#839: Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where is my job to deconstruct world-class performers. I interviewed them to tease out the habits, routines, frameworks, et cetera, that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today is Dr. Fei-Fei Li. She is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. She has been called the godmother of AI. She's a founding co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a generative AI company focusing on spatial intelligence. She is also the author of The Worlds I See, Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. Her memoir and one of Barack Obama's recommended books on AI and a Financial Times best book of 2023 Her story is incredible. It is one of beating the odds on so many different levels. And let's get straight to it. Dr. Fei-Fei Li.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:59)
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:03)
Can I answer your personal question? Dr. Li, it is nice to see you. Thanks for making the time.

**Fei-Fei Li** (1:25)
Hi Tim, very nice to be here. Very excited.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:28)
And we were chatting a little bit before we started recording about how miraculous and I suppose unfortunate it is, that somehow we managed to spend three years on the same campus and didn't bump into each other.

**Fei-Fei Li** (1:41)
I know. And now I'm wondering which college you were at and which clubs.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:46)
Oh yeah, I was Forbes. I was in Forbes College.

**Fei-Fei Li** (1:48)
No, I was Forbes too.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:50)
Okay. This is for people who don't know what the hell we're talking about. There are these residential colleges where students are split up when they come into the school and Forbes was way out there in the sticks right next to a fast food spot like 7-Eleven called Wawa.

**Fei-Fei Li** (2:07)
Wawa.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:09)
And next to the commuter train. And then there's something called eating clubs at Princeton. People can look them up, but they're effectively co-ed fraternity slash sororities where you also eat unless you want to make your own meals. And I was in Terrace.

**Fei-Fei Li** (2:23)
I was not any of that. But for those of you wondering why we didn't meet, we should say we were very studious students who are only in the libraries.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:33)
Yeah, we were very studious. I actually made my, whatever it was, $6 an hour at Guest Library working up in the attic.

**Fei-Fei Li** (2:41)
Tim, I work in the same library. I don't understand why we did not meet.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:45)
That's really hilarious. Okay, so well now we're meeting.

**Fei-Fei Li** (2:48)
Did you change name or something? Maybe we did meet.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:52)
I did. Didn't change my name, but here we are. We've reunited. That's wild that we didn't bump into each other. I was also gone for a period of time because I went to Princeton in Beijing and went to the, what was it, the Capital University of Business and Economics after that. So I was gone for a good period of time and then took a year off before graduating the class of 2000 Still, we had a lot of overlap, but let's hop into the conversation. And this is a very perhaps typical way to start, but in your case, I think it's a good place to start, which is just with the basics chronologically. Where did you grow up and could you describe your upbringing? Because based on my reading, your parents were pretty atypical for Chinese parents, in my experience, certainly.

**Fei-Fei Li** (3:45)
Yes, you know a lot. Yeah.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:48)
Could you speak to that, please?

**Fei-Fei Li** (3:50)
Yeah. I would say my childhood and leading up to the formative years is a tale of two cities. I grew up in a town in China called Chengdu. I was born in Beijing, but most of my childhood was spent in Chengdu, where it's very famous for panda bears. And at the age of 15, my mom and I joined my dad in a town called Percipity, New Jersey. And so I went from a relatively typical middle-class Chinese kid to become a new immigrant in a completely different world of all places, New Jersey, and to learn a new language, to learn a new culture, to embrace a new country. And then from there on, I went to Princeton as a physics major, but I did take some of the classes you took, and then went to Caltech as a PhD student to study AI, and the rest is history.