#782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More

0:00 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it's my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all. different fields they could be. In military Entertainment. sports or otherwise. And my guest today fits the otherwise. Category. I have wanted to have Danny Hillis.

0:21 On the show. for many years now, probably four or five years. And He came up. With my friend.

0:29 Kevin Kelly. And I was with Kevin on two pilgrimage tours to Longstory, but we were walking and talking for long periods of time on different continents and And I asked him in both cases. Who would you suggest

0:41 As a podcast guest I must interview. And we landed on Danny Hillis. So why? Why Danny Hillis? Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author, and engine. While completing his doctorate at MIT, he pioneered the parallel computers that are the basis for the processors used for AI. in most high performance computer chips. He did that.

1:03 While completing his doctor. The significance of that we'll come back to. So we will cover that. He has more than four hundred issued patents covering parallel computers, disc arrays, cancer diagnostics, and treatment. various electronic optical and mechanical devices. And the pinch to zoom display interface, you know, when you zoom in. Or zoom out.

1:20 On a map or something like that? Yeah. Or on anything really on an iPhone. Yeah, that thing. He is a co founder of the Long Now Foundation and the designer of its ten thousand year mechanical clock, which sits Inside a mountain in West Texas. And it's been funded by Jeff Bezos.

1:38 We'll talk about that a little bit. Danny has founded multiple companies, but his only regular job was as the first Disney fellow at Disney Imagineering. He has published scientific papers in Science, Nature, Modern Biology, and international journal of theoretical physics. Like what does this guy not do? And written extensively on technology for Newsweek, Wired, and Scientific American. He's the author of The Pattern on the Stone. The simple ideas that make computers work. And connection machine. is now a founding partner with Applied Invention, working on new ideas in cybersecurity medicine and agriculture. Okay, you can find the website. There's not much there because it's super top secret, but applied invention.com. And my co-host today is none other than the person who introduced me

2:18 to Danny directly, Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly, you can find him on Twitter at KevinThe Number Two Kelly. He is the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine, the former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review, and a best selling author of books on technology and culture. And I'll just Take a sidebar, he is one of the most accurate futurists. I have ever met. He is repeatedly right. His books include Excellent Advice for Living, The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, and Vanishing Asia, his gorgeous three-volume photo book set capturing West, Central, and East Asia.

2:52 Thousands of photos, he did all of it himself. Kelly is the author of the popular essay One Thousand True Fans, which I've recommended a million times. To anyone. Who has read my stuff or listened to this podcast? Subscribe to Kevin's newsletter. It's a lot of fun. Recommendo. That's R E C O M E N D O

3:10 Recommend though. Check it out. It is one of the few newsletters that I subscribe to. Every edition features six brief personal recommendations of cool stuff. And now just a few words from our sponsor. We'll jump right into it. This is a fun one. Hope you enjoy. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using ASleep podcover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top, like a fitted sheet. You can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed.

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7:43 I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. No Gentlemen. Kevin, Danny, thank you for making the time for the three amigos together. I know, Danny, it's a little presumptuous for me to call call us amigos just yet, but

8:06 Hopefully by the end of the chat. And Kevin, I must say, you know, your headline That I crafted for our podcast long ago, which was the real life most interesting man in the world. I think you might have some competition for that. That particular headline in Danny. And we'll certainly explore a lot of facets of that, but but maybe we'll start with

8:28 How the two of you met or connected in the first place. Do you want to take a stab at that, Kevin? Yeah. Wondering, I think my recollection is that um Our mutual friend Stuart Brand went to MIT Media Lab to write a book.

8:43 And I think Danny was one of the People that was embedded in that circle of the Media Lab and MIT. And at one point Stuart kinda dragged him back to Sausalito. Where I was editing The Hall Worth review at the time.

8:56 And we met. I was impressed, but that was it. And then later on when I was running Wire, Danny had a dream. Uh A clock that would tick.

9:07 Ten thousand years. As a sort of um Way to think about the future? And He wrote a proposal which I ran and wired.

9:16 And I thought it was really very interesting and a great way to frame the future. And that was it. But our mutual friend Stuart Brand decided that he would try to help Danny actually build the clock. And Made a little nonprofit called

9:32 Well, we didn't have a name. It was called the Clock Library Foundation. And I was part of the original group. Then for the past. Almost.

9:41 Thirty years, it seems like. We've been working on Together. on the Long Now's mission to encourage long term thinking and I've seen Danny in action In all those years. And so I think that's my recollection. Danny, does that

9:54 Okay. So I I'm gonna throw a bit of a wild card into things because I can't Resist. Not doing it. So Danny, there are a million places to start with you. We could try to do something chronological. Like we could start with home schooling, we could talk about AI, we could talk about dark sky weather apps.

10:16 There are so many points of entry. I thought though I might be the first to begin with a clamp, if that's the right term to use. So this device, this terrifying looking device. And a silver briefcase full of devices. How does this fit into your story? You might need to explain because I have no idea what this is. Okay.

10:41 Well at at some point I realized that I really wasn't going to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up. And then I always

10:52 Enjoyed new problems that I didn't know about, so I started a company called Applied Invention with Bran Farron that kind of worked on everything. And so how do you recruit people for a company like that? So one of the things that we did, we had this box of just weird stuff. Like a space shuttle tile.

11:13 Or A piece of synthetic diamond. Or That weird sort of clamp cutter thing that you just Mentioned.

11:22 And what we do as part of the interview process is We'd sit people down and we'd just open up the box. And immediately you could tell was this person a likely fit for the company because a lot of people would sort of wait for instructions.

11:39 Most of the people that we hired would look at it and say, Whoa, is that a Mogan clamp? Is that a is that a Lizard Gyro? Is that what is this? You know? And they would start picking up the pieces and talking about them and asking about them. And Those were the kind of people that we wanted to hire. And it wasn't a test so much of knowledge, it was more a test of curiosity and engagement and ability to learn. Although it was amazing how many of them people recognized. That was a particularly weird one that a lot of people did not get. Because as you probably know by now.

12:20 It's basically the device that is used for circumcision. To make sure you don't cut off too much. It's horrifying, but also like beautiful and how sterile it looks. And I appreciated the German on it that says Rostfrei, which means rust free, which is really what you want. I imagine. Rush rush free as uh and it and it has a limited opening, you know. So really it's it's it's hard to overdo it. Oh God squirming in my

12:50 Ergonomic chair just thinking about this. But the funniest person who ever opened that box was Robin Williams. And you can imagine where he sort of went with like space alien sex toys and things like that. He he knew what everything was and gave us a elaborate description of it. So all right. I can't resist taking the bath. There are a lot of things I'm not gonna be able to resist in this conversation. Why on earth is Robin Williams looking through this? Suitcase for this briefcase. Brand and I

13:18 had met Robin at the Walt Disney Company. It was actually the only job I ever had. I worked for a while as As something called Disney Fellow and Vice President of Imagineering. It was a job in the sense that I got a paycheck.

13:34 Which was actually kind of a novel experience for me. Because I usually Pay the paychecks. When I saw benefits. I suddenly realized what benefits meant because always previously benefits was something I had to pay.

13:48 But so that was a kind of a second education for me after my MIT education and completely different kinds of things, but Part of it. How big companies were part of it. So I like to hear, Danny, a little bit about that progression where you got your degree in I don't know math or computer science and then you started a company, uh as you said, yourself before that. That progression to work for Disney is not an obvious step for anybody.

14:16 What were you thinking and what was your your plan? I mean, you're kind of over educated for the role in some ways. Well, I've never really had a plan. I will admit. It would be nice and people know where they're going in life. And maybe I'll figure that out someday, but opportunities present themselves. And that was a moment in my life when I went to MIT

14:38 I knew I wanted to work for Marvin Minsky. Which is whole other story and I studied AI under Marvin Minsky in the early days of AI. But I realized that AI was not going to happen without big fast parallel computers.

14:51 Which didn't exist at the time. So I started to build one which I had to build From designing the chips. The operating system, like everything.

15:02 From scratch. And it rapidly became too big a project for a graduate student to do at a university. Even though Darva is giving me the money. The University didn't

15:14 Like a graduate student having this many employees. I did what was at the time a very unusual thing, which is started a company as a graduate student. And in fact, MIT told me I couldn't do it. And I said, uh I don't See how you can say that'cause I'm paying you money, you're not paying me money.

15:33 So they for I started hiring a bunch of faculty members and salt in the wood. And I hired the ex president of the university, which was Terry Weisner. They stop bothering me.

15:51 Brought in the power lobbyists. And that was a huge success from a technical standpoint, but Honestly me and the other people that started the company had no idea about how to make a company work. I made a lot of mistakes.

16:10 Yeah. How I settled the business'cause I was really mostly Wanting to just build this computer. I wasn't trying to build a company. And so we successfully built what was then the first

16:20 Big parallel computer. It was something that all the experts said was impossible for various reasons and It became the fastest computer in the world. For many years we built the fastest computers in the world. But we never made a great business out of it. Actually, interestingly enough, somebody who worked for one of our chip suppliers

16:38 Got a much better idea of gotta make a business out of it and he took very similar chips to what we were making and he made them for video games and That company Actually Took thirty years, but it finally managed to do what we set out to do. And that was NVIDIA.

16:54 I've heard of it. Yeah. One of those ships is probably the power of one of your machines, right? Oh yeah. I mean it Moore's Law really worked and got the watch it play out. I mean that was thirty years ago. So think of how many times Moore's Law has doubled since then. So you were describing this though as How you wound up at Disney.

17:16 Oh yeah, well and the company didn't work out. I kinda worked it out. I got all the hardware people that were working on it he hired a Sun Microsystems and exchange their options and thinking machines for options in Sun Microsystems. But This was just before the web took off and

17:33 That worked out well for them. But I decided that Yeah, I'd had enough of the computer business and I just wanted to do something different. And I had twin babies and a daughter that was born on the day the company closed down, so

17:48 I just kinda wanted a job for a little while and I had always had this kind of childhood dream of being an imagineer. And then it's like well just let me Be an imaginary and they're like, Well No, I think we have to give you more of a title than that. So I I didn't want to title anybody new what I was supposed to do.

18:10 So I asked for Disney Fellow, which it turns out Salvador Dali had been the only previous Disney Fellow. So I thought I was I was on pretty Safe ground there, but Also, uh they made me a vice president just so that It turns out that's very important to a big company for some people. So They talked me into that, but it was a good thing because nobody takes you seriously unless you have some title that they understand. But

18:34 It really was true that nobody knew what I was supposed to do. And actually the guy that had approved my hiring was Frank Wells. And he unfortunately died in a helicopter crash before I showed up. So really nobody knew what I was supposed to do. But that turned out to just be a fantastic way to get an education because I could say, you know, I want to be in the meeting where we decide

18:58 what we're going to build in Florida that became Animal Kingdom or what we're gonna build in Paris or what so I would insist on being in a meeting and everybody would be a little bit worried that maybe I had some authority and nobody would say no to me. So I learned a huge amount about Kind of storytelling.

19:17 And I would say the artistic way of looking at things rather than the engineering way of looking at things. What would be an example of that? Danny, of something you learned in terms of being able to s tell a story. Some of'em shocked me as kind of bad because, you know, in some sense show business is a Which is a nice way of saying lying about things. And

19:40 It's not really tethered to reality. So You know, in science If you have an argument, somebody's right. But in show business that's not really true. Just somebody wins the argument. And you never really know who was right.

19:54 So there's a completely different way people relate to each other. So basically You know, you make a movie and it either's a flop or it's a great hit. And if it's a great hit, everybody who was in the room at the time they decide to make the movie gets promoted. But, you know, nobody really knows why it was a hit or who was responsible or so on. Very different from engineering where there's a sub ground truth. Here's an example, like one of my first days. Early on they knew they needed to get an online

20:23 spaces and they said, You know, we need to make some kind of Online service or Disney Online. They didn't know what it was, but they knew online was a big thing. This was kind of the The Sillywood period when Hollywood and Silicon Valley were Dancing with each other.

20:40 And so they sat down and said, Okay, everybody Write down on a piece of paper. Some sketches of what you think this thing's gonna look like. Yeah. So

20:49 I draw the kind of block diagram of the Servers and the services and the We gotta have ways for people to log into it in a database that, you know, has a Typical kinda engineering block diagram. Then everybody else at the table.

21:05 We go around the table and everybody else holds up like a picture of a Magic castle or Yeah, it's all like Images of Things that you would look at.

21:16 Nothing about how anything would work. And And I hold up mine, everybody's like You think it should be a bunch of boxes with lines? It was just a complete disconnect. But they knew something and they focused on Different things than I did and

21:30 After a while I came to appreciate that things they were focusing on were Extremely important. And in fact, probably the most important things to make things successful or not successful in show business. So we it was a second Education for me. Could you say a little bit more about

21:46 the artistic way of seeing things Versus the engineering way. of seeing things or looking at things and we may end up coming back At some point to Richard Fleinman. I own a number of placemats that he used to use for

22:04 drawing practice in his somewhat mature friendships with One painter in particular. But I remember their debates about sort of seeing through the eyes of science versus seeing through the eyes of an artist. And I'm wondering If that artistic way of looking at the world has translated to things after Disney. For you.

22:24 Oh, well definitely has and I'll focus on the part of it that influenced me the most. I mean, it was really interesting to be around people who knew how to draw and I took drawing classes and things like but the thing that really stuck was learning what they meant by storytelling. So you know, when Disney like designs a theme park I don't think of it so much as a piece of architecture or a map.

22:49 They think of it as a story. By story it means kind of a a sequence and a narrative of going into it and experiencing it, so it sort of makes sense. to the people that are going through it. They sort of know where they are, they know what to expect, they know when it's over.

23:05 And a ride is like that, but actually the whole theme park is like that. And that way of thinking of things As a Understandable emotional experience that connects with someone. It's very different than sort of looking at No, the mechanics of how the rye's work and which is also very interesting.

23:25 But It's very subjective and yet it can be done well and it can be done Badly, and we've all been moved by watching a film or listening to a piece of music or something like that. We all know that It does affect us, it does connect with us. And so for example in the way that

23:44 most obvious way that's influenced it was that's how I started to think about designing the ten thousand year clock. My first Thought about it. I was thinking about well V mechanical problem. How do I keep it wound? How do I

23:59 Um, you know, what materials do I use? But I after a while I but came to realize that really the m most important thing about this clock and the thing that will really determine How long it lasts is. What are people?

24:14 Think about it. How do they experience it? How do they relate to it? What's the story? What is it about? What is the story? So for example, I'll give you a simple example. In the beginning when I designed it. That's like an ordinary clock. It would

24:27 Always show you what time it was. But then I realized If it's ticking away in a mountain someplace and it doesn't Care if you exist. Then why should you care if it exists?

24:40 So instead I thought much more about the story of somebody going to visit the clock and what did they see? What's the sequence of things? Where did they get confused? Where did they get frightened of like, I'm in the wrong place. And then When they get to the clock, instead of showing what time it is, it actually shows the time the last person was there. shows the time and the date that the last person was there.

25:03 And then when they wind the clock it catches up to the current time. And then of course This is sort of an idea that's obvious for anybody that's been Disney, but if you want it Take home a souvenir, so

25:15 But it does is it It has a place on the date where you could take a rubbing. So you can go home with a rubbing of the date that you were there. Things like that I don't think I really would have thought about without that education at Disney where it's With that education.

25:31 It's obvious that those things in some sense are Much more important than how you solve the technical problems. And by rubbing do you mean almost like taking paper, putting it on a wood carving and Rubbing on top of it to create an imprint. That's right. So if you did it like uh Analogue.

25:47 Yeah. So piece of. Tracing paper or eat paper, take a crayon or a piece of charcoal and do rub it across. And it That's nice because it's something that is you because it's like your handmarks and But it's also

26:00 A unique thing of the date that you were there. So it's something that kind of could only exist because of you and because of your visit there. Daniel, you you run an invention company right now. And is that something that you also apply to your clients as well as when they come in? Are you trying to

26:19 Tell them or help them. Make a story out of the inventions that you were Working on do peop other people really care about it as much as you do? People care about it, but I don't necessarily talk to the clients about that. Because

26:33 Depending on the perspective. The thing they may care about is financial sales or the reliability of the machine or the rate of production or they have something that They think they care about, but Very often behind it. There has to be some story for it to make sense that the people who are

26:51 operating the machine or buying the product. And so I'm thinking about it. that way. I'm not necessarily explaining it to the client. Oh right. Yeah, I would say pretty much everything I do is

27:04 influenced by that way of looking at things and it causes you to Look at the experience of it. Rather than the eng engineering of it. And actually i it's interesting. I mean I was very lucky'cause I I got to work with Steve Jobs when he was first making the Macintosh. And it was during that period he had been kinda kicked out of the campus of Apple and

27:24 Was in a apartment with a few pirates. Making the Macintosh and At the time this was before I had been to Disney and before I learned this and It drove me crazy because I got called in'cause I knew how to make chips and Steve wanted to make a

27:40 Custom chip for the Macintosh initially. And it wasn't gonna happen. And I was the one that had to look at it and tell him. It wasn't gonna happen in the time scale you wanted. Which is not a fun thing to do with Steve.

27:55 And so And it's like well, you know, this is just reality. No matter how much you yell at me, it's not gonna change. But you know, you've got this simulator that Andy is making all his software work on. So why don't you just sell the simulator and in he basically blew up at me and I I'm just missing the point of everything. But What I realized looking back at it is Steve was like really wrong about a lot of technical things, but what he was really right about was the story of how people would relate.

28:27 That's my shit. He had a vision about that that other people didn't have. And in some sense, it didn't matter. that he was wrong about a bunch of technical things because the story was so correct. And the way that you related was so correct. That all the technical things were fixable. But if you've been wrong about the story

28:46 No amount of technical excellence would have fixed it. And I think I only understood that in retrospect after I kinda saw people relating to the Mac. So Danny, you you were doing AI for a very long time. You made the first Computers. That were in parallel, you called it thinking machines.

29:05 Our slogan was, We want to make a machine that will be proud of us. Right. Exactly. So What is the story on AI that we're not getting right now? There's a lot of focus on all these LMs and neuronets which were very old actually. What do you think the story is?

29:25 And what's the story that that we're not Hearing. Well, I'll tell you a story I told a long time ago about AI, which I call the Songs of Eden. Which is in some sense it was a story about where human intelligence came from, and it was a story about A bunch of monkeys that kind of grunted and repeated each other's

29:44 Crunch. They sung along with each other. Didn't really mean anything. But they started Noticing the mood of the other monkeys by The grunts they were making in

29:55 Their brains began to develop to keenly notice the moods of the other monkeys because they're social animals. And so they started evolving. The ability to Distinguish sounds. But at the same time, there was another kind of thing that was evolving which

30:11 There was no name for it then, but we call it Memes Now. Which is Things that got repeated. And that were very w catchy tunes and things like that. And And so there was this kind of co evolution of these two things. One of them with the monkeys got

30:26 Sort of better and better at Distinguishing between the gruns. And the Ideas got better and better at helping the monkeys because that's how they got repeated. And so we're sort of a symbiosis of those two things of

30:42 The monkeys and the song. So the songs in some sense evolved into human culture and human ideas. And you know, we evolved into the monkeys that were able to hold those ideas and transfer those ideas. And so I kinda told the story that that was the way that

31:01 Human. intelligence evolved and predicted that that might be the way that artificial intelligence evolved that we would build machines that were sort of powerful enough, but then we'd kind of infect them with human culture. Now, the internet didn't exist then, but I wasn't quite sure where you were gonna get the human culture or how you were gonna do that. But I think that's sort of what's happened is

31:21 What we've got is not so much artificial intelligence, but we've sort of got a substrate on which human intelligence can live that's not human. And the human intelligence is all of the things that was learned from all the data that we train on in some sense. So and this is the early stages. So you might say it's just kind of imitating right now. But it's got so many examples that's really good at imitating. And that's always sort of the first part of intelligence is imitation. I mean, child.

31:49 begins with imitation, then they understand more and more. So I think we're in that imitation stage right now where We've built machines that are able to do a pretty good job of imitating and they'll go beyond their Just beginning to peek beyond the imitation stage. reason things like that. But in the end, it's not really a an artificial intelligence.

32:10 human intelligence on an artificial substrate. That's a new phrasing and lens that I've not heard before. And we'll probably come back to AI, but I want to maybe ask a And that's not the only possible form of AI for We will almost certainly come back to that. But I wanna zoom out for a second.

32:30 You said Earlier at some point, I never really had a plan. But There are people who don't have a plan. And have no direction and end up

32:40 I think as Mark Andreessen put it once as a sort of a rabbit pivoting every ten seconds going a different direction in the maze and not making any progress. Clearly you are Not that rabbit. So it seems that there is some underlying central Or way in which you choose projects or what you will do next.

33:01 How do you do that? What is your guiding sense of how you choose Where to direct your Attention. And you said at some point you want to do anything other than the computer stuff, so you

33:14 Shifted to The imagineering. Right. And there were other lifestyle factors but I'm just wondering broadly speaking, how do you choose what you're gonna do next and then Once you decide on that, I'm stealing from Kevin here, but How do you proceed once you decide that you want to get into a new field?

33:31 So first of all. Instance. I sort of love the process of a mention. I have to say that I think it's a misunderstood process because what the inventor Does is actually a very small piece of it.

33:43 What society does is it creates these preconditions for invention. And once those preconditions are in place. Then It's just a matter of sort of putting together them. Puzzle pieces and

33:58 Making it work. So I always love to See those moments where all the pieces are around and somebody just needs to And usually they're not recognized'cause they're looked at by different people. They're in different disciplines and things like that. Could you give an example? A perfect example was parallel computers.

34:15 It sort of now seems totally obvious. Like how could anybody have not Build parallel computers. But at the time there were some pieces that weren't quite there yet until you got the ability to put Multiple processors on a piece of silicon. That required a certain level of

34:34 Complexity of the silicon production technology. So nobody had done that. So I made the first multi core chips. And it was also There were proofs that

34:44 Computers became Less and less efficient the more processors that you added to them. There was something called Amdal's Law. That was how I be um Basically poo pooed parallel computers or people like Cray said you didn't need them.

34:59 Danny, just for people listening, could you define what parallel computing is? Yeah, parallel computing is what you do in the cloud when you have lots and lots of computers you put onto a problem or You do it on a single chip now that is a multi core chip that has Multiple processors on it.

35:17 It's so obvious now, it doesn't seem like an idea. But just to be clear, the traditional way was you have a sequence and you would just do one thing at a time. That was the standard way. And this is you're gonna do things multiple at the same time, which is very complex because you have to Do all kinds of things to coordinate, to you know, converge. The complexity is incredibly more

35:38 difficult when you're doing things in parallel. Yeah, and also there were all these kind of reasons why people thought it was impossible and it's hard to believe and it it took a while to understand why they were wrong. You know, it hadn't been done. But I knew it was possible because I knew the human brain worked. So

35:57 You know, their human brain has these very slow components, much slower than Transistors. So I was like, Well, maybe they won't be general purpose computers, but if you're gonna make AI, certainly That's the way to do it. So I had some confidence that Doing the thing in the the unexpected way was going to work.

36:14 And the preconditions were there that I could design COS chips. Make those work, build'em Compiler technology was at the right place. television cameras were starting to produce digital things so that you could have eyes

36:30 Yeah, digital eyes on machines. So all the preconditions of converting audio to bids were they are So all the pieces were kind of coming together. And the only reason it wasn't being done was this sort of prejudice that it was impossible, which was sort of created for commercial reasons, I think.

36:50 And so it was out there to be done and I had a reason to believe that It would work. So that's a kind of example of sort of seeing the Preconditions are all there. Now, that required an incredible amount of work on

37:04 Tens of thousands of great engineers to get it to that point. So in some sense, all I had to do was take advantage of each of those pieces that were already there and Put them together. Right now it's very formal what we decide to work on because our partners at Apply Invention, we put three tests on things. One of them is that, you know, one of the senior partners has to be really excited about it.

37:28 Which is Usually because it has some big impact on the world. Or Sometimes it's'cause it's just really cool technology, but No, usually it's because they see it has

37:39 Potential for big impact. And then The partners that are not The one that's the most excited about it. And often I'm the one that's excited about it, so

37:52 The other partners get to look at it and say Does this make any financial sense? And it can make financial sense'cause it's We're guaranteed not to lose too much money on it. Or It could make financial sense'cause there's a small chance of making a lot of money on it or you know, you have to

38:10 portfolio of those things, but that sort of has to be evaluated by different people than the one the most excited about it. Good idea. So there's a kind of practical aspect to it that I probably didn't do in the early days. I tended to do things way too early before they made any. financial sense. So now we have that bit of discipline added to it. But then the third thing that we do, which is and this is the hardest thing to do.

38:37 And we call it the non redundancy. Criterion. 'Cause by then you've got a project somebody's excited about and you know it's gonna make money. And Why would you say no? Well the answer is you would say no if it's gonna happen anyway.

38:50 In other words, if somebody else is gonna do it Well, why should you do it? You're wasting your time. It's like For some reason nobody's doing it. And you know, in the case of the parallel computing thing, it was this crazy thing called Amdal's law, which seemed to prove that it was impossible.

39:06 And so you have to say There's a unique reason why We're gonna do this. We're doing something that won't get done otherwise or won't get done for a long time or won't Get done right.

39:18 So we only take projects like that. Yeah. That one's a Tough self discipline to in force, but but we do do it.

39:29 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me. On the road. So what is AG1? AG one is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out.

40:18 go to drinkage one dot com slash Tim. That's drinkage one, the number one. Drink AG One dot com slash Tim. Last time, drink AG One dot com. Slash Tim. Check it out. Quick question on

40:38 The parallel. Computing example. So you mentioned, if I'm getting the pronunciation right, Amdal's law which indicated it was impossible You mentioned as a perhaps counterexample Obviously in different substrate the human brain does it, but Were there other pieces of evidence that led you to believe, given the constraints of the technology at the time that it was

41:00 Possible? No, I think that was the one that really made me have faith in it. There's there's something wrong with Emdol's law. 'Cause I actually at the time I couldn't tell you what the flaw was in the proof of Amdahl's law. It was pretty convincing. I mean now I can go back and tell you

41:16 That the flaw was it assumed that You just kept doing the same size problem. But of course if you have a bigger, faster computer, you do a bigger problem. And so you don't just use the same Problem. That's the reason cloud computing works and these giant parallel machines work is because you use gigantic problems on them.

41:36 And if you try to use a little problem that you were running on a single computer, they wouldn't be very efficient. But anyway, I didn't see that fly at the time. I'll give you an example of something we're doing now that sort of fits that. Cybersecurity.

41:49 Everybody agrees cybersecurity's a mess, ransoms are going up. Nobody knows even how big it is'cause everybody Hides. The break ins and so on, but like Everybody agrees it's getting worse rapidly and

42:05 The defense is losing against offense. Yeah. If you step back and really look at it. The reason that it's bad is because the internet was built on a sort of flawed foundation.

42:19 The basic idea of IP internet protocol. was that you'd look at a packet and if it wanted to go someplace you'd move it in that direction. And it was explicitly stated in the design principles that security was not the problem of the networks. Security was the problem of the thing that

42:39 Got the packet. And the pack I can kind of claim to be from anywhere. So you get this flood of packets being delivered to you. You have no idea really where they came from and you have to kinda guess which are the good ones and which are the bad ones. Unmarked packages from everywhere. Yeah. Exactly. And so

42:56 You can come up with very clever ways of guessing, but then as soon as you do that Somebody can come up with A very clever way of getting around your Heuristic of guessing. And

43:06 Ultimately the attackers have the advantage if the packets are anonymous. And so clearly the right thing is policy of what it delivers. So in some sense we did that a little bit with firewalls of you try to see that oh this is a bad packet, I'll cut it off or something. But Yeah, again, you sort of have to guess where it came from or

43:28 What it's doing to do that. So I got together bunch of people that Had been involved in the early days of these

43:36 Of the internet and had built all kinds of things on top of it and had used it for very high security applications and things like that. And And said, How would we have designed internet protocol? If we knew what we knew today. If we actually

43:52 Understood. What cyber security It's like how people were really using computers. Things like that. And you know, that's a non starter for anybody.

44:03 Any normal commercial company to ask that question'cause obviously you're not gonna replace Internet Protocol. But It was a great hypothetical that kind of captured a bunch of very smart people's imagination. And we got together and Invented something called zero trust packet routing where.

44:22 Every packet carries a kind of a passport and a visa that proves it has permission. to go where it's going. So the network itself kind of has a policy. It doesn't try to deliver everything to everything. It delivers things that are allowed to go So where they're Allowed to go.

44:39 And then it turned out after we built that that actually we looked at and said, you know, we could build this as kind of an overlay to start. On the current Internet. So people are starting to do that now. Now Oracle just announced a product that their cloud is

44:54 Gonna start using this protocol. And so I think that that's gonna cause a big shift. In the internet eventually.

45:04 Because it Sort of gets the the foundational problem. That's sort of no Sane company would looked at as a business opportunity.

45:14 And it probably isn't a business opportunity'cause it probably has to be open and know, a standard or something like that. But I think it's gonna actually Help the good guys. Yeah. Actually make the world a better place.

45:28 What do you think, Danny, the and I'm gonna keep this pretty broad, but the future of cybersecurity potentially looks like and you can choose the time frame. Five years, ten years. three years, whatever you want to paint, but I mean there could be the dystopian sort of Cormic McCarthy version of what cybersecurity looks like. Then there's the utopian kind of island Aldus Huxley. version and then there's probably something in between. I think you will actually ship to this and what this is there's sort of two completely different layers of

45:57 cybersecurity that have nothing to do with each other. So you'll have the kind of layer that we have right now that we depend on, which is the endpoints kind of protect themselves. So You know, they m force you to log in and identify yourself or exchange certificates.

46:13 That will all still exist. But completely independently of that will be something like It'll be zero trust packet routing or something like that. Where the network itself is kind of aware of who's sending the messages, what permissions they have, and it's actually aware of the identity and sort of strongly authenticated identity of the That's a completely different system than we have now.

46:37 So I think that two layer system Actually the Defender has the advantage instead of right now the attacker has the advantage. That's cool. So Dan I w I love your idea of the three criteria Mm.

46:50 Deciding whether it's your company does things, I assume maybe that's also your personal one too, where It's am I excited? Is there some Viable means to keep it going.

47:01 And then thirdly Would it happen without me. Their last one. Supposes a certain amount that you know something or you have some ability that other people don't have. To do it.

47:11 And so Going back to you with the chips, like you're a young graduate student. Oh, I'm just gonna design a chip. I'm gonna make chips. That requires either a lot of knowledge about chip making it's not every graduate student who says I can make a chip. And how am I gonna make I mean, so how do you enter into this area of

47:31 Chip design. That you don't have, but you're confident that you can make a chip. So tell me about how you get there. Maybe it just requires a lot of overconfidence. So of course it always turns out to be harder than you think. Right. But I guess I am gravitated toward learning new things. And I've also

47:49 Develop. Yeah. Search out the people who really

47:56 know the thing, so And Hang out with them. So

48:01 Find the people that really understand it. Hang out with it, learn it. And so It's not that I know things other people don't, but maybe I know a different combination of things that other people do know.

48:15 And I'm kind of willing to learn the things I don't know. and kind of have a technique of doing it with just hanging out with people who are smarter than I am. Let me open that up a bit. So I feel like there are many different species of hanging out with people. Right. So I could have As many group dinners with wine and banter. With

48:35 experts in AI is humanly possible and Who knows? Maybe I'd have a hangover and a few great ideas I Could you give a few examples of how you interact with people. Maybe because the name was invoked earlier, you could start with Marvin Minsky and maybe your first meeting.

48:56 Yeah. Because maybe that'll lead us somewhere interesting. Okay, so Marvin Minsky is the person who named artificial intelligence. He and John McCarthy kind of Founded the field. So when I went in my T

49:10 I kinda knew that I wanted to do artificial intelligence and I had read about Marvin Minsky. So I knew I wanted to work for Marvin Minsky. And I was Had to figure out how to do it and

49:24 The AI lab was sort of locked up in technology square. It was hard to even physically get into it. And you couldn't get into it unless you had a key and you couldn't get a key unless you had a job there. So I decided okay, first thing I gotta get into the building. So I did slip in a few times, but that wasn't gonna work. It was pretty high security.

49:52 Darthur was Paying for all of the lab. And I got their proposals and the proposals to NSF and I read their proposals to see what is I could possibly offer here. And I read their proposals. And you read those proposals because those were publicly available in some format because they're government funded.

50:09 Well, they were actually in the library that was in the lobby of the building, which you could get to. Okay. Here we go. Okay. So I'm in the lobby. So I can read the proposed show, Marks, nose and mustache, cup of coffee. Don't mind me. Right. Yeah. So I read them and and they came across There was one thing where they said, You know, we think it's actually important that Young kids program computers and We think even kids that can't read and write should program it. We don't know how to do that yet, but we think it's important.

50:41 I was like, ah, they don't know how to do it yet. So I will invent a way for kids who can't read and write to program computers. So I went off and I Invented. picture way where you manipulated blocks and And then that was enough, that proposal was enough to get me an interview with Seymour Pappert.

51:01 Who is Seymour? It was the first one that did sort of educational computing. And he had the gates to the kingdom in terms of getting you into the kingdom. He had the gates, okay. He was he was inside the kingdom. So what did you say to this person? Were you like I was prusing in the library, I came across this. It seems important to your funding that you develop X. No, no, I didn't give him all that backstory. I just said, Hey, here's a really cool Way I've come up with for kids that

51:28 Don't know how to read and write to program computers. He's like, Oh, I've been looking for that. Okay, got it. So it wasn't like a million things that were in these proposals. He would recognize Yeah, he he immediately recognized that was something he wanted. What a coincidence, Right.

51:44 It it this sounds a little bit like logo. It was. It he he invented logo. He's the guy that invented logo. And what did you invent? I invented something called the slot machine, which is a way of programming logo width. pictures. So you could arrange pictures and actually The squeak language is kinda the electronic version of what I invented.

52:05 physical things that you put together. To make a logo program. What is a logo program? It was an early computer program language that for kids. I got it. I got a programming language. You would say move the square

52:18 around in a circle or something. Very, very simple. Of course people thought this was very impractical because we had to convince the people someday every school will have a computer. That was considered very implausible at the time, but that was our stretch idea there, that someday every school would have a computer. So I had a physical way that you could kind of program it. By putting these in And so I got hired.

52:41 And I got a key to the building. Okay, so now I'm in the building. I'm building it. I go to Marvin Minsky's office. Marvin's never there. But after a while I make friends and You know, like where's Marvin? And it's like oh

52:55 He comes in at night and he is working Downstairs in the basement. And he's building Something which It's a personal computer.

53:05 Whoa. And I was like, Okay, that's great. And so but I had the key. The key you couldn't get into the basement without the key either. But I have the key.

53:12 So Sure enough, I go down there at night and there's Marvin Minsky with his graduate students around him. You know, in those days they were wire wrapping machines and there were the diagrams lying around all over the place of the computer. And of course I'm too shy to talk to Marvin and I don't really have anything useful to say to Marvin. So I just sort of look around and I look around at the

53:35 diagrams of the computers. I noticed a mistake on Monapa. Ha. I go to Marvin Minsky and I say, You know, I think there's an error here And Marvin went and says, Oh yeah, yeah, that seems wrong. Fix it. And it's like, Well you mean fix on the diagram? I mean he's like no fix on the diagram, fix it on the machine, you know.

53:54 Just fix it. That's Okay. Sell. All right.

53:59 look around and I find something else I go to mar with them. I said, Don't ask me every time, just like Fix the problems. So After a while I just started working They are and I think Marvin just sort of assumed I work for him.

54:12 And then eventually you know everybody's a little bit more. I mean after I'm there for a few weeks and everybody Else would get tired and go home in the morning and Then Marvin At some point he was like

54:24 Where you going? You need a ride someplace. I'm like oh I need to go back by anywhere. He's like, Yeah, why don't you just like crash in my basement? So I kinda moved into Marvin's basement. Eventually I mentioned to my that I didn't actually have a job and he gave me one. But I still sort of had my job at Logo working for Seymour, but Yeah, that was how I got into the AI lab and started working for Mars. Hanging out with people. Yeah.

54:46 So there's one other example that you were gonna give Danny outside of Marvin. Learning by hanging around people. The Hillis method of hanging around with Well, I was gonna give the Feinman example. I had met Richard Feynman. Uh a conference and we had really hit it off.

55:07 And for people listening if they don't have any context, just a brief Overview of Richard. So Richard Feynman was the Nobel Prize winning physicist that invented Feynman diagrams and quantum electrodynamics and A lot of other Basic techniques that everybody uses in physics.

55:27 And one of the youngest people that was on the Manhattan Project. So totally brilliant, but also just a lot of fun. And we really hit it off. Liked him a lot and thought he was super smart. And so when I was starting Thinking machines I wanted him involved somehow, so

55:44 I went To visit him at Caltech. And he invited me to stay at his house. He um I explained to him. building this parallel computer and and said, you know, Do you think you have any students that

55:58 We could hire Or hire as interns or something like that that might be interested in working on this. And

56:07 You know No he's a None of my students are crazy enough to Work on something like that. I mean That's nuts.

56:17 And it's just a cookie idea. That's what he said. That's a kooky idea. And he he said, Well he says actually, maybe there's this one guy I know that would work on it. You might hire him for a summer job, you know. But

56:31 He doesn't really know much about computers, but he's a really hard worker and I think he's pretty smart. Yeah, I was like, Okay, well that's good enough recommendation. For me? What's his name? He said Richard Fonder. So he came he was actually showed up on the first day, which is the middle of summer, and he he shows up and I of course

56:58 Starting a company You got like worrying about closing financing and things like that. And I wasn't really thinking of like what's everybody gonna actually do when we get All this set up on the first day and he shows up the first day. He salutes. Richard Feynman

57:15 You know, what would you like me to do? And I'm like, Oh I haven't really thought about this. So I I think we're saying I think um How would you do quantum electrodynamics on a parallel computer? And he's like That's what you want on the first day?

57:29 It's like Is that really what you need doing? And I was like, Well Actually the truth of the matter is we don't have any like pencils or paper. Nobody's gotten any supplies. He's got great, I'll be quartermaster. And so he goes out and he He gets the supplies. That was kind of his first job. But he kept on You know, every summer he would come The Thinking Machines and of course we got more serious tasks. And he actually started the first quantum computing project at Thinking Machines. So we were

57:58 Again, a bit ahead of our time on that. Probably way too ahead of our time. So Danny what I find interesting in in your approach of hanging out with people is When you're going into new field, you're not like reading the papers. You're going to talk to someone. You learn best by conversation and listening.

58:16 Or do you learn by reading some fundamental papers? I read enough papers that I have questions. Uh. You know, because You're wasting a

58:25 the time of a Marvin Minsky or uh a Richard Feynman if you don't Ask'em something that makes them think. And so I would say most of my learning was from the people, not the papers, but I always do homework beforehand to So see where the interesting questions are and in some sense

58:43 That's easier to do when you're coming into a feel from the outside because The people inside the field have already kind of settle on a set of questions is the important question. But If you don't know much, it's sort of easier for you to see sort of the big holes that are missing.

59:00 And sometimes your questions are dumb. Yeah. You know, they explain to you why they're dumb questions, but sometimes They're like, Yeah, that's actually a pretty interesting fundamental question. And you know, if you can hit on one of those, that gets you into a conversation. But ultimately I learn much more from

59:17 People And from the papers. How did you, Danny, get into Biotechnology or Just the biological sciences.

59:26 Once I set up these invention companies, people would start to come to me with problems that Kind of as a last resort. The engineer of last problem and nobody else can solve it. So that was the way that I got into biology is a doctor named uh David Higgins, it was an oncologist. He was really frustrated with his abilities to diagnose and treat cancer.

59:54 I came to me and said you know, we gotta Problem here, you know. Cancer is all these different things and No. paradigm we have for treating things just isn't

1:00:05 Working for it. Um I started talking with them about it. And that led to a big collaboration, one of the things that we realized was

1:00:15 In some sense cancering isn't something you have like a disease. It's something that You do Yeah, like your body does, and your body's constantly doing it. And your body is probably cancering right now in three or four different ways. But usually It deals with it. Um

1:00:32 Stops it and occasionally it gets out of control. So if you start thinking of it more like a verb. And then where's the action happening? Well the action is happening at the levels of proteins being expressed and proteins interacting. So even if I knew all your genes, I

1:00:50 Don't know what your proteins are doing. I know. Maybe what possible proteins are, but proteins after they get produced by the genes, they modify each other and they also come in by food and the bacteria you're got and everything like that. So what you really want to see is the proteins.

1:01:07 What's happening in the proteins and nobody had a way of looking at the proteins. So we started developing a way that you could take a Drop of blood or eventually a cell. It was at all.

1:01:20 Just measure all the proteins in it. And see how that changed with time and we started doing it with mice and studying, you know, as they got cancer. We could see how the proteins changed and the cascades and then you could look at ways of interfering with this process, which is different in every form of cancer. So

1:01:40 Once you start looking at it as kind of a runtime thing. Rather than Something that you have. What do you mean by runtime? There's two ways of looking at what's going on in a computer. I mean I could stare at the code for a long time, but

1:01:54 Uh Better way of debugging the program is to try to run the program and look at what's actually happening. And in some sense. If you look at genetics, you're looking at the program. But if you had a way of looking at all the proteins.

1:02:07 That's the equivalent of the debugger to see what's actually happening. And so Yeah, it was like kinda became a different way of looking at at cancer and the National Cancer Institute got interested in a Give us a

1:02:20 Uh. money to actually Yeah, make some real progress and then and so on. So that's how I got in Into that one. So going back to that as you got into working with this doctor

1:02:31 Is your idea well You probably say I don't know um that much about protein, so I'll start to hire people Who will be the expert in this. I I my job will be to find the people who know the most and then Start to work with them.

1:02:44 Or are you trying to bring yourself up? So you're now an expert on proteins as well. Well, so first of all You know, he was one of the world's experts. So

1:02:54 First step was just like learn from him. But then, you know, he knew people that were other interesting people to talk to and introduced me to them. And you know, it was the same thing with Marvin. Marvin introduced me to other people, or the same thing with Fine men, you know, once Final introduced me to his arch enemy Murray Helm, you know. So keep him close, Danny, keep him close. Yeah.

1:03:21 So in that case it was really David Agus was the doctor of the Rinter was my mentor and And I think with all these people. They like explaining it to somebody who doesn't understand it. Because they get to sort of go back to the fundamentals and then

1:03:38 That's a process if you've ever Taught somebody something, you know how much you learn. Teaching somebody something. So that was in some sense what I had to bring to the party was I was the blank slate that didn't know anything that was asking the dumb questions. How did the doctor find you, Denny? At that point.

1:03:56 How did he end up? Calling you or emailing you. It was funny, he kept calling me and I didn't you know,'cause you get a lot of incoming calls. Yeah, unknown caller. You're like No thanks. Mostly I don't respond to them. And then finally he was resourceful enough one day he got

1:04:13 I think it was John Dor Algore and Bill Bergman or something. You got like three different Important people.

1:04:24 Two. Call me up and say, Talk to this guy. So I did. Yeah, I mean it was so it was so far it was so far afield from things I knew about. Did he explain why he hunted you down in that way? I'm just imagining

1:04:39 Within the Let's just say I think it's fair to describe medicine sometimes as a silo. Just as there are many different silos. To reach that far afield.

1:04:50 to investigate some of the questions or to try to unpack some of these issues. at least I know a lot of doctors, M D PhDs, researchers Not a lot of them do that necessarily. No, he's a very unusual kind of a doctor to do that, just like Dick Byman was a very unusual kind of physicist and Marvin Minsky was a very unusual kind of computer scientists that they all First of all, they all share a kind of playfulness and curiosity.

1:05:21 And they all share Are kind of skepticism about the experts in their field. You know, they appreciate that they know a lot of things, but they also appreciate that they're missing a lot of things. And I think that that's probably rare in the field because you're really, you know, the best strategy for Becoming important in a field is kind of go with the flow, work on the

1:05:43 Accepted important questions. Don't Question. Just Things that nobody's

1:05:50 Paying attention to and you know, don't listen to people on the outside of the field and things like that. So yeah, these are all very unusual people. To do that. And so I do have to find an unusual person But

1:06:03 sort of is willing to put up with a dummy like me. Going back in To your three criteria. of you have to be excited by it. You've got to have some kind of financial Basis and

1:06:15 No one else is doing it. I bet that they're still three or four things a month that come into you that would fit those definitions. I would think that your opportunities or even within that space, you still have to make some choices about what you spend your limited time on. In addition to that, do you have like a fourth criteria that you're using?

1:06:34 I'm kind of realizing and I've never articulated this before, but there's always something that you kinda want to learn about. Uh. And so In that case, y it was clear that there was a lot happening in biology that I didn't No much about it.

1:06:50 And so It was an excuse to learn about it. So but how about today? I mean how about this month? I'm sure you've got three opportunities Something interesting, maybe can make money. No one else is doing it.

1:07:04 How did you decide what But new thing to do in the last month. I should say that the make money thing isn't exactly like You put it that way, because I've never really done things to like Optimized to make the great

1:07:18 You know. But You sort of have to have some financial sure model of how you're gonna pay for all of this. I mean, it has to have some sustainable way of paying for itself. Sure. It doesn't have to make you rich. I actually like Disney's formulation of that. Which is we don't make

1:07:37 Movies to make money. We make money. To make movies. Yes. Yeah. I think that's a much better way of doing it. Yeah, you have to have something that's sustainable, otherwise you're going around begging all the time. So your fourth one is I'm gonna also learn something. This is a way for me to learn.

1:07:54 Well, I'll tell you what, like right now, I've gotten very interested in agriculture. Part of it. I got interested in it because during covet I moved out to a farm in New Hampshire. And I started realizing I mean we just grew food in our own greenhouse and I started realizing how much better this food was than

1:08:12 I think uh you know, shopping at Whole Foods. And started thinking about the whole supply chain and why was it food was so bad and expensive and the more you look at it The way we do food today kind of

1:08:28 Relies on finding Some place where you can pay somebody an un fairly low wage to do something. And bringing the food from there. And

1:08:41 You know, that's not really a sustainable future and you know the land in which you can do that and just the social justice of Doing that is not gonna hold up and people want more protein, people want better food. And it's incredibly energy inefficient. You're better off in California, but You know, here you go to a grocery store.

1:09:01 Most of the vegetables that you find in the grocery store are mini weeks old. They've been shipped across Thousands of miles in refrigerator truck. Great cost energy. They're just about to spoil by the time they put them on the supermarket shelves. They've had all the flavor and everything bred out of them so that They can optimize their ability to withstand shipping long distances.

1:09:25 And the rest of the world couldn't repeat this inefficient system that we've done and yet the rest of the world wants to eat much better food, wants to eat more protein. Climate is changing. So Danny, when you're looking at a space like this, you have the seed of an interest.

1:09:43 That is prompted by this. Time spent in New Hampshire, where I've also spent a bunch of time. Yeah. Then uh You start asking questions and the

1:09:56 Peripheral vision widens to include all of these different facets that you just mentioned, right? So someone could get lost in that and just the Sheer. volume and complexity of all these different problems and challenges. How do you brainstorm

1:10:11 questions and then choose which questions to pursue. I'm interested in and maybe it's because of But technique I've developed of learning things is Are there ways to change the system rather than solving individual point problems within the system?

1:10:29 You have a very systems view of the world. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So agriculture is like the oldest technology. So

1:10:37 It's um amazing all the solutions people have come up with, like the point problem of you know, how do you Paul of weed or Pick a tomato or

1:10:48 Any one problem has been looked at in a lot of ways and lots of inventions around it and so on. But It's surprising how few people Think in terms of Plus all the things that have to happen.

1:11:02 For Food to get grown and Yeah, it ended up On the table. And a lot of it is stuck that you don't imagine like

1:11:10 Predicting the weather Mining fertilizer shipping things in refrigerator trucks and you know, it's not things that You would think of first When you're thinking of agriculture, but that's actually what a lot of the activity is.

1:11:25 So People have Point optimized out most of the specific solutions done a pretty good job of that, but Very few, if anybody

1:11:35 try to look at as a system and how could you rearrange the system? Now by system you don't mean I Assume, which is always a dangerous habit. But you're not talking about, say

1:11:46 Some people might think of permaculture as a system. But you're extending the system to include many other aspects of food production, transport, supply chain. Yeah, permaculture would be like a natural system. And so nature does build things in terms of systems, e ecologies or systems.

1:12:07 But Typically We engineer things in terms of point solutions that get put together into systems. Kind of cobbled together. Yeah. And that's because that's probably you know, that's the commercial opportunities. If you make a better point solution to something, you've got to market.

1:12:24 And you can build up expertise and a competitive advantage and so on. So there's a reason why people Do that. And you know, the system things are more complicated and more likely to fail, you know, and a lot of times I do look at it and just decide this is too complicated, I can't.

1:12:41 Do anything. But sometimes you'll look at it and say, Wow, a lot of the easy things haven't been done. If you change this and you change that at the same time and Did you find that in agriculture? There's some low hanging fruit. Pun intended. Oh yeah. And agriculture is very much like that. So clearly, for instance

1:12:59 Things should be grown much closer to where they're eaten. I mean they don't have to be grown like in vertical farms in the city. But They could be grown a few hours away out. In the suburbs.

1:13:11 And it'd be a whole lot better. But Here I am in Boston. You know, you can't hire an agricultural worker in Boston. First of all, there are very few people who know how to do it. And they would demand to be paid much more than You know, you could

1:13:26 Afford to Sell the tomato for. So You have to have a better way of using labor. You have to have a better way of building greenhouses so that they work in colder climates. You have to have different breeds of plants, different fruits and vegetables that

1:13:42 Um not optimized to be shipped two thousand miles. So you know, there are a lot of things you have to change, but if you change all of those things Up at once there's another Equilibrium point.

1:13:55 Fine. Nice equilibrium where There's another sweet spot of things working together. in which many, many crops are grown much closer to where they're consumed. But you have to change a lot of things from the architecture of the greenhouses to

1:14:10 the jobs of the w workers to the the microbiome of the soil. So you have to sort of be willing to take on all that, which means learning a lot of new things. Are you currently in exploratory learning phase, or once you have this grab bag of Different. Issues that need resolving.

1:14:28 To Produce the outcome of having multiple foods or maybe all of your food. Grown or harvested and Source near Boston, let's just say.

1:14:39 Do you rank order those and then tackle one? Do you have Teams or contractors and you try to parallel process for at at the risk of using that completely incorrectly. So one thing is you need You need to find kind of a visionary

1:14:54 Source of funding. The patriot, right. You need your Medici, right. Manager or somebody who already has this idea and is trying to make it work and hasn't figured out how to make it work. Which is what happened in this case, so And actually

1:15:09 The doctor that I mentioned before was already Working with a company. That was Starting to do this. But didn't really know how to make it work. And so they came to us

1:15:19 For Help and We probably gave'em more than they ever imagined that they wanted. And together we made it into a much bigger project and I think we're really gonna make a real system and

1:15:32 If you solve a real problem, then that comes with Actually an economic opportunity which, you know, they'll be able to Exploit. But it requires Visionary Funders who are willing to take risks and

1:15:46 Yeah, kind of like DARPA was for A L I initially, or Later other people were for A ally. I never would have been able to do the clock without Jeff Bezos kind of seeing the vision and saying, Yeah, I'm willing to step forward and do this. Those are rare people. So I guess I've been lucky that I've run into A bunch of those rare

1:16:07 Visionary people they're kinda willing to take a bet on me. So you have to Many talents, Dimmy, so many talents. I'm wondering Which one do you feel is your superpower? I don't know. Maybe

1:16:20 Not being afraid to learn new stuff. In some sense, maybe it's the superpower we're all born with. So maybe I've kept a superpower that kids have, right? So kids Like they're not afraid. To go in it.

1:16:35 And see something new and strange and start playing with it. And then after a while There's a lot of things in the world that that gets sort of beat out of you. That you learn not to do that in You get told not to do that in lots of different ways, and I guess I was lucky enough to be around people that didn't beat it out of me.

1:16:56 Here's what one of your kids told me. They said superpower was a mind shifter. Someone who can easily shift into different mindsets and view things from multiple perspectives. And I think I would agree with that. I think that's your lateral thinking. Is

1:17:12 To me, one of your superpowers. That may have come from my childhood because My childhood was my father was an epidemiologist, so We live pretty much any place that was a hepatitis epidemic. Which

1:17:26 Often came with a war and a famine too. So I lived in a lot of strange places around strange cultures. So you sort of had to mind shift into What are things like in the middle of the Congo or What are things like in Calcutta?

1:17:42 So maybe that's how I sort of got that habit of Being well to shift my mind a bit. So maybe a an angle into this. Danny, my understanding is that you

1:17:53 Homeschooled. Your three kids. Why did you do it and how did you approach it and how did that turn out? First of all, I Can't take personal credit for home school. I mean

1:18:04 My wife did a lot and also we hired a bunch of tutors and we worked with a bunch of other home schoolers and so So you guys jointly decided. I taught them some things, but it definitely takes a village, so When I was a kid I did bounce around all these schools and I remember

1:18:24 I have some great teachers. I have some really bad teachers too. And I remember sitting at school and thinking, I will never do this to my kids. And so I didn't. But when you had a great teacher they would

1:18:38 Listen to where you were and Stretch you a bit. Yeah, one of my Favorite teachers was Actually a woman named Mrs. Wilner, she was a librarian.

1:18:48 And I was really interested in collecting rocks wherever I went. I would always go in and ask for books on rocks. And she said, Okay, well here's some books on rocks, but Here's a book on electricity, too. Yeah, and I was like, Whoa, this is

1:19:03 I never would have asked for a book on electricity, but She kinda led me there and and here's a science fiction book. It's like what's science fiction? And No, it was like a juvenile science fiction book called The Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet. But you know, that was like brought me into this whole other world. But so great teachers are like that. They kind of see Where you are and they stretch you to some place you can get to. And that was wonderful. And you just have a lot more opportunity to do that in home schooling than you do in a in a classroom.

1:19:37 Were there any Aspects of cognitive development, curiosity, or otherwise that you cultivated through the home schooling, understanding that it wasn't just you as a loan operator doing it, but were there things that you wouldn't really emphasize or touch in traditional schooling that you guys

1:19:54 Included. Or emphasized. We did, but it was interesting for me. Like sometimes I would sit down to teach something that I thought was really simple. And then As I started teaching it, I realized well actually

1:20:08 This isn't so simple. There's like this other thing underneath it, another thing underneath. So I was actually not such a great teacher necessarily. You're like wait, wait, wait, I know two plus two equals four, but let's back up a minute. Yeah, exactly. You can back up. It started reminding me I saw this happen in college was I had a math professor named John Callarota and he was at the Blackboard once and he's writing along and he says, So you can see that it's obvious that this is true. And then he stops.

1:20:37 And he sits there for a long time. It felt like ten minutes or something. We're all just like waiting. It's like, yes, it's obvious. But I think that's one thing that you realize about teaching is you know how much you don't know, like you know, what that depends on or That was a wonderful thing. I think Dick Feynman was really inspirational in that of

1:21:05 He really admitted when he didn't understand something. And you're like, Well wait a minute, like what's a one and a zero? It's sort of have to back up and sort of explain that And you'd never really thought about it before, but Digital computers need to disambiguate so they force everything to be the one or zero. If it's in between, you know, they force it one way or the other. That's what digital means, right?

1:21:27 You don't put up with any in betweens. You You push it into a category of one or zero and then you build it up from there. But you start thinking about that. Nobody ever really asked me that before when I was teaching them computers. And so, yeah, Dick was always saying that he doesn't understand something unless you can derive it from first principles. So

1:21:49 watching him do that in in the the fields. I realized well, you know, I don't really understand an awful lot of the things I do either. And when you teach, you sort of realize the things you don't understand. Danny, I was just wondering what what do you Try to optimize in your life. These days.

1:22:06 Well, I wish I had a lot more time ahead of me. So right now time Seems like the most Precious thing. To me.

1:22:15 Then you start realizing how much of it you squandered. It doesn't like you squandered very much time. I'm not seeing that. Where were you squandering? When did you squander anything? Objection, your honor. Yeah. I did a lot of things that didn't work out. Okay, so let's talk about some failures. Wh where were some of the failure? Well, I mean, I think that thinking machines was my first big failure because if I had asked that financial sustainability question really treated that as a s problem of serious thought like I was thinking about The machines

1:22:53 I would have done a much better job that company Didn't have to fail. It was awful when it did, you know. It had like f five hundred people, mo almost none of whom had had another job. It was like I was hiring people straight out of MIT and We were building the TAS computer and everything was going great. You know, we just did a bunch of dumb things in how we set up the business that

1:23:16 Yeah, we didn't pay enough attention to laws that were getting passed by our competitors in Congress that were making it illegal to export our products or Making it hard for people to acquire our products and yeah, we were just sort of blindsided by that. We did stupid stuff. Yeah, we were

1:23:35 Going up, up, up and So it didn't occur to us that We might have it. Something might cause a downturn and we might n not have enough cash in the bank and you know

1:23:46 Going back, we just manage it badly. It's sad because I mean it was a terrible moment for me. I felt like I had let down all of these people. And I had let them down. Danny

1:23:58 You look back. on this life review and lessons learned. And Flash forward to today, you said focusing on well, you look back and realize how much time you've squandered, what rules do you have for yourself or how do you think about not squandering the time you have left?

1:24:17 Have you changed anything? Well the non redundancy is a piece of it. Mm-hmm. Right, if someone else can do it and we'll do it. Don't work on things that are gonna happen anyway. I still think hanging out with extraordinary people is the right thing. But there's an i interesting problem with that, which I've realized, which is I tended to

1:24:35 Hang out with a lot of people that were older than I was. Because of that. Because there's sort of Establish themselves as extraordinary.

1:24:43 And of course. But has been very sad to see so many of my friends die and so on. So I'm actually very curious, I'm sure that There's a whole generation of younger extraordinary people that I haven't met yet.

1:24:57 And that's something I'd love to do. Is meet some of those unusual people that are Thinking about things differently and Learn from them.

1:25:08 So That's kind of Part of my agenda. These days. So what do you think would most surprise your twenty year old self about your life today.

1:25:20 I guess one thing that surprises me is that it's sort of Has all worked out. You were not really expecting that? No, I think I was always kind of on the edge of Failing in some sense. And you know, many times I did, but it still worked out.

1:25:41 And so I think I probably worried more than I needed to,'cause it always seemed like Oh, this is pretty dangerous, or you know, I'm gonna be peniless, or you know, there were times when I was peniless, you know, I couldn't pay my mortgage. So I I think I worried way too much. I worry less now. So Danny, this is gonna be a fast left turn, but I've been staring at this

1:26:05 the whole time we've been chatting and I don't know why I can use the term O C D because I have been diagnosed with it, although I think it's actually a superpower in a bunch of respects. I've been staring at this prompt What is the entanglement with capital E for like an hour and a half here and uh just Waiting for the right Segue that I'm I don't know if I'm gonna find the right segue. So what is the entanglement? One of the things that

1:26:31 I've noticed about the world. Yeah. It used to be. Yeah. Nature.

1:26:38 and technology were very different things. Technology was something that We designed and we understood and we controlled Nature was this mysterious complicated Thing that

1:26:51 You know, we didn't understand at all and pretty much had that take and work around and kind of riff with, but Those two things are becoming entangled in sort of both directions. So Things that used to be natural, like The atmosphere.

1:27:07 Um or Our genes are Or mines or My knee joint. Are now technological artifacts, right? And

1:27:19 The Things that Used to be technological and Controlled.

1:27:26 And design are actually kind of evolved and having like the internet. Nobody can draw you a wiring diagram of the internet. Nobody can really tell you how Chat GPT came to that conclusion. I mean they could sort of make up a story about it, but they can't they don't really understand it in the way that You used to understand a computer when it produced an answer.

1:27:48 Because it wasn't really designed. It was kind of a combination of designed and evolved and learned and So what's happening is that Yeah, and a lot of People's use of Computers is now they kind of know the magic incantations that cause this library.

1:28:04 for you to do that, but they don't really know like All the things that are going on underneath that. Uh Make it work. And so it's becoming more like nature. Nature. We used to kind of know, Well, here's you know, the magic incantations we use for making beer. We don't know really why this makes good beer. This makes Bad beer or this makes champagne, but we sort of know when we do this, it does that. And that that's kind of becoming our relationship with computers. So I think that

1:28:32 What's happening is The distinction between the natural and the artificial is becoming Entangled. Um That idea may just kinda go away. So there is sort of

1:28:43 Almost. Is no pure nature and they're almost No, is no pure technology that we fully understand, at least not in the technology that we're using to have this conversation.

1:28:54 For example, there is nobody who understands every piece of it. I would've put in a plug. For my very first book. Out of control. Which was about that entanglement.

1:29:06 Yeah, I I I think you're one of the people that really got me thinking about that entanglement. And that book is probably what a lot of what got me thinking about this. ideas and artificial life got me thinking about it. And the way I would say is there's one thing with two different faces. And those Basically we we we had two different faces to the single thing and

1:29:27 We're recognizing that there's only one class. Which has perspectives on the same Thing.

1:29:33 You're saying natural and synthetic or nature and engineered. Yeah, they're basically different. faces of the same thing going on in the long arc of the universe. We're Danny might say they're being entangled, I would say that they've always been entangled.

1:29:49 But we had Two separate views of them and now are We have a better view of it. Yeah.

1:29:55 I know I think there's also something very special about this Instant in time. And by this instant in time I mean Plus or minus a century. The long now. Yeah. But you know I think when people look back at history

1:30:09 Even really our lifetimes. I mean, over my lifetime Yeah, the population is more than double You know, the Climate has changed, the computers have Come out the

1:30:21 Everything is really very, very different. In a way that That's never happened before. The population hasn't doubled in a single lifetime before, and I don't think it will again. Right. Right. So

1:30:32 I think we are at a a special moment where A sort of technological power. And gotten enough to make these things that are more complicated than we can understand. And that's kind of a qualitative change. We weren't building stuff that was More complicated than we understood before.

1:30:50 We're producing outputs that were completely unexpected. Danny to a question about the entanglement and this actually relates to Uh. Name you mentioned earlier, Jeff Bezos. So he's described AI. I don't think it was specific to LLM so it was broader than that as a discovery and not an invention.

1:31:09 As something akin to electricity or fire. How do you think about Yeah. So I wanna make a distinction between

1:31:20 AI and What's called AI right now. Please. So Intelligence is a very complicated multi-factored thing like life.

1:31:33 It's not just one thing. And The beginnings of AI We thought the things that were hard for us to do were the intelligence. Like we thought

1:31:43 Playing chess would be intelligent or Solving Calculus tests. Would be intelligence. Or translating languages. That came later, but that's it. The things that were hard for us.

1:31:57 We thought that's intelligence. And that was the stuff that early AI concentrated on. And actually it turns out that was really the easy part. The hard part was the stuff that was We were so good at we didn't even notice. Like

1:32:13 Recognizing a face, jumping to a conclusion. Yeah, having an intuition about something. Yeah, those things were way, way harder. So We thought

1:32:25 Producing speech would be hard. We didn't think listening would be hard. We just sort of did that without apparent effort. But listening to speech turned out to be way harder than producing speech. In the early days there was always a box called Yeah, sometimes a

1:32:43 Well with the neural network, the pattern recognizer That was sort of was gonna guess the obvious thing that was gonna happen next and recognize the pattern uh And we thought that was gonna be the easy part.

1:32:56 'Cause it was just gonna be some neural networks that got trained. No, it turns out that those neural networks Much bigger than We were guessing. Way bigger than we were guessing. And you had to train them

1:33:10 Or at least so far we've only known how to train them with way more data than we were imagining training them with. And so on, but sure enough. You know, that box has now gotten built. That's what we call AI right now, is that That little box in intelligence. And is actually really good at kind of imitating human intelligence. And

1:33:29 Imitating is Kind of a f good first step. That's you know, that's what my granddaughters do first. You know, I have A granddaughter that can sit and talk to a an electrician is if she knows what electricity is, just by using the right words and saying phrases that she's heard before and so on. And she can kind of fake it. pretty well. But she has no idea what she's talking about. And that's kind of mostly where AI is right at this moment. I mean it you know, it'll be in a different place A year from now and you know, it's starting people understand that and putting it in different places. But it's just one little part of intelligence. It's a good start.

1:34:09 But it's not gonna do All of the things that we do. that we consider intelligence until people come up with some other ideas, but people will come up with other ideas. The other big change is we got a lot more smart people working on it than we ever had before. So those are the people that are gonna come up with all those other ideas to make it work. So

1:34:28 I do think AI's gonna happen pretty fast. Just because we have so many smart people working on it. Is there anything you think people are Broadly speaking. Overestimating.

1:34:41 And underestimating with respect to the development of AI. AI non quotation marks. I think they're Overestimating The capabilities of what we have now. But underestimating

1:34:56 What we'll be able to accomplish over the long run. Yeah. It's interesting. I think that people you know, get mixed up on time scales a lot. In general I'm kind of a

1:35:08 short term pessimists and long term optimists. I think that that's that probably applies to AI as much as anything. I'll make an observation that um I I've been reading the early history of the discovery of electricity. Way before Tesla and Edison. I mean like you know, Faraday And Davies and these guys and What was remarkable

1:35:33 was how the smartest people at the time, like Newton and others, were just so wrong. I mean just so far off. The strangest ideas about what electricity was And they really haven't clue. And it was just many, many years of going through and they would and actually before they had the scientific journals, they had scientific demonstrations every week. Where they were demoing the latest discoveries in electricity. For paying tickets.

1:35:58 And Each time we would go along, they'd have another discovery and what they were discovering it was far more complex, far more unintuitive. than what they thought and I think that's exactly where we are with intelligence. We have no theory of intelligence. We have no idea what it is. We're just discovering some of the earliest primitives of what it might be.

1:36:18 But I think we're as far From knowing what intelligence is as they were from understanding what electricity was in the seventeen hundreds. I think that's fair, except maybe it's actually quite possible we'll never understand what intelligence is because That was sort of part of the prediction of the songs of Eden papers, it may be easier to actually make intelligence than to understand and

1:36:41 Right. We used Plants for Thousands and thousands of years without understanding How they work.

1:36:48 We use a natural world without understanding how Actually They are made and are governed. So we can Use things that we don't understand.

1:36:57 So what's first is us being able to make things that we can use and don't understand. So a quick question on intelligence though. Is it a useful term if we can't understand it or is it just so broad a label applied to so many things that it's kind of useless and should just be replaced by thin slicing and using more precise labels or concepts. I'm gonna answer first because I think we're gonna start to

1:37:23 Unbundle? The concepts as we discover more things. I mean my hypothesis is that we'll discover more about how our mind works through AI than hundred years of Neurobiology has. And we'll come to understand Intelligence is not a single dimension. I think it's a very high dimensional space.

1:37:40 In which there's lots of different Primitives are elements. And part of what we're doing right now. is we'll begin to discover some of those elements and that t intelligence is basically compounds. We have a compounded intelligence.

1:37:52 That's made up of lots of different kinds of cognition and stuff. And so I think We're on that. Has. Two

1:37:58 Not replace it as much as to unbundle it. And also I would ag Absolutely agree with what Kevin said, but I'd take it one step further. Which is

1:38:08 Even if we un Bundle human intelligence. Mm. Did all of those things. There's still more to intelligence than that.

1:38:18 But there's other kinds of intelligence that we can't even imagine. And actually those are the ones I'm most interested in. Cause I said I I always like hanging out with people who are much smarter than I am. I would love hanging out with machines that are much smarter than people. Right. Yeah. But smart in different ways.

1:38:38 Or playing million color connect four with a mantis shrimp, you know? Yeah. Exactly. The way I say is is that the space of all possible minds is huge And that human intelligence, we're gonna find out, is on the edge. Like we're at the edge of the galaxy. We're not at the center.

1:38:52 We're gonna be an edge. species of intelligence in the map of all possible minds and The reason why we want AI is to arrive But these other places in the high dimensional space of thinking that we

1:39:06 Can't even imagine. That's the main thing. It's not to replace human thinking. That's boring. Nine months we can have another human mind. But you want other kinds of thinking. That's the whole point. This is related to the transition thing, but I think humans as we know'em today are kind of Half between monkeys and

1:39:25 What we're going to become. You know, we've still got a lot of monkey in us. We're not the far right in that diagram of the monkeys. No, no, no. Definitely. We're we're in this transitional phase. You know, we've still got a lot of monkey in us. And I'm really excited by that. thing that we're gonna become.

1:39:42 So Danny, I have a question for you related to the short term pessimist, long term optimist. I'm sad to report that there are Lots of people, my vintage. younger Just people kind of close to my I'm forty seven. So close to my age or even

1:39:59 quite a bit younger, mid thirties. Who are on the fence with respect to having kids, or have decided not to have kids because They look at climate change. They'll look at the

1:40:11 What they might fairly consider some of the unpredictability around AI and the fear around Skynet. And if we could go down this list of concerns they have that they cite as Compelling evidence that they do not want to bring a life into this world because the future To them look so bleak.

1:40:30 How do you think about The long term. Future. I mean, there is a value in optimism. There's like a utilitarian function to optimism. But If we're able to put that aside, and maybe we can't. Like how do you think about

1:40:45 A hundred years from now. Two hundred years from now. So I understand that, but I also understand that like when I was a kid We were like taught to hide under our desk for when the atomic bomb

1:40:56 Was gonna get dropped. And thinking even as a kid like This isn't gonna work. I mean I knew people who died of smallpox, you know, that disease doesn't exist anymore. When I was a kid, most other kids We're hungry. And we're malnourished. We're likely to die of childhood diseases.

1:41:21 That's not true anymore. So Yeah, when I was a chad, you know, I had friends I now understand were gay friends and only understood later and understood what they were going through, but you know, they couldn't say that to anybody. So there were so many things to be frightened about, and yet there were so many ways in which the world just got so much better.

1:41:42 And even in my lifetime. It did. And it's true that You know, it also we create a lot of problems. In that process. But we've always created a lot of problems.

1:41:54 Well I guess, you know, if I just look at the sweep of history It there isn't. Any time. when you'd say, Oh, I would do better going back a hundred years or at least you know, not in history. You you would not want to be alive a hundred years ago compared to being alive now. Especially if you're gonna be born in a random place and

1:42:16 Thanks. But even you know, I wouldn't want to be a king a hundred years a much better To be a peasant. Today than to be a king. Of couple of centuries ago.

1:42:27 In terms of Yeah, you're Health your Food that you ate, how you spend your time, so on. So your comfort, everything. So I think that there is a general trend. It's

1:42:39 Possible that some Catastrophic. setback that could happen, but even if that happens I kinda believe that humans are adapta enough, or nature is adaptable enough that it'll pick up and

1:42:52 start up again. I suppose there's a scenario where it's without humans and something else, but I'm certainly optimistic, you know, the earth is gonna be fine. And I actually do believe that, you know, there are people that are gonna see that Ten thousand year clock. Decide what to do with it when it comes to the end of this ten thousand years. But you know, it won't be steady progress. It never has been.

1:43:16 And so there's a bunch of things To worry about. I see white people are worried, but Yeah. Did you

1:43:23 The picture you look at, the more you realize I guess progress isn't a steady upwards thing. It's kind of Two steps forward. One step back. So let me ask you just a question about

1:43:36 rank ordering sort of existential concerns because I I'm very fortunate to effectively his job. Talk to the smartest, most interesting people I can find. And behind closed doors, generally not on the podcast. Sometimes on the podcast.

1:43:51 I have Brilliant, brilliant. Friends, some of the smartest people I know. Who are very preoccupied about climate change and basically view us as the

1:44:03 Frog in the heating pot of water. It's gonna eventually reach a boil. And it's not too late, but everyone needs to act now. And there just don't seem to be the incentives in place for that to really happen, frankly. Political will or competency as one piece of it. Then you have folks Equally brilliant.

1:44:20 In some cases you might even argue more brilliant. You say The preoccupation with climate change is completely Ridiculous. It's just patently absurd that people would consider not having kids. citing that as a reason. And these are not people who are Coming at it from a political

1:44:36 perspective. They're just saying if we actually look at Trying to weigh the severity of certain risks. This isn't even top five. Where do you fall on that? So I don't think that people underestimate the problem.

1:44:53 It's a like a really Big problem. And it's gonna cause. A lot of difficulties. But people do underestimate our ability to deal with

1:45:04 Problems. And so yeah, it's gonna be bad. And it's already starting to be bad for people. But People have dealt with a lot of bad stuff.

1:45:14 And come out of it and come out of it better and come out of it is improvement. So I don't minimize the difficulties of climate change and the challenges and it's gonna be a mess, but I also know that there's a lot of super smart people that are working on all kinds of things that are gonna help with it in ways that are hard to imagine. And so some of those are

1:45:38 Likely to work. And You know, it's kinda easier to imagine Catastrophes? Than it is to imagine Magic solutions.

1:45:47 So it was easier for people to imagine that the population explosion was going to Doom us. You know, that was a real easy idea. But Actually Kevin was the first person to point out to me, I think, that actually our Big problem in a century now is gonna be the population

1:46:05 Shrink implosion. And people are starting to realize that already and it was just hard for people to see. So We're kinda hardwired to pay attention to danger. And yeah, that's I'm part And also

1:46:21 It is a And a fact which is that Bad things happen fast and good things happen slow. Can you say more about that? So

1:46:32 Yeah, if you read the newspaper It's bad things that happen closest to you or furtherest away. It's full of bad things, you know, that's you know, the plane crash, the the war started and you know There was no newspaper headline that said The majority of kids aren't hungry anymore. Yeah.

1:46:53 Over time. It's continuing to happen. And so I think that The world has actually been getting subtly better, but there was almost no headlines about the things that did that. They weren't the attention givers. But also.

1:47:07 Some of the better things are things that didn't happen. Most of the good things are things that didn't happen. Your kid did not die. You did not get robbed on the way to to work. All those things. And so There's no headline at all about the things that didn't happen. But you know, Danny

1:47:22 If you had to rank your worries. What would you put at the top? Um I don't deny that AI is an existential risk for

1:47:31 Humans as we know them. Maybe what's good about humans could Go on NAIs with honest. I think that's a possibility. I actually think it's more likely that AIs will help us get out of this mess. What is this mess? For example, you know, help us deal with

1:47:49 Climate change. Help us deal with the next epidemic. Help us Avoid the nuclear war. We're even we're just talking about population. I think it would be kind of an amazing coincidence. At the very moment where we're headed towards a population implosion That we have robots and AIs.

1:48:06 That's another Possibility. In some sense. It's Much harder to imagine

1:48:14 solutions to problems than just to imagine Problem. Kind of a trivial example, but When The technology for cell phones

1:48:24 was being developed by Motorola and I kind of knew about it. I went around and I told all my friends You're gonna have a phone in your pocket someday. It'll be just like Star Trek. Mm. Every single one of them without exception said, Oh, I would never want that.

1:48:41 And they gave all kind of reasonable reasons. They solved the problems. They were like, Well, if people were like on the bus, everybody would be talking on the phone in a restaurant. People would be getting phone calls, you know, people would interrupt me in the middle of the night with the wrong number, you know, the they could see all the problems very vividly. But They sort of couldn't see how much it would Enable them.

1:49:06 So they all predicted that they wouldn't work. And there was also another part of that I was involved with We were bringing the internet to everybody and there was the common Response almost invariably. Every time I talked about it.

1:49:19 Was people were worried about the haves and the have nots. What about all the people who don't have this technology? What are you doing? About that. And my response was I'm not doing anything because The benefits of this is so good that it's gonna happen anyway. The thing you wanna be worried about is what happens when everybody has it.

1:49:37 There's gonna be a lot more problems when everybody has a cell phone in your in their pocket. That's gonna be their problem. Not that the people don't have it. So There is a sense in which there's an asymmetry. We're

1:49:52 The things that break are easy to see and the things that work. Are hard. They're not equivalent. It takes a lot more energy. To imagine something working than it is to imagine how it breaks. I'll give you a very specific example today.

1:50:05 VS most people You know, would you like a chip inside your brain that Augmented your brain and helped. Pretty much everybody you talk to is gonna say no. Wouldn't want that, you know, and they'll give you lots of very good reasons why

1:50:21 They don't want it and a lot of them are are valid, but boy I'm pretty sure that When that becomes possible. Everybody's gonna want one. Yeah, I think it'll be just like the cellphones. It'll just do so much for you that yeah, you'll put up with the problems, you'll work around with the problems, but it'll be

1:50:39 You first, is all I can say. Yeah. So can all watch Danny glitching on video six months from now. So I wanna come back to something and I'm gonna steal some cliff notes from Kevin here, but you mentioned Talking in restaurants on cell phones. And I'm very, very sensitive to sounds. And I see something in notes that Kevin and I were sharing. I don't know anything about this, but the name is descriptive enough.

1:51:10 That I feel like I kinda get the idea. Babble the cone of silence. Yeah, I I wanted what happened to it. What is this?

1:51:19 Is it like a Jetsons helmet that you plop on loud kids? What happened? The cool thing that somebody should do, but it was originally the problem of open offices and people overhearing each other's conversations. And so it turns out that The best thing to mask a conversation Is somebody

1:51:41 Talking in exactly the same voice, saying something different. And so This was a little machine that people could put on their desk and and we test it. It w it worked, which is that it sort of listened to you talking for a while. And then it started talking kind of in your voice, but

1:51:58 Saying And just mm. Making up Babble.

1:52:04 But in your voice and kind of your intonation and so on and sort of talked over you out. To the people around you. So The phenomenon was that

1:52:15 And the room got a little bit louder. Yeah. Mostly people didn't notice that. Mostly there was just kind of a little buzz, but If you actually try to listen in on the conversation of the person on the desk next to you.

1:52:28 Can't do it. Seemed like you could hear it, but you couldn't actually understand. Yeah. Yeah. And um But happen with that was

1:52:36 Herman Miller Bought that technology for use in offices. It was actually a very sad thing. They set up a company to Started. Much to my surprise

1:52:46 The restaurants got very interested in it. Which Sort of bugs me'cause I h hate all of the noise in restaurants, but Yeah, things like you know the line at the pharmacy was interested in and so on, but It was very sad because the CEO

1:53:02 And I'm A heart attack in Nobody had the heart to keep going. So We'll never know if the technology would have worked.

1:53:10 Kevin, what would you like to see Danny work on? If Danny was like I'm out of my idea bag is empty. And he he showed up and he said Boss Kelly reporting for duty.

1:53:23 What do you want me to do? I mean yeah another way to think about that is Danny is the inventor and he has a company that invents things. What would I like Danny to invent? Yeah. If I had to come make a commission, I had a billion dollars. Oh my gosh. Robot beard trimmer.

1:53:41 Yeah, exactly. Something that's would meet all his criteria. Well no. No, just for you. This doesn't have to be description. No, no, no, but I mean something he would accept. Well he's got no ideas in this hypothetical situation. So I have to I have to thinkers. How about you, Tim? What would what would you want?

1:54:00 Well, it's just it's very front of mind for me. No pun intended in this case, but I have neurodegenerative Disease on both sides of my family. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's. And more.

1:54:15 And I've been interested and followed neuroscience. I was originally a neuroscience major way, way back in the day. And Would love for you to take your blank canvas No question is dumb. and apply it to Neurodegenerative diseases.

1:54:33 That's one that immediately Yeah, I know how to go about that. Somebody should do it. Which is you know, it's the same thing with cancer, sh with the cancer thing. What we really need is we need a way to read out The proteins in your body

1:54:50 Dynamically like We can read out. Your genes. And if we could really monitor that and read it out, you could find the processes Yeah.

1:55:00 Create disease. Before disease happens. So right now When we treat disease the cats out of the bag. Your body does a great job of compensating for everything for a long time until it just can't handle it.

1:55:17 But things have already gone a long way before you show any symptom. Right. That's why so many Alzheimer's interventions fail. It's just too late stage. Yeah. So your your body is great at masking things going wrong. If you could look at the proteins in the body. Then you can see things are starting to go wrong before you're showing any symptoms and you could see what was going wrong.

1:55:40 And you could start creating it before the damage starts happening. Right now We start tweeting things after this already Lots of damage. Enough damage that

1:55:51 Your body can't hide it. And so We need to head off diseases rather than treating diseases. We need to Treat. When you're on the way to getting a disease, not when you have a disease.

1:56:03 And the only way to do that is to have this debugger to understand what's going inside. And the only way to do that is to look at the proteins. And that's a technical problem. It's a very solvable problem. We got a long way to solving it actually and Unfortunately was kind of all s screwed up by the Theranos thing, which sort of gave a bad name to all that field and made it impossible to Fine. So that was so the tragedy of that is

1:56:29 Done. you know, sort of one fraudulent thing kind of gave a whole field a bad name, but It will come back and it may come back soon enough to actually Help you and members of your family and And there are people that are doing that. So look for people who are doing that. I'd love to meet people who are doing that.

1:56:48 But I think that's the path. And procedurally. In terms of Looking at Proteins would that take

1:56:56 The form of And um grasping for straws here, but something like a grail test currently. So for cancer screening looking at DNA fragments. The first version of it would be a blood test. You know, it might be a finger prick that you would do regularly and just monitor it. But Right now it's just Again

1:57:14 We have so few Because the way the medical system is set up. We have lots of blood samples, but we don't have the blood samples very well correlated with the medical records and so on. So these some big sort of population studies where you get a lot of regular blood samples that you get good proteomic inventories, which is You know, a technology that is not

1:57:37 Quite there, yeah, because There's no Commercial Opportunity for it, yeah. or limited commercial opportunities for it, yeah. But as soon as you start doing that and you start correlating what's happening with people

1:57:51 What was happening with their proteins before they got sick? As soon as you get that database. Then I think we'll be able to head off a lot of diseases before they happen. Systemic diseases. Not infectious diseases.

1:58:05 So Danny, I I thought of two inventions I'd like to have from you. One sort of um profound, the other one's sort of trivial. So the profound one was I recently had an MRI. Which is an amazing piece of technology, but man. What up? Pain. What a unpleasant experience. And I just imagine like well since a hundred years from now, there has to be some way

1:58:26 that they're gonna have a machine. It does this. In a much More Comfortable, easy, quick.

1:58:34 I got one I'm working on on this. I just had two MRIs today, so I sympathize. There you go. My sympathy. Right right, right. I mean couldn't it's there has to be a better way, right? And I mean I've had so many of these things and every time I'm like, Wow, this is a terrible experience. I am working on something that won't do everything in MRI do, but I think it'll

1:58:55 be more useful based on an ultrasound. Okay. And here's the funny thing. MRI The great thing about an MRI is it produces this three D image And it can go to the doctor, the radiologist and

1:59:10 Yeah, they can interpret it or an AI can interpret it because you've got An output. That is some disconnected from the process of measuring it. Ultrasound these days is not like that. Ultrasound really

1:59:26 The person that's doing the ultrasound has a lot more information than is captured in a picture or a video. They know how they're moving it around. They know that they're pushing it past this mus yeah, they're shoving in this direction. They're using this muscle to be a lens to magnify the thing behind it. You know, they have the intent of where they're moving at, why they're moving at. And so They can perceive a whole lot more.

1:59:53 And then they have to take what they perceive and write it into report. With maybe a few numbers measured or something like that. But it's not nearly as satisfying What gets to the physician It's not

2:00:08 as useful as an X ray or an MRI or a CAT scan or something like that. Well, there's no reason that ultrasound has to be like that. If you had Either a sensor on it or a robot moving it around, or you had the information of the pressures and the motion and the you had a model of tissue deformation and speed of sound through tissue and things like that. You could produce a three dimensional

2:00:33 Image like from an M R I with ultrasound. That would actually have information uh that you don't get from MI. And But just

2:00:43 Hasn't been done yet. I'd love to meet people who are Doing that. I might have to work on it myself. So the second trivial.

2:00:52 Invention, Danny, that I'm gonna assign to you is We all love a little microwave which will instantly heat something up. I want the reverse. I want to put it in the machine and have it instantly ice cold. There's a way of doing that is laser cooling. You do it atom by atom. Okay.

2:01:16 That'd be a fun one. Yeah, that would be No, I don't know how to do that. That would be a billion dollars for sure. Don't know how to do that. So Danny, if the sort of Divine treasurer of the universe just bestowed upon you.

2:01:29 twenty billion dollars. So one of your criteria can vanish, right? In terms of the sustainability, you're covered. for the foreseeable future and beyond. Let's say then it came down to Only what gets you the most excited. So it could be sort of focused on that and you were allowed to indulge For every like one or two serious projects that would have an impact, you had to do one trivial.

2:01:57 Not trivial. I I feel like, you know, that's underestimating how important something seemingly trivial could become later. Well, I'll tell you one that's already happened, but it was like that for me. It's traveling all over the world. I Chris was super interested in maps and looking at maps of where I was and so long. And I always wanted to like

2:02:18 Take a map and like Expand that and just like Go into it. I had that dream. Since I was a kid.

2:02:26 God, it's like an infinite zoom. Yeah, like a pinch to zoom. Yeah. Yeah, here we go. Okay. But there was no such thing, right, at that time. But I really wanted that. I knew I wanted pinched to zone. So as I started building it And

2:02:44 I had worked with Steve Jobs and I got a kind of a prototype of it working and I Invited him over to To look at it and And he said, Ah, you know, people Won't want white fingerprint smudges all over the screen. But uh but I kept on working on it and eventually I made actually

2:03:08 Yes. touch table thing and you know it was a v very expensive. It actually went into the situation room of the White House. So Like that was a During the Obama administration, Obama would show people like he had this map that he could Pinch to zoom, right.

2:03:25 Then of course Apple came out with the iPhone. And you know, other people were working on it and then Fortunately when I did the table thing I filed a patent. And then when the um

2:03:37 iPhone came out, of course, it did a very beautiful job of pinch to zoom and Very refined version of it. Yeah. People start using it and then The other phone companies started doing it.

2:03:49 And Apple sued them. Apple filed a patent on Peace of Zoom and sued them and actually I think won like a billion dollars from Sam Song and So But I'd filed this patent and Samsung went back and

2:04:02 Went to the patent office and said, Wait a minute, you know, this Danny's patent Like pre-dates all of this. So the patent office, Oh yeah, it does, and then invalidated Apple's patent. So everybody who had Androids or Samsung Fund or whatever Yeah, they could use pinch system too. So I think that's the the invention that I'm kind of proudest of because even though I never got paid a dime for it. I see like little kids who had that same instinct that I had.

2:04:31 Like I see them going to like a magazine and just like trying to To zoom out the picture. And I know that like nobody'll ever remember that as Ever having been invented. Because it's like Kids are born with it. It's become so much of a

2:04:47 part. So you know, when you innately want something like that and you know you want it. So Danny, how about some practical advice for people listening who may be inventor types about patents. I know you have a complicated relationship with patents. Here's a here's the case where patents may have done some good. I know other times You're not so sure about the worth of patents

2:05:08 What would you suggest to people who are inventive? For instance Uh wired. We were involved. It was inventing the web.

2:05:16 And Wired invented the click foo ad banner. Right, you know, I mean Brian De Balenhoff was the guy who Coded that. And Not one of us

2:05:26 Ever thought about Patterning it. It just seemed Obvious. Good thing. It was entirely patentable, but but it just never even was in our vocabulary

2:05:37 And I'm not you know, I don't know sure how much it would have been worth if we had, but Danny, what do you think about patents and people who are inventing What would you suggest? So first of all I think patents might be good for inventors, but I don't think they're very good for society.

2:05:54 So if I had a choice I would eliminate the patent system. Now there might be particular things like pharmaceuticals and things like that where You could make the trade off the other way, but I think in general around computers and I'm happy software patents are kind of getting rejected much more and so on, so I've always

2:06:15 felt a sense of I guess ambivalence about Cartons. So why are you threatening if you don't believe? Well so I pan Because

2:06:25 Remember I'm often solving problems for other people. And so I mean they have paid for something to happen and so they want to own something at the end. But I think for inventors and I and I know inventors that have

2:06:41 May Lots of money on patents, but you have to sort of sue people. And so they end up wasting an awful lot of their life in courtrooms and You know, I hate it. I occasionally get dragged into court for something that I've patented that somebody else owns

2:06:58 Yeah, you have to get the pose and It's pretty Yeah, yeah, it's a big waste of time, it's a big waste of society's resources. And The whole idea of patent system was initially to help society. It was to get inventors to disclose their patents, but

2:07:16 I think that things that are sort of self disclosing like pinch to zoom once somebody sees it. You don't need a Do any more disclosure about it, right? Or maybe you do about how you made it work or something, but they could take it apart and see how you made it work. So I would say that

2:07:33 We sho ought to Definitely narrow down the things that we allow to patent. And I think that To inventors, I typically say Maybe file patents Is trading fodder in this ridiculous game that's gonna have to happen?

2:07:50 But Don't Go off and sue people. for violating your patent and Yeah, you might get rich that way, but it's not worth your time.

2:07:58 It's not the way to spend your life. Are there any uh inventors? Could be. Past or present. Who really inspire you if a

2:08:09 Intrepid inventor. looked at you and they said, Danny Who are some people I should pay attention to? Or study. In the world of inventing.

2:08:19 Broadly speaking. Anybody stand out to you? I admire the most and Some of'em have been my mentors or people like Claude Shannon.

2:08:31 You kind of look at something really complicated and messy. And get a take on it. That makes it simple and understandable in a way that gives everybody else power to do something about that. Who is Claude?

2:08:47 So Claude Shannon invented The bit. Actually another one of my mentors. Name to the bit, but But he invented it. He invented information theory.

2:08:57 So you invented a way of measuring information and encoding information. You worked for Bell Bell telephone and there were Interested in what was the theoretical limit. You can put down a wire. No, but even before that, like his master's thesis was the application of Boolean logic to switching circuits. You know, he just had this way of thinking about

2:09:19 Things that were so powerful. That it gave Everybody else a way of thinking about things and everybody else a way of solving problems that we just take for granted when we measure things in megabytes and Stuff like that.

2:09:34 Somebody I lived to know, somebody that was on my thesis committee. Invented the bit. Right. If it's or discovered it or whatever. Those are the kind of people that I I admire the most Because they give everybody el

2:09:50 The power to Imagine new things and do New things. Newton did that in physics. Feynman did that in physics with Feynman diagrams. So

2:10:02 Those are the real wows of history. So speaking of people that you admire, I have a favorite question. What is A heresy that you have, and I define the heresy as something that you believe that the people you most admire Don't believe. This is a little strange one. You're not gonna like

2:10:19 That's the whole point. I don't believe in cause and effect. Oh wow Okay, okay.

2:10:31 Explain what that is for people who don't know. Okay, so we look at an equation like F equals MA and we say, Oh, force causes masses to accelerate when you push on it. Okay. That's Seems to be what F equal M A says.

2:10:45 Just going back to Newton. But I think that's just a story. I think that We like to tell stories in which there are agents that cause change because they're we're social creatures and we like

2:10:58 To sort of personify nature. But I could rewrite F equal MA. To be A equals F over M and say mass is caused by Yeah, force acting on acceleration.

2:11:15 And that creates mass uh just as easily as I could say That the force causes the acceleration. It's just a way we tell the story. And some stories are intuitive to us and sort of make sense and fit with our intuitions and some stories don't. And so when we can tell a story about something that's kind of explanatory and helps us guess at what's gonna happen next, or Things like that.

2:11:42 Then you know, we believe it's True in some fundamental sense and and so It's the way our brain works, we're wired to look for causes and effects. And that's like why we're kind of wired to believe in God, because if you Have a chain of causes and effects, then it sort of has to be a

2:12:00 First cause at the beginning. Causing all the rest of that. But I think that's just kind of the way our brain works and the way we tell stories about reality. I don't think reality actually has causes and effects. Let me poke on that a little bit. So Is it that cause and effect doesn't exist, or is it that we simply over apply

2:12:21 Cause and effect. And I was thinking back to the proteomics discussion and identifying changes in proteins over a sufficient data set such that you could have some predictive ability or ability to intervene earlier. So hopefully. Mitigate or prevent disease states.

2:12:41 Like. Alzheimer's disease or otherwise. So Does that mesh with what you are saying.

2:12:47 Or does it not? I'm not saying that Thinking in terms of causing and effects isn't a useful way of thinking. Just like I'm all for storytelling. Right, right. I believe in storytelling as is a useful way. So I think

2:13:02 But we are when we tell a story about a protein pathway causing Something. We're making up a story. And we really look at what's happening in the physics, all those Things work in the other direction too. And the story isn't

2:13:21 really what the physics is doing. It's a sort of simplified thread of things that we can understand. And what's doing. So it is useful. To kind of abstract out these threads that we can tell stories about. Because that gives us a handle on a and helps us Manipulated. So

2:13:37 It I'm not I'm not saying it that's not a helpful trick of thinking, but it's a trick. It's not really how the universe works and we shouldn't fool ourselves into that and we shouldn't get too enamored. Why it in fact maybe when we get new kinds of AI?

2:13:54 Maybe they'll be able to think without using that trick. Right now, we can pretty much only think using that track. Got it. Yeah. And that's what digital is, okay. So computers are all about kind of playing out this Fantasy of cause and effect. So

2:14:10 By forcing everything to be either be a zero or a one and nothing in between and making everything digital. We can kind of make things that almost work. Perfectly, is it? This and this cause that. to happen. And so

2:14:24 In some sense the computer is the ultimate fantasy of putting together causes and effects and piling causes and effects and engineering them into long chains that we write with programs and control them. And this comes so close to Doing exactly what our fantasy is. But It's hard to believe it's not true.

2:14:47 How does and this is way outside of my area of areas of expertise. So who knows if I'm painting us into a corner here, but how does quantum computing affect That's Presentation of computing. And the forcing into

2:15:01 One binary option or cause and effect. That's exactly the right question to ask because it's gets If you really look at true quantum computers, it's much harder. That sort of Explain it in terms of causes and effects like we do as a

2:15:18 Digital computer. You operate on it and it causes this state to turn into that state is a sort of a cause thing, but Actually The cause also involves observation of the states and

2:15:32 Just looking at it changes it and so One of the early things will be quantum Key generation. Well We'll sort of have a module and say, If we do this, we get a cryptographic key.

2:15:44 That has the right properties. No. How that magic happens. Very few people will have Any intuition of how that happened. And the people who

2:15:54 do have really deep intuition will realize that It's actually Not causes and effects in the way that we're used to thinking about it. So I have a half bake amateur hunch and prediction about quantum computing, which is I think in a hundred years from now

2:16:12 That will realize that Quantum does not want to do computation. It's actually not gonna be used a lot for computation, but there'll be something else. that we'll discover that it's really incredibly useful for.

2:16:25 Other than computation. Because I think competition does want be Much more cause and effect. Sometime in the nineties I I wrote a little book about how comput. Patterns in the stone.

2:16:36 Pattern in the sun. That's right. It just You know, kind of a high school student that was interested in computers. Captain. Understand. Mostly who likes reading the book are people who already understand everything in the book, but they like they like seeing it all explained. But it had a chapter on quantum computing.

2:16:56 Yeah, yeah, this was Written. And then early nineties. Yeah.

2:17:02 I got this funny call from the publisher and said You know, this this weird thing. Your book is the only computer book we have from the last century that's continuing to sell. I don't know. It kinda made me feel pretty weird. Fortunately they didn't say the last millennium, right? But they said, you know, would you like to revise it? I went back, and you know, there are a lot of things that's happened since then. Understatement.

2:17:36 But It was interesting because it was a most of the stuff I had in the book Didn't change at all, in fact. Yeah.

2:17:45 Certain things more and certain things less and so on. But one of the things I talked about was quantum computing. It really even w in quantum computing there wasn't much I would change. What I said about it is You know, if you want to look for where something could be a real game changer It's quantum computing. And it's got all this potential and all these hints that

2:18:07 It could work. And there's good theoretical reason to believe that it would be revolutionary But nobody's actually gotten it. To be Useful, yeah.

2:18:18 And that's pretty much still the state that it's in. I was surprised that In the end I decided it was sort of more interesting as an historical document of how computing looked. In the nineties and I didn't change it, but Most of it wouldn't have changed anyway.

2:18:34 So let me at the risk of this going sideways, I introduced a really slippery Term. But we were discussing earlier the possibility if my memory serves me. that AI and developing AI, different types of AIs could help us get a better understanding of

2:18:53 intelligence writ large, different types of intelligence we might, as Kevin mentioned, discover we're on the edge of the galaxy or university. Exactly, possibility space, not in the center. Is it possible that through AI or quantum computing or other aspects of studying quantum phenomena, that we will get a better grasp of what consciousness is. recognizing again that that is a term that begs definition and I mean there are a lot of people who take different stabs at it, but sort of what it is to be aware. that we're aware of perhaps would be one.

2:19:30 Possible. Way of Offering that but Also, how that emerges from simpler constituent.

2:19:37 Pieces that maybe at some requisite level of complexity suddenly have this emergent phenomenon which is Consciousness. It certainly does

2:19:47 Possible. My guess. And this is really just a yes. Is that consciousness is going to turn out to be way less important than we think? In the sense that it's gonna be a very small piece. Of intelligence and it might just be a kind of a act. For example

2:20:05 Okay, so I have a complicated idea in my mind. And I Turn it into a series of grunts and grunt at you. Um This one grunt and

2:20:16 Somehow you listen to those grunts and you construct An idea in your mind. And so we sort of went through this translation process and so We have a lot of our brain is devoted to that compression process of turning the idea into grunts. And turning the grunts into an idea.

2:20:34 So Given you've got all the hardware lying around, you've probably had the experience of Misunderstanding somebody, but what you misunderstood is actually more interesting than what they said. Right. Sure.

2:20:47 Or vice versa. Because that your brain took the thing that they said and expanded into an I a sensible idea. And maybe it was more sensible than the one that they had in the first place. Well so

2:21:02 You could do that within your own brain just by talking to yourself. And so Probably given you got all this hardware lying around for compressing and decompressing ideas. A good thing to do with the idea is to

2:21:17 Compress it. Tell it to yourself. And see if you misunderstand it in an interesting way. And maybe consciousness is just some hack like that. I've often thought that

2:21:29 One of the main Benefits. Of language. was not so much that it enabled collaboration with other people. But that it gave us access to our own thoughts.

2:21:40 Can you imagine trying to think without language is just like it almost doesn't seem possible. So language I think was a dual purpose invention. That mostly Communicating with ourselves, basically.

2:21:54 No. I think consciousness may be that. I think consciousness may be our access to our own thoughts. And that may be useful, but it may not be the most critical thing in Intelligence like maybe you could not have it and You still be very smart and maybe I wouldn't even be able to tell the difference.

2:22:14 I think in that that space of possible minds we could think Like Things that are really, really s intelligent that have very little consciousness. Things that have a lot of consciousness That can't communicate things that communicate, but I think Consciousness is another kind of elemental primitive.

2:22:30 Yeah, and I think you could have multiple entities that have access to each other's thoughts, and that might be even richer so super consciousness that might Be better. So I think this might be another case of Us looking at

2:22:45 What's apparent to us when we think of our thinking and we're very impressed with the Things that are sort of Very visible to us. Like we were very impressed with their ability to play chess. But ultimately it might not be so important. Proverbial.

2:23:02 Like drunk guy looking for his keys under the street light at night and they're like, Wait, I thought you left that in the bar. He's like, Yeah, this is where all the light is. So We're coming up I could keep going for another three hours, but we're coming up on three hours now. Which has gone by very, very quickly. Kevin, do you have any uh closing As we start to land the plane.

2:23:21 Questions for Danny, comments or or questions? Complaints. Old feuds you'd like to revive? Wait one. To go back to the question of what are you trying to optimize in your life,'cause you were saying you were trying to

2:23:35 Optimize your time. Are there any other things that you are the general trajectory of your life, maybe in space particularly recent years, where you feel This is what you were Trying to Optimize, maximize.

2:23:48 Or another way of saying is like again, when you're deciding what to do How to spend your time, the little Time that we have. What's something that you are trying to Make more of it.

2:23:59 I guess I try to ask the question Will this make a difference? Over how much time. Yeah, how long will that difference matter? Okay. If it makes a lot of difference after I'm dead, I'd rather

2:24:15 Do that. And I think a lot of people think I wanna make a difference, but I think the Wait it. Much too much to the near term.

2:24:24 And so For instance, I really admire Bill Gates is a philanthropist. He works really hard and he's super smart about it. But one thing that

2:24:36 Bothers me about Some of the things that they do is because they try to measure everything They try to do things that make a difference in the time that they can measure them. Yeah, and I think that that It's maybe not.

2:24:49 The right Metric. To be optimizing because it doesn't allow for the long tail of time of impact. of things. It's like

2:25:00 You know, w when Claude Shannon like invents the bet. The difference is That that makes Or just becoming a parent. Mm.

2:25:10 Now. Mm-hmm. After he's dead. You know, that's something that over time Makes a huge difference, but if you tried to measure it during his lifetime, it would have been really hard to

2:25:23 Give it any credit. The long tail of impact. Alright, I'm gonna I'll pick from my my grab bag of favorite questions one of them. is pretty simple. It's a metaphor, but if you could put anything on a Giant billboard. To get a message.

2:25:40 An image question anything. Two. Many, many people, hundreds of millions, billions of people. Could be a

2:25:50 Quote. Could be a quote from someone else, could be a motto that you or philosophy that you live by, could be anything at all. What might you put on that billboard? Could be an ad for your company. No ads. That's the one rule. Okay. In a sense I think I've answered that because I think the most successful example of that was Stuart Brand

2:26:14 having a picture of the whole earth. I think he realized that When people saw that picture of the whole earth like floating in space They would think about everything differently, and they did. And so To me, there's no picture like that of the future.

2:26:32 You can't conjure up an image. You can conjure up an image of the past of maybe the pyramids or something like that. But there is no Iconic. image of like the future and If you could imagine something to put on a billboard.

2:26:47 That Sort of made People see the future And believe that there was that future. That's what I do and the ten thousand year clock is the best

2:26:59 Approximation I can do to that. But I think that that's what the world needs. I think it needs that Picture. But Hold

2:27:09 The context of everything today. In the context of a the development of humanity. Over Tens of thousands of years.

2:27:18 And I think that would make Yeah, a much more optimistic picture for everybody. And let me just add'cause I don't think we have This clock is real. It exists right now.

2:27:29 It's inside a mountain in West Texas. It's inside a vertical tunnel. With uh spiral staircase carved into the rock and it's hanging Almost five hundred feet.

2:27:43 It's a mammoth. Mammoth. monumental clock that It is gonna take for ten thousand years. And

2:27:52 My impression of having visited it is that it feels like the clock has always been inside the mountain. It feels ancient. The scale, the scope, the ambition, the the tooling required, like the site identification, everything is

2:28:10 Pretty beyond belief. And I know we haven't spent a lot of time on it. I'll link to a few things for people who are listening also. Wasn't sure how much you could say about certain aspects of it. So we spend a lot of time on other things. But Danny, is there anything else that you would like to say about the ten thousand year clock? No, actually I think it's good that we spent time on other things. It will speak for itself.

2:28:34 It's a story. And actually my favorite thing about the ten thousand year clock is I run into people regularly Who've heard about it but assume it's just a myth. Have you seen Bigfoot? No. Bigfoot? In West Texas. Yeah, well, you get all kinds of versions of it. It's in Nevada. But that to me is very satisfying because stories are actually what really lasts and

2:29:07 Really, you know, your question about the billboard is like that of you know, what's an idea you want to put in people's head that sort of stays there and an idea has a lot more sticking power than any physical thing you could build. And so I love it that it has sort of

2:29:24 become a story with a life of its own. And that to me is as exciting in the fact that they you know there's this giant thing sitting in a shaft. And the mountain. Yeah, makes me think of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And I can imagine the tagline, See you in ten thousand years. Yeah, that that works. If anybody believed me, well that's part of selling the story, right?

2:29:49 And uh Danny people can find applied invention at appliedinvenvention.com. Is that the best? Is there anything else? For those fans of zip codes, you can get applied invention. But they can contact me with that way. Perfect. And great. And I do want to meet smart people. I told you that that's like what I'm seeking for is the Brilliant people with different ways of looking at the world. So Danny, have you have you spent any time with Derek Sivers before? Have you guys met before? Derek Sivers. Do you know this name? Oh, all right. Well Kevin and I both know Derek. I feel like you guys would make for a fun meeting. Danny, Kevin, thank you for taking the time. This has been absolutely fantastic. I have tons and tons of notes. We didn't even get to the giant robot dinosaurs another time. And for people listening.

2:30:40 You will be able to find links to everything that we've discussed at the show notes on Tim.blog slash podcast as per usual. And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but to yourself. And thanks for tuning. Yeah. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up. in the uh the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite. of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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