#1188 - Lex Fridman

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Four, three, two, one. Hello, Lex.

Lex Fridman (0:08)

Hey, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

We're here, man. What's going on?

Lex Fridman (0:10)

We're here, in Mecca.

Joe Rogan (0:11)

Thanks for doing this. You brought notes. You're seriously prepared.

Lex Fridman (0:15)

When you're jumping out of a plane, it's best to bring a parachute. This is my parachute.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

I understand, yeah. How long have you been working in artificial intelligence?

Lex Fridman (0:25)

My whole life, I think.

Joe Rogan (0:27)

Really?

Lex Fridman (0:27)

Yeah, so when I was a kid, I wanted to become a psychiatrist. I wanted to understand the human mind. I think the human mind is the most beautiful mystery that our entire civilization has taken on exploring through science. I think you look up at the stars and you look at the universe out there. You had, you know, DeGrasse Tyson here.

It's an amazing, beautiful, scientific journey that we're taking on and exploring the stars. But the mind, to me, is a bigger mystery and more fascinating. And it's been the thing I've been fascinated by from the very beginning of my life. And just, I think all of human civilization has been wondering, you know, what is inside this thing? The hundred trillion connections that are just firing all the time, somehow making the magic happen to where you and I can look at each other, make words, all the fear, love, life, death that happens is all because of this thing in here. And understanding why is fascinating.

And what I early on understood is that one of the best ways, for me at least, to understand the human mind is to try to build it. And that's what artificial intelligence is.

You know, it's not enough to sort of, from a psychology perspective, to study from a psychiatry perspective to investigate from the outside. The best way to understand is to do.

Joe Rogan (2:04)

So you mean almost like reverse engineering a brain.

Lex Fridman (2:09)

There's some stuff, exactly, reverse engineering the brain. There's some stuff that you can't understand until you try to do it. But you can hypothesize your, I mean, we're both martial artists from various directions. You couldn't hypothesize about what is the best martial art.

But until you get it in the ring, like what the UFC did, and test ideas is when you first realize that the touch of death that I've seen some YouTube videos on, that you perhaps cannot kill a person with a single touch or your mind or telepathy, that there are certain things that work, wrestling works, punching works.

Okay, can we make it better? Can we create something like a touch of death? Can we figure out how to turn the hips, how to deliver a punch in a way that does do a significant amount of damage? And then you, at that moment, when you start to try to do it, and you face some of the people that are trying to do the same thing, that's the scientific process. And you try, you actually begin to understand what is intelligence. And you begin to also understand how little we understand. It's like Richard Feynman, who I'm dressed after today. Are you?

He was a physicist. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. Yeah. Yeah, he always used to wear this exact thing. So I feel pretty badass wearing it.

Joe Rogan (3:38)

If you think you know astrophysics, you don't know astrophysics.

Lex Fridman (3:42)

That's right.

Joe Rogan (3:43)

Well, he said it about quantum physics.

Lex Fridman (3:44)

Quantum physics, that's right. That's right.

So he was a quantum physicist.

And he kind of...

I remember hearing him talk about that understanding the nature of the universe, of reality, could be like an onion. We don't know. But it could be like an onion to where you think, you know, you're studying a layer of an onion, and then you peel it away and there's more. And you keep doing it, and there's an infinite number of layers. With intelligence, there's the same kind of component to where we think we know, we got it. We figured out. We figured out how to beat the human world champion in chess. We solved intelligence. And then we tried the next thing. Wait a minute. Go is really difficult to solve as a game. And then you say, OK, I came up when the game of Go was impossible for artificial intelligence systems to beat and have now recently have been beaten.

Joe Rogan (4:36)

Within the last like five years, right?

Lex Fridman (4:38)

The next last five years, there's a lot of technical fascinating things of why that victory is interesting and important for artificial intelligence.