's easy like i
mean you you tend to say stuff is easy
the uh i guess you said it's easy
relative to the
external perception problem
can you elaborate why you think it's
easy feature engineering works
for driver monitoring feature
engineering does not work for the
external
so human faces are not
human faces and the movement of human
faces and head
and body is not as variable as the
external environment
is your intuition um yes and there's
another big difference as well um your
reliability of a driver monitoring
system
doesn't actually need to be that high
the uncertainty
if you have something that's detecting
whether the human is paying attention it
only works 92
of the time you're still getting almost
all the benefit of that because
the human like you're training the human
yeah right you're you're dealing with a
system that's
really helping you out it's a
conversation it's not
like the external thing where guess what
if you swerve into a tree you swerve
into a tree
right like you get no margin for error
yeah i think that's really well put i
i i think that's the right exactly the
place
where um where comparing to the external
perception the control problem
driver monitoring is easier because you
know the bar for success is much lower
yeah but i i still think like the human
face
is more complicated actually than the
external environment but for driving you
don't give a damn
i don't need you i don't need something
i don't need something that complicated
to to to have to communicate the idea
to the human that i want to communicate
which is yo
system might mess up here you got to pay
attention
yeah see that's that's my love and
fascination is the
the human face and it feels like this is
a nice place to um create products that
create an experience in the car
so like it feels like there should be
more richer experiences
in the car you know like that's an
opportunity for
like something like my eye or just any
kind of system like a tesla or any of
the autonomous vehicle companies
is because software's and there's much
more sensors
and so much is running on software and
you're doing machine learning anyway
there's an opportunity to create totally
new experiences
that we're not even anticipating you
don't think so
no you think it's a box that gets you
from a to b and you want to do it
chill yeah i mean i think as soon as we
get to level three on highways okay
enjoy your candy crush
enjoy your hulu enjoy your
you know whatever whatever sure you get
this you can look at screens basically
versus right now what do you have music
and audio books so level three is where
you can kind of disengage in
in stretches of time
[Music]
[Applause]
well you think level three is possible
like on the highway going for 100 miles
and you can just go to sleep oh yeah
uh sleep so again
i think it's really all on a spectrum i
think that
being able to use your phone while
you're on the highway
and like this all being okay and being
aware that the car might alert you and
you have five seconds to basically
so the five second thing that you think
is possible yeah i think it is oh yeah
not not in all scenarios right some
scenarios it's not
it's the whole risk thing that you
mentioned is nice is to be able to
estimate like
how risky is this situation exactly
that's really important to understand
one other thing you mentioned comparing
comma and
autopilot is that um
something about the haptic feel of the
way combo controls the car
when things are uncertain like it
behaves a little bit more uncertain when
things are uncertain
that's kind of an interesting point and
then autopilot is much more confident
always even when it's uncertain until it
runs into trouble
yeah that's that's a funny thing i
actually mentioned that to elon i think
and then the first time we talked he
wasn't biting
is like communicating uncertainty i
guess comet doesn't really communicate
uncertainty explicitly communicates it
through haptic feel
like what what's the role of
communicating uncertainty do you think
oh we do some stuff explicitly like we
do detect the lanes when you're on the
highway and we'll show you how many
lanes we're using to drive with
you can look at where it thinks the
lanes are you can look at um
the path and yeah we want to be better
about this we're actually hiring
i want to hire some new ui people ui
people you mentioned this because it's
such an
it's a ui problem too right it's we're
we have a great designer now
but you know we need people who are just
gonna like build this and debug these
uis
qt people and okay is that what the ui
has done with this key
we're moving the new ui is in qt c plus
plus qt
uses it yeah we had some react stuff in
there
react js would just react react is his
own language right
react native reaction react to the
javascript framework
yeah it's all it's all based on
javascript but it's
you know i like c plus plus
what do you think about uh dojo with
tesla
and their foray into what appears to be
specialized hardware for uh training
neonets
i guess it's something maybe you can
correct me from my
shallow looking at it it seems like
something like google did with tpus but
specialized
for uh driving data i don't think it's
specialized for driving data
it's just legit just tpu they want to
inter go the apple way basically
everything required in the chain is done
in-house well so you have a problem
right now and
this is one of my one of my concerns i
really would like to see
somebody deal with this if anyone out
there is doing it i'd like to help them
if i can
um you basically have two options right
now to train
your options are nvidia or google
so google is not even an option
their tpus are only available in google
cloud
google has absolutely onerous terms of
service restrictions
uh they may have changed it but back in
google's terms of service it said
explicitly you are not allowed to use
google cloud ml
for training autonomous vehicles or for
doing anything that competes with google
without google's prior written
permission
well okay i mean google is not a
platform company
uh i wouldn't i wouldn't touch tpus with
a 10-foot pole
so that leaves you with the monopoly uh
nvidia and video
so i mean that you're not a fan of well
look i was a huge fan of in 2016 nvidia
jensen came sat in the car um
cool guy when the stock was 30 a share
uh nvidia stock has skyrocketed i
witnessed a real
change in who was in management over
there in like 2018
and now they are let's exploit let's
take every dollar we possibly can out of
this ecosystem
let's charge ten thousand dollars for
a100s because we know we got the best
in the game
and let's charge ten thousand dollars
for an a100
when it's really not that different from
3080 which is 699.
um the margins that they are making off
of those high-end chips are
so high that i mean i think they're
shooting themselves in the foot just
from a business perspective
because there's a lot of people talking
like me now who are like somebody's got
taken video down
yeah where they could dominate it nvidia
could be the new intel
yeah to be in inside everything
essentially
and and yet the winners in in certain
spaces like
autonomous driving the winners only the
people who are like
desperately falling back and trying to
catch up and have a ton of money
like the big automakers are the ones
interested in partnering with nvidia
oh and then i think a lot of those
things are going to fall through if i
were nvidia
sell chips sell chips at a reasonable
markup
to everybody to everybody without any
restrictions without any restrictions
intel did this look at intel they had a
great long run
nvidia is trying to turn their they're
like trying to productize their chips
way too much they're trying to extract
way more value than they can sustainably
sure you can do it tomorrow is it going
to up your share price sure if you're
one of those ceos
like how much can i strip mine this
company and you know and that's what's
weird about it too
like the ceo is the founder it's the
same guy yeah i mean i still think
jensen's a great guy that's great why do
this
you have a choice you have a choice
right now are you trying to cash out are
you trying to buy a yacht
if you are fine but if you're trying to
be
the next huge semiconductor company sell
chips
well the the interesting thing about
jensen is he is
a big vision guy so he has
a plan like for 50 years down the road
so it makes me wonder like how does
price gouging fit into it yeah how does
that
like it's it doesn't seem to make sense
to plan
i worry that he's listening to the wrong
people yeah that that's the sense i have
too sometimes because i despite
everything
i think nvidia is an incredible company
well one
sort of i'm deeply grateful to nvidia
for the products they've created me to
pass right
and so the 1080 ti was a great gpu still
have a lot of them
it was yeah but
at the same time it just feels like
feels like you don't want to put all
your stock in nvidia and so like elon
is doing um what tesla is doing with
autopilot and dojo
is the apple way is because they're not
going to share dojo with uh george hotz
uh
i i know they should sell that chip
oh they should sell their even their
their accelerator the accelerator that's
in all the cars the 30 watt one
sell it why not so open it up
make me why does this have to be a car
company
well if you sell the chip here's what
you get yeah
make some money off the chips it doesn't
take away from your chip
you're going to make some money free
money and also
the world is going to build an ecosystem
of tooling for you
right you're not going to have to fix
the bug in your tanh layer
someone else already did well the
question that's an interesting question
i mean that's the
question steve jobs asked that's the
question elon musk is
uh perhaps asking is uh
do you want tesla stuff inside other
vehicles in
inside potentially inside like uh irobot
vacuum cleaner
yeah i think you should decide where
your advantages are
i'm not saying tesla should start
selling battery packs to automakers
because battery packs to automakers they
are straight up in competition with you
if i were tesla i'd keep the battery
technology totally yeah ssr's we make
batteries
but the thing about the tesla tpu um
is anybody can build that it's just a
question of you know
are you willing to spend the you know
the money it could be a huge source of
revenue potentially
are you willing to spend 100 million
dollars right anyone can build it
and someone will and a bunch of
companies now are starting trying to
build ai accelerators somebody's going
to get the idea right
and yeah hopefully they don't get greedy
because they'll just lose to the next
guy who finally and then eventually the
chinese are going to make knock off and
video chips and that's
from your perspective i don't know if
you're also paying attention to stan
tesla for a moment
all dave elon musk has talked about a
complete rewrite
of uh the neural net that they're using
that seems to
again i'm half paying attention but it
seems to involve
basically a kind of integration of all
the sensors to where
it's a four dimensional view you know
you have a 3d
model of the world over time and then
you can i think it's done
both for the for actually you know
so the neural network is able to in a
more holistic way deal with the world
and make predictions and so on
but also to make the annotation task
more uh
you know easier like you can annotate
the world
in one place and then kind of distribute
itself across the sensors and
across a different like the hundreds of
tasks that are involved
in the hydronet what are your thoughts
about this rewrite is it just like some
details
that are kind of obvious there are steps
that should be taken or is there
something fundamental
that could challenge your idea that end
to end is the right solution
uh we're in the middle of a bakery right
now as well we haven't shipped a new
model in a bit
of what kind uh we're going from 2d to
3d
right now all our stuff like for example
when the car pitches back the lane lines
also pitch back
uh because we're assuming the flat ro
flat world hypothesis
uh the new models do not do this the new
models output everything in 3d
um so this but there's still no
annotation so the 3d is
it's more about the opposite yeah uh
we have we have disease and everything
uh we've disease
yeah we had a disease we had a disease
um we unified
a lot of stuff as well uh we switched
from tensorflow to pi torch
yes uh my understanding
of what tesla's thing is is that their
annotator now annotates across the time
dimension
uh i mean cute
why are you building an annotator i i
find their entire pipeline
i find your vision i mean the vision
event to end
very compelling but i also like the
engineering of the data engine that
they've created
in terms of supervised learning
pipelines
that thing is damn impressive you're
basically the
the idea is that you have hundreds of
thousands of people that are doing data
collection for you by doing their
experience so that's kind of similar to
the common ai model
and you're able to
mine that data based on the kind of edge
cases you need
i i think it's harder to do in the end
to end learning
the mining of the right edge cases like
that's where feature engineering
is actually really powerful because
like us humans are able to do this kind
of mining a little better but but
yeah there's obvious as we as we know
there's obvious constraints and
limitations to that
idea uh carpathi just tweeted he's like
um
you get really interesting insights if
you saw if you sort your validation set
by loss
and look at the highest loss examples
yeah
uh so yeah i mean you can do we we have
we have a little data engine like thing
we're training a segment uh
it's not fancy it's just like okay train
the new segment
run it on 100 000 images and now take
the thousand with highest loss
select 100 of those by human put those
get those ones labeled
retrain do it again right so it's a much
less well-written data engine and yeah
you can you can take these things really
far and it is
impressive engineering and if you truly
need supervised data for a problem
yeah things like data engine are the
high end of the
what is attention is a human paying
attention i mean we're going to probably
build something that looks like data
engine to push our driver monitoring
further
um but for driving itself you have it
all annotated beautifully
by what the human does so yeah that's
interesting i mean that applies to
driver
attention as well do you want to detect
the eyes do you want to detect blinking
and pupil movement
do you want to detect all the like face
alignments the landmark detection and so
on
and then doing kind of reasoning based
on that or do you want to take the
entirety of the face over time and
do and i mean it's obvious that over
eventually you have to do end to end
with some calibration with some fixes
and so on
but it's uh like i don't know when
that's the right move
even if it's end to end there actually
is there is no
kind of um you have to supervise that
with humans
whether a human is paying attention or
not is a completely subjective judgment
um like you can try to like
automatically do it with some stuff but
you don't
have if i record a video of a human i
don't have
true annotations anywhere in that video
the only way to get them
is with you know other humans labeling
it really
well i don't know uh you you so
if you think deeply about it you could
you might be able to just depending on
the task maybe you'll discover
self-annotating things like
you know you can look at like steering
wheel reversal or something like that
you can discover little moments of lapse
of attention yeah
i mean that's that's where psychology
comes in
is there indicate because you have so so
much data to look at
so you might be able to find moments
when there's like just
inattention that even with smartphone if
you want to detect smartphone use
yeah you can start to zoom in i mean
that's the gold mine
sort of the comma ai i mean tesla's
doing this too right is there they're
doing
annotation based on it's like uh
self-supervised
learning too it's just a small part of
the entire picture
it's that's kind of the challenge
of solving a problem in machine learning
if you can discover
self-annotating parts of the problem
right our driver monitoring team is half
a person right now i have a problem
you know once we have skill to full once
we have two people once we have two
three people on that team
i definitely want to look at
self-annotating stuff or yeah for
attention
let's go back for a sec to uh to a comma
and how what you know for people who are
curious to try it out
how do you install a comma in say a 2020
toyota corolla
or like what are the cars that are
supported what are the cars that you
recommend
and what does it take you have a few
videos out but maybe through words can
you explain
what's it take to actually install a
thing so we support uh i think it's 91
cars
91 makes models um we get to 100 this
year
nice the yeah the
2020 corolla great choice
the um 2020 sonata uh it's using the
stock longitudinal it's using just our
lateral control
but it's a very refined car their
longitudinal control is not
bad at all um so yeah corolla
sonata or if you're willing to get your
hands a little dirty and look in the
right places on the internet the honda
civic is great
uh but you're going to have to install a
modified eps firmware
in order to get a little bit more torque
and i can't help you with that comma
does not officially endorse that
um but we have been doing it we didn't
ever release it
uh we waited for someone else to
discover it and then you know
and you have a discord server where
people there's a very active
developer community yeah as opposed to
so
depending on the level of
experimentation you're willing to
to do that's the community if you
if you just want to buy it and you have
a supported car yeah it's
10 minutes to install there's youtube
videos it's
ikea furniture level if you can set up a
table from ikea
you can install a comma 2 in your
supported car and it will just work
now you're like oh but i want this
high-end feature or i want to fix this
bug
okay well welcome to the developer
community uh
so what if i wanted to this is something
i asked you offline
or like a few months ago if i wanted to
run my own code
to um so use comma as a
platform and try to run something like
open pilot
what does it take to do that um so
there's a toggle in the settings called
enable ssh
and if you toggle that you can ssh into
your device you can modify the code you
can upload whatever code you want to it
um there's a whole lot of people so
about 60 of people are running stock
comma
about 40 percent of people are running
forks and there's a community
of there's a bunch of people who
maintain these forks and these forks
support
different cars or they have you know uh
different toggles
we try to keep away from the toggles
that are like disabled driver monitoring
but
you know there's some people might want
that kind of thing and like you know
yeah you can it's your car it's your
i'm not here to tell you you know
uh we we have some you know we ban
if you're trying to subvert safety
features you're banned from our discord
i don't want anything to do with you
but there's some forks doing that you
got it
so you encourage responsible uh forking
yeah yeah some people you know yeah some
people uh like like there's forks that
will do
um some people just like having a lot of
uh readouts on the ui like a lot of like
flashing numbers so there's forks that
do that
uh some people don't like the fact that
it disengages when you press the gas
pedal there's forks that disable that
got it now the the stock experience is
is what
like so it does both lane keeping and
longitudinal control
all together so it's not separate like
it is an autopilot
no so okay um some cars we use the stock
longitudinal control we don't do the
longitudinal control on all the cars
uh some cars the acc's are pretty good
in the cars it's the lane keep that's
atrocious in anything except for
autopilot super cruise
but you know you just turn it on and it
it works what does this engagement look
like yeah so we have i mean i'm very
concerned about mode confusion
i've experienced it on supercruise and
and autopilot where
like autopilot like autopilot disengages
i don't realize that the acc is still on
the lead car moves slightly over and
then the tesla accelerates to like
whatever my set speed is super fast and
like
what's going on here um we have
engaged and disengaged and this is
similar to my understanding i'm not a
pilot but my understanding is either the
pilot
is in control or the co-pilot is in
control
and we have the same kind of transition
system either open pilot is engaged or
open pilot is disengaged
engage with cruise control disengage
with either gas break or cancel
let's talk about money what's uh the
business strategy for comma
profitable well it's you're good
so congratulations yeah uh what uh
so basically selling so we should say
combo cost uh
a thousand bucks comment 200 for the
interface to the car as well it's 1200
all said done
nobody's usually up front like this yeah
you got it you got to have the tac
on right yeah i love it this side i'm
not going to lie to you
trust me it will add 1200 value to your
life yes
it's still super cheap 30 days no
questions asked money back guarantee and
prices are only going up you know if
there ever is future hardware
it could cost a lot more than twelve
hundred dollars so comma three is in the
works
so it could be all i will say is future
hardware is going to cost a lot more
than the current hardware
yeah like i mean the people that use uh
the people i've spoken with that use
comma
use open pilot they first of all they
use it a lot
so people that use it they they fall in
love with oh our retention rate is
insane
this is a good sign yeah it's a really
good sign um
70 of comma 2 buyers are daily active
users
yeah it's amazing
um oh also we don't plan on stopping
selling the comma too
like like it's you know so whatever you
create that's beyond comma two
it would be uh it would be potentially a
phase shift
like it's you it's so much better that
like you could use comma two and you can
use
comma depends what you want it's three
point four one kind of 42
yeah you know autopilot hardware one
versus hardware two yeah the comma two
is kind of like hardware one got it got
it
got it got it i think i heard you talk
about retention rate with the
vr headsets that the average is just
once yeah which is fast i mean it's such
a fascinating way to think about
technology
and this is a really really good sign
and the other thing that people say
about comm is like they can't believe
they're getting this for a thousand
bucks
right it's it seems it seems like a some
kind of steal
so but in terms of like long-term
business strategies it basically to
put so it's currently in like a thousand
plus cars
1200 more uh
so yeah dailies is about uh
dailies is about 2 000 weekly is about 2
500. monthlies is over 3 000.
wow we've grown a lot since we've
stopped
is the goal like can we talk crazy for a
second i mean what's the
goal to overtake tesla let's talk
okay so i mean android did overtake ios
yeah that's exactly it right so
yeah they did it i actually don't know
the timeline of that one
they but let let's talk uh
because everything is in alpha now the
autopilot you could argue is in alpha in
terms of
towards the big mission of autonomous
driving right and so
what yes your goal to overtake into
millions of cars
essentially of course where would it
stop
like it's open source software it might
not be millions of cars with a piece of
comma hardware but yeah
i think open pilot at some point
will cross over autopilot in in users
just like android crossed over ios
how does google make money from android
uh it's it's complicated their own
devices make money
google google makes money by just kind
of having you on the internet
uh yes google search is built in gmail
is built in
android is just a shill for the rest of
google's ecosystem yeah but the problem
is
android is not is a brilliant thing i
mean
android arguably changed the world so
there you go that's
you can you can feel good ethically
speaking but as a business strategy it's
questionable i'll sell hardware so
hardware i mean it took google a long
time to come around to it but they are
now making money on the pixel
you're not about money you're more about
winning yeah of course
but if only if only 10 percent of open
pilot devices
come from comma ai we still make a lot
that is still yes that is a ton of money
for our company but can't somebody
create
a better comma using open pilot or
you're basically saying well i'll
compete well i'll compete
is can you create a better android phone
than the google pixel right
i mean you can but like i love that so
you're confident
like you know what the hell you're doing
yeah it's
it's uh confidence in merit i mean our
money yeah our money comes from we're a
consumer electronics company
yeah and put it this way so we sold we
sold like three thousand company's
um i'm 2500 right now uh
and like
okay we're probably going to sell 10 000
units next year right 10 000 units
even just a thousand dollars a unit okay
we're 10 million in uh
in in in in revenue um get that up to a
hundred thousand
maybe double the price of the unit now
we're talking like 200 million in
revenue yeah
actually making money uh one of the rare
semi-autonomous or autonomous vehicle
companies that are actually making
money yeah yeah you know
if you have if you look at a model when
we were just talking about this
yesterday if you look at a model
and like you're testing like you're a b
testing your model and if you're you're
you're
one branch of the a b test the losses go
down very fast in the first five epochs
yeah
that model is probably going to converge
to something considerably better than
the one where the losses are going down
slower
why do people think this is going to
stop why do people think one day there's
going to be a great like
well waymo's eventually going to surpass
you guys
no they're not you see like a world
where like
a tesla or a car like a tesla would be
able to
basically press a button and you like
switch to open pilot
you know you know they load in i don't
know so
i think so first off i think that we may
surpass tesla
in terms of users uh i do not think
we're gonna surpass tesla ever in terms
of revenue
i think tesla can capture a lot more
revenue per user than we can
um but this mimics the android ios model
exactly
there may be more android devices but
you know there's a lot more iphones than
google pixels
so i think there'll be a lot more tesla
cars sold than pieces of comma hardware
um and then as far as a
tesla owner being able to switch to open
pilot
uh does ios does iphones run android
no but you can if you really want to do
it but it doesn't really make sense like
it's not
it doesn't make sense who cares what
about if uh a large company like
automakers 4g m toyota came to george
hotz or
on the tech space amazon facebook google
came with a large pile of cash
would would you consider being
purchased
do you see that as a one possible not
seriously now
um i would probably uh
see how much uh they'll entertain
for me
um and if they're willing to like jump
through a bunch of my hoops then maybe
but like no not the way that m a works
today i mean we've been approached
and i laugh in these people's faces i'm
like are you kidding me
yeah you know because you're so it's so
it's so demeaning the m a people are
so demeaning to companies they treat the
startup world
as their innovation ecosystem and they
think that i'm cool with going along
with that
so i can have some of their scam fake
fed dollars you know fedcoin i don't
what am i gonna do with more fedcoin you
know i had coin fat coin man
i love that so that's the cool thing
about podcasting actually is uh
people criticize i don't know if you're
familiar with the spotify
uh giving joe rogan a hundred million
and something about that
and you know they respect
despite all the that people are
talking about spotify
people understand that podcasters like
joe rogan
know what the hell they're doing yeah so
they give them money
and say just do what you do and
like the equivalent for you would be
like
george do what the hell you do because
you're good at it try not to murder too
many people
like try like there's some kind of
common sense things like
just don't go on a weird rampage of
yeah it comes down to what companies i
could respect
right um you know could i respect gm
never
um no i couldn't i mean could i respect
like
a hyundai more so right that's that's a
lot closer toyota
what's your nah nah it's korean is the
way
i think i think that you know the
japanese the germans the us they're all
too
they're all too you know they all think
they're too great what about the tech
companies
apple apple is of the tech companies
that i could respect apple's the closest
yeah i mean i could never subscribe it
would be ironic
oh if uh if common ai is acquired by
apple
i mean facebook look i quit facebook 10
years ago because i didn't respect the
business model
um google has declined so fast in the
last five years
what are your thoughts about waymo as
present and future so let me let me see
let me start by saying something uh nice
which is uh
i've visited them a few times and i've
[Music]
have ridden in their cars and
the engineering that they're doing
both the research and the actual
development and the engineering they're
doing
and the scale they're actually achieving
by doing it all themselves
is really impressive and the the balance
of safety and innovation
and like the cars work
really well for the routes they drive
like they drive
fast which was very surprising to me
like it drives like
the speed limit or faster the speed
limit it goes
and it works really damn well and the
interface is nice and chandler arizona
yeah yeah yeah in challengers in a very
specific environment so
it i you know it gives me enough
material
in my mind to push back against the
madman of the world like
george hotz to be like
like because you kind of imply there's
zero probability they're going to win
yeah and and after i've used
after i've written in it to me it's not
zero oh it's not for technology reasons
bureaucracy no it's worse than that it's
actually for product reasons i think
oh you think they're just not capable of
creating an amazing product uh
no i think that the product that they're
building doesn't make sense
um so a few things uh you say the weimos
are fast
um benchmark away mo against a competent
uber driver
right right the uber driver is faster
it's not even about speed it's the thing
you said
it's about the experience of being stuck
at a stop sign
because pedestrians are crossing
non-stop
i like when my uber driver doesn't come
to a full stop at the stop sign yeah
you know and so
let's say the waymo's are 20 slower than
than an uber
right um you can argue they're going to
be cheaper
and i argue that users already have the
choice to trade off money for speed
it's called uberpool um i think it's
like 15
of rides or uber pools right users are
not willing to trade off
money for speed so the whole product
that they're building
is not going to be competitive with
traditional ride sharing networks
right um like and also
whether there's profit to be made
depends entirely on one company having a
monopoly
i think that the level for autonomous
ride sharing vehicles
market is going to look a lot like the
scooter market if even the technology
does come to exist which i question
who's doing well in that market yeah
it's a race to the bottom
you know well they could be it could be
closer like an uber and a lyft
where it's just a one or two players
well
the scooter people have given up trying
to market scooters
as a practical means of transportation
and they're just like
they're super fun to ride look at wheels
i love those things and they're great on
that front
yeah but from an actual transportation
product perspective
i do not think scooters are viable and i
do not think level 4 autonomous cars are
viable
if you uh let's play a fun experiment if
you
ran let's do a tesla and let's do waymo
if uh elon musk took a vacation for
a year he just said screw it i'm gonna
go live on an island
no electronics and the board decides
that we need to find somebody to run the
company
and they they decide that you should run
the company for a year
how do you run tesla differently i
wouldn't change much
do you think they're on the right track
i wouldn't change i mean i'd have some
minor changes but even even my debate
with tesla
about you know end to end versus segnets
like that's just software who cares
right
like it's not gonna it's not like you're
doing something terrible with segnats
you're probably building something
that's at least going to help you debug
the end-to-end system a lot
right it's very easy to transition from
what they have
to like an end-to-end kind of thing
and then i presume you would uh
in the model y or maybe in the model 3
start adding driver sensing with
infrared yes i would add i would
i would add infrared camera infrared
lights
right away to those cars um
and start collecting that data and do
all that kind of stuff yeah
very much i think they're already kind
of doing it it's it's an incredibly
minor change
if i actually were ceo of tesla first
off i'd be horrified that i wouldn't be
able to do a good job as elon
and then i would try to you know
understand the way he's done things
before he would also have to take over
his twitter
so god i don't tweet yeah what's your
twitter situation why
why why are you so quiet on twitter
comma is
like what what's your social network
presence like because you you
on instagram you're you're you uh you do
live streams you're
you're you're um you understand the
music of the internet
but you don't always fully engage into
it you're part-time i used to have a
twitter
yeah i mean it's the pr instagram is a
pretty place
instagram is a beautiful place it
glorifies beauty i like i like
instagram's values as a network
um twitter glorifies conflict glorifies
you know
like like like like like you know just
shots
taking shots at people and it's like you
know well
you know twitter and donald trump are
perfectly
they're perfect for each other so
tesla's on uh tesla's on the right track
in your view yeah
okay so let's try let's like really try
this experiment if you ran
way more let's say they're i don't know
if you agree but
they seem to be at the head of the pack
of the kind of
uh what would you call that approach
like it's not necessarily lighter based
because it's not about lighter but
before robot taxi
level four robot taxi all in before any
before making your revenue
uh so they're probably at the head of
the pack if you were
said hey george can you please run this
company for a year how would you
change it uh i would go i would get
anthony levandowski out of jail
and i would put him in charge of the
company
um let's try to break that apart
why do you do you want to make do you
want to destroy the company by doing
that or
do you mean or do you mean uh you like
renegade style thinking that uh pushes
that that like throws away bureaucracy
and goes to first principle thinking
what
what do you mean by that um i think
anthony lewandowski is a genius
and i think he would come up with a much
better idea of what to do with waymo
than me
so you mean that unironically he is a
genius oh yes oh absolutely
without a doubt i mean i'm not saying
there's no shortcomings
but in the interactions i've had with
him yeah
what um he's also willing to take like
who knows what he would do with waymo
i mean he's also out there like far more
out there than i am yeah there's big
risks
yeah what do you make of him i was i was
going to talk to him in this podcast and
i was going back and forth
i'm i'm such a gullible naive human like
i see the best in people
and i slowly started to realize that
there might be some people out there
that like have multiple faces to the
world
they're like deceiving and dishonest i
still
refuse to like i i just i trust people
and i don't care if i get hurt by it but
like
you know sometimes you have to be a
little bit careful especially platform
wise and
podcast wise what do you what am i
supposed to think
so you think you think he's a good
person
oh i don't know i don't really make
moral judgments
and it's difficult to oh oh i mean this
about the waymo actually i mean that
whole idea very non-ironically about
what i would do
the problem with putting me in charge of
waymo is waymo is already
10 billion dollars in the hull right
whatever idea waymo does look
com is profitable comes raised 8.1
million dollars that's small
you know that's small money like i can
build a reasonable consumer electronics
company
and succeed wildly at that and still
never be able to pay back weight most 10
billion
so i i think the basic idea with women
well forget the 10 billion because they
have some backing but
your basic thing is like what can we do
to stop making some money
well no i mean my bigger idea is like
whatever the idea is that's going to
save waymo
i don't have it it's going to have to be
a big risk idea and i cannot think of a
better person than anthony lewandowski
to do it
so that is completely what i would do as
ceo of waymo i call myself a
transitionary ceo
do everything i can to fix that
situation yeah
uh yeah cause i can't i can't do it
right like i can't i can't
oh i mean i can talk about how what i
really want to do is just apologize for
all those corny
uh you know ad campaigns and be like
here's the real state of the technology
yeah um like i have several criticism
i'm a little bit more bullish on
waymo than than you seem to be but
one criticism i have is it went into
corny mode too early
like it's still a startup it hasn't
delivered on anything so
it should be like more renegade and show
off the engineering that they're doing
which just can be impressive as opposed
to doing these weird commercials of like
your friendly yeah your friendly car
company
i mean that's my biggest my biggest
snipe at waymo was always that guy's a
paid actor
that guy's not a waymo user he's a paid
actor look here i found his call sheet
do kind of like what spacex is doing
with uh the rocket launchers just
get put the nerds up front put the
engineers up front and just like
show failures too just i love i love
spacex's
yeah yeah the thing they're doing is
right and it just
feels like the right but we're all so
excited to see them succeed
yeah i can't wait to see when it won't
fail you know like you lie to me i want
you to fail
you tell me the truth you'll be honest
with me i want you to succeed yeah
uh yeah and that requires the uh the
renegade ceo
right i'm with you i'm with you i still
have a little bit of faith in waymo to
for for the renegade ceo to step forward
but
it's not it's not john krafter yeah
it's uh you can't it's not chris
holmstone
and those people may be very good at
certain things yeah
but they're not renegades because these
companies are fundamentally even though
we're talking about billion dollars
all these crazy numbers they're still
like early stage startups
i mean i i just i if you are pre-revenue
and you've raised 10 billion dollars i
have no idea like
like this just doesn't work no it's
against everything silicon valley
where's your minimum viable product
you know where's your users what's your
growth numbers
this is traditional silicon valley why
do you not apply it to what you think
you're too big to fail already
like how do you think autonomous
driving will change society so the
mission is
for comma to uh solve
self-driving do you have like a vision
of the world of how
it'll be different
is it as simple as a to b transportation
or is there like
because these are robots it's not about
autonomous driving in and of itself it's
what the technology enables
it's i think it's the coolest applied ai
problem i like it because it has a clear
path to monetary value um
but as far as that being the thing that
changes the world
i mean no like like there's cute things
we're doing in common like who thought
you could stick a
phone on the windshield middle drive um
but like really the product that you're
building is not
something that people were not capable
of imagining 50 years ago
so no it doesn't change the world in
that front could people imagine the
internet 50 years ago only true
junior genius visionaries yeah everyone
could have imagined autonomous cars 50
years ago
it's like a core but i don't drive it
see i i have this sense
and i told you like i'm my long-term
dream
is robots with which you have deep
with whom you have deep connections
right
and there's different trajectories
towards that
and i've been thinking so i've been
thinking of launching a startup
i see autonomous vehicles as a potential
trajectory to that that
i'm that's not where the direction i
would like to go but
i also see tesla or even kamehameha like
pivoting into
into robotics broadly defined
that's at some stage in the way like
you're mentioning the internet didn't
expect
let's solve you know when i say a comma
about this we could talk about this but
let's solve self-driving cars first
got to stay focused on the mission don't
don't don't you're not too big to fail
for however much i think kama's winning
like no no
no you're winning when you solve level
five self-driving cars and until then
you haven't win and
one and you know again you want to be
arrogant in the face of other people
great you want to be arrogant in the
face of nature you're an idiot right
stay mission focused brilliantly put uh
like i mentioned
thinking of launching a startup i've
been considering actually before
cove i've been thinking of moving to san
francisco oh
oh i wouldn't go there so why is uh
okay well and now i'm thinking about
potentially austin
um and we're in san diego now san diego
come here
so why what um
i mean you're such an interesting human
you've launched so many successful
things
what uh why san diego what do you
recommend why not san francisco
have you thought so for in your case san
diego with qualcomm and snapdragon i
mean
that's an amazing combination but that
wasn't really why
that wasn't the why no i mean qualcomm
was an afterthought qualcomm was it was
a nice thing to think about it's like
you can have
a tech company here and a good one i
mean you know i like qualcomm but
no um what's the west san diego better
than stephanie why does san francisco
suck
well so okay so first off we all kind of
said like we want to stay in california
people like the ocean you know
california
for for its flaws it's like a lot of the
flaws of california are not necessarily
california as a whole and they're much
more san francisco specific
yeah um san francisco so i think first
year cities in general
have stopped wanting growth uh
well you have like in san francisco you
know the voting class always votes to
not build more houses because they own
all the houses and they're like well
you know once people have figured out
how to vote themselves more money
they're going to do it
it is so insanely corrupt um it is not
balanced at all
like political party-wise you know it's
it's a one-party city and
for all the discussion of diversity it's
has it's stops lacking real diversity of
thought of background of uh
approaches to strategies of yeah ideas
it's it's kind of a strange place that
it's the loudest
people about diversity and the biggest
lack of diversity
well i mean that's that's what they say
right it's the projection
projection yeah yeah it's interesting
and even people in silicon valley tell
me that's uh
like high up people but everybody is
like this is a terrible place it doesn't
make i mean and coronavirus is really
what killed it yeah
san francisco was the number one uh
exodus
during coronavirus we still think san
diego is a good place to be
yeah yeah i mean we'll see
we'll see what happens with california
a bit longer term yeah i like austrians
and austin's an interesting choice i
wouldn't i wouldn't i don't have really
anything bad to say about austin
either except for the extreme heat in
the summer um which you know but that's
like very on the surface right i think
as far as like an ecosystem
goes it's it's cool i personally love
colorado
colorado uh yeah i mean you have these
states that are
you know like just way better run
um california is you know it's
especially san francisco so it's high
horse and like
yeah can i ask you for advice
to me and to others about
what's it take to build a successful
startup oh i don't know i haven't done
that
talk to someone who did that well you
know
uh this is like another book of years
that i'll buy for 67
i suppose uh so there's um
one of these days will sell out yeah
that's right jail breaks are going to be
a dollar and books are going to be 67.
how i uh how i joe broke the iphone by
george cotts that's right
how i jailbroke the iphone and you can
do it
that's right that's right oh god okay i
can't wait but
quite so you haven't introspected you
have built
a very unique company i mean
not not you but you and others
but i don't know um there's no
there's nothing you have an interest but
you haven't really sat down and thought
about like
well like if you and i we're having a
bunch of we're having some beers
and you're seeing that i'm depressed and
whatever i'm struggling
there's no advice you can give oh i mean
more beer more beer
yeah i think it's all very like
situation dependent
um here's okay if i can give a generic
piece of advice
it's the technology always wins the
better technology
always wins and lying always
loses build technology
and don't lie i'm with you i agree very
much
the long run long run sure it's the long
run you know what the market can remain
irrational longer than you can remain
solvent
true fact well this is this is an
interesting point because i
ethically and just as a human believe
that um
like sm like hype and smoke and mirrors
is not at any stage of the company is a
good strategy
i mean there's some like you know pr
magic kind of like
you know you want a new product yeah if
there's a call to action
if there's like a call to action like
buy my new gpu look at it it takes up
three slots and it's this big it's huge
buy my g for you yeah
that's great if you look at you know
especially in that in the ai space
broadly but autonomous vehicles
like you can raise a huge amount of
money on nothing
and the question to me is like i'm
against that i'll never be
part of that i don't think i hope not
willingly not but like is there
something to be said
to uh essentially lying to raise
money like fake it till you make it kind
of thing
i mean this is billy mcfarland the fire
festival like we all we all
experienced uh you know what happens
with that no
no don't fake it till you make it be
honest
and hope you make it the whole way the
technology wins
right the technology wins and like there
is i'm not
i use like the anti-hype you know that's
that's a slava kpss reference but
um hype isn't necessarily bad
i loved camping out for the iphones
um you know and as long as the hype is
backed by
like substance as long as it's backed by
something i can actually
buy and like it's real then hype is
great and it's a great
feeling it's when the hype is backed by
lies that it's a bad feeling
i mean a lot of people call elon musk a
fraud how could he be a fraud
i've noticed this this kind of
interesting effect which is
he does tend to over promise
and deliver what's what's the better way
to phrase it
promise a timeline that he doesn't
deliver on he delivers much
later on what do you think about that
because i do that i think that's a
programmer thing
yeah i do that as well you think that's
a really bad thing to do or
is that okay i think that's again as
long as like
you're working toward it and you're
gonna deliver on it
it's not too far off right
right like like you know the whole the
whole
autonomous vehicle thing it's like i
mean i still think
tesla's on track to beat us i still
think even with their even with their
missteps they
have advantages we don't have um
you know illness is better than me at
at like marshaling massive amounts of
resources
so you know i still think given the fact
they're maybe making some wrong
decisions
they'll end up winning and like
it's fine to hype it if you're actually
gonna win
right if elon says look we're gonna be
landing rockets back on earth in a year
and it takes four
like you know he landed a rocket back on
earth
and he was working toward it the whole
time i think there's some amount of like
i think when it becomes wrong is if you
know you're not gonna meet that deadline
if you're lying yeah that's brilliantly
put like
this is what people don't understand i
think
like elon believes everything he says he
does
as far as i can tell he does and i i
detected that
in myself too like if i it's only
if
you're like conscious of yourself lying
yeah i think so yeah you know you can't
take that to such an extreme
right like in a way i think maybe billy
mcfarland believed everything he said
too
right that's how you started cult and
everybody uh kills themselves
yeah yeah like it's you need you need if
there's like some
factor on it it's fine and you need some
people to like
you know keep you in check but like
if you deliver on most of the things you
say and just the timelines are off
yeah it does piss people off though i
wonder
but who cares in the long arc of history
the people
everybody gets pissed off at the people
who succeed which is
one of the things that frustrates me
about this world
is uh they don't celebrate
the success of others like
there's so many people that want elon to
fail
it's so fascinating to me like what
is wrong with you like so
elon musk talks about like people short
like they talk about financial
yeah but i think it's much bigger than
the financials i've seen like the human
factors community they
want they want other people to fail
why why why like even people the
harshest thing is like
you know even people that like seem to
really hate donald trump
they want him to fail yeah or like the
other president or
they want barack obama to fail it's like
we're almost involved it's weird but i
i want that i would love to inspire that
part of the world to change
because well damn it if the human
species is going to survive we should
celebrate success
like it seems like the efficient thing
to do in this objective function that
like we're all striving for
is to celebrate the ones that like
figure out how to like do better
at that objective function as opposed to
like dragging them down
back into them into the mud i think
there is
this is the speech i always give about
the commenters on hacker news
um so first off something to remember
about the internet in general
is commenters are not representative of
the population
yeah i don't comment on anything i don't
you know
commenters are are representative of a
certain sliver of the population
and on hacker news a common thing i'll
say is when you'll see something that's
like
you know promises to be wild out there
and
in innovative there is some amount of
you know checking them back to earth but
there's also some amount of
if this thing succeeds well
i'm 36 and i've worked at large tech
companies my whole life
they can't succeed because if they
succeed that would mean that i could
have done something different with my
life
but we know that i couldn't have we know
that i couldn't have and and that's why
they're going to fail
and they have to root for them to fail
to kind of maintain their world image
so tune it out and they comment well
it's hard i uh so one of the things one
of the things i'm considering
startup wise is to change that
because i think the i think it's also
a technology problem it's a platform
problem i agree it's like
because the thing you said most people
don't comment
i think most people want to comment
they just don't because it's all the
for commenting exactly i don't
want to be grouped in with that or not
you don't want to be in a at a party
where everyone is an
yeah so they but that's a platform
problem that's
i can't believe what reddit's become i
can't believe the group think in reddit
comments
there's a red is an interesting one
because they're subreddits
and so you can still see especially
small subreddits
that like that are little like havens of
like
joy and positivity and like deep
even disagreement but like nuanced
discussion but it's only like small
little pockets
but that's uh that's emergent the
platform's not helping that or
hurting that so i guess naturally
something about the internet uh if you
don't put in a lot of effort to
encourage
nuance and positive good vibes it's
naturally going to decline into chaos
i would love to see someone do this well
yeah um i think it's
yeah very doable this is uh i think
actually so
i i feel like twitter could be
overthrown joshua bach talked about how
like uh if you have like and retweet
like
that's only positive wiring right
the only way to do anything like
negative there
is um with a comment and
that's like that asymmetry is what gives
you know twitter its particular
toxicness
whereas i find youtube comments to be
much better because youtube comments
have a have a
of an up and a down and they don't show
the downloads
without getting into depth of this
particular discussion
the point is to explore possibilities
and get a lot of data on it because uh
i mean i could disagree with what you
just said it's it's uh the point is it's
unclear
it's a it hasn't been explored in a
really rich way
like the these questions of how to
create
platforms that encourage positivity yeah
i think it's a it's a technology problem
and i think we'll look back at twitter
as it is now maybe it'll happen within
twitter
but most likely somebody overthrows them
is
we'll look back at twitter and say we
can't believe we put up with this level
of toxicity you need a different
business model too
any any social network that
fundamentally has advertising as a
business model
this was in the social dilemma which i
didn't watch but i liked it it's like
you know there's always the you know
you're the product you're not the uh but
they had a nuanced take on it that i
really liked and it said
the product being sold is influence over
you
the product being sold is literally your
you know
influence on you like
that can't be if that's your idea okay
well
you know guess what it cannot be toxic
yeah
maybe there's ways to spin it like with
with uh giving
a lot more control to the user and
transparency to see what is happening to
them as opposed to
in the shadows as possible but that
can't be the primary source of
but the users aren't no one's going to
use that it depends
it depends it depends i think i think
that the you're
you're not going to you can't depend on
self-awareness of the users
it's a it's another it's a longer
discussion because uh
you can't depend on it but
you can reward self-awareness
like if for the ones who are willing to
put in the work of self-awareness
you can reward them and incentivize and
perhaps be pleasantly surprised how many
people
are are willing to be self-aware on the
internet
like we are in real life like i'm
putting a lot of effort with you right
now
being self-aware about if i say
something stupid or mean
sure i'll like look at your like body
language like i'm putting in that effort
it's costly for an introvert it's very
costly
but on the internet it
like most people are like i don't care
if if this hurts somebody i don't care
if this uh
is not interesting or if this is yeah
the mean or whatever
i think so much of the engagement today
on the internet is so disingenuous too
yeah you're not doing this out of a
genuine this is what you think you're
doing this just straight up to
manipulate others whether you're in you
just became an ad okay
okay let's talk about a fun topic which
is programming
here's another book idea for you let me
pitch uh what's your uh perfect
programming setup
so like this by george hotz so
uh like what listen you're
giving me give me a macbook air sitting
in a corner of a hotel room and you know
i'll still have so you really don't care
you don't
fetishize like multiple monitors
keyboard
uh those things are nice and i'm not
going to say no to them
but do they automatically unlock tons of
productivity no not at all i have
definitely been more productive on a
macbook air in a corner of a hotel room
what about ide
so uh which operating system
do you love what uh text editor do you
use
ide what um is there is there something
that
is like the perfect if you could just
say the perfect productivity
set up for george hawks doesn't matter
it doesn't doesn't matter
it really doesn't matter you know i
guess i code most of the time in vim
like literally i'm using an editor from
the 70s you know you didn't
make anything better okay vs code is
nice for reading code there's a few
things that are nice about
it uh i think that they're you can build
much better tools
how like ida's xrefs work way better
than vx vs codes why
yeah actually that's a good question
like why i i still use
sorry emacs eat for most uh
i've actually know i have to confess
something dark
cause i've never used bim yeah
it's i think maybe i'm just afraid
that my life has been a like a waste
[Laughter]
i'm so i'm not i'm not evangelical about
emacs i
i think this this is how i feel about
tender flow versus pie torch
yeah having just like we've switched
everything to pie torch now put months
into the switch
i have felt like i've wasted years on
tensorflow i can't believe it
i can't believe how much better pie
torch is yeah
i've used emacs and them doesn't matter
yeah still just my heart
somehow i fell in love with lisp i don't
know why you can't
the heart wants what the heart wants i
don't i don't understand it but it just
connected with me maybe it's the
functional language at first i connected
with
maybe it's because so many of the ai
courses before the deep learning
revolution were taught
with lisp in mind i don't know i don't
know what it is but i'm i'm
stuck with it but at the same time like
why am i not using a modern id for some
of these programming like i don't know
they're not that much better i've used
modernity to use them but at the same
time so
to just not to disagree with you but
like i like multiple monitors
like i've i have to do work on a laptop
and
it's a it's a pain in the ass and also
i'm addicted to the
kinesis weird keyboard that you could
you could see
uh yeah so you don't have any of that
you can just be in a macbook
i mean look at work i have three 24-inch
monitors i have a happy hacking keyboard
i have a
razer death header mouse like but it's
not essential for you no
let's go to a day in the life of george
hotz what is the
perfect day productivity-wise so we're
not talking about like
hunter s thompson uh drugs yeah and uh
let's let's look at productivity like
what
what's the day look like on like hour by
hour is there any
irregularities that create a magical
george hawks experience
i can remember three days in my life and
i remember these days vividly
when i've gone through kind of
radical transformations to the way i
think
and what i would give i would pay a
hundred thousand dollars if i could have
one of these days tomorrow
um the days have been so impactful and
one was first discovering eliezer
yukowski on the singularity
and reading that stuff and like you know
my mind was blown
um the next was discovering
uh the hutter price and then ai is just
compression
like finally understanding aix i and
what all that was
you know i like read about it when i was
18 19 i didn't understand it and then
the fact that like lossless compression
implies intelligence
the day that i was shown that and then
the third one is controversial
the day i found a blog called
unqualified reservations
and uh read that and i was like
wait which one is that that's uh what's
the guy's name curtis garvin
yeah so many people tell me i'm supposed
to talk to him
yeah but he looks he sounds insane or
brilliant
but insane or both i don't know the day
i found that blog was another like this
was during like like
gamergate and kind of the run-up to the
2016 election and i'm like
wow okay the world makes sense now this
this like i had a framework now to
interpret this just like i got the
framework for ai and a framework to
interpret technological progress like
those days when i discovered these new
frameworks were oh interesting it's just
not about
but what was special about those days
how did those days come to be
is it just you got lucky like sure i
like
well you just encounter hutter prize on
uh on hack news or something like that
um like what but you see i don't think
it's just
see i don't think it's just that like i
could have gotten lucky at any point i
think that in a way
you were ready at that moment yeah
exactly to receive the information
but is there some magic to the day today
of like
like eating breakfast and it's the
mundane things
nah nothing no i drift i drift through
life
without structure i drift through life
hoping and praying that i will get
another day like those days
and there's nothing in particular you do
to uh to be a receptacle
for another for day number four
no i didn't do anything to get the other
ones so i don't think i have to really
do anything now i took a month-long trip
to new york and
i mean the ethereum thing was the
highlight of it but the rest of it was
pretty terrible
i did a two-week road trip and i got i
had to turn around i had to turn around
i'm driving in uh
in gunnison colorado i passed through
gunnison and uh
the snow starts coming down this path up
there called monarch pass in order to
get through to denver you gotta get over
the rockies
and i had to turn my car around i
couldn't i watched
i watched a f-150 go off the road i'm
like i gotta go back and
like that day was meaningful because
like like it was real like i actually
had to turn my car around
um it's rare that anything even real
happens in my life even as
you know mundane is the fact that yeah
there was snow
i had to turn around stay in gunnison
and leave the next day something about
that moment for
real okay so actually it's interesting
to break apart the three moments you
mentioned
if it's okay so uh i always have trouble
pronouncing his name but
allows yakowski yeah
so what how did your
world view change in starting to
consider
the the exponential growth of ai and agi
that
he thinks about and the the the threats
of artificial intelligence and all that
kind of ideas like
can you is it j like can you maybe uh
break apart like what
exactly was so magical to use a
transformational experience
today everyone knows him for threats and
ai safety um this was pre
that stuff there was i don't think a
mention of ai safety on the page
um this is this is old yukowski stuff
he'd probably denounce it all now he'd
probably be like that's exactly what i
didn't want to happen
well sorry man
is there something specific you can take
from his work that you can remember
yeah uh it was this realization that
uh computers double in power every 18
months
and humans do not and they haven't
crossed yet
but if you have one thing that's
doubling every 18 months and one thing
that's staying like this
you know here's your log graph here's
your line
you know you calculate that
and that did that open the door to the
exponential thinking
like thinking that like you know what
with technology we can actually
transformed the world
it opened the door to human obsolescence
it opened the door to realize that in my
lifetime
humans are going to be replaced
and then the matching idea to that of
artificial intelligence with the hutter
prize
you know i'm torn i go back and forth on
what i think about it
yeah but the the the basic thesis
is it's nice to com it's a nice
compelling notion that
we can reduce the task of creating an
intelligent system a general
intelligence system
into the task of compression so you can
think of all of intelligence in the
universe in fact
as a kind of compression
do you find that was that just at the
time you found that as a compelling idea
do you still find that
a compelling idea i still find that
compelling idea
um i think that it's not that useful day
to day
but actually um one of maybe my quests
before that was a search for the
definition of the word intelligence
and i never had one and i definitely
have a definition of the word
compression
it's a very uh simple uh straightforward
one
and uh you know what confession is you
know what lossless is lossless
compassion not lossy lossless
compression
and that that is equivalent to
intelligence which i believe
i'm not sure how useful that definition
is day to day but like i now have a
framework to understand what it is
and he just 10x 10xed the uh the prize
for that competition like recently a few
months ago
you ever thought of taking a crack at
that oh i did
oh i did i spent i spent the next after
i found the prize i spent the next
six months of my life trying it and uh
well that's when i started learning
everything about
ai and then i worked vicarious for a bit
and then i learned
read all the deep learning stuff and i'm
like okay now i like i'm called up to
modern ai
wow and i had i had a really good
framework to put it all in from the
compression stuff
right like some of the first uh some of
the first deep learning models i played
with were
uh like gpt basically but before
transformers before it was still
uh rnn's to to do uh
character prediction but by the way on
the compression side
i mean the especially neural networks
what do you make of the lossless
requirement with the hudder prize so
you know human intelligence and neural
networks can probably compress
stuff pretty well but it would be lossy
it's imperfect
uh you can turn a lossy compressor into
a lossless compressor pretty easily
using an arithmetic encoder right you
can take an arithmetic encoder
and you can just encode the noise with
maximum efficiency
right so even if you can't predict
exactly what the next character is
the better a probability distribution
you can put over the next character
you can then use an arithmetic encoder
to uh right you don't have to know
whether it's an e or an i
you just have to put good probabilities
on them and then you know code those
and if you have it's a bits of entropy
thing right
so let me on that topic could be
interesting as a little side
tour what are your thoughts in this year
about gpt3
and these language models and these
transformers is there something
interesting
to you as an ai researcher or is there
something interesting to you
as an autonomous vehicle developer nah i
think uh
i think it's overhyped i mean it's not
like it's cool it's cool for what it is
but no
we're not just going to be able to scale
up to gpg 12 and get
general-purpose intelligence like your
loss function
is literally just you know you know
cross-entropy loss on the character
right like that's not the loss function
of general intelligence
is that obvious to you yes can you
imagine
that like to play devil's advocate on
yourself is it
possible that you can the gpt-12 will
achieve general intelligence
with something as dumb as this kind of
loss function
i guess it depends what you mean by
general intelligence
so there's another problem with the gpts
and that's that they don't have
a uh they don't have long-term memory
right right so like just
gpt 12 a scaled up version of gpt two or
three
i find it hard to believe
well you can scale it in it's yeah so
it's a hardcore
hard-coded length but you can make it
wider and wider and wider yeah
you're gonna get you're gonna get cool
things from those systems
but i i don't think you're ever gonna
get something that can like
you know build me a rocket ship what
about solve driving
so you know you can use transformer with
video for example
you think is there something in there no
because
hey look we use we as a group we use a
group we could change that group out to
a transformer
um i think driving is much more
markovian than language
so markov you mean like the memory which
which aspect of uh
i mean that like most of the information
in the state at t
minus one is also in the in is in state
t yeah right and it kind of like drops
off
nicely like this where sometime with
language you have to refer back to the
third paragraph on the second page
i feel like there's not many like like
you can say like speed limit signs but
there's really not many things in
autonomous driving that look like that
but if you look at uh to play devil's
advocate
is uh the risk estimation thing that
you've talked about it's kind of
interesting
is uh it feels like there might be some
longer term
uh aggregation of context necessary to
be able to figure out like
the context yeah i'm not even sure i'm
i'm believing my my own devil's we have
a nice we have a nice like vision model
which outputs like a a
one two four dimensional perception
space um
can i try transformers on it sure i
probably will
at some point we'll try transformers and
then we'll just see do they do better
sure
i'm well it might not be a game changer
no well i'm not like like
might transformers work better than
grooves for autonomous driving sure
might we switch sure is this some
radical change no
okay we use a slightly different you
know we switch from rnns to grooves
like okay maybe it's greased to
transformers but no it's not
yeah i well on the on the topic of
general intelligence i don't know
how much i've talked to you about it
like what um
do you think will actually build an agi
like if if you look at ray kurzweil with
a singularity do
you have like an intuition about you're
kind of saying driving is easy
yeah and i
i tend to personally believe that
solving driving
will have really deep important
impacts on our ability to solve general
intelligence
like i i think driving doesn't require
general intelligence
but i think they're going to be
neighbors in a way that it's like deeply
tied
because it's so like driving is so
deeply connected to the human experience
that i think solving one will help solve
the other
but but so i don't see i don't see
driving is like
easy and almost like separate than
general intelligence but like what's
your
vision of a future with a singular do
you see there'll be a single moment like
a singularity where it'll be a phase
shift
are we in the singularity now like what
do you have crazy ideas about the future
in terms of
agi we're definitely in the singularity
now um we are
coolers of course look at the bandwidth
between people the bandwidth between
people goes up
all right um the singularity is just you
know when the bandwidth but
what do you mean by the bandwidth of the
people communications tools the whole
world is networked
the whole world is networked and we
raise the speed of that network right
oh so you think the communication of
information in a
distributed way is a empowering thing
for collective intelligence
oh i didn't say it's necessarily a good
thing but i think that's like when i
think of the definition of the
singularity yeah it seems kind of right
i see like it's a change in the world
beyond which
like the world be transformed in ways
that we can't possibly imagine no i mean
i think we're in the singularity now in
the sense that there's like you know one
world and a monoculture and it's also
linked
yeah i mean i i kind of shared the
intuition that
the the singularity will originate from
the collective intelligence
of us ants versus the like some single
system agi
type thing oh i totally agree with that
yeah i don't i don't really believe in
like like a hard take off agi kind of
thing
um yeah i don't think i don't even think
ai is all that different
in kind from what we've already been
building
um with respect to driving i think
driving is a subset of general
intelligence and i think it's a pretty
complete subset
i think the tools we develop at comma
will also be extremely helpful
to solving general intelligence and
that's i think the real reason why i'm
doing it
i don't care about self-driving cars
it's a cool problem to beat people at
but yeah i mean yeah you're kind of
you're of two minds
so one you do have to have a mission and
you want to focus and make sure you
get you get there you can't forget that
but
at the same time there is a thread
that's much
bigger than uh the connects the entirety
of your effort that's much bigger than
just driving
with ai and with general intelligence it
is so easy to delude yourself
into thinking you've figured something
out when you haven't if we build a level
5 self-driving car
we have indisputably built something
yeah
is it general intelligence i'm not going
to debate that i will say we've built
something
that provides huge financial value yeah
beautifully put that's the engineering
credo like just just build the thing
it's like that's why i'm with uh with
the with elon on uh
go to mars yeah that's a great one you
can argue like
who the hell cares about going to mars
but the reality is
set that as a mission get it done yeah
and then you're going to crack some pro
problem that you've never even expected
in the process of doing that yeah
yeah i mean no i think if i had a choice
between humanity going to mars and
solving self-driving cars i think going
to mars is uh
better but i don't know i'm more suited
for self-driving cars i'm an information
guy i'm not a modernist i'm a
postmodernist
post modernist all right beautifully put
let me let me drag you back to
programming for a sec what
three maybe three to five programming
languages should people learn
do you think like if you look at
yourself what did you get the most out
of
from learning uh well so everybody
should learn
c and assembly we'll start with those
two right assembly
yeah if you can't code in assembly you
don't know what the computer's doing
you don't understand like you don't have
to be great in assembly but you have to
code in it and then like you have to
appreciate assembly in order to
appreciate all the great things c
gets you and then you have to code and
see in order to appreciate all the great
things python gets you
so i'll just say assembly c and python
we'll start with those three
the memory allocation of of c and the
the the fact that so assemblies give you
a sense of just how many levels of
abstraction
you get to work on in modern day
programs yeah yeah graph coloring for
assignment register assignment and
compilers yeah like you know you got to
do you know the compiler your computer
only has a certain number of registers
you can have all the variables you want
a c
function you know so you get to start
your build intuition about
compilation like what a compiler gets
you
what else um well then there's then
there's kind of uh
so those are all very imperative
programming languages um
then there's two other paradigms for
programming that everybody should be
familiar with
i'm one of them is functional uh you
should learn haskell and take that all
the way through
learn a language with dependent types
like
learn that whole space like the very pl
theory
heavy languages and haskell is your
favorite functional
what is that the go-to you would say
yeah i'm not a great haskell programmer
i
wrote a compiler in haskell once there's
another paradigm and actually there's
one more paradigm that i'll even talk
about
after that that i never used to talk
about when i would think about this but
the next paradigm is learn verilog of
hdl
um understand this idea of all of the
instructions execute at once
if i have a block in verilog and i write
stuff in it
it's not sequential they all execute it
once
and then like think like that that's how
hardware works
to be so i guess assembly doesn't quite
get you that
assembly's more about compilation and
verilog is more about the hardware
like giving a sense of what actually is
the hardware is doing
assembly c python are straight like they
sit right on top of each other in fact c
is well let's see it's kind of coded in
c but you could imagine the first c was
coded in assembly and python is actually
coded in c
um so you know you can straight up go on
that
got it and then verilog gives you that's
brilliant
okay and then i think there's another
one now everyone should carpathi calls
it programming 2.0
which is learn a i'm not even gonna
don't learn tensorflow learn pi torch so
machine learning
we've got to come up with a better term
than programming 2.0 or um
but yeah it's a programming language
i wonder if it could be formalized a
little bit better which we feels like
we're in the early days
of what that actually entails
data-driven programming
data-driven programming yeah but it's so
fundamentally different as a paradigm
than the others uh like it almost
requires a different skill set
but you think it's still yeah
and ply torch versus tensorflow pytorch
wins it's the fourth paradigm it's the
fourth paradigm that i've kind of seen
there's like this you know imperative
functional hardware i don't know a
better word for it
and then ml do you have advice
for people uh that want to you know get
into programming want to learn
programming you have a
a video uh what is programming new
blessings exclamation point
and i think the top comment is like
warning this is not for noobs
uh do you have a noob like uh
tldw for that video but also uh
a new but friendly advice on
how to get into programming you are
never going to learn programming by
watching a video
called learn programming the only way to
learn programming i think and the only
one is the only way
everyone i've ever met who can program
well learned it all in the same way they
had something they wanted to do
and then they tried to do it and then
they were like
oh well okay this is kind of you know be
nice if the computer could kind of do
this thing and then
you know that's how you learn you just
keep pushing on a project
um so the only advice i have for
learning programming is go program
somebody wrote to me a question like we
don't really
they're looking to learn about recurring
neural networks
he's saying like my company is thinking
of doing recruit using recurring neural
networks for time series data
but we don't really have an idea of
where to use it yet
we just want to like do you have any
advice on how to learn about
these are these kind of general machine
learning questions and i think
the answer is like actually
have a problem that you're trying to
solve and and just i see that stuff oh
my god when people talk like that
they're like
i heard machine learning's important
could you help us integrate machine
learning with macaroni and cheese
production
you just i don't even you can't help
these people like who lets you run
anything who lets that kind of person
run anything
i think we're we're all um we're all
beginners at some point
so it's not like they're a beginner it's
it's like
my problem is not that they don't know
about machine learning my problem is
that they think that
machine learning has something to say
about macaroni and cheese production
or like i heard about this new
technology how can i use it for why
like i don't know what it is but how can
i use it for why
that's true you have to build up an
intuition of how because you might be
able to figure out a way but
like the prerequisites you should have a
macaroni and cheese problem to solve
first
exactly and then two you should
have more traditional like in the
learning process should involve
more traditionally applicable problems
in the space of whatever that is of
machine learning
and then see if it could be applied to
background at least start with tell me
about a problem like if you have a
problem you're like
you know some of my boxes aren't getting
enough macaroni in them
um can we use machine learning to solve
this problem that's
much much better than how do i apply
machine learning to macaroni and cheese
one big thing maybe this is me uh
talking to the audience a little bit
because i get these days
so many messages a device on how to like
learn stuff okay my
this this this is not me being mean i
think this is quite a profound actually
is you should google it oh yeah
like one of the uh
like skills that you should really
acquire as an engineer
as a researcher as a thinker like one
there's two
two complementary skills like one is
with a blank sheet of paper with no
internet to think deeply
and then the other is to google the crap
out of the questions you have like
that's actually a skill i
don't people often talk about but like
doing research like pulling at the
thread like looking up different words
going into like
github repositories with two stars and
like looking how they did stuff like
looking at the code or going on twitter
seeing like there's little pockets of
brilliant people that are like having
discussions
like if you're a neuroscientist go into
signal processing community if you're an
ai person going into the
psychology community like like switch
communities that keep searching
searching searching
because it's so much better
to invest in like finding somebody else
who already solved your problem
than than this to try to solve the
problem and because they've
often invested years of their life like
entire communities
are probably already out there who have
tried to solve your problem
i think they're the same thing i think
you go try to solve the problem
and then in trying to solve the problem
if you're good at solving problems
you'll stumble upon the person who
solved it already yeah
but the stumbling is really important i
think that's a skill that people should
really approach especially in undergrad
like search if you ask me a question how
should i get started in deep learning
like especially
like that is just so google like
the whole point is you google that and
you get a million pages
and just start looking at them yeah
start pulling at the thread
start exploring start taking notes start
getting it
advice from a million people that
already like spent their
life answering that question actually oh
well yeah i mean that's definitely also
yeah when people like ask me things like
that i'm like trust me the top answer on
google is much much better than anything
i'm going to tell you
right yeah people ask
it's an interesting question let me know
if you have any recommendations what
three books
technical or fiction or philosophical
had an impact
on your life or you would recommend
perhaps uh
maybe we'll start with the least
controversial uh infinite jest
um infinite jest is a
david foster wallace yeah it's a book
about wireheading really
very enjoyable to read very uh
well-written
you know you will you will you will grow
as a person reading this book
uh it's effort um and i'll set that up
for the second book which is pornography
it's called atlas shrugged um
uh which um atlas drug is pornography
i mean it is i will not i will not
defend the i will not say atlas shrugged
is a well-written book
it is entertaining to read certainly
just like pornography
the production value isn't great um you
know there's a 60-page
monologue in there that ann rand's
editor really wanted to take out
and she uh paid she paid out of her
pocket to keep that 60 page monologue in
the book
um but it is a great book for a kind of
framework um of human relations
and i know a lot of people are like yeah
but it's a terrible framework
yeah but it's a framework just for
context
in a couple days i'm speaking with for
uh
probably four plus hours with euron
brook who's
the main living remaining objectivists
objectivist interesting uh so
i've always found this philosophy quite
interesting on many levels one of how
repulsive
some percent of large percent of the
population find it
which is always uh always funny to me
when people
are like unable to even read a
philosophy
because uh of some i think that says
more about their psychological
perspective on it
yeah but but there is something about
objectivism and iran's philosophy that's
very deeply connected to this idea of
capitalism
of uh the ethical life is the productive
life
um that was always um
compelling to me it didn't seem as like
i didn't seem to interpret it in the
negative sense that some people do
to be fair i read that book when i was
19. so you had an impact at that point
yeah
yeah and the the bad guys in the book
have this slogan from each according to
their ability to each according to their
need
and i'm looking at this and i'm like
these are the most cards this is team
rocket level cartoonishness
right no bad guy and then when i
realized that was actually the slogan of
the communist party
i'm like wait a second wait no no no no
no just you're telling me this really
happened yeah it's interesting i mean
one of the criticisms of her work is she
has a cartoonish view of good and evil
like
that there's like the the reality isn't
jordan peterson says this
is that each of us have the capacity for
good and evil in us as opposed to like
there's some characters who are purely
evil and some characters are purely good
and that's in a way why it's
pornographic
the production value i love it well evil
is punished and there's very clearly
you know there's no there's no you know
uh just like porn doesn't have uh you
know like character growth well you know
neither does alex shrugged like
brilliant well put but as a 19 year old
george cotts it was
it was good enough yeah yeah what uh
what's the third
you have something um i i could give
these these two i'll just throw out uh
there's sci-fi uh permutation city
um great things to start thinking about
copies of yourself and then um
that is uh greg egan
uh he's uh that might not be his real
name some australian guy might not be
australian
i don't know um and then this one's
online it's called the metamorphosis of
prime intellect
um it's a story set in a
post-singularity world it's interesting
is there uh can you if either of the
worlds do you find something uh
philosophy interesting in them that you
can comment on
i mean it is clear to me that uh
metamorphosis prime intellect is like
written by
an engineer uh which is
it's very it's very almost a pragmatic
take on a utopia in a way
positive or negative well that's up to
you to decide reading the book
and the ending of it is very interesting
as well and i didn't realize what it was
i first read that when i was 15. i've
reread that book several times in my
life
and it's sure it's 50 pages everyone
should go read it
what's uh sorry this is a little tangent
i've been working through the foundation
i've been i've haven't read much sci-fi
my whole life and i'm trying to fix that
the last few months that's been a little
side project
what's uh to use the greatest sci-fi
novel
uh that uh people should read or is that
or
i mean i would yeah i would i would say
like yeah permutation city metamorphosis
environmental i got it
um i don't know i i didn't like
foundation uh i thought it was way too
modernist
i feel like dune i've never read dune
i've never read dune i have to read it
uh fire upon the deep is
interesting uh
okay i mean look everyone should read
everyone's reading romance everyone
should read snow crash
if you haven't read those like start
there um yeah i haven't read snow
questions
yeah no it means very entertaining go to
lecture bach and if you want the
controversial one
bronze age mindset
all right i'll look into that one those
aren't sci-fi
but just to round out books so
a bunch of people asked me on twitter
and read it and so on for advice
so what advice would you give a young
person today about life
another way
what uh yeah i mean looking back
especially when you're
young younger you did and you continued
it
you've accomplished a lot of interesting
things
is there some advice from those
i'm that life of yours that you can pass
on if college ever opens again i would
love to give a graduation speech
um at that point i will put a lot of
somewhat satirical effort into this
question
yeah at this you haven't written
anything at this point
oh you know what always wear sunscreen
this is water
like you're plagiarizing i mean you know
but that's the that's the like clean
your room
you know yeah you can play drugs from
from all this stuff and it's it's
there is no self-help books aren't
designed to help you they're designed to
make you feel good
like whatever advice i could give you
already know
everyone already knows sorry it doesn't
feel good
right like you know you know what what
if
if i tell you that you should you know
eat well and and and read more and
it's not gonna do anything i think the
whole like genre of those kind of
questions is
is is meaningless i don't know if
anything
it's don't worry so much about that
stuff don't be so caught up in your head
right i mean you're yeah in the sense
that your whole life
is your whole existence is like moving
version of that advice
i don't know yeah
there's there's something i mean there's
something in you that resists that kind
of thinking and that in itself
is it's just illustrative of uh
who you are and there's something to
learn from that
i think you're you're clearly not
overthinking stuff
yeah and you know it's a gut thing i
even when i talk about my advice i'm
like my advice is only relevant to me
it's not relevant to anybody else i'm
not saying you should go out if you're
the kind of person who overthinks things
to stop overthinking things it's not bad
it doesn't work for me maybe it works
for you i you know i don't know
let me ask you about love yeah
uh so i think last time we talked about
the meaning of life
and it was it was kind of about winning
of course uh i don't think i've talked
to you about
love much whether romantic or just love
for
the common humanity amongst us all what
role has love played in your life in
this
in this quest for winning where does
love fit in
well the word love i think means uh
several different things there's
uh love in the sense of maybe i could
just say there's like love in the sense
of opiates and love in the sense of
uh oxytocin and then love in the sense
of
maybe like a love for math i don't think
fits into either those first two
paradigms
uh so each of those have they uh
have they have they given something to
you
in your life i'm not that big of a fan
of the first two
um what
the same reason i'm not a fan of you
know the same reason i
don't do opiates and don't take ecstasy
right
and there were times look i've tried
both um
i like opiates way more than i liked
ecstasy uh but they're not
the ethical life is the productive life
so maybe that's
my problem with with those and then like
yeah a sense of
i don't know like abstract love for
humanity
i mean the abstract love for humanity
i'm like yeah i've always
felt that and i guess it's hard for me
to imagine not feeling it and maybe
there's people who don't and
i don't know but yeah that's just like a
background thing that's there
i mean since we brought up uh drugs let
me ask you
this is becoming more and more part of
my life because i'm talking a few
researchers that are working on
psychedelics
i've eaten shrooms a couple times and it
was
fascinating to me that like the mind can
go
like it's fascinating the mine can go to
places i didn't imagine it could go and
it was
very friendly and and positive and
exciting and
everything was kind of hilarious in the
in the place wherever my mind went
that's where i went
is uh what do you think about
psychedelics do you think they have
where do you think the mind goes have
you done psychedelics
where do you think the mind goes uh is
there something useful to learn about
the places it goes
once you come back you know i find it
interesting
that this idea that psychedelics have
something to teach
is almost unique to psychedelics right
people don't argue this about
amphetamines and
that's true and i'm not really sure why
yeah i think
all of the drugs have lessons to teach i
think there's things to learn from
opiates i think there's things to learn
from amphetamines i think there's things
to learn from psychedelics things to
learn from marijuana
um but also at the same time
recognize that i don't think you're
learning things about the world i think
you're learning things about yourself
yes um and you know what's the
even though it might have even been uh
might have been a timothy leary quote i
don't want to miss about him but the
idea is basically like
you know everybody should look behind
the door but then once you've seen
behind the door you don't need to keep
going back
um so i mean and that's my thoughts on
on all real drug use too
except maybe for caffeine it's a it's a
little experience
that uh it's good to have but oh yeah no
i mean
yeah i guess yeah psychedelics are
definitely um
so you're a fan of new experiences i
suppose yes because they all
contain a little especially the first
few times it contains some lessons that
could be picked up
yeah and i'll i'll revisit psychedelics
maybe once a year
um usually small smaller doses
maybe they turn up the learning rate of
your brain i've heard that
i like that yeah that's cool big
learning rates have pros and cons
last question this is a little weird one
but you've called yourself
crazy in the past uh
first of all on a scale of one to ten
how crazy would you say
are you oh i mean it depends how you you
know when you compare me to elon musk
and anthony lewandowski not so crazy
so like like a seven let's go with six
six yes six what uh
well like seven seven's a good number
seven sorry well yeah i'm sure
day by day changes right so but you're
in that
in that area what uh
in thinking about that what do you think
is the role of madness
is that a feature or a bug if you were
to uh dissect your
brain so okay from like a
like mental health lens on crazy
i'm not sure i really believe in that
i'm not sure i really believe in like
a lot of that stuff right this concept
of
okay you know when you get over to like
like like like
hardcore bipolar and schizophrenia these
things are clearly
real somewhat biological and then over
here on the spectrum you have like
a dd and oppositional defiance disorder
and
these things that are like wait this is
normal spectrum human behavior like this
isn't
you know where's the the line here and
why is this like a
problem so there's this whole this you
know the neurodiversity of humanity is
huge like people think i'm always on
drugs people are saying this to me on my
streams and like guys you know like i'm
real open with my drug use i'd tell you
if i was on drugs
yeah i had like a cup of coffee this
morning but other than that this is just
me
you're witnessing my brain and action
so so the word madness doesn't even uh
make sense and then you're in the rich
neurodiversity of
humans i think it makes sense but only
for
like some insane extremes like if you
are
actually like visibly hallucinating
um you know that's okay but there is the
kind of spectrum on which you stand out
like that that's uh like if i were to
look you know at decorations on a
christmas tree or something like that
like if you were a decoration out that
would catch my eye like
that thing is sparkly
whatever the hell that thing is uh
there's something to that
just like refusing to be um
boring or maybe boring is the wrong word
but to um
yeah i mean be willing to sparkle
you know it's it's like somewhat
constructed i mean
i am who i choose to be uh
i'm gonna say things as true as i can
see them i'm not gonna i'm not gonna
lie and but that's a really important
feature in itself so like whatever the
neurodiversity of your
whatever your brain is not putting um
constraints on it that force it to to
fit into the mold of what society is
like
defines what you're supposed to be so
you're one of the specimens that
that doesn't mind being yourself
being right is super important
except at the expense of being wrong
without breaking that apart i think it's
a beautiful way to end it and george
you're one of the most special humans i
know it's truly an honor to talk to you
thanks so much for doing it thank you
for having me
thanks for listening to this
conversation with george hotz and thank
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from the great and powerful linus
torvald
talk is cheap show me the code
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time