#2117 - Ray Kurzweil

**Joe Rogan** (0:06)
Train by day.

**Ray Kurzweil** (0:08)
All day. Great to see you.

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
I was telling you before, I'm admiring your suspenders, and you told me you have how many pairs of these things?

**Ray Kurzweil** (0:19)
Thirty of them, yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (0:21)
How did you?

**Ray Kurzweil** (0:21)
I wear them every day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:22)
Do you really? Every day? Yeah. Why do you like suspenders?
Practicality thing?

**Ray Kurzweil** (0:30)
No, it expresses my personality. And different ones have.
Different personalities that express how I feel that day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:48)
I see. So it's in just another style point.

**Ray Kurzweil** (0:50)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (0:50)
See, the reason why I was asking...

**Ray Kurzweil** (0:52)
You don't see any hand-painted suspenders. Have you ever seen one?

**Joe Rogan** (0:57)
I don't know. I would have not noticed. I only noticed because you were here. I'm not really a suspender aficionado.
But the reason why I'm asking is because you're basically a technologist. I mean, you know a lot about technology, and you would think that suspenders are kind of outdated tech.

**Ray Kurzweil** (1:17)
Well, people like them.

**Joe Rogan** (1:19)
Clearly.

**Ray Kurzweil** (1:21)
And I'm surprised I haven't caught on.
But you have to have somebody who can actually paint them. I mean, these are hand-painted suspenders.

**Joe Rogan** (1:30)
So the ones that you have, these are right here, these are hand-painted?

**Ray Kurzweil** (1:33)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (1:33)
Interesting.
Okay. So that's part of it. So you're wearing art.

**Ray Kurzweil** (1:37)
Exactly.

**Joe Rogan** (1:39)
So...

**Ray Kurzweil** (1:40)
And art is part of technology. I mean, we're using technology to create art now.

**Joe Rogan** (1:44)
That's true. And it's...

**Ray Kurzweil** (1:47)
In fact, the very first... I mean, I've been now in AI for 61 years, which is actually a record. And the first thing I did was create something that could write music.
Writing music now with AI is a major field today, but this was actually the first time that had ever been done.

**Joe Rogan** (2:13)
Yeah, that was one of your many inventions.

**Ray Kurzweil** (2:15)
That was the first one, yeah. Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (2:17)
So, when you... Why did you go about doing that? What was your desire to create artificial intelligence music?

**Ray Kurzweil** (2:24)
Well, my father was a musician, and I felt this would be a good way to relate to him, and he actually worked with me on it.
And you could feed in music, like you could feed in, let's say, Mozart or Chopin, and I would figure out how they created melodies, and then write melodies in the same style. So you could actually tell this is Mozart, this is Chopin. It wasn't as good, but it's the first time that that had been done.

**Joe Rogan** (3:00)
It wasn't as good then.
What are the capabilities now? Because now they can do some pretty extraordinary things.

**Ray Kurzweil** (3:08)
Yeah, it's still not up to what humans can do, but it's getting there. And it's actually pleasant to listen to.
We still have a while to do art, both art, music, so on.

**Joe Rogan** (3:23)
One of the main arguments against AI art comes from actual artists who are upset that what essentially they're doing is they're like, you could say, write, draw a paint, or create a painting the style of Frank Frazetta, for instance.
And what it would be would be they would take all of Frazetta's work that he's ever done, which is all documented on the internet. And then you create an image that's representative of that. So you're essentially in one way or another, you're kind of taking from the art.

**Ray Kurzweil** (3:58)
Right, but it's not quite as good. It will be as good. I mean, I think we'll match human experience by 2029 That's been my idea.
It's not it's not as good.

**Joe Rogan** (4:14)
Which is the best image generator right now, Jamie?
They really change almost from day to day right now, but like Mid Journey was the most popular one at first, and then Dolly, I think, is a really good one, too. Mid Journey is incredibly impressive. Incredibly impressive graphics. I've seen some of the Mid Journey stuff. It's mind-blowing.

**Ray Kurzweil** (4:34)
Still not quite as good.

**Joe Rogan** (4:38)
But boys, it's so much better than it was five years ago. That's what's scary.
It's so quick.

**Ray Kurzweil** (4:42)
I mean, it's never going to reach its limit. We're not going to get to a point, okay, this is how good it's going to be.
It's going to keep getting better.