The Nature of Meaning: A Conversation with Peter Wang

As we ponder the nature of meaning and our place in the world, it's clear that traditional metaphysical lenses can only take us so far. Most people view the world as a subject-object dichotomy, where we, as individuals, exist separately from the objects around us. However, what if this perspective is too narrow? What if there's a more interconnected, holistic view of the world that recognizes our inherent embeddedness within it?

Peter Wang, a physicist with a passion for philosophy, has been exploring these ideas in his work. He suggests that faith and technology have played significant roles in providing meaning to people throughout history. Faith in God as a religion, innovation in modern technology, and even basic human values like love and being good at something have all served as sources of inspiration and purpose. Yet, Wang argues that there's something deeper at play here. Why do we constantly strive for order and structure in the world? What drives our desire to impose meaning on chaos?

Wang proposes a new perspective, one that views the world as a complex web of interconnectedness. He suggests that we're not separate entities, but rather standing wave patterns within this larger network. When we interact with the world around us, we're not just external agents; we're also imbuing the objects and people we touch with our own energy and consciousness. This idea challenges traditional notions of objectivity and highlights the importance of attention, intimacy, and connection in shaping our experiences.

One fascinating thought experiment Wang has been exploring is what if everything we touch or interact with was actually imbued with a physical residue of our own life force? What if this "quantum magnetic crystal" – as he calls it – was a real phenomenon that could be harnessed through concentration and focus? This idea may seem like mumbo-jumbo, but Wang invites us to consider the possibility. If such a thing existed, wouldn't we feel an attraction to objects that had been transformed by our interactions with them? Wouldn't we want to imbue as many things with love and meaning as possible?

This line of inquiry leads Wang to propose a radical new view of human purpose: to imbue as many things with love as possible. This idea resonates deeply, suggesting that our lives are not just about personal fulfillment or external validation but about creating connections with the world around us. By recognizing our inherent interconnectedness and the role we play in shaping reality, we can begin to see ourselves as co-creators rather than passive observers.

As we navigate the complexities of modern life, it's essential to consider Wang's provocative ideas. As individuals, institutions, and societies, we often face challenges that seem too great to overcome alone. But what if our true strength lies not in our ability to act alone but in our capacity to connect with one another and the world around us? By embracing this more holistic perspective, we may just discover a new sense of purpose and meaning that transcends traditional notions of individual achievement.

In conclusion, Peter Wang's conversation has left us with much to ponder. As we move forward, it's clear that our understanding of the world and our place within it will continue to evolve. By embracing interconnectedness, attention, and love, we may just find a new way forward – one that recognizes our inherent embeddedness in the world and invites us to co-create meaning with every interaction.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe following is a conversation with peter wang one of the most impactful leaders and developers in the python community former physicist current philosopher and someone who many people told me about and praised as a truly special mind that i absolutely should talk to recommendations ranging from travis oliphant to eric weinstein so here we are this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with peter wang you're one of the most impactful humans in the python ecosystem so you're an engineer leader of engineers but you're also a philosopher so let's talk both in this conversation about programming and philosophy first programming what do you is the best or maybe the most beautiful feature of python or maybe the thing that made you fall in love or stay in love with python well those are three different things what i think is most beautiful what made me fall in love with me stay in love when i first started using it was when i was a c plus computer graphics performance nerd in the 90s and yeah in late 90s and that was my first job out of college um and we kept trying to do more and more uh like abstract and higher order programming in c plus which at the time was quite difficult with templates the the compiler support wasn't great etc so when i started playing around with python that was my first time encountering really first class support for types for functions and things like that and it felt so incredibly expressive so that was what kind of made me fall in love with a little bit and also once you spend a lot of time in a c plus dev environment the ability to just whip something together that basically runs and works the first time is amazing so really productive scripting language i mean i i knew pearl i knew bash i was decent at both but python just made everything it made the whole world accessible right i could script this and that and the other network things you know little hard drive utilities i could write all these things in the space of an afternoon and that was really really cool that's what made me fall in love is there something specific you could put your finger on that you're not programming in perl today like why python for scripting i think there's not a specific thing as much as the design motif of both the the creator of the language and the core uh group of people that built the standard library around him um there was definitely there was a taste to it i mean steve jobs you know used that term you know in somewhat of an arrogant way but i think it's a real thing that it was designed to fit a friend of mine actually expressed this really well he said python just fits in my head and there's nothing better to to say than that now now people might argue modern python there's a lot more complexity but certainly as version 5 152 i think is my first version that fit in my head very easily so that's what made me fall in love with it okay so the most beautiful feature of python that made you stay in love it's like over the years what has like you know you do a double take you you return too often as a thing that just brings you a smile i really still like the um the ability to play with meta classes and express higher order things when i have to create some new object model to model something right it's easy for me because i'm i'm pretty expert as a python programmer i can easily put all sorts of lovely things together and use properties and decorators and other kinds of things and create something that feels very nice so that that to me i would say that's tied with the numpy and vectorization capabilities i love thinking in terms of the matrices and the vectors and these kind of data structures so i would say those two are kind of uh tied for me so the elegance of the numpy data structure like slicing through the different multi-dimensions yeah there's just enough things there it's like a very it's a very simple comfortable tool just it's easy to reason about what it does when you don't stray too far afield can you uh put your finger on how to design a language such that it fits in your head certain things like the colon or the certain notation aspects of python that just kind of work is it uh something you have to kind of write out on paper look and say it's just right is it a taste thing or is there a systematic process what's your sense i think it's more of a taste thing but one one thing that should be said is that you have to pick your audience right so the better defined the user audience is or the users are the easier it is to build something that fits in their minds because their needs will be more compact and coherent it is possible to find a projection right a compact projection for their needs the more diverse the user base the harder that is yeah and so as python has grown in popularity that's also naturally created more complexity as people try to design any given thing there will be multiple valid opinions about a particular design approach and so i do think that's the that's the downside of popularity it's almost an intrinsic aspect of the complexity of the problem well at the very beginning aren't you an audience of one isn't ultimately aren't all the greatest projects in history were just solving a problem that you yourself had well so clay shirky in his um book on crowdsourcing or his kind of thoughts on crowdsourcing he identifies the first step of crowdsourcing is me first collaboration you first have to make something that works well for yourself yeah it's very telling that when you look at all of the impactful big project well they're fundamental projects now in the scipy and pi data ecosystem they all started with the people in the domain trying to scratch their own itch and the whole idea of scratching your own itch is something that the open source or the free software world has known for a long time but in the scientific computing areas you know these are assistant professors or electrical engineering grad students they didn't have really a lot of programming skills necessarily but python was just good enough for them to put something together that fit in their domain right so it's almost like a it's a necessity as a mother invention aspect and also it was a really harsh filter for utility and compactness and expressiveness like it was too hard to use then they wouldn't have built it because it was just too much trouble right it was a side project for them and also necessity creates a kind of deadline it seems like a lot of these projects are quickly thrown together in the in the first step and that even though it's flawed that just seems to work well for software projects well it does work well for software projects in general and in this particular space um well one one of my colleagues uh stan siebert identified this that all the projects in the scipy ecosystem um you know if we just rattle them off there's num pai there's scipy built by different collaborations of people although travis is the heart of both of them um but numpy coming from numeric and numero these are different people and then you've got pandas you've got jupiter or ipython there's um there's matplotlib there's just so many others i'm you know not going to justify trying to name them all but all of them are actually different people and as they rolled out their projects the fact that they had limited resources meant that they were humble about scope um a a great famous hacker jamie zawiski once said that every every geek's dream is to build the uh the ultimate middleware right and the the thing is with these scientists turned programmers they had no such theme they were just trying to write something that was a little bit better for what they needed the matlab and they were going to leverage what everyone else had built so naturally almost in kind of this annealing process or whatever we built a very modular cover of the basic needs of a scientific computing library if you look at the whole human story how much of a leap is it we've developed all kinds of languages all kinds of methodologies for communication he just kind of like grew this collective intelligence the civilization grew it expanded wrote a bunch of books and now we tweet uh how big of a leap is programming if programming is yet another language is it just a nice little trick that's temporary in our human history or is it like a big leap in the uh almost us becoming uh another organism at a higher level of abstraction something else i think the act of programming or using grammatical constructions of some underlying primitives that is something that humans do learn but every human learns this anyone who can speak learns how to do this what makes programming different has been that up to this point when we try to give instructions to computing systems all of our computers well actually this is not quite true but i'll first say it and then i'll tell you to tell you why it's not true but for the most part we can think of computers as being these iterated systems so when we program we're giving very precise instructions to uh iterated systems that then run at um incomprehensible speed and run those instructions in my experience some people are just better equipped to model systematic iterated systems well whatever iterated systems in their head some people are really good at that and other people are not um and so when you have like for instance sometimes people have tried to build systems that uh make programming easier by making a visual drag and drop and the issue is you can have a drag and drop thing but once you start having to iterate the system with conditional logic handling case statements and branch statements and all these other things the visual drag and drop part doesn't save you anything you still have to reason about this giant iterated system with all these different conditions around it that's the hard part right so handling iterated logic um that's the hard part the languages we use then emerge to give us ability and capability over these things now the one exception to this rule of course is the most popular programming system in the world which is excel which is a data flow and a data driven immediate mode data transformation oriented programming system and this actually not an accident that that system is the most popular programming system because it's so accessible to much of a much broader group of people i do think as we build future computing systems you're actually already seeing this a little bit it's much more about composition of modular blocks they themselves um actually maintain all their internal state and the interfaces between them are well-defined data schemas and so to stitch these things together using like ifttt or zapier or any of these kind of you know i would say compositional scripting kinds of things i mean hypercard was also a little bit in this vein that's much more accessible to most people it's it's really that implicit state that's so hard for people to track yeah okay so that's modular stuff but there's also an aspect where you're standing on the shoulders of giants so you're building like higher and higher levels of abstraction you do that a little bit with language so with language you develop sort of ideas philosophies from plato and so on and then you kind of leverage those philosophies as you try to have deeper and deeper conversations but with programming it seems like you can build much more complicated systems like without knowing how everything works you can build on top of the work of others and it seems like you're developing more and more sophisticated uh expressions ability to express ideas in a computational space i think it's worth pondering the difference here between complexity and complication uh sure okay right back to excel well not quite back to excel but but the the idea is um you know when we have a human conversation all languages uh for humans emerged to support um human uh relational communications which is that the person we're communicating with is a person and they would communicate back to us and so we sort of um hit a residence point right when we actually agree on some concepts so there's a messiness to it and there's a fluidity to it with computing systems when we express something to the computer and it's wrong we just try again so we can basically live many virtual worlds of having failed at expressing ourselves to the computer until the one time we expressed ourselves right then we kind of put in production and then discover that it's still wrong you know a few days down the road so i think the the sophistication of things that we build with computing one has to really pay attention to the difference between when an end user is expressing something onto a system that exists versus when they're extending the system to to increase the system's capability um for someone else to then interface with we happen to use the same language for both of those things and usu in most cases but it doesn't have to be that and excel is actually a great example of this of kind of a counterpoint to that okay so what about the idea of you said messiness wouldn't you put the software 2.0 idea this idea of machine learning into the further and further steps into the world of messiness the same kind of beautiful messages of human communication isn't that what machine learning is is uh building on levels of abstraction that don't have messiness in them that uh at the operating system level then there's python the programming languages that have more and more power but then finally there's a neural networks that ultimately work with data and so the programming is almost in the space of data and the data is allowed to be messy isn't that a kind of program so the idea of software 2.0 is a lot of the programming happens in the space of data so back to excel all roads lead back to excel in the space of data and also the hyper parameters of the neural networks and all of those allow this the same kind of messiness that human communication allows it does but you know my background is a physics i took like two cs courses in college so i don't have now i did cram a bunch of cs uh in prep when i applied for grad school but um but still i don't have a formal background in computer science um but what i have observed in studying programming languages and programming systems and things like that is that there seems to be this this this triangle it's one of these beautiful little iron triangles in it that you find in life sometimes and it's the connection between the code correctness and kind of expressiveness of code the semantics of the data and then the kind of correctness or parameters of the underlying hardware compute system so there's the algorithms that you want to you know apply um there's what the bits that are stored on whatever media actually represent so the semantics of the data you know within the representation and then there's what the computer can actually do in every programming system every information system ultimately finds some spot in the middle of this little triangle sometimes some systems collapse them into just one edge are we are we including humans as a system no no i'm just thinking about computing systems here okay and the reason i bring this up is because i believe there's no free lunch around this stuff so if we build if we build machine learning systems to sort of write the correct code that is at a certain level of performance so it'll sort of select right with the hyper parameters we can tune kind of how we want the performance boundary and sla to look like for transforming some set of inputs into certain kinds of outputs that training process itself is intrinsically sensitive to the kinds of inputs we put into it it's and it's quite sensitive to the boundary conditions we put around the performance so i think even as we move to using automated systems to build this transformation as opposed to humans explicitly from a top-down perspective figuring out well this schema and this database and these columns get selected for this algorithm and here we put a you know a fibonacci heap for some other thing human design or computer design ultimately what we hit the boundaries that we hit with these information systems is when the representation of the data hits the real world is where there's a lot of slop and a lot of interpretation and that's where actually i think a lot of the work will go in the future is actually understanding kind of how to better in this in the view of these live data systems how to better encode the semantics of the world for those things they'll be less about the details of how we write a particular sql query okay but given the semantics of the real world and the messiness of that what does the word correctness mean when you're talking about code there's a lot of dimensions to correctness historically and this is one of the reasons i say that we're coming to the end of the era of software because for the last 40 years or so software correctness was really defined about functional correctness i write a function it's got some inputs does it produce the right outputs if so then i can turn it on hook it up to the live database and it goes and more and more now we have i mean in fact i think the bright line in the sand between machine learning systems or modern data-driven systems versus software classical software systems is that the values of the input actually have to be considered with the function together to say this whole thing is correct or not and usually there's a performance sla as well like did it actually finish making sla sorry service level agreement so it has to return within some time you have a 10 millisecond time budget to return a prediction of this level of accuracy right um so these are things that were not traditionally in most business computing systems the last 20 years at all people didn't think about it but now we have value dependence on functional correctness so that that question of correctness is becoming a bigger and bigger question why does that map to the end of software we've thought about software as just this thing that you can do in isolation with some you know test trial inputs and in a very you know um very sort of sandboxed environment and we can quantify how does it scale how does it you know perform how many nodes do we need to allocate if we want to scale this many inputs when we start turning this stuff into prediction systems real cybernetic systems you're going to find scenarios where you get inputs that you don't want to spend a little more time thinking about you're going to find inputs that are not it's not clear what you should do right so then the software has a varying amount of runtime and correctness with regard to input and that is a different kind of system altogether now it's a full on cybernetic system it's a next generation information system that is not like traditional software systems can you maybe describe what is a cybernetic system do you include humans in that picture so is it as a human in the loop kind of complex mess of the whole kind of interactivity of software with the real world or is it something more concrete well when i say cybernetic i really do mean that the software itself is closing the observe orient decide act loop by itself so humans being out of the loop is is the fact what for me uh makes it a cybernetic system and humans are out of that loop when humans are out of the loop when the machine is actually sort of deciding on its own what it should do next to get more information that makes it a cybernetic system so we're just at the dawn of this right i think everyone talking about mlai it's it's it's great but really the thing we should be talking about is when we really enter the cybernetic era and all of the questions of ethics and governance and all correctness and all these things they really are the most important questions okay can we just linger on this what does it mean for the human to be out of the loop in a cybernetic system because isn't the cybernetic system that's ultimately accomplished in some kind of purpose that at the at the bottom you know the the turtles all the way down at the bottom turtle is a human well the human may have set some criteria but the human wasn't precise so for instance i just read the other day that um earlier this year or maybe it was last year at some point the um libyan army i think um sent out some automated killer drones with explosives um and there was no human in the loop at that point they basically put them in a geofenced area said find any moving target like a truck or vehicle it looks like this and boom um that's not a human in the loop right so increasingly the less human there is in the loop the more concerned you are about these kinds of systems because uh there's unintended consequences like less the original designer and engineer of the system is able to predict even one with good intent is able to predict the consequences of such a system is that that's right there are some software systems right that run without humans in the loop that are quite complex and that's like the electronic markets and we get flash crashes all the time we get um you know in the in the heyday of high frequency trading there's a lot of market microstructure people doing all sorts of weird stuff that the market designers had never really thought about contemplated or intended so when we run these full-on systems with these automated trading bots um now they become automated you know killer drones and then all sorts of other stuff we we are that's what i mean by we're at the dawn of the cybernetic era and the end of the era of just pure software are you more concerned if you're thinking about cybernetic systems or even like self-replicating systems so systems that aren't just doing a particular task but are able to sort of multiply and scale in some dimension in the digital or even the physical world are you more concerned about uh like the lobster being boiled so a gradual with us not noticing collapse of civilization or a big explosion uh it's like oops kind of a big thing where everyone notices but it's too late i think that it will be a different experience for different people um i do i do um share a common point of view with some of the climate um you know people who are concerned about climate change and and just the uh this uh the the big existential risks that we have but unlike a lot of people who are who share my level of concern i think the collapse will not be quite so dramatic as some of them think and what i mean is that i think that for certain tiers of let's say economic class or certain locations in the world people will experience dramatic collapse scenarios but for a lot of people especially in the developed world the realities of collapse will be managed there will be narrative management around it so that they essentially insulate the middle class will be used to insulate the upper class from the pitch forks and the and the um flaming torches and everything it's interesting because uh so my specific question wasn't is my question was more about cybernetic systems the software okay uh it's interesting but it would nevertheless perhaps be about class so the effect of algorithms might affect certain classes more than others absolutely i was more thinking about whether it's social media algorithms or actual robots is there going to be a gradual effect on us where we wake up one day and don't recognize the humans we are or or is it something truly dramatic where there's you know like a meltdown of a nuclear reactor kind of thing chernobyl like uh catastrophic events that um are almost bugs in a program that scaled itself too quickly yeah i'm not as concerned about the visible stuff and the reason is because the big visible explosions i mean this is something i said about social media is that you know at least with nuclear weapons when a newt goes off you can see it and you're like well that's really wow that's kind of bad right i mean oppenheimer was reciting the baha'i gita right when he saw one of those things go off so we can see nukes are really bad he's not reciting anything about twitter well but right but then when when you have social media when you have um all these different things that conspire to create a layer of virtual experience for people that alienates them from you know reality and from each other that's very pernicious it's impossible to see right and it kind of slowly gets in there so you've written about this idea of virtuality on this topic which you define as the subjective phenomenon of knowingly engaging with virtual sensation and perception and suspending or forgetting the context that it's uh somalicum so let me ask uh what is real is there a hard line between reality and virtuality like perception drifts from some kind of physical reality we have to kind of have a sense of what is the line that's to we've gone too far right right for me it's not about any hard line about physical reality as much as um a simple question of um does the particular technology help people connect in a more integral way with other people with their environment with all of the full spectrum of things around them so it's less about oh this is a virtual thing and this is a hard real thing more about when we create virtual representations of the real things um always some things are lost in translation usually many many dimensions are lost in translation right we're now coming to almost two years of covet people on zoom all the time you know it's different when you meet somebody in person than when you see them i've seen you on youtube lots right but the senior person is very different and so i think when we engage in virtual experiences all the time and we only do that there is absolutely a level of embodiment there's a level of embodied experience some participatory interaction that is lost and it's very hard to put your finger on exactly what it is it's hard to say oh we're gonna spend a hundred million dollars building a new system that captures this five to five five percent better higher fidelity human expression no one's gonna pay for that right so when we rush madly into a world of simulacrum and and virtuality um you know the things that are lost are it's difficult once everyone moves there it can be hard to look back and see what we've what we've lost so is it irrecoverably lost or rather when you put it all on the table is it possible for more to be gained than is lost if you look at video games they create virtual experiences that are surreal and can bring joy to a lot of people can connect a lot of people uh and can get people to talk a lot of trash uh so they can bring out the best and the worst in people so is it possible to have a future world where the pros outweigh the cons it is i mean it's possible to have that in the in the current world but um when literally trillions of dollars of capital are tied to using those things to groom the worst of our inclinations and to attack our weaknesses in the limbic system to create these things into id machines versus connection machines then um then the those good things don't stand a chance can you make a lot of money by building connection machines is it possible do you think to bring out the best in human nature to uh create fulfilling connections and relationships in the digital world and make a shit ton of money um if i it out i'll let you know but what's your intuition without concretely knowing what's my intuition is that a lot of our digital technologies give us the ability to have synthetic connections or to experience virtuality they have co-evolved with sort of the human expectations it's sort of like sugary drinks as people have more sugary drinks they get they need more sugary drinks to get that same hit right so with these virtual things and with tv and fast cuts and you know tick tocks and all these different kinds of things we're co-creating essentially humanity that sort of asks and needs those things and now becomes very difficult to get people to slow down it gets difficult for people to hold their attention on on slow things and actually feel that embodied experience right so mindfulness now more than ever is so important in schools and um as a therapy technique for people because our environment has been accelerated and mcluhan actually talks about this in the electric environment of the television and that was before tick-tock and before front-facing cameras so i think for me the the concern is that it's not like we can ever switch to doing something better but more of the humans and technology they're not independent of each other the technology that we use kind of molds what we need for the next generation of technology yeah but humans are intelligent and they're uh introspective and they can reflect on the experiences of their life so for example there's been many years in my life where i i ate an excessive amount of sugar and then a certain moment i woke up and said uh why do i keep doing this this doesn't feel good like long term and i think uh so going through the tick tock process of realizing okay when i shorten my attention span actually that does not make me feel good longer term and realizing that and then going to platforms going to places that um are away from the sugar so so in in so doing you can create platforms that can make a lot of money when so to help people wake up to what actually makes them feel good long-term develop grow as human beings and it just feels like humans are more intelligent than uh mice looking for cheese they're able to sort of think i mean we can think we can contemplate our mortality right and contemplate things like long-term love and we can have a long-term fear of certain things like mortality we can contemplate whether the experiences the sort of the drugs of daily life that we've been partaking in is making us happier a better people and then once we contemplate that we can make financial decisions in using services and paying for services that are making us better people so it just seems that we're in the very first stages of social networks that just were able to make a lot of money really quickly but in bringing out sometimes the bad parts of human nature they didn't destroy humans they just they just fed everybody a lot of sugar and now everyone's gonna wake up and say hey we're gonna start having like sugar-free social media right right well there's a lot to unpack there i think some people certainly have the capacity for that and i certainly think i mean it's very interesting even the way you said it you woke up one day and you thought well this doesn't feel very good yeah well that's still your limbic system saying this doesn't feel very good right you have a cat brains worth of neurons around your gut right and so maybe that exaggerated and that was telling you hey this isn't good humans are more than just mice looking for cheese or monkeys looking for sex and power right so let's slow down now you're um now a lot of people would argue with you on that one but we're more than just that but we're at least that and we're very very seldom not that so um my i don't actually disagree with you that we could be better and that we can that better platforms exist and people are voluntarily noping out of things like facebook and noting awesome verb it's a great term yeah i love it i use it all the time you're going to have to know part of that i want to nope out of that right it's going to be a hard pass and and that's and that's that's great but that's again to your point that's the first generation of front-facing cameras of social pressures and you as a you know self-starter self-aware adult have the capacity to say yeah i'm not going to do that i'm going to go and spend time on long form reads i'm going to spend time managing my attention i'm going to do some yoga if you're a 15 year old in high school and your entire social environment is everyone doing these things guess what you're going to do you're going to kind of have to do that because your limbic system says hey i need to get the guy or the girl or whatever and that's what i'm going to do and so one of the things that we have to reason about here is the social media systems or you know social media i think is a first our first encounter with a technological system that runs a bit of a loop around our own cognition and attention it's not the last it's it's far from the last and it gets to the heart of some of the philosophical achilles heel of the western philosophical system which is each person gets to make their own determination each person is an individual that's you know sacrosanct in their agency and their sovereignty and all these things the problem with these systems is they come down and they are able to manage everyone on mass and so every person is making their own decision but together the the bigger system is causing them to act with a group um dynamic that's very profitable for people so this is the issue that we have is that our philosophies are actually not geared to understand what is it for a person to be to have an uh high trust connection uh as part of a collective and for that collective to have its right to coherency and agency that's something like when when a social media app causes a family to break apart it's done harm to more than just individuals right so that concept is not something we really talk about or think about very much but that's actually the problem is that we're vaporizing molecules into atomic units and then we're hitting all the atoms with certain things that's like yeah well that person chose to look at my app so our understanding of human nature is at the individual level it emphasizes the individual too much because ultimately society operates at the collective level and these apps do as well and the apps do as well so for us to understand the progression the development of this organism we call human civilization we have to think of the collective level too i would say multi-tiered multi-tiered multi-so individual as well individuals family units social collectives um and and on the way up okay two so you've said that individual humans are multi-layered susceptible to signals and waves and multiple strata the physical the biological social cultural intellectual so sort of going along these lines can you describe the layers of the cake that that is a human being and maybe the human collective human society so i'm just stealing wholesale here from robert persig who is the author of zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance and in his um follow-on book uh has a sequel to it called lila he goes into this in a little more detail but um it's it's a it's a crude approach to thinking about people but i think it's still an advancement over traditional subject object metaphysics where we look at people as a dualist would say well is is your mind you know your consciousness is that is that just merely the matter that's in your brain or is there something kind of more beyond that and they would say yes there's a soul sort of ineffable soul beyond just merely the physical body right and then and i'm not one of those people right i think that we don't have to draw a line between are things only this or only that collectives of things can emerge structures and patterns that are just as real as the underlying pieces but you know they're transcendent but they're still of the underlying pieces so your body is this way i mean we just know physically you consist of atoms and uh and and whatnot and then the atoms are arranged into molecules which then arrange into certain kinds of structures that seem to have a homeostasis to them we call them cells and those cells form you know sort of biological structures those biological structures give your body its physical ability and biological ability to consume energy and to maintain homeostasis but humans are social animals and a human by themselves is is not very long for the world so we also part of our biology is wire to connect to other people to you know from the mirror neurons to our language uh centers and all these other things so we are intrinsically there's a layer there's a part of us that wants to be part of a thing if we're around other people not saying a word but they're just up and down jumping and dancing laughing we're gonna feel better right and they didn't there was no exchange of physical anything they didn't give us like five atoms of happiness right but there's an induction in our own sense of self that is at that social level and then beyond that um person puts the intellectual level kind of one level higher than social i think they're actually more intertwined than that but the intellectual level is the the level of pure ideas that you are a vessel for memes you're a vessel for philosophies you will conduct yourself in a particular way i mean i think part of this is if we think about it from a physics perspective you're not you know there's a joke that physicists like to um approximate things and we'll say well approximate a spherical cowl right you're not a spherical cow you're not a spherical human you're a messy human and we can't even um say what the dynamics of your emotion will be unless we analyze all four of these layers right if it's if you're if you're muslim at a certain time of day guess what you're going to be on the ground kneeling and praying right and that has nothing to do with your biological need to get on the ground or physics of gravity it is an intellectual drive that you have it's a cultural phenomenon and an intellectual belief that you carry so that's what the four layered stack is is all about it's that a person is not only one of these things they're all of these things at the same time it's a superposition of dynamics that run through us that make us who we are so no layers is special um not so much nowhere especially each layer is just different um but we are each layer against the participation trophy yeah each layer is a part of what you are you are a layer cake right of all these things and if we try to deny right so many philosophies do try to deny the reality of some of these things right some people say well we're only atoms well we're not only atoms because there's a lot of other things that are only atoms i can reduce a human being to a bunch of soup and it's not they're not the same thing even though it's the same atoms so i think the the order and the patterns that emerge within humans to understand to really think about what a next generation philosophy would look like that would allow us to reason about extending humans into the digital realm or to interact with autonomous intelligences that are not biological nature we really need to appreciate these that human what human beings actually are is the superposition of these different layers you mentioned consciousness are each of these layers of cake conscious is consciousness a particular quality of one of the layers is there like a spike if you have a consciousness detector at these layers or it's something that just permeates all of these layers and just takes different form i believe what humans experience as consciousness is something that sits on a gradient scale of a general principle in the universe that seems to look for order and reach for order when there's an excess of energy you know it's it would be odd to say a proton is alive right it'd be odd to say like this particular atom or molecule of of hydrogen gas is alive but there's certainly something we can make assemblages of these things that that are that have autopoetic aspects to them that will create structures that will you know crystalline solids will form very interesting and beautiful structures um this gets kind of into weird mathematical territories you start thinking about penrose and game of life stuff uh about the generativity of math itself like the hyper real numbers things like that but um without going down that rabbit hole i would say that there seems to be a tendency in the world that when there is excess energy things will structure and pattern themselves and they will then actually furthermore try to create an environment that furthers their continued stability it's the concept of externalized extended phenotype or niche construction so um this is ultimately what leads to certain kinds of amino acids forming certain kinds of structures and so forth until you get the ladder of life so what we experience as consciousness no i don't think cells are conscious of that level but is there something beyond mere equilibrium state biology and and chemistry and biochemistry that drives what makes things work i think there is um so adrian bajan has this constructive law there's other things you look at when you look at the life sciences and you look at any kind of statistical physics and statistical mechanics when you look at things far out of equilibrium when you have excess energy what happens then life doesn't just make a harder soup it starts making structure there's something there the poetry of reaches for order when there's an excess of energy because you brought up game of life you did it not me my i love cellular automata so i have to sort of linger on that for a little bit so cellular automata i guess is uh or game of life is a very simple example of reaching for order when there's an excess of energy or reaching for order and somehow creating complexity it within like this explosion of just turmoil somehow trying to construct structures and so doing uh creates very elaborate organism-looking type things what intuition do you draw from this simple mechanism well i i like to turn that around on its head and um and look at it as what if every single one of the patterns created life or created you know not life but created interesting patterns because you know some of them don't and sometimes you make cool gliders and other times you know you start with certain things and you make gliders and other things that then construct like you know and gates and not gates right and you build computers on them um all of these rules that create these patterns that we can see those are just the patterns we can see what if our subjectivity is actually limiting our ability to perceive the order in all of it you know what are some of the things that we think are random are actually not that random we're simply not integrating at a final f level across a broad enough time horizon um and this is again i said we go down the rabbit holes and the penrose stuff or like wolf runs explorations on these things um there is something deep and beautiful in the mathematics of all this that is hopefully one day i'll have enough money to work and retire and just ponder those those questions but there's something there but you're saying there's a ceiling to when you have enough money and you retire and you ponder it there's a ceiling to how much you can truly ponder because there's cognitive limitations in what you're able to perceive as a pattern yeah so and maybe mathematics extends your perception capabilities but it's still it's still finite it's just like yeah the mathematics we use is the mathematics that can fit in our head yeah you know did god really create the integers or did god create all of it and we just happen at this point in time to be able to perceive integers well she just did the the positive energy and then we um she just graded the natural numbers and then we screwed all up with zero and then i guess okay but we did we created mathematical uh operations so we can have iterated steps to approach bigger problems right i mean the entire the entire point of the arabic numeral system and it's a rubric for mapping a certain set of operations and folding them into a simple little expression but that's just the operations that we can fit in our heads there are many other operations besides right the thing that worries me the most about aliens and humans is that their aliens are all around us and we're too dumb yeah see them oh certainly yeah or life let's say just life life of all kinds of forms or organisms you know what just even the intelligence of organisms is uh imperceptible to us because we're too dumb and we're looking self-centered a particular kind of thing yeah when i was at cornell i had a lovely professor of asian religions jamerry law and she would tell this um story about a musical a musician a western musician who went to japan and he taught you know classical music and could play you know all sorts of instruments he went to japan um and he would ask people you know he would basically be looking for things in the style of western you know chromatic scale and these kinds of things and then finding none of it he would say well there's really no music in japan but they're using a different scale they're playing different kinds of instruments right the same thing she was using as sort of a metaphor for religion as well in the west we center a lot of religion certainly the the religions of abraham we center them around belief and in the east it's more about practice right spirituality and practice rather than belief so anyway the point is here to your point um life we i think so many people are so fixated on certain aspects of self-replication or you know homeostasis or whatever but if we kind of broaden and generalize this thing of things reaching for order under which conditions can they then create an environment that sustains that order that um allows them you know the the invention of death is an interesting thing there are some organisms on earth that are thousands of years old and it's not like they're incredibly complex actually simpler than the cells that comprise us but they never die so at some point um death was invented you know somewhere along the eukaryotic scale i mean even the protists right there's death and why is that along with the sexual reproduction right there is something about the renewal process something about the ability to respond to a changing environment where it just becomes you know just killing off the old generation and letting new generations try seems to be the best way to fit into the niche you know human historian seems to write about wheels and fires the greatest inventions but it seems like death and sex are pretty good and they're they're kind of essential inventions at the very beginning at the very beginning yeah well we didn't invent them right well broad we you didn't invent life i see us as one uh you particular homo sapien did not invent them but uh we together it's a team project just like you're saying i think the greatest homo sapien invention is collaboration so when you say collaboration peter where do ideas come from and how do they take hold in society what's is that the nature of collaboration is that the basic atom of collaboration is ideas it's not not ideas but it's not only ideas there's a book i just started reading called death from a distance have you heard of this no it's a really fascinating thesis which is that humans are the only conspecific the the only species that can kill other members of the species from range and maybe there's a few exceptions but if you look in the animal world you see like pronghorns butting heads right you see the alpha lion and the beta lion and they take each other down humans we develop the ability to chuck rocks at each other and while at prey but also at each other and that means the beta male can chunk a rock at the alpha male and take them down and with very he can throw a lot of rocks actually miss a bunch of times so just hit once and be good so this ability to actually kill members of our own species from range without a threat of harm to ourselves created essentially mutually assured destruction where we had to evolve cooperation if we didn't then if we just continue to try to do like i'm the biggest monkey in the tribe and i'm gonna you know own this tribe and you have to go if we do it that way then those tribes basically failed and the tribes that's that persisted and that have now given rise to the modern homo sapiens are the ones where respecting the fact that we can kill each other from range uh without heart like there's an asymmetric ability to to snipe the leader from range that meant that we sort of had to learn how to cooperate with each other right come back here don't throw that rock at me let's talk our witnesses out so violence is also part of collaboration the threat of violence let's say well the recognition i was maybe the better way to put it is the recognition that we have more to gain by working together than the prisoner's dilemma of both of us defecting so uh mutually assured destruction in all his forms is part of this idea of collaboration well and eric weinstein talks about our nuclear piece right i mean it kind of sucks with thousands of warheads aimed at each other we mean russia and the us but it's like on the other hand you know we only fought proxy wars right we did not have another world war three of like hundreds of millions of people dying to like machine gun fire and and you know giant you know guided missiles so the original nuclear weapon is a rock that we learned how to throw essentially the original yeah well the original scope of the world for any human being was their little tribe i would say it still is to the most for the most part eric weinstein speaks very highly of you which was very surprising to me at first because i didn't know there's this depth to you because i knew you as a as a as an amazing leader of engineers and engineer yourself and so on so it's fascinating maybe just as a comment uh a side tangent that we can take uh what's your nature of your friendship with eric weinstein how did the two how did such two interesting paths cross is it your origins in physics is it your interest in philosophy and the ideas of how the world works what is it it's actually it's very random it's uh eric found me um he actually found travis uh and and i um sheriff elephant yeah we were both working at a company called nthot uh back in the mid 2000's and we're doing um a lot of consulting around scientific python um and we'd made some some tools and uh eric was trying to use some of these python tools to visualize he had a fiber bundle approach to modeling certain aspects of economics he was doing this and that's how he kind of got in touch with us and so um this was in the early mid 2000s 07 time frame oh six or seven eric weinstein trying to use python right hyper bundles uh using some of the tools that we've built in the open source that's somehow entertaining to me that's the thought of that it's really funny but then um you know we met with him a couple of times really interesting guy and then in the wake of the 0708 kind of financial collapse he uh helped organize with lee smolin um a symposium at the perimeter institute about um okay well clearly you know big finance can't be trusted governments in its pockets would regularly capture what the f do we do um and all sorts of people nasim talib was there and uh andy lowe from mit was there and you know bill jainway i mean just a lot of you know top billing people were there and he invited me and uh travis and uh another one of her co-workers uh robert kern who is a anyone in the scipy numpy community knows robert um really great guy so the three of us also got invited to go to this thing and that's where i met brett weinstein for the first time as well yeah i knew him before he got all famous for unfortunate reasons i guess but uh but but anyway we um so we met then and kind of had a friendship um you know throughout since then you have a depth of thinking that uh kind of runs with eric in terms of just thinking about the world deeply and thinking philosophically and then there's eric's interest in programming i actually never um you know he'll bring up programming to me quite a bit as a metaphor for stuff right but i never kind of pushed the point of like what's the nature of your interest in programming i think you saw it probably as a tool yeah absolutely the to visualize to explore mathematics and explore physics but and i was wondering like what's the his uh depth of interest and also his uh vision for what programming would look like in the future have you have you had interaction with him like discussion in the space of python no programming well um in the sense of sometimes he asked me why is this stuff still so hard um uh yeah you know everybody's a critic but uh but actually no eric programming i mean like yes yes well not programming in general but certain things in the python ecosystem but he uh but he actually i think what i find in listening some of his stuff is that he does use programming metaphors a lot right he'll talk about apis or object oriented and things like that so i think that's a useful set of frames for him to draw upon for uh discourse um i haven't paired programmed with him in a very long time you've you've previously well i mean trying to try to help like put together some of the visualizations around these things but it's been a very not really pair program but like even looked at his code right i mean how legendary would be is that like uh get repo with peter wang and eric weinstein well honestly honestly robert kearn did all the heavy lifting so i have to give credit where credit is due robert is is the silent but incredibly deep um quiet not silent but quiet but incredibly deep individual at the heart of a lot of those things that eric was trying to do um but we did have you know in the as travis and i were starting our company in um 2012 time frame we went to new york eric was still in new york at the time he hadn't moved to this is before he joined teal capital we just had like a steak dinner somewhere maybe it was keane's i don't know somewhere in new york so it's me travis eric and then wes mckinney the creative pandas and then wes is um then business partner adam the five is sat around having this just a hilarious time amazing dinner um i forget what all we talked about but it was it was one of those conversations which i wish um as soon as covet is over maybe eric and i can sit down recreate recreate it somewhere in uh in la or maybe he comes here because a lot of cool people here in austin right exactly yeah we're all here here come here yeah so he uses uh the metaphor source code sometimes to talk about physics we figure out our own source code so you with the physics background um and uh somebody who's quite a bit of an expert in source code do you think we'll ever figure out our own source code in the way that eric means do you think we'll figure out the nature of constantly working on that problem i mean i think we'll we'll make more and more progress for me there's some things i don't really doubt too much like i don't really doubt that one day we will create um a synthetic maybe not maybe not fully in silicon but a synthetic approach to um cognition that rivals uh the biological 20 watt computers in our heads what's cognition here cognition which aspect perception attention memory recall asking better questions that for me is a measure of intelligence doesn't roomba vacuum cleaner already do that or do you mean oh it doesn't ask questions i mean no it's so i mean i have a roomba but it's well yeah it's not even as smart as my cat right so yeah but it asks questions about what is this wall it now new feature asks is this poop or not apparently yes a lot of our current cybernetics system it's a cybernetic system it will go and it'll happily vacuum up some poop right the older generations would a new one just released does not this is a commercial i wonder if it still gets stuck under my first rung of my stair um in any case i these cybernetic systems we have they are mold they're designed to be sent off into a relatively static environment and whatever dynamic things happen in the environment they have a very limited capacity to respond to a human baby a human toddler of you know 18 months of age has more capacity to manage its own attention and its own capacity to make better sense of the world than the most advanced robots today so again my cat i think can do a better job of my two and they're both pretty clever so i do think though back to my kind of original point i think that it's not for me it's not question at all that we will be able to create synthetic systems that are able to do this um better than the human at an equal level or better than the human mind it's also for me not a question that we will be able to put them alongside humans so that they capture the full broad spectrum of what we are seeing as well and also looking at our responses listening to our responses even maybe measuring certain vital signs about us so in this kind of sidecar mode a greater intelligence could use us and our whatever 80 years of life to train itself up and then be a very good simulacrum of us moving forward right so who is in the sidecar in that picture of the future exactly is the the baby version of our immortal selves okay so once the baby grows up is there any use for humans i think so i think that out of out of epistemic humility we need to keep humans around for a long time and i would hope that anyone making those systems would believe that to be true out of epistemic humility what's the nature of the humility that that we don't know what we don't know so we don't right so we don't first i mean first we have to build systems that that help us do the things that we do know about that can then probe the unknowns that we know about but the unknown unknowns we don't know we could always know nature is the one thing that is infinitely able to surprise us so we should keep biological humans around for a very very very long time even after our immortal selves have transcended have gone off to explore other worlds gone to go communicate with the life forms living in the sun or whatever else so yeah um you know i think that's that's for me these are these seem like things that are going to happen like i don't really question that that they're gonna happen assuming we don't completely you know destroy ourselves is it possible to create an ai system that you fall in love with and it falls in love with you and you have a romantic relationship with it or a deep friendship let's say i would hope that that is the design criteria for any of these systems and if we cannot have a meaningful relationship with it then it's still just a chunk of silicon so then what is meaningful because um back to sugar well sugar doesn't love you back right so the computer has to love you back and what does love mean well in this context for me love i'm going to take a page from ellen de baton love means that it wants to help us become the best version of ourselves yes um that's beautiful that's a beautiful definition of love so what what role does love play in the human condition at the individual level and at the group level because you were kind of saying that humans we should really consider humans both the individual and the group and the societal level what's the role of love in this whole thing we talked about sex we talked about death thanks to the bacteria they invented it at which point did we invent love by the way i mean is that is that also no i think i think love is is the the start of it all and the feelings of and this gets this is sort of beyond uh just you know romantic sensual whatever kind of things but actually genuine love as we have for another person love as it would be used in a religious text right i think that capacity to feel love more than consciousness that is the universal thing our feeling of love is actually a sense of that generativity when we can look at another person and see that they can be something more than than they are and more than just what we you know a pigeonhole we might stick them in we see i mean i think there's in any religious text you'll find um voiced some concept of this that you should see the grace of god in the other person right they're they're made in the spirit of of what you know the love that god feels for his creation or her creation and so i think this thing is actually the root of it so i would say before i don't think i don't think molecules of water feel conscious of consciousness but there is some proto-micro quantum thing of love that's the generativity when there's more energy than what they need to maintain equilibrium and that when you sum it all up is something that leads to i mean i had my mind blown one day as an undergrad at the physics computer lab i logged in and you know when you log into bash for a long time there was a little fortune that would come out and it said man was created by water to carry itself uphill and i was logging in to work on some you know problem set and i logged in and i saw that and i just said son of a bitch you know i just i logged out i went to the coffee shop and i got a coffee and i sat there on the quad like you know it's not wrong and yet wtf right um so when you look at it that way it's like yeah okay non-equilibrium physics is a thing um and so when we think about love when we think about these kinds of things i would say that in the modern day human condition there's a lot of talk about freedom and individual liberty and rights and all these things but that's a and that's very hegelian it's very kind of following from the western philosophy of of the the individual as sacrosanct but it's not really couched i think the the right way because it should be how do we maximize people's ability to love each other to love themselves first to love each other their responsibilities to the previous generation to the future generations those are the kinds of things that should be our design criteria right those should be what we start with to then come up with the philosophies of self and of rights and responsibilities um but that that love being at the center of it i think when we design systems for cognition um it it should absolutely be built that way i think if we simply focus on efficiency and productivity these kind of very uh industrial era you know all the things that marx had issues with right those that's that's a way to go and and really i think go off the deep end in the wrong way so one of the interesting consequences of thinking of life in this hierarchical way of an individual human and then there's groups in their societies is uh i believe that you believe that corporations are people so this is a this is a kind of a politically dense idea and all those kinds of things if we just throw politics aside if we throw all of that aside in which sense do you believe that corporations are people so um and how does love connect to that right so the belief is that groups of people have some kind of higher level i would say mesoscopic claim to agency i you know so so where do i you know let's let's start with this most people would say okay individuals have claims to agency and sovereignty nations we certainly act as of nations so at a very large large scale nations have rights to sovereignty and agency like everyone plays the game of modernity as if that's true right we believe france is a thing we believe the united states is a thing but to say that groups of people at a smaller level than that um like a family unit is the thing well in our law in our laws we actually do encode this concept i believe that in a relationship in a marriage right one partner can sue for loss of consortium right if someone breaks up the marriage or whatever so these are concepts that even in law we do respect there is something about the union and about the family so for me i don't think it's so weird to think that groups of people have a right to a claim to rights and sovereignty of some degree i mean we and we uh look at our clubs we look at churches these are we we talk about these collectives of people as if they have a real agency to them and then they do but i think if we take that one step further and say okay they can accrue resources well yes check you know by law they can um they can own land they can engage in contracts they can do all these different kinds of things so we in legal terms uh support this idea that groups of people have rights where we go wrong on this stuff is that the most popular version of this is the for-profit absentee owner corporation that then is able to amass larger resources than anyone else in the landscape anything else any other entity of equivalent size and they're able to essentially bully around individuals whether it's laborers whether it's people whose resources they want to capture they're also able to bully around our system of representation which is still tied to individuals right so um i don't believe that's correct i don't think it's good that they you know they're people but they're assholes i don't think that corporations as people acting like assholes is a good thing but the idea that collectives and collections of people that we should treat them philosophically as having some agency some agency and some some mass at a mesoscopic level i think that's an important thing because one one thing i do think we under-appreciate sometimes is the fact that relationships have relationships so it's not just individuals having relationships with each other but if you have eight people seated around a table right each person has a relationship with each of the others and that's obvious but then if it's four couples each couple also has a relationship with each of the other couples right the dyads do and if it's couples but one is the the you know father mother older and then you know one of their children and their spouse that that family unit of four has a relationship with the other family unit of four so the idea that relationships have relationships is something that we intuitively know in navigating the social landscape but it's not something i hear expressed like that it's certainly not something that is i think taken into account very well when we design these kinds of things so i think um the reason why i care a lot about this is because i think the future of humanity requires us to form better sense make collective sense making units at something you know around dunbar number you know half to 5x dunbar and that's very different than right now where we um defer sense making to massive aging zombie institutions um or we just do it ourselves we go it alone go to the dark force of the internet so that's really interesting so you've talked about agency i think maybe calling it a convenient fiction at all these different levels so even at the human individual level it's kind of a fiction we all believe because we are like you said made of cells and cells are made of atoms so that's a useful fiction and then there's nations that seems to be a useful fiction but it seems like some fictions are better than others you know there's a lot of people that argue the fiction of nation is a bad idea one of them lives two doors down from me michael malus he's an anarchist you know i'm sure there's a lot of people who are into meditation that believe the idea this useful fiction of agency of an individual is uh troublesome as well we need to let go of that in order to truly like to transcend i don't know i don't know what words you want to use but suffering or to uh to elevate the experience of life so you're kind of arguing that okay so we have some of these useful fictions of agency we should add a stronger fiction that we tell ourselves about the agency of groups in the hundreds of the half of dunbar's number five x dunbar's number yeah something on that order and we call them fictions but really they're rules of the game right rules that we we we feel are fair or rules that we consent to yeah i always question the rules when i lose like a monopoly that's when i usually question when i'm winning i don't question the rules we should play game monopoly someday there's a trippy version of it that we could do what what kind of contract monopoly is induced by a friend of mine to me where you can write contracts on future earnings or landing on various things and you can hand out like you know you can land first three times you land a park places free or whatever just and then you start trading those contracts for money and then you create human civilization uh and somehow bitcoin comes into it okay uh but some of these actually i bet if me and you and eric sat down to play a game of monopoly and we were to make nfts out of the contracts we wrote we could make a lot of money now it's a terrible idea yes i would never do it but i bet we could actually sell the nfts around i have other ideas to make money that i could tell you and they're all terrible ideas um including cat videos on the internet okay but some of these rules of the game some of these fictions are it seems like they're better than others they have worked this far to cohere um human to organize human collective action but you're saying something about especially this technological age requires modified fictions stories of agency why the dunbar number and also you know how do you select a group of people you know del mar numbers i think it did i have the sense that it's overused as a kind of law that somehow we can have deep human connection at this scale like some of it feels like an interface problem too it feels like if i have the right tools i can deeply connect with a large number larger number of people it just feels like uh there's a huge value to interacting just in person getting to share traumatic experiences together beautiful experiences together but there's other experiences like um that in the digital space that you can share it just feels like dunbar's number could be expanded significantly perhaps not to to the level of millions and billions but it feels like it could be expended so how yeah how do we find the right interface you think um for uh having a little bit of a collective here that has agency you're right that there's many different ways that we can build trust with each other um my friend joe edelman talks about a few different ways that um you know mutual appreciation trustful conflict um just experiencing something like you know there's a variety of different things that we can do but all those things take time and you have to be present the less presence you are i mean there's just again a no free lunch principle here the less present you are the more of them you can do but then the less less connection you build so i think there is sort of a human capacity issue around some of these things now that being said if we can use certain technologies so for instance if i write a little monograph on my view of the world you read it asynchronously at some point and you're like wow peter this is great here's mine i read it i'm like wow lex this is awesome we can be friends without having to spend 10 years you know figuring all this stuff out together we just read each other's thing and be like oh yeah this guy's exactly in my wheelhouse and vice versa and we can then um you know connect just a few times a year and maintain a high trust relationship it can expand a little bit but it also requires these things are not all technological nature it requires the individual themselves to have a certain level of capacity to have a certain lack of neuroticism right if you want to use like the ocean big five sort of model people have been pretty centered the less centered you are the fewer authentic connections you can really build for a particular unit of time it just takes more time other people have to put up with your crap like there's a lot of the stuff that you have to deal with if you are not so well balanced right so yes we can help people get better to where they can develop more relationships faster and then you can maybe expand dunbar number by quite a bit but you're not going to do it i think it's be hard to get it beyond 10x kind of the rough swag of what it is you know well don't you think that ai systems could be an addition to dunbar's number so like why do you count as one system or multiple ai systems multiple ai systems so i do believe that ai systems for them to integrate into human society as it is now have to have a sense of agency so there has to be a individual because otherwise we wouldn't relate to them we could engage certain kinds of individuals to make sense of them for us and be almost like did you ever watch uh star trek uh like voyager like there's the volta who were like the interfaces the ambassadors for the dominion um we may have ambassadors that speak on behalf of these systems they're like the mentats of dune maybe or something like this i mean we already have this to some extent if you look at the biggest sort of i wouldn't say ai system but the biggest cybernetic system in the world is the financial markets it runs outside of any individual's control and you have an entire stack of people on wall street wall street analysts to cnbc reporters whatever they're all helping to communicate what does this mean you know like jim cramer like running around and yelling and stuff like all of these people are part of that lowering of the complexity there to meet since you know to help do sense making for people whatever capacity they're at and i don't see this changing with ai systems i think you would have ringside commentators talking about all the stuff that this ai system is trying to do over here over here because it's a it's actually a super intelligence so if you want to talk about humans interfacing making first contact with the super intelligence we're already there we do it pretty poorly and if you look at the gradient of power and money what happens is the people closest to it will absolutely exploit their distance for personal financial gain so we should look at that and be like oh well that's probably what the future will look like as well um but nonetheless i mean we're already doing this kind of thing so in the future we can have ai systems but you're still gonna have to trust people to bridge the sense making gap to them see i don't i just feel like there could be of like millions of ai systems that have have agencies you have when you say one super intelligence superintelligence in that context means it's able to solve particular problems extremely well but there's some aspect of human-like intelligence that's necessary to be integrated into human society so not financial markets not sort of weather prediction systems or i don't know logistics optimization i'm more referring to things that you interact with on the intellectual level yeah and that i think requires there has to be a backstory there has to be a personality i believe it has to fear its own mortality in a genuine way like there has to be all many of the elements that we humans experience that are fundamental to the human condition because otherwise we would not have a deep connection with it but i don't think having a deep connection with it is necessarily going to stop us from building a thing that has quite an alien intelligence aspect sure um so another now the other kind of alien intelligence on this planet is octopuses or octopates or whatever you want to call them octopi yeah there's a there's a little controversy as to what the plural is i guess but an octopus um you know it really acts as a collective intelligence of eight intelligent arms right its arms have a tremendous amount of neural density to them and i see if we can build i mean just let's let's go with what you're saying if we build a singular intelligence that interfaces with humans that has a sense of agency so it can run the cybernetic loop and develop its own theory of mind as well as it's a theory of action all these things i agree with you that that's the necessary components to build a real intelligence right there's got to be something at stake it's got to make a decision it's got to then run the ooda loop okay so we build one of those well if we can build one of those we'll probably build 5 million of them so build five million of them and if their cognitive systems are already digitized and already kind of there we stick an antenna on each of them bring it all back to a hive mind that maybe doesn't make all the individual decisions for them but treats each one as almost like a neural neuronal input of a much higher bandwidth and fidelity going back to a central system that is then able to perceive much broader uh dynamics that we can't see in the same way that a phased array radar right you think about how phase phase-to-radar works it's just sensitivity it's just radars and then it's hypersensitivity and really great timing between all of them and with a flat array it's as good as a curved radar dish right so with these things it's a phased array of cybernetic systems that'll give the centralized intelligence uh much much better much higher fidelity understanding of what's actually happening in the environment but the more power the more understanding the central superintelligence has the dumber the individual like fingers of this intelligence are i think i think necessarily i don't see what has to be this argument there has to be the experience of the individual agent has to have the full richness of the human-like experience you have to be able to be driving the car in the rain listening to bruce springsteen and all of a sudden break out in tears because remembering some something that happened to you in high school we can implant those memories if that's really needed but no no no but the central agency like i guess i'm saying for for in my view for intelligence to be born you have to have uh a decentralization like each one has to struggle and reach so each one in excess of energy has to reach for order as opposed to a central place doing so have you ever read like some sci-fi where um there's like hive minds uh like the vern revenge i think has one of these and then um some of the stuff from um yes on the commonwealth saga the idea that uh you're an individual but you're connected with like a few other individuals telepathically as well and together you form a swarm so if you are i'd ask you what do you think it is the experience of if you are like well a borg right if you are one if you're part of this hive mind outside of all the aesthetics forget the aesthetics internally what is your experience like because i have a theory as to what that looks like the one question i have for you about that experience is how much is there a feeling of freedom of free will because i obviously as a human very biased but also somebody who values freedom and biased it feels like the experience of freedom is essential for um trying stuff out to being to being creative and doing something truly novel which is at the core of yeah well i don't think you have to lose any freedom when you're in that mode because i think what happens is we think we still think and i mean you're still thinking about this in a sense of a top-down command and control hierarchy which is not what it has to be at all i think the experience so i'll just you know show my cards here i think the experience of being a robot in that robot swarm a robot who has agency over their own local environment that's doing sense making and reporting it back to the hive mind um i think that robot's experience would be one of when the hive mind is working well it would be an experience of like talking to god right that you essentially are reporting to you're sort of saying here's what i see i think this is what's going to happen over here i'm going to go do this thing because i think if i'm going to do this this will make this change happen in the environment and and then and god she may tell you that's great and in fact your your brothers and sisters will join you to help make this go better right and then she can let your brothers and sisters know hey you know peter is going to go do this thing would you like to help him because we think that this will make this thing go better and they'll say yes we'll help him so the whole thing could be actually a very emergent the the sense of you know what does it feel like to be a cell in a network that is alive that is generative and i think actually the feeling is serendipity that that there's random order not random disorder or chaos but random order just when you needed to hear bruce springsteen you turn on the radio and bam it's bruce springsteen right that feeling of serendipity i feel like um this is a bit of a flight of fancy but every cell in your body must have like what does it feel like to be a cell in your body when it needs sugar there's sugar when it is oxygen there's just oxygen now when it needs to go and do its work and pull like as one of your muscle fibers right it does its work and it's great it contributes to the cause right so this is all again a flight of fancy but i think as we extrapolate up what does it feel like to be an independent individual with some bounded sense of freedom all sense of freedom is actually bounded but it with about a sense of freedom that still lives within a network that has order to it and i feel like it has to be a feeling of serendipity so the cell there's a feeling of serendipity even though it has no way of explaining why it's getting oxygen and sugar when it gets it so you have to each individual component has to be too dumb to understand the big picture no the big picture's bigger than what it can understand but isn't that an essential characteristic of the individual is to be too dumb to understand the bigger picture like a bit not dumb necessarily but limited in its capacity to understand because the mo okay the moment you understand i feel like that leads to if you tell me now that there's some bigger intelligence controlling everything i do intelligence broadly defined meaning like you know even the sam harris thing there's no free will if i'm smart enough to truly understand that that's the case that's gonna i don't know if i have philosophical breakdown yeah right because we're in the west and we're pumped full of this stuff of like you are a golden fully free individual with all your freedoms and all your liberties and go grab a gun and shoot whatever you want to no it's actually you don't actually have a lot of these you're not unconstrained but the areas where you can manifest agency you're free to do those things you can say whatever you want on this podcast you can create a podcast right yeah you're not you're i mean you have a lot of this kind of freedom but even as you're doing this you are actually i guess where the the the demo of this is that we are already intelligent agents in such a system right in that one of these these like robots of one of five million little swarm robots or one of the borg they're just posting an internal bulletin board i mean maybe the board cube is just a giant facebook machine floating in space and everyone's just posting on there they're just posting really fast and like oh yeah it's called the metaverse now then that's called the metaverse that's right here's the enterprise maybe we shall go shoot it yeah everyone up votes and they're gonna go shoot it right but we already are part of a human online collaborative environment and collaborative sense making system it's not very good yet it's got the overhangs of zombie sense-making institutions all over it but as that washes away and as we get better at this we are going to see humanity improving at speeds that um are unthinkable in the past and it's not because anyone's freedoms were limited in fact the open source when we started this with open source software right the collaboration what the internet surfaced was the ability for people all over the world to collaborate and produce some of the most foundational software that's in use today right that entire ecosystem was created by collaborators all over the place so these online kind of swarm kind of things are not novel it's just i'm just suggesting that future ai systems if you can build one smart system you have no reason not to build multiple if you build multiple there's no reason not to integrate them all into a collective sense making substrate and that thing will certainly have emergent intelligence that none of the individuals and probably not in the human designers will be able to really you know put a bow around and explain but in some sense would that ai system still be able to go like rural texas buy a ranch go off the grid go full survivalist can you disconnect from the hive mind you may not want to so to be ineffective to be intelligent you have access to way more intelligence capability if you're plugged into five million other really really smart cyborgs why would you leave so like there's a word control that comes to mind so it doesn't it it doesn't feel like control like over over uh overbearing control it's it's just i think systems now this is your point i mean look at look at how much how uncomfortable you are with this concept right i think systems that feel like overbearing control will not evolutionarily win out i think systems that give their individual elements the feeling of serendipity and the feeling of agency that that will those systems will win but that's not to say that there will not be emergent higher level order on top of it and that's the thing that's the philosophical breakdown that we're staring right at which is in the western mind i think there's a very sharp delineation between explicit control now cartesian like what is the vector where is the position where is it going it's completely deterministic and kind of this idea that things emerge everything we see is the emergent patterns of other things and there is agency when there's extra energy so you have spoken about a kind of meaning crisis that we're going through but it feels like since uh since we invented sex and death we broadly speaking we've been searching for a kind of meaning so it feels like uh human civilization has been going through a meaning crisis of different flavors throughout its history why is how is this particular meaning crisis different or is it really a crisis and it wasn't previously what's your sense a lot of human history there wasn't so much a meaning crisis there was just a like food and not getting eaten by bears crisis right once you get to a point where you can make food there was the like not getting killed by other humans crisis so sitting around wondering what is all about is actually a relatively recent luxury um and the and to some extent the meaning crisis coming out of that is precisely because well not precisely because i i believe that meaning is the consequence of um when we make consequential decisions it's tied to agency right when we make consequential decisions that generates meaning so if we make a lot of decisions but we don't see the consequences of them then it feels like what was the point right but if there's all these big things happening but we're just along for the ride then it also does not feel very meaningful meaning as far as i can tell is my working definition circuit 2021 is uh generally the result of a person making a consequential decision acting on it and then seeing the consequences of it so historically just when humans are in survival mode you're making consequential decisions all the time so there's not a lack of meaning because like you either got eaten or you didn't right you got some food and that's great you feel good like these are all consequential decisions only in you know the post fossil fuel and industrial revolution could we create a massive leisure class i could sit around not being threatened by bears not starving to death making and making decisions somewhat but a lot of times not making not seeing the consequences of any decisions they make the general sort of sense of anamiy i think this is the french term for it in the in the wake of the consumer society in the wake of mass mass media telling everyone hey you know choosing between hermes and chanel is a meaningful decision no it's not i don't know what either of those means oh there's high-end uh luxury um uh purses and crap like that but the point is that we we give people the idea that consumption is meaning that making a choice of this team versus that team spectating has meaning so we produce all of these different things that are as if meaning right but really making a decision that has no consequences for us and so that creates the meaning crisis well you're saying uh choosing between chanel and the other one is has no consequence i mean i why is one more meaningful than the other it's not that it's more meaningful the other it's that you make a decision between these two brands and you're told this brand will make me look better in front of other people if i buy this brand of car if i wear that brand of apparel right the idea like a lot of decisions we make are around consumption but consumption by itself doesn't actually yield meaning gaining social status does provide meaning so that's why in this era of um abundant production we uh so many things turn into status games the nft kind of explosion is a similar kind of thing everywhere there are status games because you know we just have so much excess production um but aren't those status games a source of meaning like what why do the games we play have to be grounded in physical reality like they are when you're trying to run away from lions why can't we in this virtuality world on social media why can't we play the games on social media even the dark ones right we can yeah and you're but you're saying that's crazy there's a meaningful crisis well there's a meeting crisis in that there's two aspects of it number one playing those kinds of status games uh oftentimes requires destroying the planet because um it's it's it ties to consumption consuming the latest and greatest version of a thing buying the latest limited edition sneaker and throwing out all the old ones maybe it keeps on the old ones but the amount of sneakers we have to cut up and destroy every year to create artificial scarcity for the next generation right this is kind of stuff that's not great it's not great at all so conspicuous consumption fueling status games is really bad for the planet not sustainable the second thing is you can play these kinds of status games but then what it does is it renders you captured to the virtual environment the status games the really wealthy people are playing are all around the hard resources where they're gonna build the factories they're gonna have the fuel in the rare earths to make the next generation of robots they're then going to one game run circles around you and your your children so that's another reason not to play those virtual status games so you're saying ultimately the the the big picture game is won if by people who have access or control over actual hard resources so you can't you don't see a society where most of the games are um played in the virtual space they'll be captured in the physical space it's it it all builds it's just like the stat the stack of human being right if you only play the game at the cultural and intellectual level the people the hard resources and access to layer zero physical are going to own you but isn't money not connected to or less and less connected to hard resources and money still seems to work it's a virtual technology um there's different kinds of money part of the reason that some of the stuff is able to go a little unhinged is because uh the the the big sovereignties where one spends money and uses money and plays money games and inflates money um their their ability to adjudicate the physical resources and hard resources on land and things like that those have not been challenged in a very long time so you know we went off the gold standard most money is not connected to physical resources it's an idea and that idea is very closely connected to status um so why but it's also tied to like it's actually tied to law it is tied to some physical hard things so you have to pay your taxes yes so it's always at the end going to be connected to the the blockchain of physical reality so in the case of law and taxes it's connected to government and uh government is what violence is the i'm playing the monopoly on violence devil's advocates here and popping one devil off the stack at a time isn't ultimately of course it'll be connected to physical reality but just because people control the physical reality it doesn't mean the status lebron james in theory could make more money than the owners of the teams in theory and to me that's a virtual idea so somebody else constructed a game and now you're playing in the space of virtual uh in the virtual space of the game so it just feels like there could be games where status we build realities that give us meaning in the virtual space like i can imagine such things being possible oh yeah okay so i see what you i think i see what you're saying there with the idea there i mean we'll take the lebron james side and put in like some youtube influencer yes sure right so the youtube influencer it is status games but at a certain level it precipitates into real dollars and into like well you look at mr beast right he's like sending off half a million dollars worth of fireworks or something right on a youtube video and also like saving you know like saving trees and so on sure right you're trying to plant a milling tree with the mark robert or whatever it was yeah like it's not that those kinds of games can't lead to real consequences it's that for the vast majority of people in consumer culture they are incented by the i would say mostly i'm thinking about middle class consumers they're incented by advertisements they're centered by their memetic environment to treat the purchasing of certain things the need to buy the latest model whatever that need to appear however the need to pursue status games as a driver of meaning and my point would be that it's a very hollow driver of meaning and that is what creates a meaning crisis because at the end of the day it's like eating a lot of empty calories right yeah it tasted good going down a lot of sugar but man it did not it was not enough protein to help build your muscles and you kind of feel that in your gut and i think that's i mean to all the stuff aside and setting aside a discussion on currency which i hope we get back get back to you that's what i mean about the meaning crisis part of it being created by the fact that we don't um we're not encouraged to have more and more direct relationships we're actually alienated from relating to even even our family members sometimes right we're we're encouraged to relate to brands we're encouraged to relate to these kinds of things that then tell us to um do things that are really of low consequence and that's where the meaning crisis comes from so the role of technology in this so there's somebody you mentioned who's jacques elio his view of technology he warns about the towering piles of technique which i guess is a broad idea of technology yes so i think correct me if i'm wrong for him technology is a is a is bad moving away from human nature and it's ultimately destructive my question broadly speaking this meaning crisis can technology what are the pros and cons of technology can it be good yeah i think it can be i certainly draw on some of the lowell's ideas and i think some of them are are pretty good um but the way he defines technique is uh well also somandon as well i mean he speaks to the general mentality of efficiency homogenized processes homogenized production homogenized labor to produce homogenized artifacts that then are not actually they they don't sit well in the environments it's essentially you can think of as the antonym of craft whereas a craftsman will come to you know a problem uh maybe a piece of wood and then make it to a chair it may be a site to build a house or build a stable or build you know whatever and they will consider how to bring various things in to build something well contextualized that's in uh in right relationship with that environment but the way we have driven technology over the last 150 years is not that at all it is how can we you know make sure the input materials are homogenized cut to the same size you know diluted and doped exactly the right alloy concentrations how do we create machines that then consume exactly the right kind of energy to be able to run at this high speed to stamp out the same parts which then go out the door everyone gets the same tickle me elmo and the reason why everyone wants it is because we have broadcast that tells everyone this is the cool thing so we homogenize demand right and we're like beaudelard um and look other critiques of modernity coming from that direction you know the situation list as well they it's that their point is that at this point in time consumption is the thing that drives a lot of the economic stuff not the need but the need to consume and build status games on top so we have homogenized when we discovered i think this is uh this is really like bernays and stuff right in the early 20th century we discovered we can create we can create demand we can create desire in a way that was not possible before because of broadcast media and one not only do we create desire we don't create a desire for each person to connect to some bespoke thing to build a relationship with their neighbor or their spouse we are telling them you need to consume this brand you need to drive this vehicle you got to listen to this music have you heard this have you seen this movie right so creating homogenized demand makes it really cheap to create homogenized product and now you have economics of scale so we make the same tickle me elmo give it to all the kids and all the kids are like hey i got to tickle me elmo right so this is ultimately where this ties in then to run away hyper capitalism is that we then capitalism is always looking for growth it's always looking for growth and growth only happens the margins so you have to squeeze more and more demand out you got to make it cheaper and cheaper to make the same thing but tell everyone they're still getting meaning from it you're still like this is still your tickle me elmo right and we we see little bits of this dripping critiques of this dripping in popular culture you see it sometimes it's when buzz lightyear walks into the thing he's like oh my god at the toy store i'm just a toy like there's millions of other or there's hundreds of other buzz lightyears just like me right that is i think you know a fun pixar critique on this homogenization dynamic i agree with you on most of the things you're saying so i'm playing devil's advocate here but you know this homogenized machine of capitalism is also the thing that is able to fund if channeled correctly innovation invention and development of totally new things that in the best possible world create all kinds of new experiences that can enrich lives um the quality of lives for uh all kinds of people so isn't this the machine that actually enables the experiences and more and more experiences that would then give meaning it has done that to some extent i mean it's not all good or bad in my perspective you know we can always look backwards and offer a critique of the path we've taken to get to this point in time um but that's a different that's somewhat different it informs the discussion um but it's somewhat different than the question of where do we go in the future right sure is this still the same rocket we need to ride to get to the next point we'll even get us to the next point well how does this so you're predicting the future how does it go wrong in your view we have the mechanisms we have now explored enough technologies to where we can actually i think sustainably produce what most people in the world need to live we have also created the infrastructures to allow continued research and development of additional science and medicine and various other kinds of things the organizing principles that we use to govern all these things today have been a lot of them have been just inherited from honestly medieval times some of them have refactored a little bit in the industrial era but a lot of these modes of organizing people are deeply problematic and furthermore they're rooted in i think a very industrial mode perspective on human labor and this is one of those things i'm going to go back to the open source thing there was a point in time when well let me ask you this if you look at the core scipy sort of collection of libraries that's scipy numpy map plot lib right there's ipython notebook let's throw pandas in there psychic learn a few of these things um how much value do you think economic value would you say they drive in the world today that's one of the fascinating things about talking to you and travis is like it it's it's immeasurable it's like uh at least a billion dollars a day maybe a billion dollars sure i mean it's like it's similar question of like how much value does wikipedia create right it's like all of it i don't know well i mean if you look at our systems when you do a google search right now some of that stuff runs through tensorflow but when you look at you know siri when you do credit card transaction fraud like just everything right every intelligent station under the sun they're using some aspect of these kinds of tools so i would say that these create billions of dollars of value you mean like direct use of tools that leverage direct yeah yeah even that's billions a day yeah yeah right easily i think like the things they could not do if they didn't have these tools right yes so that's billions of dollars a day great i think that's about right now if we take how many people did it take to make that right and there was a point in time not anymore but there was a point in time when they could fit in a van i could have fit them in my mercedes center right and so if you look at that like holy crap literally a van of maybe a dozen people could create value to the tune of billions of dollars a day what lesson do you draw from that well here's the thing what can we do to do more of that like that's open source the way i've talked about this in other environments is when we use generative participatory crowdsourced approaches we unlock human potential at a level that is better than what capitalism can do i would challenge you know anyone to go and try to hire the right 12 people in the world to build that entire stack the way those 12 people did that right they'd be very very hard to press to do that if a hedge fund could just hire a dozen people and create like something that is worth billions of dollars a day every single one of them will be racing to do it right but finding the right people fostering the right collaborations getting it adopted by the right other people to then refine it that is a thing that was organic in nature that that took crowdsourcing that took a lot of the open source ethos and it took the right kinds of people right now those people who started that said i need to have a part of a multi-billion dollar a day sort of enterprise they're like i'm doing this cool thing to solve my problem for my friends right so the point of telling the story is to say that our way of thinking about value our way of thinking about allocation of resources our ways of thinking about property rights and all these kinds of things they come from finite game scarcity mentality medieval institutions as we are now entering to some extent we are sort of in a post-scarcity era although some people are hoarding a whole lot of stuff we are at a point where if not now soon we'll be in a post-scarcity era the question of how we allocate resources has to be revisited at a fundamental level because the kind of software these people built the modalities that those human ecologies that built this software it treats software's on property actually sharing creates value restricting a forking reduces value so that's different than any other physical resource that we've ever dealt with it's different than how most corporations treat software ip right so if treating software in this way created this much value so efficiently so cheaply because feeding a dozen people for 10 years is really cheap right that's the that's the reason i care about this right now is because looking forward when we can automate a lot of labor where we can in fact the the programming for your robot in your part neck of the woods and you're part of the amazon to build something sustainable for you and your tribe to deliver the right medicines to take care of the kids that's just software that's just code that could be totally open sourced right so we can actually get to a mode where all of this additional generative things that humans are doing they they don't have to be wrapped up in a container and then we charge for all the exponential dynamics out of it that's what facebook did that's what modern social media did right because the old internet was connecting people just fine facebook came along and said well anyone can post a picture anyone can post some text and we're gonna amplify the crap out of it to everyone else and it exploded this generative network of human interaction and then said how do i make money off that oh yeah i'm going to be a gatekeeper on everybody's attention and that's how i'm going to make money so how do we create uh more than one van how do we have millions of vans full of people that create numpy scipy that create python so you know the story of those people is often they have some kind of job outside of this this is what they're doing for fun don't you need to have a job don't you have to be connected plugged in to the capitalist system isn't that what like um isn't this consumerism the engine that results in the individuals that kind of take a break from it every once in a while to create something magical like at the edges right the question of surplus right this is this is the question like if everyone were to go and run their own farm no one would have time to go and write numpy sci-fi right maybe but that's that's that's what i'm talking about when i say we're maybe at a post scarcity point for a lot of people the question that we're never encouraged to ask in a super bowl ad is how much do you need how much is enough do you need to have a new car every two years every five if you have a reliable car can you drive one for 10 years is that all right you know i had a car for 10 years was fine you know your iphone do you have to upgrade every two years i mean sort of you you're using the same apps you did four years ago right this should be a super bowl ad this should be a super bowl ad that's great maybe you really need a new iphone maybe one of our listeners will will fund something like this of like no but just actually bringing it back bringing it back to actually the question of what do you need how do we create the infrastructure for collectives of people to live on the basis of providing you know what we need meeting people's needs with a little bit of excess to handle emergencies and things like that pulling our resources together to handle the really really big you know emergencies somebody with a really rare care form cancer or some massive fire sweeps through you know half the the village or whatever but can we actually unscale things and solve for people's needs and then give them the capacity to explore how to be the best version of themselves and for travis that was you know throwing away his shot a tenure in order to write numpy for others it's uh there is a saying in the in the sci-fi uh community that you know sci-fi advance is one failed postdoc at a time and that's you know we can do these things we can actually do this kind of collaboration because code software information organization that's cheap that those bits are very cheap to fling across the oceans so you mentioned travis we've been talking and we'll continue to talk about open source um maybe you can comment how did you meet travis who who is travis alphon what's what's your relationship been like through the years uh where did you work together how did you meet what's uh the present and the future look like yeah so the first time i met travis was at a sci-fi conference in pasadena do you remember the year 2005. i was working at again at nthot you know working on scientific computing consulting and um a couple of years later he joined us at nthot i think 2007 um and he came in as president uh the the one of the founders of and thought was the ceo eric jones um and we're all very excited that travis was joining us and that was you know great fun so i worked with travis um on a number of consulting projects and we worked on um some open source stuff i mean it was just a really it was a good a good time there and then it was primarily python related oh yeah it was all python numpy consulting kind of stuff um towards the end of that time uh we started getting called into more and more finance shops um they were adopting python pretty heavily i did some work on like a high frequency trading shop um working some stuff and then we worked together on some um at a couple investment banks in in manhattan and so we started seeing that there was a potential to take python in the direction of business computing more than just being this niche like matlab replacement for big vector computing what we were seeing was oh yeah you could actually use python as a swiss army knife to do a lot of shadow data transformation kind of stuff so that's when we realize the potential is much greater and so we started anaconda i mean it was called continuum analytics at the time but we started in january of 2012 with a vision of shoring up the parts of python that needed to get expanded to handle data at scale to do web visualization application development et cetera and that was that yeah so he was ceo and i was president for the first five years and then um we raised some money and then the board sort of put in a new ceo they hired a kind of professional ceo and then travis you laugh about that um i took over the cto role travis then left after a year to do his own thing through kwan site um which was more oriented around some of the bootstrap years that we did at continuum where it was you know open source some consulting it wasn't sort of like gung-ho product development and it wasn't focused on you know we accidentally stumbled into the package management problem at anaconda but we had a lot of other visions of other technology that we built in the open source and travis was really trying to push again the frontiers of numerical computing vector computing handling things like auto differentiation and stuff intrinsically in the open ecosystem so i think that's the the you know that's kind of the direction he's he's working on in some of his his work we remain great friends and um you know and colleagues and collaborators even though he's no longer uh day-to-day you know working at anaconda but he gives me a lot of feedback about you know this and then the other what's uh what's a big lesson you learned from travis about life or about programming about leadership wow there's a lot there's a lot travis is a really really good guy he really his heart is really in it he cares a lot um i've gotten that sense having interacted with them it's so interesting yeah such a good he's a really good dude and he and i you know it's so interesting we come from very different backgrounds we're quite different as people um but we uh i think we can like not talk for a long time and then and then be on a conversation and be eye to eye on like 90 of things and so he's someone who i believe no matter how much fog settles into the ocean his ship my ship are pointed sort of in the same direction of the same star wow so that's a beautiful way to phrase it no matter how much fog there is appointed the same star yeah and i hope he feels the same way i mean i hope he knows that over the years now um we both care a lot about the community um for someone who cares so deeply i would say this about travis that's interesting for someone who cares so deeply about the nerd details of like type system design and vector computing and efficiency of expressing this and then the other memory layouts and all that stuff he cares even more about the people in the ecosystem the community and i have um a similar kind of alignment i care a lot about the tech i really do but for me the the beauty of what this human ecology has produced is i think a touchstone it's an early version we should look at it and say how do we replicate this for humanity at scale what this open source collaboration was able to produce how can we be generative in human collaboration moving forward and create that as a civilizational kind of dynamic like can we seize this moment to do that because like a lot of the other open source movements it's all nerds nerding out on code for nerds you know um and the this because it's scientists because it's people working on data that all of it faces real human problems um i think we have an opportunity to actually make a bigger impact is there a way for this kind of open source vision to make money absolutely to fund the people involved is that yes it's hard it's hard but but we're trying to do that in our own way um at anaconda uh because we know that business users as they use more of the stuff they have needs that like business specific needs around security provenance um you know they really can't tell their vps and their investors hey we're having you know our data scientists are installing random packages from who knows where and running on customer data so they have to have someone to talk to and that's what anaconda does so we are you know a governed source of packages for them and that's great that makes some money we take some of that and we just uh take that as a dividend we take a percentage of revenues and write that as a dividend for the open source community but beyond that i really see the development of a marketplace for people to create notebooks models data sets curation of these different kinds of things and to really have a long tail marketplace dynamic with that can you speak about this problem that you stumbled into of package management python package management what is that a lot of people speak very highly of conda which is part of anaconda which is the package manager there's a ton of packages so first what are package managers and second what was there before what is pip and why is condom more awesome the package problem is this which is that in order to do um numerical computing efficiently with python there are a lot of low-level libraries that need to be compiled compiled with a c compiler or c plus plus compiler for trend compiler they need to not just be compiled but they need to be compiled with all of the right settings and oftentimes those settings are tuned for specific chip architectures and and when you add gpus to the mix when you look at different operating systems you may be on the same chip but if you're running mac versus linux versus windows on the same x86 chip you compile link differently all of this complexity is beyond the capability of most data scientists to reason about and it's also beyond what most of the package developers want to deal with too yes because your package developer you're like i code on linux this works for me i'm good it is not my problem to figure out how to build this on an ancient version of windows right that's just simply not my problem so what we end up with is we have a creator econ or create a a very creative crowdsourced environment where people want to use this stuff but they can't and so we ended up creating a new set of technologies like a build recipe system a build system and an installer system that is able to um well to put it simply it's able to build these packages correctly on each of these different kinds of platforms and operating systems and make it so when people want to install something they can it's just one command they don't have to you know set up a big compiler system and do all these things so when it works well it works great now the difficulty is we have literally thousands of people writing code in the ecosystem building all sorts of stuff and each person writing code they may take a dependence on something else and so all this web incredibly complex web of dependencies so installing the correct package for any given set of packages you want getting that right sub graph is an incredibly hard problem and again most data scientists don't want to think about this they're like i want to install numpy and pandas i want this version of some like geospatial library i want this other thing like why is this hard these exist right yes and it is hard because it's well you're installing this on a version of windows right and half of these libraries are not built for windows or the latest version isn't available but the old version was if you go to the old version of this library that means you need to go to a different version of that library and so the python ecosystem by by virtue of being crowdsourced we were able to fill a hundred thousand different niches but then we also suffer this problem that because it's crowdsourced and no one it's like a tragedy the commons right no one really needs wants to support their thousands of other dependencies so we end up sort of having to do a lot of this and of course the condo forge community also steps up as an open source community that you know maintains some of these recipes that's what conda does now pip is a tool that came along after conda to some extent it came along as an easier way for the um for the python developers writing python code that didn't have as much compiled you know stuff they could then install different packages and what ended up happening in the python ecosystem was that a lot of the core python and web python developers they never ran into any of this compilation stuff at all so even we have you know uh uh on video we have uh guido and guido van rossum saying you know what the scientific community's packaging problems are just too exotic and different i mean talking about fortran compilers right um like you guys just need to build your own solution perhaps right so the python core python community went and built its own sort of packaging technologies not really contemplating the complexity of the stuff over here and so now we have the challenge where you can pip install some things in some libraries if you just want to get started with them you can pimp and sell tensorflow and that works great the instant you want to also install some other packages that use different versions of numpy or some like graphics library or some opencv thing or some other thing you now run into dependency hell because you cannot you know opencv can have a different version of jpeg over here than pytorch over here like they actually they all have to use that if you want to use gpu acceleration they have to all use the same underlying drivers and same gpu cuda things so it's it gets to be very gnarly and it's a level of technology that both the makers and the users don't really want to think too much about and that's where you step in and try to solve this we try to solve this sub graph problem how much is that and you said you don't want to think they don't want to think about it but how much is it a little bit on the developer and providing them tools to to be a little bit more clear of that subgraph of dependency that's necessary it is it is getting to a point where we do have to think about look can we pull some of the most popular packages together and get them to work on a coordinated release timeline get them to build against the same test matrix et cetera et cetera right and there is a little bit of dynamic around this but again it is a volunteer community um you know people working on these different projects have their own timelines and their own things they're trying to meet so we end up trying to pull these things together and then it's it's just incredibly and i would recommend just as a business tip don't ever go into business where when your hard work works you're invisible and when it breaks because of someone else's problem you get flack for it because that's that's for our in our situation right when something doesn't install properly usually it's some upstream issue but it looks like condo's broken it looks like you know anaconda screwed something up when things do work though it's like oh yeah cool it's worked assuming naturally of course that's very easy to make that work right so we end up in this kind of um problematic scenario but uh but it's okay because i think we're still um you know our hearts in the right place we're trying to move this forward as a community sort of affair i think most of the people in the community also appreciate the work we've done over the years to try to move these things forward in a in a collaborative fashion so one of the sub-graphs of dependencies that became super complicated is the move from python 2 to python 3. so there's all these ways to mess with these kinds of ecosystems of packages and so on so i just want to ask you about that particular one what do you think about the move from python 2 to 3 now why did it take so long what were from your perspective just seeing the packages all struggle in the community all struggle through this process what lessons do you take away from it why did it take so long looking back some people perhaps underestimated how much adoption python 2 had i think some people also underestimated how much or they overestimated how much value some of the new features in python 3 really provided like the things they really loved about python 3 just didn't matter to some of these people in python 2. yeah because this change was happening as python scipy was starting to take off really like past like a hockey stick of adoption in the early data science era in the early 2010s a lot of people were learning and onboarding in whatever just worked and the teachers were like well yeah these libraries i need are not supported on python 3 yet i'm going to teach you python 2. it took a lot of advocacy to get people to move over to python 3. so i think it wasn't any particular single thing but it was one of those death by you know a dozen cuts which just really made it hard to move off of python 2 and also python 3 itself as they were kind of breaking things and changing these around reorganize the standard library there's a lot of stuff that was happening there that kept giving people an excuse to say i'll put off to the next version 2 is working fine enough for me right now so i think that's essentially what happened there and i will say this though the strength of the python data science movement i think is what kept python alive in that transition because a lot of languages have died in left left their user bases behind if there wasn't the use of python for data there's a good chunk of python users that during that transition would have just left for go and rust and stayed in fact some people did they moved to go and rust and they just never looked back the fact that we were able to grow by the by millions of users the python data community that is what kept the momentum for python going and now the usage of python for data is over 50 um of the overall python user base so i will put i will make i'm happy to debate that on stage somewhere icon with someone if they really want to take issue with that statement but from my where i sit i think that's true the statement there the idea is that the switch from python 2 to python 3 would have probably destroyed python if it didn't also coincide with python for whatever reason just overtaking the data science community anything that processes data yeah so like the timing was perfect that this maybe imperfect decision was coupled with the great timing and on the value of data in in our world i would say the troubled execution of a good decision it was a decision that was necessary it's possible if we had more resources we could have done in a way that was a little bit smoother but ultimately you know the the the arguments for python 3 i bought them at the time and i buy them now right having great text handling is like a non-negotiable table stakes thing you need to have in a language so um so that's great um but uh the execution you know python is the um it's volunteer driven it's like the now the most popular language on the planet but it's all literally volunteers so the lack of resources meant that they had to really they had to do things in a very uh hamstrung way and i think to carry the python momentum and the language through that time the data movement was a critical part of that so some of it was karen stick i actually have to uh shamefully admit that it took me a very long time to switch from python 2 and python 3 because i'm a machine learning person it was just for the longest time you could just do fine with python 2. right but i think the moment where i switched uh everybody i worked with and switched myself for small projects and big is when finally when numpy announced that they're going to end support uh like in 2020 or something like that right so like when i i realized oh this isn't going this is going to end right so that's the stick that's not a carrot that's not so for longest time was carrots it was like all of these packages were saying okay we have python 3 support now come join us we have python 2 and python 3 but one numpy one of the packages i sort of love and depend on uh said like nope it's over that's that's when i uh decided to switch i wonder if you think it was possible much earlier for somebody like uh like numpy or some major package to step into the cold well it's like it's a chicken and egg problem too right you don't want to cut off a lot of users unless you see the user momentum going too so the decisions for the scientific community for each of the different projects you know there's not a monolith some projects are like we'll only be releasing new features on python three yeah and that was more of a sticky carrot or yeah a firm carrot if you will a firm carrot um a stick shaped carrot yeah but then for others yeah numpy in particular because it's at the base of the dependency stack for so many things um that was the final stick that was a stick shaped stick people were saying look if i have to keep maintaining my releases for python 2 that's that much less energy that i can put into making things better for the python 3 folks or in my new version which is of course going to be python 3. so people were also getting kind of pulled by this tension so the overall community sort of had a lot of input into when the numpy core folks decided they would end of life on python 2. so as this these numbers are a little bit loose but there are about 10 million python programmers in the world you could argue that number but let's say 10 million uh that's actually where i was looking to 27 million total programmers developers in the world you mentioned in the talk that uh changes need to be made for there to be 100 million programmers so first of all do you see a future where there's a hundred million python programmers and second what kind of changes need to be made so anaconda minicon to get downloaded about a million times a week so i think the idea that there's only 10 million python programmers in the world is a little bit under counting there are a lot of people who escape traditional accounting that are using python and data in their jobs i do believe that the future world for it to well the world i would like to see is one where people are data literate so they are able to use tools that let them express their questions and ideas fluidly um and the data variety and data complexity will not go down it will only keep increasing so i think some level of code or code like things will continue to be relevant and so my my hope is that we can build systems that allow people to more seamlessly integrate python kinds of expressitivity with data systems and operationalization methods that are much more seamless and what i mean by that is you know right now you can't punch python code into an excel cell i mean there's some tools you can do to kind of do this we didn't built a thing for doing this back in the day but but i feel like the total addressable market for python users if we do the things right is on the order of the excel users which is you know a few hundred million so um i think python has to get better at being embedded you know being a smaller thing that pulls in just the right parts of the ecosystem to run numerix and do data exploration meeting people where they're already at with their data and their data tools and then i think also it has to be easier to take some of those things they've written and flow those back into deployed systems or apps or visualizations i think if we don't do those things then we will always be kept in the silo as sort of a you know expert users tool and not a tool for the masses you know i work with a bunch of folks in the adobe creative suite and i'm kind of forcing them or inspired them to learn python uh to do a bunch of stuff that helps them and it's interesting because they probably wouldn't call themselves a python programmers but right while using python i would love it if the tools like photoshop and premiere and all those kinds of tools that are targeted towards creative people i guess that's where excel excel is targeted towards a certain kind of audience that works for data financial people all that kind of stuff if they if there would be easy ways to leverage to use python for quick scripting tasks yeah and i you know there's an exciting application of uh artificial intelligence in this space that i'm hopeful about looking at open ai codex with um generating programs yeah so almost helping people bridge the gap from kind of visual interface to generating programs to something formal and then they can modify it and so on but kind of without having to read the manual without having to do a google search on stack overflow which is essentially what a neural network does when it's doing code generation uh is is actually generating code and allowing a human to communicate with multiple programs and then maybe even programs to communicate with each other via python right so that that to me is a really exciting possibility because i think there's a there's a friction to kind of like how do i learn how to use python in my life there's a oftentimes you kind of what start a class you start learning about types yes i don't know functions like this is you know python is the first language with which you start to learn to program but i feel like that's going to take a long time for you to understand why it's useful you almost want to start with a script well you you do in fact i i think starting with the theory theory behind programming languages and types and i mean types are there to make the compiler writer's jobs easier types are not i mean heck do you have an ontology of types for just the objects in this table no so types are there because compiler writers are human and they're limited in what they can do but um i think that the beauty of scripting like there's a there's a python book that's uh called automate the boring stuff which is exactly the right mentality um i grew up with computers in a time when i could uh when when steve job was still pitching these things as bicycles for the mine they were supposed to not be just media consumption devices um but they were they were actually you could you could write some code you could write basic you could write some stuff to do some things and that feeling of a computer as the thing that we can use to extend ourselves has all but evaporated for a lot of people so you see a little bit in parts and the current the generation of youth around minecraft or roblox right and i think python circuit python these things um could be a renaissance of that of people actually shaping and using their computers as computers as an extension of their minds and their curiosity their creativity so you know you talk about scripting the adobe suite with python in the 3d graphics world python is a scripting language some of these 3d graphics suites use and i think that's great we should better support those kinds of things but ultimately the idea that i i should be able to have power over my computing environment if i want these things to happen repeatedly all the time i should be able to say that somehow to the computer right now whether um the operating systems get there faster by having some you know siri backed with open ai with whatever so you just say siri make this do this and every other friday right we probably will get there somewhere and apple's always had these ideas you know there's the apple script in the menu that no one ever uses but um you can do these kinds of things but when you start doing that kind of scripting the challenge isn't learning the type system or even the syntax of the language the challenge is all of the dictionaries on all the objects of all their properties and attributes and parameters like who's got time to learn all that stuff right so that's when then programming by prototype or by example becomes the right way to get the user to express their desire so there's a lot of these these different ways that we can approach programming but i do think when as you were talking about the the adobe scripting thing i was thinking about you know when we do use something like numpy when we use things in the python data and scientific let's say expression system there's a reason we use that which is that it gives us mathematical precision it gives us actually quite a lot of precision over precisely what we mean about this data set that data set and it's the fact that we can have that precision that lets python be powerful over as a duct tape for data you know you give me a tsv or a csv and you if you give me some massively expensive vendor tool for data transformation i don't know i'm gonna be able to solve your problem but if you give me a python prompt you can throw whatever data you want at me i will be able to mash it into shape so that ability to take it as sort of this like um you know machete out of the data jungle is really powerful and i think that's why at some level we're not we're not going to get away from some of these expressions and apis in libraries in python for for data transformation you've been at the center of the python community for many years if you could change one thing about the community to help it grow to help it improve to help it flourish and prosper what would it be i mean not you know it doesn't have to be one thing but what what kind of comes to mind what are the challenges humility is one of the values that we have at anaconda at the company but it's also on the values in the in the community that it's been breached a little bit in the last few years but in general people are are quite decent and reasonable and nice and that humility prevents them from seeing the greatness that they could have i don't know how many people in the core python community really understand that they stand perched at the edge of an opportunity to transform how people use computers yes and actually pycon because the last physical icon i went to uh russell keith mcgee gave a great keynote about you know very much along the lines of the challenges i have which is you know python for a language that doesn't actually they can't put an interface up on like the most popular computing devices it's done really well as a language hasn't it you can't write a web front end with python really i mean everyone uses javascript you certainly can't write native apps so for a language that you can't actually write apps in any of the front-end runtime environments python's done exceedingly well yeah um and so that that wasn't to pat ourselves in the back that was to challenge ourselves the community to say we through our current volunteer dynamic have gotten to this point what comes next and how do we seize you know we've caught the tiger by the tail how do we make sure we keep up with it as it goes forward so that's one of the questions i have about sort of open source at communities best there's a kind of humility is that humility prevent you to have a vision for creating something like very new and powerful and you've brought us back to consciousness again the collaboration is a swarm emergent dynamic humility lets these people work together without anyone trouncing anyone else how do they you know in consciousness there's the question the binding problem how does a singular our attention how does that emerge from you know billions of neurons yes so how can you have a swarm of people emerge a consensus that has a singular vision to say we will do this and most importantly we're not going to do these things emerging a coherent pointed focused leadership dynamic from a collaboration being able to do that kind of and then dissolve it so people can still do the swarm thing that's a problem there's a question so you have you have to have a charismatic leader for some reason lioness torval comes to mind but he you know there's people who criticize you he rules that iron fist man but there's still charisma there's a charisma right there's a charisma to that iron fist uh there's uh every leader is different i would say in their success so he doesn't i don't even know if you can say he doesn't have humility uh there's such a meritocracy of ideas that like this is a good idea and this is a bad idea there's a step function to it once you clear a threshold yeah he's open once you clear the bozo threshold he's open to your ideas i think yes right but see the the interesting thing is obviously that will not stand in an open source community if that threshold that is defined by that one particular person is not actually that good so you actually have to be really excellent at what you do so the the he's very good at what he does and so there's some aspect of leadership where you can get thrown out people can just leave you know that's how it works with open source yeah they'll fork but at the same time you want to sometimes be a leader like with a strong opinion because people i mean there's some kind of balance here for this like hive mind to get like behind leadership is a big topic and i didn't you know i'm not one of these guys that went to mba school and said i'm going to be an entrepreneur and i'm going to be a leader and i'm going to read all these harvard business review articles on leadership and all this other stuff like it i was a physicist turned into a software nerd who then really like nerded out on python um i know i am entrepreneurial right i saw a business opportunity around the use of python data but um for me what has been interesting over this journey with the last 10 years is how much i started really enjoying the understanding thinking deeper about organizational dynamics and leadership and leadership does come down to a few core things number one a leader has to create belief or at least has to dispel disbelief leadership also you have to have vision loyalty and experience so can you say belief in a singular vision like what is belief yeah belief means a few things belief means here's what we need to do and this is a valid thing to do and we can do it um that you have to be able to drive that belief um and every step of leadership along the way has to help you amplify that belief to more people i mean i think at a fundamental level that's what it is you have to have a vision you have to be able to um show people that or you have to convince people to believe in the vision and to to get behind you and that's where the loyalty part comes in and the experience part comes in there's all different flavors of leadership so if we talk about linus we could talk about elon musk and steve jobs there's sandra pachai there's people that kind of put themselves at the center and are strongly opinionated and some people are more like consensus builders right what works well for open source what works well in the space of programming so you you've been a programmer you've led many programmers and now sort of at the center of this ecosystem what what works well in the programming world would you say it really depends on the people what style leadership is best and it depends on the programming community i think for the python community um servant leadership is one of the values like at the end of the day the leader has to also be um the high priest of values right so any kind of any collection of people has values of their living and if you want to maintain uh certain values and those values help you as an organization become more powerful then the leader has to live those values unequivocally and has to you know has to hold the values so in our case in this collaborative community around python i think that the humility is one of those values servant leadership you actually have to kind of do the stuff you have to walk the walk not just talk the talk i don't feel like the python community really demands that much from a vision standpoint and they should and i think they should this is the interesting thing is like so many people use python from where comes the vision you know like you have a elon musk type character who has makes bold statements about the vision for particular companies he's involved with and it's like i think a lot of people that work at those companies kind of can only last if they believe that vision because and some of it is super bold so my question is and by the way those companies often use python uh what you know how do you establish a vision like get to 100 million users right get to where you know the python is at the center of the machine learning and was it data science machine learning deep learning artificial intelligence revolution right like in many ways perhaps the python community is not thinking of it that way but it's leading the way on this like the the tooling is like essential right well you know for a while um pycon people in the scientific python and the pi data community um they would submit talks those early to early 2010s mid-2010s they would submit talks for pycon and the talks would all be rejected because there was the separate sort of pi data conferences and like well these these probably belong more to pi data and instead there'd be yet another talk about you know threads and you know whatever some web framework and it's like um that was an interesting dynamic to see that there was i mean at the time it was a little annoying because we want to try to get more users and get more people talking about these things and pycon is a huge venue right it's thousands of python programmers but then also came to appreciate that you know parallel having an ecosystem that allows parallel innovation is not bad right there are people doing embedded python stuff there's people doing web programming people do scripting there's cyber uses of python i think the ultimately at some point if your slide mode mold covers so much stuff you have to respect the different things are growing in different areas and different niches now some at some point that has to come together and the central body has to provide resources the principle here is subsidiarity give resources to the various groups to then allocate as they see fit in their niches that would be a really helpful dynamic but again it's a volunteer community it's not like that that many resources to start with what was or is your favorite programming setup what operating system what keyboard how many screens uh listening to what time of day are you drinking coffee tea tea um sometimes coffee depending on how well i slept um i used to have do you get a unite owl i remember somebody asked you somewhere a question about work-life balance and and or like not just work-life balance but like a family you know you lead a company and your answer was was basically like i still haven't figured it out yeah i think i've gotten a little bit better balance i have a really great leadership team now supporting me and so that takes a lot of the day-to-day stuff um off my plate and uh my kids are getting a little older so that helps so um and of course i have a wonderful wife who takes care of a lot of the things that i'm not able to take care of and she's she's great i try to get to sleep earlier now um because i have to get up every morning at six to take my kid down to the bus stop oh wow so there's a hard there's a hard thing yeah for a while i was doing polyphasic sleep which is really interesting like i go to bed at nine wake up at like two a.m work till five sleep three hours wake up at eight like that was actually it was interesting it wasn't too bad how did it feel it was good i didn't keep it up for years but once i have travel then it just everything goes out the window right because then you're like time zones and all these things socially was it except like were you able to live outside of how you felt were you yes able to live normal society oh yeah because like on the nights that i wasn't out hanging out with people or whatever going to bed at night no one cares yeah i wake up at two i'm still responding to their slacks emails whatever and you know uh shit posting on twitter or whatever at two in the morning is exactly right and then you go to bed for a few hours and you wake up it's like you had an extra day in the middle yes and i'd read somewhere that you know humans naturally have biphasic sleep or something i don't know but um i i read basically everything somewhere so right every option of everything every option of everything i will say that that worked out for me for a while although i don't do it anymore um in terms of programming setup i had a 27 inch high dpi um setup that i really liked um but then i moved to a curved monitor just because uh when i moved to the new house i want to have a bit more screen for zoom plus communications plus you know like various concepts it's like one large monitor one large curved monitor um what operating system mac okay yeah is that is that what happens when you become important is you stop using uh linux and windows i would no i actually have i have a windows box as well on the next table over um but uh but i have i have three desks right yes so the main one is the standing desk so that i can you know whatever what i'm like i have a teleprompter set up and everything else and then i've got my imac and then egpu and then windows pc the reason i moved to mac was uh it's it's got a linux prompt or no sorry it's got a unique it's got a unix prompt so i can do all my stuff but then um i uh i don't have to worry like when i'm presenting for clients or investors or whatever like it i don't have to worry about any like acpi related f sick things in the middle of a presentation like none of that it just it will always wake from sleep um and it won't colonel panic on me and this is not a dig against linux except that i just um i feel really bad i feel like a traitor to my community saying this right but in 2012 i was just like okay started my own company what did i get and linux laptops were just not quite there um yes and so i've just stuck with max can i just defend something that nobody respectable seems to do which is uh so i i do a boot on linux windows but in windows i have uh windows subsystems for linux or whatever ws api and i find myself being able to handle everything i need in almost everything i need in linux for basic sort of tasks scripting tasks within wsl and it creates a really nice environment so i've been but like whenever i hang out with like especially important people like they're all on an iphone and a mac and it's like yeah like what there there is a messiness to windows and a messiness to linux that makes me feel like you're still in it well the linux stuff windows subsystem for linux is very tempting but there's still the windows on the outside where i don't know where and i've been okay i've been i've i've used dos since version 1.11 or 1.21 or something so i've been a long time microsoft user and i will say that like like it's really hard for me to know where anything is how to get to the details behind something when something screws up as invariably does and just things like changing group permissions on some shared folders and stuff just everything seems a little bit more awkward more clicks than it needs to be not to say there aren't weird things like hidden attributes and all those other happy stuff on on uh on mac but for the most part um and and well actually especially now with the new hardware coming out on mac it'll be very interesting you know with the new m1 um there were some dark years the last few years when i was like i think maybe i have to move off of mac as a platform but i mean like my keyboard was just not working like literally my keyboard just wasn't working right i had this touch bar didn't have a physical escape button like i needed to because i used vim and now i think we're back so yeah so you use vim and you have a what kind of keyboard so i use the realforce 87u uh it's a mechanical as a topra key switch it's a weird shape there's a normal shape i say that because i use a kinesis and i had right you said some dark you said you had dark moments i've i've i've recently had a dark moment like what am i doing with my life i remember sort of flying in a very kind of tight space and as i'm working this is what i do on an airplane i pull out a laptop and on top of the laptop i'll put a kinesis keyboard that's hardcore man i was thinking is this who i am is this what i'm becoming will i be this person because i'm on emacs with this kinesis keyboard sitting like with everybody around emacs on windows on the wsl yeah yeah emacs on linux on windows yeah on windows and like everybody around me is using their iphone to look at tick tock so i'm like in this land and i thought you know what maybe i need to become an adult and put the 90s behind me and uh use like a normal keyboard and then i did some soul searching and i decided like this is who i am this is me like coming out of the closet to saying i'm kinesis keyboard all the way i'm going to use emacs you know you know also kinesis fan um uh uh west mckinney the creative pandas oh he he just he banged out pandas on a kinesis keyboard i believe i don't know if he's still using one maybe but certainly 10 years ago like he was if if anyone's out there maybe we need to have a kinesis support group please reach out isn't there already one is there one there's got to be an rc channel man oh no and you access it through emacs okay do you still program these days i do a little bit um honestly the last thing i did was um i had written i was working with my son to script some minecraft stuff so i was doing a little bit of that that was the last literally the last code i wrote oh you know what also i wrote some code to do some cap table evaluation waterfall modeling kind of stuff what advice would you give to a young person said your son today in high school maybe even college about career about life this may be where i get into trouble a little bit we are coming to the end we're we're rapidly entering a time between worlds so we have a world now that's starting to really crumble under the weight of aging institutions that no longer even pretend to serve the purposes they were created for we are creating technologies that are hurtling billions of people headlong into philosophical crises who they don't even know the philosophical operating systems in their firmware and they're heading into a time when that gets vaporized so for people in high school and certainly i tell my son this as well he's in middle school people in college you are going to have to find your own way you're going to have to have a pioneer spirit even if you live in the middle of the most dense urban environment all of human reality around you is the result of the last few generations of humans agreeing to play certain kinds of games a lot of those games no longer no longer operate according to the rules they used to um collapse is non-linear but it will be managed and so if you are in a particular social caste or economic caste and it's it's not um i think it's it's not kosher to say that about america but america is a very stratified and classist society there's some mobility but but it's really quite classist in america unless you're in the upper middle class you are headed into very choppy waters so it is really really good to think and understand the fundamentals of what you need to build a meaningful life for you your loved ones with your family um and almost all of the technology being created that's consumer facing is designed to own people to take the four stack you know of people to delaminate them and to own certain portions of that stack and so if you want to be an integral human being if you want to have your agency and you want to find your own way in the world you know when you're young would be a great time to spend time looking at some of the classics around you know what it means to live a good life what it means to build connection with people and so much of the status games so much of the stuff you know one of the things that i sort of talk about as we create more and more technology there's a gradient technology and a gradient technology always leads to gradient of power and this is jacqueline's point to some extent as well that gradient of power is not going to go away the technologies are going so fast that even people like me who helped create some of the stuff i'm being left behind that's on the cutting edge research i don't know what's going on in gans today you know i go read some proceedings so as the world gets more and more technological it will create more more gradients where people will seize power economic fortunes and the way they make the people who are left behind okay with their lot in life is they create lottery systems they make you take part in the narrative of your own being trapped in your own economic sort of zone so avoiding those kinds of things is really important knowing when someone is running game on you basically so these are the things i would tell young people it's a dark message but it's realism i mean it's what i see so after you gave some realism you sit back you sit back with your son you're looking out of the sunset what to him can you give as words of hope and to you from where do you derive hope for the future of our world so you said at the individual level you have to have a pioneer mindset to go back to the classics to understand what is in human nature you can find meaning but at the societal level what's your jacket when you look at possible trajectories what gives you hope what gives me hope is that we have little tremors now shaking people out of the reverie of the fiction of modernity that they've been living in kind of a late 20th century style modernity um that's that's good i think because um and also to your point earlier people are burning out on some of the social media stuff they're sort of seeing the ugly side especially the latest news with uh facebook and the whistleblower right it's quite clear these things are not all they're cracked up to be so do you believe like i believe better social media can be built because they are burning out they'll incentivize other competitors to be built do you think that's possible well the thing about it is that um when you have extractive return on returns um you know capital coming in and saying look you own a network give me some exponential dynamics out of this network what are you going to do you're going to just basically put a toll keeper at every single node and every single graph uh edge every node every vertex every edge but if you don't have that need for it if no one's sitting there saying hey wikipedia monetize every every character every byte every phrase then generative human dynamics will naturally sort of arise assuming we do we respect a few principles around online communications so the greatest and biggest social network in the world is still like email sms right yes so we're fine there the issue with the social media as we call it now is they're all they're actually just new amplification systems right now it's benefit to certain people like yourself who have interesting content um to to to to be amplified um so let's create a creator economy and that's that's cool there's a lot of great content out there but giving everyone a shot at the fame lottery saying hey you could also have your if you wiggle your butt the right way on tick tock you could have your 15 seconds of microfame that's not healthy for society at large so i think if we can create tools that help people be conscientious about their attention spend time looking at the past and really retrieving memory and culling not calling but processing and thinking about that i think that's certainly possible and hopefully that's what we get um so i'm so the bigger picture the bigger question about uh you're asking about what gives me hope is that um these early shocks of you know coveted lockdowns and remote work and all these different kinds of things i think it's getting people to a point where they are look they're they're sort of no longer in the reverie right as my friend jim rutt says there's more people with ears to hear now right with pandemic and education everyone's like wait wait what have you guys been doing with my kids like how are you teaching them that what is this crap you're giving them his homework right so i think these are the kinds of things that are getting um in the supply chain disruptions getting more people to think about how do we actually just make stuff this is all good but the concern is that it's still going to take a while for these things for people to learn how to be agentic again um and to be in right relationship with each other and with the world so the the message of hope is still people are resilient and we're build we are building some really amazing technology and i also like to me i derive a lot of hope from from individuals in that van the power of a single individual to uh transform the world to do positive things for the world is quite incredible now you've been talking about it's nice to have as many of those individuals as possible right but even the power of one is kind of magical it is it is we're in a mode now where we can do that i think also you know part of what i try to do is in coming to podcasts like yours and then you know spamming with all this philosophical stuff that i've got going on um there are a lot of good people out there trying to put um words around the current technological social economic crises that we're facing in the space of a few short years i think there has been a lot of great content produced around this stuff for people who want to see want to find out more or think more about this um we're popularizing certain kinds of philosophical ideas that uh move people beyond just the oh you're communist oh your capitalist kind of stuff like it's sort of we're way past that now so um that also gives me hope that i feel like i myself am getting a handle on how to think about these things um it makes me feel like i can you know hopefully affect change for the better we've been sneaking up on this question all over the place let me ask the big ridiculous question what is the meaning of life wow um the meaning of life yeah i don't know i mean that i've never really understood that question when you say meaning crisis you're you're saying that there is a search for a kind of experience that's could be described as fulfillment as like the ah like the aha moment of just like joy and maybe when you see something beautiful or maybe you have created something beautiful that experience that you get it feels like it all makes sense so some of that is just chemicals coming together in your mind and all kinds of things but it seems like we're building a sophisticated uh collective intelligence that's providing meaning in all kinds of ways it's it's members and it there's a theme to that meaning so for for a lot of history i think faith played an important role uh faith in god as a religion i think technology in the modern era is kind of serving a little bit of a source of meaning for people like innovation of different kinds i think the old school things of love and the basics of just being good at stuff but you were a physicist so there's a desire to say okay yeah but these seem to be like symptoms of something deeper right like why little meaning what's capital m yeah what's capital i'm meaning why are we reaching for order when there is excess of energy i don't know if i can answer the why any y that i come up with i think is gonna be um i i'd have to think about that a little more maybe maybe get back to you on that but i will say this we do look at the world through a traditional i think most people look at the world through what i would say is a subject object kind of a metaphysical lens that we have our own subjectivity and then there's there's all of these object things that are not us so i'm i'm me and this is these things are not me right and i'm interacting with them i'm doing things to them but a different view of the world that looks at it as much more connected that realizes oh i'm i'm really quite embedded in a soup of other things and i'm simply um almost like a standing wave pattern of different things right um so when you look at the world in that kind of connected sense i i i've recently taken a shine to this particular thought experiment which is what if it was the case that everything that we touch with our hands that we pay attention to that we actually give intimacy to what if there's actually you know all the mumbo-jumbo like you know people with the magnetic healing crystals and all this other kind of stuff and quantum energy stuff what if that was a thing what if when you literally when your hand touches an object when you really look at something and you concentrate and you focus on it and you really give it attention you actually give it there is some physical residue of something a part of you a bit of your life force that goes into it okay now this is of course completely mumbo jumbo stuff this is not like i don't actually think this is real but let's do the thought experiment what if it was what if there actually was some the quantum magnetic crystal and you know energy field thing that just by touching this can this can has changed a little bit somehow and it's not much unless you put a lot into it and you touch it all the time like your phone right these things gained they gave meaning to you a little bit um but what if there's something that technical objects the phone is a technical object it does not really receive attention or intimacy and then allow itself to be transformed by it but if it's a piece of wood if it's the handle of a knife that your mother used for 20 years to make dinner for you right what if it's a keyboard that you banged out your world transforming software library on these are technical objects and these are physical objects but somehow there's something to them we feel an attraction to these objects as if we have imbued them with life energy yeah right so if you walk that thought experiment through what happens when we touch another person when we hug them when we hold them and it the the reason this ties into my answer for your question is that um there's if there is such a thing if we were to hypothesize uh you know hypothetically it's such a thing um it could be that the purpose of our lives is to imbue as many things with that love as possible that's a that's a beautiful answer and a beautiful way to end it peter uh you're an incredible person thank you spanning so much in the space of engineering and in the space of philosophy i i'm uh really proud to be living in the same city and uh i'm really grateful that you would spend your valuable time with me today thank you well thank you i appreciate the opportunity to speak with you thanks for listening to this conversation with peter wang to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from peter wang himself we tend to think of people as either malicious or incompetent but in a world filled with corruptable and unchecked institutions there exists a third thing malicious incompetence it's a social cancer and it only appears once human organizations scale beyond personal accountability thank you for listening and hope to see you next time youthe following is a conversation with peter wang one of the most impactful leaders and developers in the python community former physicist current philosopher and someone who many people told me about and praised as a truly special mind that i absolutely should talk to recommendations ranging from travis oliphant to eric weinstein so here we are this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with peter wang you're one of the most impactful humans in the python ecosystem so you're an engineer leader of engineers but you're also a philosopher so let's talk both in this conversation about programming and philosophy first programming what do you is the best or maybe the most beautiful feature of python or maybe the thing that made you fall in love or stay in love with python well those are three different things what i think is most beautiful what made me fall in love with me stay in love when i first started using it was when i was a c plus computer graphics performance nerd in the 90s and yeah in late 90s and that was my first job out of college um and we kept trying to do more and more uh like abstract and higher order programming in c plus which at the time was quite difficult with templates the the compiler support wasn't great etc so when i started playing around with python that was my first time encountering really first class support for types for functions and things like that and it felt so incredibly expressive so that was what kind of made me fall in love with a little bit and also once you spend a lot of time in a c plus dev environment the ability to just whip something together that basically runs and works the first time is amazing so really productive scripting language i mean i i knew pearl i knew bash i was decent at both but python just made everything it made the whole world accessible right i could script this and that and the other network things you know little hard drive utilities i could write all these things in the space of an afternoon and that was really really cool that's what made me fall in love is there something specific you could put your finger on that you're not programming in perl today like why python for scripting i think there's not a specific thing as much as the design motif of both the the creator of the language and the core uh group of people that built the standard library around him um there was definitely there was a taste to it i mean steve jobs you know used that term you know in somewhat of an arrogant way but i think it's a real thing that it was designed to fit a friend of mine actually expressed this really well he said python just fits in my head and there's nothing better to to say than that now now people might argue modern python there's a lot more complexity but certainly as version 5 152 i think is my first version that fit in my head very easily so that's what made me fall in love with it okay so the most beautiful feature of python that made you stay in love it's like over the years what has like you know you do a double take you you return too often as a thing that just brings you a smile i really still like the um the ability to play with meta classes and express higher order things when i have to create some new object model to model something right it's easy for me because i'm i'm pretty expert as a python programmer i can easily put all sorts of lovely things together and use properties and decorators and other kinds of things and create something that feels very nice so that that to me i would say that's tied with the numpy and vectorization capabilities i love thinking in terms of the matrices and the vectors and these kind of data structures so i would say those two are kind of uh tied for me so the elegance of the numpy data structure like slicing through the different multi-dimensions yeah there's just enough things there it's like a very it's a very simple comfortable tool just it's easy to reason about what it does when you don't stray too far afield can you uh put your finger on how to design a language such that it fits in your head certain things like the colon or the certain notation aspects of python that just kind of work is it uh something you have to kind of write out on paper look and say it's just right is it a taste thing or is there a systematic process what's your sense i think it's more of a taste thing but one one thing that should be said is that you have to pick your audience right so the better defined the user audience is or the users are the easier it is to build something that fits in their minds because their needs will be more compact and coherent it is possible to find a projection right a compact projection for their needs the more diverse the user base the harder that is yeah and so as python has grown in popularity that's also naturally created more complexity as people try to design any given thing there will be multiple valid opinions about a particular design approach and so i do think that's the that's the downside of popularity it's almost an intrinsic aspect of the complexity of the problem well at the very beginning aren't you an audience of one isn't ultimately aren't all the greatest projects in history were just solving a problem that you yourself had well so clay shirky in his um book on crowdsourcing or his kind of thoughts on crowdsourcing he identifies the first step of crowdsourcing is me first collaboration you first have to make something that works well for yourself yeah it's very telling that when you look at all of the impactful big project well they're fundamental projects now in the scipy and pi data ecosystem they all started with the people in the domain trying to scratch their own itch and the whole idea of scratching your own itch is something that the open source or the free software world has known for a long time but in the scientific computing areas you know these are assistant professors or electrical engineering grad students they didn't have really a lot of programming skills necessarily but python was just good enough for them to put something together that fit in their domain right so it's almost like a it's a necessity as a mother invention aspect and also it was a really harsh filter for utility and compactness and expressiveness like it was too hard to use then they wouldn't have built it because it was just too much trouble right it was a side project for them and also necessity creates a kind of deadline it seems like a lot of these projects are quickly thrown together in the in the first step and that even though it's flawed that just seems to work well for software projects well it does work well for software projects in general and in this particular space um well one one of my colleagues uh stan siebert identified this that all the projects in the scipy ecosystem um you know if we just rattle them off there's num pai there's scipy built by different collaborations of people although travis is the heart of both of them um but numpy coming from numeric and numero these are different people and then you've got pandas you've got jupiter or ipython there's um there's matplotlib there's just so many others i'm you know not going to justify trying to name them all but all of them are actually different people and as they rolled out their projects the fact that they had limited resources meant that they were humble about scope um a a great famous hacker jamie zawiski once said that every every geek's dream is to build the uh the ultimate middleware right and the the thing is with these scientists turned programmers they had no such theme they were just trying to write something that was a little bit better for what they needed the matlab and they were going to leverage what everyone else had built so naturally almost in kind of this annealing process or whatever we built a very modular cover of the basic needs of a scientific computing library if you look at the whole human story how much of a leap is it we've developed all kinds of languages all kinds of methodologies for communication he just kind of like grew this collective intelligence the civilization grew it expanded wrote a bunch of books and now we tweet uh how big of a leap is programming if programming is yet another language is it just a nice little trick that's temporary in our human history or is it like a big leap in the uh almost us becoming uh another organism at a higher level of abstraction something else i think the act of programming or using grammatical constructions of some underlying primitives that is something that humans do learn but every human learns this anyone who can speak learns how to do this what makes programming different has been that up to this point when we try to give instructions to computing systems all of our computers well actually this is not quite true but i'll first say it and then i'll tell you to tell you why it's not true but for the most part we can think of computers as being these iterated systems so when we program we're giving very precise instructions to uh iterated systems that then run at um incomprehensible speed and run those instructions in my experience some people are just better equipped to model systematic iterated systems well whatever iterated systems in their head some people are really good at that and other people are not um and so when you have like for instance sometimes people have tried to build systems that uh make programming easier by making a visual drag and drop and the issue is you can have a drag and drop thing but once you start having to iterate the system with conditional logic handling case statements and branch statements and all these other things the visual drag and drop part doesn't save you anything you still have to reason about this giant iterated system with all these different conditions around it that's the hard part right so handling iterated logic um that's the hard part the languages we use then emerge to give us ability and capability over these things now the one exception to this rule of course is the most popular programming system in the world which is excel which is a data flow and a data driven immediate mode data transformation oriented programming system and this actually not an accident that that system is the most popular programming system because it's so accessible to much of a much broader group of people i do think as we build future computing systems you're actually already seeing this a little bit it's much more about composition of modular blocks they themselves um actually maintain all their internal state and the interfaces between them are well-defined data schemas and so to stitch these things together using like ifttt or zapier or any of these kind of you know i would say compositional scripting kinds of things i mean hypercard was also a little bit in this vein that's much more accessible to most people it's it's really that implicit state that's so hard for people to track yeah okay so that's modular stuff but there's also an aspect where you're standing on the shoulders of giants so you're building like higher and higher levels of abstraction you do that a little bit with language so with language you develop sort of ideas philosophies from plato and so on and then you kind of leverage those philosophies as you try to have deeper and deeper conversations but with programming it seems like you can build much more complicated systems like without knowing how everything works you can build on top of the work of others and it seems like you're developing more and more sophisticated uh expressions ability to express ideas in a computational space i think it's worth pondering the difference here between complexity and complication uh sure okay right back to excel well not quite back to excel but but the the idea is um you know when we have a human conversation all languages uh for humans emerged to support um human uh relational communications which is that the person we're communicating with is a person and they would communicate back to us and so we sort of um hit a residence point right when we actually agree on some concepts so there's a messiness to it and there's a fluidity to it with computing systems when we express something to the computer and it's wrong we just try again so we can basically live many virtual worlds of having failed at expressing ourselves to the computer until the one time we expressed ourselves right then we kind of put in production and then discover that it's still wrong you know a few days down the road so i think the the sophistication of things that we build with computing one has to really pay attention to the difference between when an end user is expressing something onto a system that exists versus when they're extending the system to to increase the system's capability um for someone else to then interface with we happen to use the same language for both of those things and usu in most cases but it doesn't have to be that and excel is actually a great example of this of kind of a counterpoint to that okay so what about the idea of you said messiness wouldn't you put the software 2.0 idea this idea of machine learning into the further and further steps into the world of messiness the same kind of beautiful messages of human communication isn't that what machine learning is is uh building on levels of abstraction that don't have messiness in them that uh at the operating system level then there's python the programming languages that have more and more power but then finally there's a neural networks that ultimately work with data and so the programming is almost in the space of data and the data is allowed to be messy isn't that a kind of program so the idea of software 2.0 is a lot of the programming happens in the space of data so back to excel all roads lead back to excel in the space of data and also the hyper parameters of the neural networks and all of those allow this the same kind of messiness that human communication allows it does but you know my background is a physics i took like two cs courses in college so i don't have now i did cram a bunch of cs uh in prep when i applied for grad school but um but still i don't have a formal background in computer science um but what i have observed in studying programming languages and programming systems and things like that is that there seems to be this this this triangle it's one of these beautiful little iron triangles in it that you find in life sometimes and it's the connection between the code correctness and kind of expressiveness of code the semantics of the data and then the kind of correctness or parameters of the underlying hardware compute system so there's the algorithms that you want to you know apply um there's what the bits that are stored on whatever media actually represent so the semantics of the data you know within the representation and then there's what the computer can actually do in every programming system every information system ultimately finds some spot in the middle of this little triangle sometimes some systems collapse them into just one edge are we are we including humans as a system no no i'm just thinking about computing systems here okay and the reason i bring this up is because i believe there's no free lunch around this stuff so if we build if we build machine learning systems to sort of write the correct code that is at a certain level of performance so it'll sort of select right with the hyper parameters we can tune kind of how we want the performance boundary and sla to look like for transforming some set of inputs into certain kinds of outputs that training process itself is intrinsically sensitive to the kinds of inputs we put into it it's and it's quite sensitive to the boundary conditions we put around the performance so i think even as we move to using automated systems to build this transformation as opposed to humans explicitly from a top-down perspective figuring out well this schema and this database and these columns get selected for this algorithm and here we put a you know a fibonacci heap for some other thing human design or computer design ultimately what we hit the boundaries that we hit with these information systems is when the representation of the data hits the real world is where there's a lot of slop and a lot of interpretation and that's where actually i think a lot of the work will go in the future is actually understanding kind of how to better in this in the view of these live data systems how to better encode the semantics of the world for those things they'll be less about the details of how we write a particular sql query okay but given the semantics of the real world and the messiness of that what does the word correctness mean when you're talking about code there's a lot of dimensions to correctness historically and this is one of the reasons i say that we're coming to the end of the era of software because for the last 40 years or so software correctness was really defined about functional correctness i write a function it's got some inputs does it produce the right outputs if so then i can turn it on hook it up to the live database and it goes and more and more now we have i mean in fact i think the bright line in the sand between machine learning systems or modern data-driven systems versus software classical software systems is that the values of the input actually have to be considered with the function together to say this whole thing is correct or not and usually there's a performance sla as well like did it actually finish making sla sorry service level agreement so it has to return within some time you have a 10 millisecond time budget to return a prediction of this level of accuracy right um so these are things that were not traditionally in most business computing systems the last 20 years at all people didn't think about it but now we have value dependence on functional correctness so that that question of correctness is becoming a bigger and bigger question why does that map to the end of software we've thought about software as just this thing that you can do in isolation with some you know test trial inputs and in a very you know um very sort of sandboxed environment and we can quantify how does it scale how does it you know perform how many nodes do we need to allocate if we want to scale this many inputs when we start turning this stuff into prediction systems real cybernetic systems you're going to find scenarios where you get inputs that you don't want to spend a little more time thinking about you're going to find inputs that are not it's not clear what you should do right so then the software has a varying amount of runtime and correctness with regard to input and that is a different kind of system altogether now it's a full on cybernetic system it's a next generation information system that is not like traditional software systems can you maybe describe what is a cybernetic system do you include humans in that picture so is it as a human in the loop kind of complex mess of the whole kind of interactivity of software with the real world or is it something more concrete well when i say cybernetic i really do mean that the software itself is closing the observe orient decide act loop by itself so humans being out of the loop is is the fact what for me uh makes it a cybernetic system and humans are out of that loop when humans are out of the loop when the machine is actually sort of deciding on its own what it should do next to get more information that makes it a cybernetic system so we're just at the dawn of this right i think everyone talking about mlai it's it's it's great but really the thing we should be talking about is when we really enter the cybernetic era and all of the questions of ethics and governance and all correctness and all these things they really are the most important questions okay can we just linger on this what does it mean for the human to be out of the loop in a cybernetic system because isn't the cybernetic system that's ultimately accomplished in some kind of purpose that at the at the bottom you know the the turtles all the way down at the bottom turtle is a human well the human may have set some criteria but the human wasn't precise so for instance i just read the other day that um earlier this year or maybe it was last year at some point the um libyan army i think um sent out some automated killer drones with explosives um and there was no human in the loop at that point they basically put them in a geofenced area said find any moving target like a truck or vehicle it looks like this and boom um that's not a human in the loop right so increasingly the less human there is in the loop the more concerned you are about these kinds of systems because uh there's unintended consequences like less the original designer and engineer of the system is able to predict even one with good intent is able to predict the consequences of such a system is that that's right there are some software systems right that run without humans in the loop that are quite complex and that's like the electronic markets and we get flash crashes all the time we get um you know in the in the heyday of high frequency trading there's a lot of market microstructure people doing all sorts of weird stuff that the market designers had never really thought about contemplated or intended so when we run these full-on systems with these automated trading bots um now they become automated you know killer drones and then all sorts of other stuff we we are that's what i mean by we're at the dawn of the cybernetic era and the end of the era of just pure software are you more concerned if you're thinking about cybernetic systems or even like self-replicating systems so systems that aren't just doing a particular task but are able to sort of multiply and scale in some dimension in the digital or even the physical world are you more concerned about uh like the lobster being boiled so a gradual with us not noticing collapse of civilization or a big explosion uh it's like oops kind of a big thing where everyone notices but it's too late i think that it will be a different experience for different people um i do i do um share a common point of view with some of the climate um you know people who are concerned about climate change and and just the uh this uh the the big existential risks that we have but unlike a lot of people who are who share my level of concern i think the collapse will not be quite so dramatic as some of them think and what i mean is that i think that for certain tiers of let's say economic class or certain locations in the world people will experience dramatic collapse scenarios but for a lot of people especially in the developed world the realities of collapse will be managed there will be narrative management around it so that they essentially insulate the middle class will be used to insulate the upper class from the pitch forks and the and the um flaming torches and everything it's interesting because uh so my specific question wasn't is my question was more about cybernetic systems the software okay uh it's interesting but it would nevertheless perhaps be about class so the effect of algorithms might affect certain classes more than others absolutely i was more thinking about whether it's social media algorithms or actual robots is there going to be a gradual effect on us where we wake up one day and don't recognize the humans we are or or is it something truly dramatic where there's you know like a meltdown of a nuclear reactor kind of thing chernobyl like uh catastrophic events that um are almost bugs in a program that scaled itself too quickly yeah i'm not as concerned about the visible stuff and the reason is because the big visible explosions i mean this is something i said about social media is that you know at least with nuclear weapons when a newt goes off you can see it and you're like well that's really wow that's kind of bad right i mean oppenheimer was reciting the baha'i gita right when he saw one of those things go off so we can see nukes are really bad he's not reciting anything about twitter well but right but then when when you have social media when you have um all these different things that conspire to create a layer of virtual experience for people that alienates them from you know reality and from each other that's very pernicious it's impossible to see right and it kind of slowly gets in there so you've written about this idea of virtuality on this topic which you define as the subjective phenomenon of knowingly engaging with virtual sensation and perception and suspending or forgetting the context that it's uh somalicum so let me ask uh what is real is there a hard line between reality and virtuality like perception drifts from some kind of physical reality we have to kind of have a sense of what is the line that's to we've gone too far right right for me it's not about any hard line about physical reality as much as um a simple question of um does the particular technology help people connect in a more integral way with other people with their environment with all of the full spectrum of things around them so it's less about oh this is a virtual thing and this is a hard real thing more about when we create virtual representations of the real things um always some things are lost in translation usually many many dimensions are lost in translation right we're now coming to almost two years of covet people on zoom all the time you know it's different when you meet somebody in person than when you see them i've seen you on youtube lots right but the senior person is very different and so i think when we engage in virtual experiences all the time and we only do that there is absolutely a level of embodiment there's a level of embodied experience some participatory interaction that is lost and it's very hard to put your finger on exactly what it is it's hard to say oh we're gonna spend a hundred million dollars building a new system that captures this five to five five percent better higher fidelity human expression no one's gonna pay for that right so when we rush madly into a world of simulacrum and and virtuality um you know the things that are lost are it's difficult once everyone moves there it can be hard to look back and see what we've what we've lost so is it irrecoverably lost or rather when you put it all on the table is it possible for more to be gained than is lost if you look at video games they create virtual experiences that are surreal and can bring joy to a lot of people can connect a lot of people uh and can get people to talk a lot of trash uh so they can bring out the best and the worst in people so is it possible to have a future world where the pros outweigh the cons it is i mean it's possible to have that in the in the current world but um when literally trillions of dollars of capital are tied to using those things to groom the worst of our inclinations and to attack our weaknesses in the limbic system to create these things into id machines versus connection machines then um then the those good things don't stand a chance can you make a lot of money by building connection machines is it possible do you think to bring out the best in human nature to uh create fulfilling connections and relationships in the digital world and make a shit ton of money um if i it out i'll let you know but what's your intuition without concretely knowing what's my intuition is that a lot of our digital technologies give us the ability to have synthetic connections or to experience virtuality they have co-evolved with sort of the human expectations it's sort of like sugary drinks as people have more sugary drinks they get they need more sugary drinks to get that same hit right so with these virtual things and with tv and fast cuts and you know tick tocks and all these different kinds of things we're co-creating essentially humanity that sort of asks and needs those things and now becomes very difficult to get people to slow down it gets difficult for people to hold their attention on on slow things and actually feel that embodied experience right so mindfulness now more than ever is so important in schools and um as a therapy technique for people because our environment has been accelerated and mcluhan actually talks about this in the electric environment of the television and that was before tick-tock and before front-facing cameras so i think for me the the concern is that it's not like we can ever switch to doing something better but more of the humans and technology they're not independent of each other the technology that we use kind of molds what we need for the next generation of technology yeah but humans are intelligent and they're uh introspective and they can reflect on the experiences of their life so for example there's been many years in my life where i i ate an excessive amount of sugar and then a certain moment i woke up and said uh why do i keep doing this this doesn't feel good like long term and i think uh so going through the tick tock process of realizing okay when i shorten my attention span actually that does not make me feel good longer term and realizing that and then going to platforms going to places that um are away from the sugar so so in in so doing you can create platforms that can make a lot of money when so to help people wake up to what actually makes them feel good long-term develop grow as human beings and it just feels like humans are more intelligent than uh mice looking for cheese they're able to sort of think i mean we can think we can contemplate our mortality right and contemplate things like long-term love and we can have a long-term fear of certain things like mortality we can contemplate whether the experiences the sort of the drugs of daily life that we've been partaking in is making us happier a better people and then once we contemplate that we can make financial decisions in using services and paying for services that are making us better people so it just seems that we're in the very first stages of social networks that just were able to make a lot of money really quickly but in bringing out sometimes the bad parts of human nature they didn't destroy humans they just they just fed everybody a lot of sugar and now everyone's gonna wake up and say hey we're gonna start having like sugar-free social media right right well there's a lot to unpack there i think some people certainly have the capacity for that and i certainly think i mean it's very interesting even the way you said it you woke up one day and you thought well this doesn't feel very good yeah well that's still your limbic system saying this doesn't feel very good right you have a cat brains worth of neurons around your gut right and so maybe that exaggerated and that was telling you hey this isn't good humans are more than just mice looking for cheese or monkeys looking for sex and power right so let's slow down now you're um now a lot of people would argue with you on that one but we're more than just that but we're at least that and we're very very seldom not that so um my i don't actually disagree with you that we could be better and that we can that better platforms exist and people are voluntarily noping out of things like facebook and noting awesome verb it's a great term yeah i love it i use it all the time you're going to have to know part of that i want to nope out of that right it's going to be a hard pass and and that's and that's that's great but that's again to your point that's the first generation of front-facing cameras of social pressures and you as a you know self-starter self-aware adult have the capacity to say yeah i'm not going to do that i'm going to go and spend time on long form reads i'm going to spend time managing my attention i'm going to do some yoga if you're a 15 year old in high school and your entire social environment is everyone doing these things guess what you're going to do you're going to kind of have to do that because your limbic system says hey i need to get the guy or the girl or whatever and that's what i'm going to do and so one of the things that we have to reason about here is the social media systems or you know social media i think is a first our first encounter with a technological system that runs a bit of a loop around our own cognition and attention it's not the last it's it's far from the last and it gets to the heart of some of the philosophical achilles heel of the western philosophical system which is each person gets to make their own determination each person is an individual that's you know sacrosanct in their agency and their sovereignty and all these things the problem with these systems is they come down and they are able to manage everyone on mass and so every person is making their own decision but together the the bigger system is causing them to act with a group um dynamic that's very profitable for people so this is the issue that we have is that our philosophies are actually not geared to understand what is it for a person to be to have an uh high trust connection uh as part of a collective and for that collective to have its right to coherency and agency that's something like when when a social media app causes a family to break apart it's done harm to more than just individuals right so that concept is not something we really talk about or think about very much but that's actually the problem is that we're vaporizing molecules into atomic units and then we're hitting all the atoms with certain things that's like yeah well that person chose to look at my app so our understanding of human nature is at the individual level it emphasizes the individual too much because ultimately society operates at the collective level and these apps do as well and the apps do as well so for us to understand the progression the development of this organism we call human civilization we have to think of the collective level too i would say multi-tiered multi-tiered multi-so individual as well individuals family units social collectives um and and on the way up okay two so you've said that individual humans are multi-layered susceptible to signals and waves and multiple strata the physical the biological social cultural intellectual so sort of going along these lines can you describe the layers of the cake that that is a human being and maybe the human collective human society so i'm just stealing wholesale here from robert persig who is the author of zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance and in his um follow-on book uh has a sequel to it called lila he goes into this in a little more detail but um it's it's a it's a crude approach to thinking about people but i think it's still an advancement over traditional subject object metaphysics where we look at people as a dualist would say well is is your mind you know your consciousness is that is that just merely the matter that's in your brain or is there something kind of more beyond that and they would say yes there's a soul sort of ineffable soul beyond just merely the physical body right and then and i'm not one of those people right i think that we don't have to draw a line between are things only this or only that collectives of things can emerge structures and patterns that are just as real as the underlying pieces but you know they're transcendent but they're still of the underlying pieces so your body is this way i mean we just know physically you consist of atoms and uh and and whatnot and then the atoms are arranged into molecules which then arrange into certain kinds of structures that seem to have a homeostasis to them we call them cells and those cells form you know sort of biological structures those biological structures give your body its physical ability and biological ability to consume energy and to maintain homeostasis but humans are social animals and a human by themselves is is not very long for the world so we also part of our biology is wire to connect to other people to you know from the mirror neurons to our language uh centers and all these other things so we are intrinsically there's a layer there's a part of us that wants to be part of a thing if we're around other people not saying a word but they're just up and down jumping and dancing laughing we're gonna feel better right and they didn't there was no exchange of physical anything they didn't give us like five atoms of happiness right but there's an induction in our own sense of self that is at that social level and then beyond that um person puts the intellectual level kind of one level higher than social i think they're actually more intertwined than that but the intellectual level is the the level of pure ideas that you are a vessel for memes you're a vessel for philosophies you will conduct yourself in a particular way i mean i think part of this is if we think about it from a physics perspective you're not you know there's a joke that physicists like to um approximate things and we'll say well approximate a spherical cowl right you're not a spherical cow you're not a spherical human you're a messy human and we can't even um say what the dynamics of your emotion will be unless we analyze all four of these layers right if it's if you're if you're muslim at a certain time of day guess what you're going to be on the ground kneeling and praying right and that has nothing to do with your biological need to get on the ground or physics of gravity it is an intellectual drive that you have it's a cultural phenomenon and an intellectual belief that you carry so that's what the four layered stack is is all about it's that a person is not only one of these things they're all of these things at the same time it's a superposition of dynamics that run through us that make us who we are so no layers is special um not so much nowhere especially each layer is just different um but we are each layer against the participation trophy yeah each layer is a part of what you are you are a layer cake right of all these things and if we try to deny right so many philosophies do try to deny the reality of some of these things right some people say well we're only atoms well we're not only atoms because there's a lot of other things that are only atoms i can reduce a human being to a bunch of soup and it's not they're not the same thing even though it's the same atoms so i think the the order and the patterns that emerge within humans to understand to really think about what a next generation philosophy would look like that would allow us to reason about extending humans into the digital realm or to interact with autonomous intelligences that are not biological nature we really need to appreciate these that human what human beings actually are is the superposition of these different layers you mentioned consciousness are each of these layers of cake conscious is consciousness a particular quality of one of the layers is there like a spike if you have a consciousness detector at these layers or it's something that just permeates all of these layers and just takes different form i believe what humans experience as consciousness is something that sits on a gradient scale of a general principle in the universe that seems to look for order and reach for order when there's an excess of energy you know it's it would be odd to say a proton is alive right it'd be odd to say like this particular atom or molecule of of hydrogen gas is alive but there's certainly something we can make assemblages of these things that that are that have autopoetic aspects to them that will create structures that will you know crystalline solids will form very interesting and beautiful structures um this gets kind of into weird mathematical territories you start thinking about penrose and game of life stuff uh about the generativity of math itself like the hyper real numbers things like that but um without going down that rabbit hole i would say that there seems to be a tendency in the world that when there is excess energy things will structure and pattern themselves and they will then actually furthermore try to create an environment that furthers their continued stability it's the concept of externalized extended phenotype or niche construction so um this is ultimately what leads to certain kinds of amino acids forming certain kinds of structures and so forth until you get the ladder of life so what we experience as consciousness no i don't think cells are conscious of that level but is there something beyond mere equilibrium state biology and and chemistry and biochemistry that drives what makes things work i think there is um so adrian bajan has this constructive law there's other things you look at when you look at the life sciences and you look at any kind of statistical physics and statistical mechanics when you look at things far out of equilibrium when you have excess energy what happens then life doesn't just make a harder soup it starts making structure there's something there the poetry of reaches for order when there's an excess of energy because you brought up game of life you did it not me my i love cellular automata so i have to sort of linger on that for a little bit so cellular automata i guess is uh or game of life is a very simple example of reaching for order when there's an excess of energy or reaching for order and somehow creating complexity it within like this explosion of just turmoil somehow trying to construct structures and so doing uh creates very elaborate organism-looking type things what intuition do you draw from this simple mechanism well i i like to turn that around on its head and um and look at it as what if every single one of the patterns created life or created you know not life but created interesting patterns because you know some of them don't and sometimes you make cool gliders and other times you know you start with certain things and you make gliders and other things that then construct like you know and gates and not gates right and you build computers on them um all of these rules that create these patterns that we can see those are just the patterns we can see what if our subjectivity is actually limiting our ability to perceive the order in all of it you know what are some of the things that we think are random are actually not that random we're simply not integrating at a final f level across a broad enough time horizon um and this is again i said we go down the rabbit holes and the penrose stuff or like wolf runs explorations on these things um there is something deep and beautiful in the mathematics of all this that is hopefully one day i'll have enough money to work and retire and just ponder those those questions but there's something there but you're saying there's a ceiling to when you have enough money and you retire and you ponder it there's a ceiling to how much you can truly ponder because there's cognitive limitations in what you're able to perceive as a pattern yeah so and maybe mathematics extends your perception capabilities but it's still it's still finite it's just like yeah the mathematics we use is the mathematics that can fit in our head yeah you know did god really create the integers or did god create all of it and we just happen at this point in time to be able to perceive integers well she just did the the positive energy and then we um she just graded the natural numbers and then we screwed all up with zero and then i guess okay but we did we created mathematical uh operations so we can have iterated steps to approach bigger problems right i mean the entire the entire point of the arabic numeral system and it's a rubric for mapping a certain set of operations and folding them into a simple little expression but that's just the operations that we can fit in our heads there are many other operations besides right the thing that worries me the most about aliens and humans is that their aliens are all around us and we're too dumb yeah see them oh certainly yeah or life let's say just life life of all kinds of forms or organisms you know what just even the intelligence of organisms is uh imperceptible to us because we're too dumb and we're looking self-centered a particular kind of thing yeah when i was at cornell i had a lovely professor of asian religions jamerry law and she would tell this um story about a musical a musician a western musician who went to japan and he taught you know classical music and could play you know all sorts of instruments he went to japan um and he would ask people you know he would basically be looking for things in the style of western you know chromatic scale and these kinds of things and then finding none of it he would say well there's really no music in japan but they're using a different scale they're playing different kinds of instruments right the same thing she was using as sort of a metaphor for religion as well in the west we center a lot of religion certainly the the religions of abraham we center them around belief and in the east it's more about practice right spirituality and practice rather than belief so anyway the point is here to your point um life we i think so many people are so fixated on certain aspects of self-replication or you know homeostasis or whatever but if we kind of broaden and generalize this thing of things reaching for order under which conditions can they then create an environment that sustains that order that um allows them you know the the invention of death is an interesting thing there are some organisms on earth that are thousands of years old and it's not like they're incredibly complex actually simpler than the cells that comprise us but they never die so at some point um death was invented you know somewhere along the eukaryotic scale i mean even the protists right there's death and why is that along with the sexual reproduction right there is something about the renewal process something about the ability to respond to a changing environment where it just becomes you know just killing off the old generation and letting new generations try seems to be the best way to fit into the niche you know human historian seems to write about wheels and fires the greatest inventions but it seems like death and sex are pretty good and they're they're kind of essential inventions at the very beginning at the very beginning yeah well we didn't invent them right well broad we you didn't invent life i see us as one uh you particular homo sapien did not invent them but uh we together it's a team project just like you're saying i think the greatest homo sapien invention is collaboration so when you say collaboration peter where do ideas come from and how do they take hold in society what's is that the nature of collaboration is that the basic atom of collaboration is ideas it's not not ideas but it's not only ideas there's a book i just started reading called death from a distance have you heard of this no it's a really fascinating thesis which is that humans are the only conspecific the the only species that can kill other members of the species from range and maybe there's a few exceptions but if you look in the animal world you see like pronghorns butting heads right you see the alpha lion and the beta lion and they take each other down humans we develop the ability to chuck rocks at each other and while at prey but also at each other and that means the beta male can chunk a rock at the alpha male and take them down and with very he can throw a lot of rocks actually miss a bunch of times so just hit once and be good so this ability to actually kill members of our own species from range without a threat of harm to ourselves created essentially mutually assured destruction where we had to evolve cooperation if we didn't then if we just continue to try to do like i'm the biggest monkey in the tribe and i'm gonna you know own this tribe and you have to go if we do it that way then those tribes basically failed and the tribes that's that persisted and that have now given rise to the modern homo sapiens are the ones where respecting the fact that we can kill each other from range uh without heart like there's an asymmetric ability to to snipe the leader from range that meant that we sort of had to learn how to cooperate with each other right come back here don't throw that rock at me let's talk our witnesses out so violence is also part of collaboration the threat of violence let's say well the recognition i was maybe the better way to put it is the recognition that we have more to gain by working together than the prisoner's dilemma of both of us defecting so uh mutually assured destruction in all his forms is part of this idea of collaboration well and eric weinstein talks about our nuclear piece right i mean it kind of sucks with thousands of warheads aimed at each other we mean russia and the us but it's like on the other hand you know we only fought proxy wars right we did not have another world war three of like hundreds of millions of people dying to like machine gun fire and and you know giant you know guided missiles so the original nuclear weapon is a rock that we learned how to throw essentially the original yeah well the original scope of the world for any human being was their little tribe i would say it still is to the most for the most part eric weinstein speaks very highly of you which was very surprising to me at first because i didn't know there's this depth to you because i knew you as a as a as an amazing leader of engineers and engineer yourself and so on so it's fascinating maybe just as a comment uh a side tangent that we can take uh what's your nature of your friendship with eric weinstein how did the two how did such two interesting paths cross is it your origins in physics is it your interest in philosophy and the ideas of how the world works what is it it's actually it's very random it's uh eric found me um he actually found travis uh and and i um sheriff elephant yeah we were both working at a company called nthot uh back in the mid 2000's and we're doing um a lot of consulting around scientific python um and we'd made some some tools and uh eric was trying to use some of these python tools to visualize he had a fiber bundle approach to modeling certain aspects of economics he was doing this and that's how he kind of got in touch with us and so um this was in the early mid 2000s 07 time frame oh six or seven eric weinstein trying to use python right hyper bundles uh using some of the tools that we've built in the open source that's somehow entertaining to me that's the thought of that it's really funny but then um you know we met with him a couple of times really interesting guy and then in the wake of the 0708 kind of financial collapse he uh helped organize with lee smolin um a symposium at the perimeter institute about um okay well clearly you know big finance can't be trusted governments in its pockets would regularly capture what the f do we do um and all sorts of people nasim talib was there and uh andy lowe from mit was there and you know bill jainway i mean just a lot of you know top billing people were there and he invited me and uh travis and uh another one of her co-workers uh robert kern who is a anyone in the scipy numpy community knows robert um really great guy so the three of us also got invited to go to this thing and that's where i met brett weinstein for the first time as well yeah i knew him before he got all famous for unfortunate reasons i guess but uh but but anyway we um so we met then and kind of had a friendship um you know throughout since then you have a depth of thinking that uh kind of runs with eric in terms of just thinking about the world deeply and thinking philosophically and then there's eric's interest in programming i actually never um you know he'll bring up programming to me quite a bit as a metaphor for stuff right but i never kind of pushed the point of like what's the nature of your interest in programming i think you saw it probably as a tool yeah absolutely the to visualize to explore mathematics and explore physics but and i was wondering like what's the his uh depth of interest and also his uh vision for what programming would look like in the future have you have you had interaction with him like discussion in the space of python no programming well um in the sense of sometimes he asked me why is this stuff still so hard um uh yeah you know everybody's a critic but uh but actually no eric programming i mean like yes yes well not programming in general but certain things in the python ecosystem but he uh but he actually i think what i find in listening some of his stuff is that he does use programming metaphors a lot right he'll talk about apis or object oriented and things like that so i think that's a useful set of frames for him to draw upon for uh discourse um i haven't paired programmed with him in a very long time you've you've previously well i mean trying to try to help like put together some of the visualizations around these things but it's been a very not really pair program but like even looked at his code right i mean how legendary would be is that like uh get repo with peter wang and eric weinstein well honestly honestly robert kearn did all the heavy lifting so i have to give credit where credit is due robert is is the silent but incredibly deep um quiet not silent but quiet but incredibly deep individual at the heart of a lot of those things that eric was trying to do um but we did have you know in the as travis and i were starting our company in um 2012 time frame we went to new york eric was still in new york at the time he hadn't moved to this is before he joined teal capital we just had like a steak dinner somewhere maybe it was keane's i don't know somewhere in new york so it's me travis eric and then wes mckinney the creative pandas and then wes is um then business partner adam the five is sat around having this just a hilarious time amazing dinner um i forget what all we talked about but it was it was one of those conversations which i wish um as soon as covet is over maybe eric and i can sit down recreate recreate it somewhere in uh in la or maybe he comes here because a lot of cool people here in austin right exactly yeah we're all here here come here yeah so he uses uh the metaphor source code sometimes to talk about physics we figure out our own source code so you with the physics background um and uh somebody who's quite a bit of an expert in source code do you think we'll ever figure out our own source code in the way that eric means do you think we'll figure out the nature of constantly working on that problem i mean i think we'll we'll make more and more progress for me there's some things i don't really doubt too much like i don't really doubt that one day we will create um a synthetic maybe not maybe not fully in silicon but a synthetic approach to um cognition that rivals uh the biological 20 watt computers in our heads what's cognition here cognition which aspect perception attention memory recall asking better questions that for me is a measure of intelligence doesn't roomba vacuum cleaner already do that or do you mean oh it doesn't ask questions i mean no it's so i mean i have a roomba but it's well yeah it's not even as smart as my cat right so yeah but it asks questions about what is this wall it now new feature asks is this poop or not apparently yes a lot of our current cybernetics system it's a cybernetic system it will go and it'll happily vacuum up some poop right the older generations would a new one just released does not this is a commercial i wonder if it still gets stuck under my first rung of my stair um in any case i these cybernetic systems we have they are mold they're designed to be sent off into a relatively static environment and whatever dynamic things happen in the environment they have a very limited capacity to respond to a human baby a human toddler of you know 18 months of age has more capacity to manage its own attention and its own capacity to make better sense of the world than the most advanced robots today so again my cat i think can do a better job of my two and they're both pretty clever so i do think though back to my kind of original point i think that it's not for me it's not question at all that we will be able to create synthetic systems that are able to do this um better than the human at an equal level or better than the human mind it's also for me not a question that we will be able to put them alongside humans so that they capture the full broad spectrum of what we are seeing as well and also looking at our responses listening to our responses even maybe measuring certain vital signs about us so in this kind of sidecar mode a greater intelligence could use us and our whatever 80 years of life to train itself up and then be a very good simulacrum of us moving forward right so who is in the sidecar in that picture of the future exactly is the the baby version of our immortal selves okay so once the baby grows up is there any use for humans i think so i think that out of out of epistemic humility we need to keep humans around for a long time and i would hope that anyone making those systems would believe that to be true out of epistemic humility what's the nature of the humility that that we don't know what we don't know so we don't right so we don't first i mean first we have to build systems that that help us do the things that we do know about that can then probe the unknowns that we know about but the unknown unknowns we don't know we could always know nature is the one thing that is infinitely able to surprise us so we should keep biological humans around for a very very very long time even after our immortal selves have transcended have gone off to explore other worlds gone to go communicate with the life forms living in the sun or whatever else so yeah um you know i think that's that's for me these are these seem like things that are going to happen like i don't really question that that they're gonna happen assuming we don't completely you know destroy ourselves is it possible to create an ai system that you fall in love with and it falls in love with you and you have a romantic relationship with it or a deep friendship let's say i would hope that that is the design criteria for any of these systems and if we cannot have a meaningful relationship with it then it's still just a chunk of silicon so then what is meaningful because um back to sugar well sugar doesn't love you back right so the computer has to love you back and what does love mean well in this context for me love i'm going to take a page from ellen de baton love means that it wants to help us become the best version of ourselves yes um that's beautiful that's a beautiful definition of love so what what role does love play in the human condition at the individual level and at the group level because you were kind of saying that humans we should really consider humans both the individual and the group and the societal level what's the role of love in this whole thing we talked about sex we talked about death thanks to the bacteria they invented it at which point did we invent love by the way i mean is that is that also no i think i think love is is the the start of it all and the feelings of and this gets this is sort of beyond uh just you know romantic sensual whatever kind of things but actually genuine love as we have for another person love as it would be used in a religious text right i think that capacity to feel love more than consciousness that is the universal thing our feeling of love is actually a sense of that generativity when we can look at another person and see that they can be something more than than they are and more than just what we you know a pigeonhole we might stick them in we see i mean i think there's in any religious text you'll find um voiced some concept of this that you should see the grace of god in the other person right they're they're made in the spirit of of what you know the love that god feels for his creation or her creation and so i think this thing is actually the root of it so i would say before i don't think i don't think molecules of water feel conscious of consciousness but there is some proto-micro quantum thing of love that's the generativity when there's more energy than what they need to maintain equilibrium and that when you sum it all up is something that leads to i mean i had my mind blown one day as an undergrad at the physics computer lab i logged in and you know when you log into bash for a long time there was a little fortune that would come out and it said man was created by water to carry itself uphill and i was logging in to work on some you know problem set and i logged in and i saw that and i just said son of a bitch you know i just i logged out i went to the coffee shop and i got a coffee and i sat there on the quad like you know it's not wrong and yet wtf right um so when you look at it that way it's like yeah okay non-equilibrium physics is a thing um and so when we think about love when we think about these kinds of things i would say that in the modern day human condition there's a lot of talk about freedom and individual liberty and rights and all these things but that's a and that's very hegelian it's very kind of following from the western philosophy of of the the individual as sacrosanct but it's not really couched i think the the right way because it should be how do we maximize people's ability to love each other to love themselves first to love each other their responsibilities to the previous generation to the future generations those are the kinds of things that should be our design criteria right those should be what we start with to then come up with the philosophies of self and of rights and responsibilities um but that that love being at the center of it i think when we design systems for cognition um it it should absolutely be built that way i think if we simply focus on efficiency and productivity these kind of very uh industrial era you know all the things that marx had issues with right those that's that's a way to go and and really i think go off the deep end in the wrong way so one of the interesting consequences of thinking of life in this hierarchical way of an individual human and then there's groups in their societies is uh i believe that you believe that corporations are people so this is a this is a kind of a politically dense idea and all those kinds of things if we just throw politics aside if we throw all of that aside in which sense do you believe that corporations are people so um and how does love connect to that right so the belief is that groups of people have some kind of higher level i would say mesoscopic claim to agency i you know so so where do i you know let's let's start with this most people would say okay individuals have claims to agency and sovereignty nations we certainly act as of nations so at a very large large scale nations have rights to sovereignty and agency like everyone plays the game of modernity as if that's true right we believe france is a thing we believe the united states is a thing but to say that groups of people at a smaller level than that um like a family unit is the thing well in our law in our laws we actually do encode this concept i believe that in a relationship in a marriage right one partner can sue for loss of consortium right if someone breaks up the marriage or whatever so these are concepts that even in law we do respect there is something about the union and about the family so for me i don't think it's so weird to think that groups of people have a right to a claim to rights and sovereignty of some degree i mean we and we uh look at our clubs we look at churches these are we we talk about these collectives of people as if they have a real agency to them and then they do but i think if we take that one step further and say okay they can accrue resources well yes check you know by law they can um they can own land they can engage in contracts they can do all these different kinds of things so we in legal terms uh support this idea that groups of people have rights where we go wrong on this stuff is that the most popular version of this is the for-profit absentee owner corporation that then is able to amass larger resources than anyone else in the landscape anything else any other entity of equivalent size and they're able to essentially bully around individuals whether it's laborers whether it's people whose resources they want to capture they're also able to bully around our system of representation which is still tied to individuals right so um i don't believe that's correct i don't think it's good that they you know they're people but they're assholes i don't think that corporations as people acting like assholes is a good thing but the idea that collectives and collections of people that we should treat them philosophically as having some agency some agency and some some mass at a mesoscopic level i think that's an important thing because one one thing i do think we under-appreciate sometimes is the fact that relationships have relationships so it's not just individuals having relationships with each other but if you have eight people seated around a table right each person has a relationship with each of the others and that's obvious but then if it's four couples each couple also has a relationship with each of the other couples right the dyads do and if it's couples but one is the the you know father mother older and then you know one of their children and their spouse that that family unit of four has a relationship with the other family unit of four so the idea that relationships have relationships is something that we intuitively know in navigating the social landscape but it's not something i hear expressed like that it's certainly not something that is i think taken into account very well when we design these kinds of things so i think um the reason why i care a lot about this is because i think the future of humanity requires us to form better sense make collective sense making units at something you know around dunbar number you know half to 5x dunbar and that's very different than right now where we um defer sense making to massive aging zombie institutions um or we just do it ourselves we go it alone go to the dark force of the internet so that's really interesting so you've talked about agency i think maybe calling it a convenient fiction at all these different levels so even at the human individual level it's kind of a fiction we all believe because we are like you said made of cells and cells are made of atoms so that's a useful fiction and then there's nations that seems to be a useful fiction but it seems like some fictions are better than others you know there's a lot of people that argue the fiction of nation is a bad idea one of them lives two doors down from me michael malus he's an anarchist you know i'm sure there's a lot of people who are into meditation that believe the idea this useful fiction of agency of an individual is uh troublesome as well we need to let go of that in order to truly like to transcend i don't know i don't know what words you want to use but suffering or to uh to elevate the experience of life so you're kind of arguing that okay so we have some of these useful fictions of agency we should add a stronger fiction that we tell ourselves about the agency of groups in the hundreds of the half of dunbar's number five x dunbar's number yeah something on that order and we call them fictions but really they're rules of the game right rules that we we we feel are fair or rules that we consent to yeah i always question the rules when i lose like a monopoly that's when i usually question when i'm winning i don't question the rules we should play game monopoly someday there's a trippy version of it that we could do what what kind of contract monopoly is induced by a friend of mine to me where you can write contracts on future earnings or landing on various things and you can hand out like you know you can land first three times you land a park places free or whatever just and then you start trading those contracts for money and then you create human civilization uh and somehow bitcoin comes into it okay uh but some of these actually i bet if me and you and eric sat down to play a game of monopoly and we were to make nfts out of the contracts we wrote we could make a lot of money now it's a terrible idea yes i would never do it but i bet we could actually sell the nfts around i have other ideas to make money that i could tell you and they're all terrible ideas um including cat videos on the internet okay but some of these rules of the game some of these fictions are it seems like they're better than others they have worked this far to cohere um human to organize human collective action but you're saying something about especially this technological age requires modified fictions stories of agency why the dunbar number and also you know how do you select a group of people you know del mar numbers i think it did i have the sense that it's overused as a kind of law that somehow we can have deep human connection at this scale like some of it feels like an interface problem too it feels like if i have the right tools i can deeply connect with a large number larger number of people it just feels like uh there's a huge value to interacting just in person getting to share traumatic experiences together beautiful experiences together but there's other experiences like um that in the digital space that you can share it just feels like dunbar's number could be expanded significantly perhaps not to to the level of millions and billions but it feels like it could be expended so how yeah how do we find the right interface you think um for uh having a little bit of a collective here that has agency you're right that there's many different ways that we can build trust with each other um my friend joe edelman talks about a few different ways that um you know mutual appreciation trustful conflict um just experiencing something like you know there's a variety of different things that we can do but all those things take time and you have to be present the less presence you are i mean there's just again a no free lunch principle here the less present you are the more of them you can do but then the less less connection you build so i think there is sort of a human capacity issue around some of these things now that being said if we can use certain technologies so for instance if i write a little monograph on my view of the world you read it asynchronously at some point and you're like wow peter this is great here's mine i read it i'm like wow lex this is awesome we can be friends without having to spend 10 years you know figuring all this stuff out together we just read each other's thing and be like oh yeah this guy's exactly in my wheelhouse and vice versa and we can then um you know connect just a few times a year and maintain a high trust relationship it can expand a little bit but it also requires these things are not all technological nature it requires the individual themselves to have a certain level of capacity to have a certain lack of neuroticism right if you want to use like the ocean big five sort of model people have been pretty centered the less centered you are the fewer authentic connections you can really build for a particular unit of time it just takes more time other people have to put up with your crap like there's a lot of the stuff that you have to deal with if you are not so well balanced right so yes we can help people get better to where they can develop more relationships faster and then you can maybe expand dunbar number by quite a bit but you're not going to do it i think it's be hard to get it beyond 10x kind of the rough swag of what it is you know well don't you think that ai systems could be an addition to dunbar's number so like why do you count as one system or multiple ai systems multiple ai systems so i do believe that ai systems for them to integrate into human society as it is now have to have a sense of agency so there has to be a individual because otherwise we wouldn't relate to them we could engage certain kinds of individuals to make sense of them for us and be almost like did you ever watch uh star trek uh like voyager like there's the volta who were like the interfaces the ambassadors for the dominion um we may have ambassadors that speak on behalf of these systems they're like the mentats of dune maybe or something like this i mean we already have this to some extent if you look at the biggest sort of i wouldn't say ai system but the biggest cybernetic system in the world is the financial markets it runs outside of any individual's control and you have an entire stack of people on wall street wall street analysts to cnbc reporters whatever they're all helping to communicate what does this mean you know like jim cramer like running around and yelling and stuff like all of these people are part of that lowering of the complexity there to meet since you know to help do sense making for people whatever capacity they're at and i don't see this changing with ai systems i think you would have ringside commentators talking about all the stuff that this ai system is trying to do over here over here because it's a it's actually a super intelligence so if you want to talk about humans interfacing making first contact with the super intelligence we're already there we do it pretty poorly and if you look at the gradient of power and money what happens is the people closest to it will absolutely exploit their distance for personal financial gain so we should look at that and be like oh well that's probably what the future will look like as well um but nonetheless i mean we're already doing this kind of thing so in the future we can have ai systems but you're still gonna have to trust people to bridge the sense making gap to them see i don't i just feel like there could be of like millions of ai systems that have have agencies you have when you say one super intelligence superintelligence in that context means it's able to solve particular problems extremely well but there's some aspect of human-like intelligence that's necessary to be integrated into human society so not financial markets not sort of weather prediction systems or i don't know logistics optimization i'm more referring to things that you interact with on the intellectual level yeah and that i think requires there has to be a backstory there has to be a personality i believe it has to fear its own mortality in a genuine way like there has to be all many of the elements that we humans experience that are fundamental to the human condition because otherwise we would not have a deep connection with it but i don't think having a deep connection with it is necessarily going to stop us from building a thing that has quite an alien intelligence aspect sure um so another now the other kind of alien intelligence on this planet is octopuses or octopates or whatever you want to call them octopi yeah there's a there's a little controversy as to what the plural is i guess but an octopus um you know it really acts as a collective intelligence of eight intelligent arms right its arms have a tremendous amount of neural density to them and i see if we can build i mean just let's let's go with what you're saying if we build a singular intelligence that interfaces with humans that has a sense of agency so it can run the cybernetic loop and develop its own theory of mind as well as it's a theory of action all these things i agree with you that that's the necessary components to build a real intelligence right there's got to be something at stake it's got to make a decision it's got to then run the ooda loop okay so we build one of those well if we can build one of those we'll probably build 5 million of them so build five million of them and if their cognitive systems are already digitized and already kind of there we stick an antenna on each of them bring it all back to a hive mind that maybe doesn't make all the individual decisions for them but treats each one as almost like a neural neuronal input of a much higher bandwidth and fidelity going back to a central system that is then able to perceive much broader uh dynamics that we can't see in the same way that a phased array radar right you think about how phase phase-to-radar works it's just sensitivity it's just radars and then it's hypersensitivity and really great timing between all of them and with a flat array it's as good as a curved radar dish right so with these things it's a phased array of cybernetic systems that'll give the centralized intelligence uh much much better much higher fidelity understanding of what's actually happening in the environment but the more power the more understanding the central superintelligence has the dumber the individual like fingers of this intelligence are i think i think necessarily i don't see what has to be this argument there has to be the experience of the individual agent has to have the full richness of the human-like experience you have to be able to be driving the car in the rain listening to bruce springsteen and all of a sudden break out in tears because remembering some something that happened to you in high school we can implant those memories if that's really needed but no no no but the central agency like i guess i'm saying for for in my view for intelligence to be born you have to have uh a decentralization like each one has to struggle and reach so each one in excess of energy has to reach for order as opposed to a central place doing so have you ever read like some sci-fi where um there's like hive minds uh like the vern revenge i think has one of these and then um some of the stuff from um yes on the commonwealth saga the idea that uh you're an individual but you're connected with like a few other individuals telepathically as well and together you form a swarm so if you are i'd ask you what do you think it is the experience of if you are like well a borg right if you are one if you're part of this hive mind outside of all the aesthetics forget the aesthetics internally what is your experience like because i have a theory as to what that looks like the one question i have for you about that experience is how much is there a feeling of freedom of free will because i obviously as a human very biased but also somebody who values freedom and biased it feels like the experience of freedom is essential for um trying stuff out to being to being creative and doing something truly novel which is at the core of yeah well i don't think you have to lose any freedom when you're in that mode because i think what happens is we think we still think and i mean you're still thinking about this in a sense of a top-down command and control hierarchy which is not what it has to be at all i think the experience so i'll just you know show my cards here i think the experience of being a robot in that robot swarm a robot who has agency over their own local environment that's doing sense making and reporting it back to the hive mind um i think that robot's experience would be one of when the hive mind is working well it would be an experience of like talking to god right that you essentially are reporting to you're sort of saying here's what i see i think this is what's going to happen over here i'm going to go do this thing because i think if i'm going to do this this will make this change happen in the environment and and then and god she may tell you that's great and in fact your your brothers and sisters will join you to help make this go better right and then she can let your brothers and sisters know hey you know peter is going to go do this thing would you like to help him because we think that this will make this thing go better and they'll say yes we'll help him so the whole thing could be actually a very emergent the the sense of you know what does it feel like to be a cell in a network that is alive that is generative and i think actually the feeling is serendipity that that there's random order not random disorder or chaos but random order just when you needed to hear bruce springsteen you turn on the radio and bam it's bruce springsteen right that feeling of serendipity i feel like um this is a bit of a flight of fancy but every cell in your body must have like what does it feel like to be a cell in your body when it needs sugar there's sugar when it is oxygen there's just oxygen now when it needs to go and do its work and pull like as one of your muscle fibers right it does its work and it's great it contributes to the cause right so this is all again a flight of fancy but i think as we extrapolate up what does it feel like to be an independent individual with some bounded sense of freedom all sense of freedom is actually bounded but it with about a sense of freedom that still lives within a network that has order to it and i feel like it has to be a feeling of serendipity so the cell there's a feeling of serendipity even though it has no way of explaining why it's getting oxygen and sugar when it gets it so you have to each individual component has to be too dumb to understand the big picture no the big picture's bigger than what it can understand but isn't that an essential characteristic of the individual is to be too dumb to understand the bigger picture like a bit not dumb necessarily but limited in its capacity to understand because the mo okay the moment you understand i feel like that leads to if you tell me now that there's some bigger intelligence controlling everything i do intelligence broadly defined meaning like you know even the sam harris thing there's no free will if i'm smart enough to truly understand that that's the case that's gonna i don't know if i have philosophical breakdown yeah right because we're in the west and we're pumped full of this stuff of like you are a golden fully free individual with all your freedoms and all your liberties and go grab a gun and shoot whatever you want to no it's actually you don't actually have a lot of these you're not unconstrained but the areas where you can manifest agency you're free to do those things you can say whatever you want on this podcast you can create a podcast right yeah you're not you're i mean you have a lot of this kind of freedom but even as you're doing this you are actually i guess where the the the demo of this is that we are already intelligent agents in such a system right in that one of these these like robots of one of five million little swarm robots or one of the borg they're just posting an internal bulletin board i mean maybe the board cube is just a giant facebook machine floating in space and everyone's just posting on there they're just posting really fast and like oh yeah it's called the metaverse now then that's called the metaverse that's right here's the enterprise maybe we shall go shoot it yeah everyone up votes and they're gonna go shoot it right but we already are part of a human online collaborative environment and collaborative sense making system it's not very good yet it's got the overhangs of zombie sense-making institutions all over it but as that washes away and as we get better at this we are going to see humanity improving at speeds that um are unthinkable in the past and it's not because anyone's freedoms were limited in fact the open source when we started this with open source software right the collaboration what the internet surfaced was the ability for people all over the world to collaborate and produce some of the most foundational software that's in use today right that entire ecosystem was created by collaborators all over the place so these online kind of swarm kind of things are not novel it's just i'm just suggesting that future ai systems if you can build one smart system you have no reason not to build multiple if you build multiple there's no reason not to integrate them all into a collective sense making substrate and that thing will certainly have emergent intelligence that none of the individuals and probably not in the human designers will be able to really you know put a bow around and explain but in some sense would that ai system still be able to go like rural texas buy a ranch go off the grid go full survivalist can you disconnect from the hive mind you may not want to so to be ineffective to be intelligent you have access to way more intelligence capability if you're plugged into five million other really really smart cyborgs why would you leave so like there's a word control that comes to mind so it doesn't it it doesn't feel like control like over over uh overbearing control it's it's just i think systems now this is your point i mean look at look at how much how uncomfortable you are with this concept right i think systems that feel like overbearing control will not evolutionarily win out i think systems that give their individual elements the feeling of serendipity and the feeling of agency that that will those systems will win but that's not to say that there will not be emergent higher level order on top of it and that's the thing that's the philosophical breakdown that we're staring right at which is in the western mind i think there's a very sharp delineation between explicit control now cartesian like what is the vector where is the position where is it going it's completely deterministic and kind of this idea that things emerge everything we see is the emergent patterns of other things and there is agency when there's extra energy so you have spoken about a kind of meaning crisis that we're going through but it feels like since uh since we invented sex and death we broadly speaking we've been searching for a kind of meaning so it feels like uh human civilization has been going through a meaning crisis of different flavors throughout its history why is how is this particular meaning crisis different or is it really a crisis and it wasn't previously what's your sense a lot of human history there wasn't so much a meaning crisis there was just a like food and not getting eaten by bears crisis right once you get to a point where you can make food there was the like not getting killed by other humans crisis so sitting around wondering what is all about is actually a relatively recent luxury um and the and to some extent the meaning crisis coming out of that is precisely because well not precisely because i i believe that meaning is the consequence of um when we make consequential decisions it's tied to agency right when we make consequential decisions that generates meaning so if we make a lot of decisions but we don't see the consequences of them then it feels like what was the point right but if there's all these big things happening but we're just along for the ride then it also does not feel very meaningful meaning as far as i can tell is my working definition circuit 2021 is uh generally the result of a person making a consequential decision acting on it and then seeing the consequences of it so historically just when humans are in survival mode you're making consequential decisions all the time so there's not a lack of meaning because like you either got eaten or you didn't right you got some food and that's great you feel good like these are all consequential decisions only in you know the post fossil fuel and industrial revolution could we create a massive leisure class i could sit around not being threatened by bears not starving to death making and making decisions somewhat but a lot of times not making not seeing the consequences of any decisions they make the general sort of sense of anamiy i think this is the french term for it in the in the wake of the consumer society in the wake of mass mass media telling everyone hey you know choosing between hermes and chanel is a meaningful decision no it's not i don't know what either of those means oh there's high-end uh luxury um uh purses and crap like that but the point is that we we give people the idea that consumption is meaning that making a choice of this team versus that team spectating has meaning so we produce all of these different things that are as if meaning right but really making a decision that has no consequences for us and so that creates the meaning crisis well you're saying uh choosing between chanel and the other one is has no consequence i mean i why is one more meaningful than the other it's not that it's more meaningful the other it's that you make a decision between these two brands and you're told this brand will make me look better in front of other people if i buy this brand of car if i wear that brand of apparel right the idea like a lot of decisions we make are around consumption but consumption by itself doesn't actually yield meaning gaining social status does provide meaning so that's why in this era of um abundant production we uh so many things turn into status games the nft kind of explosion is a similar kind of thing everywhere there are status games because you know we just have so much excess production um but aren't those status games a source of meaning like what why do the games we play have to be grounded in physical reality like they are when you're trying to run away from lions why can't we in this virtuality world on social media why can't we play the games on social media even the dark ones right we can yeah and you're but you're saying that's crazy there's a meaningful crisis well there's a meeting crisis in that there's two aspects of it number one playing those kinds of status games uh oftentimes requires destroying the planet because um it's it's it ties to consumption consuming the latest and greatest version of a thing buying the latest limited edition sneaker and throwing out all the old ones maybe it keeps on the old ones but the amount of sneakers we have to cut up and destroy every year to create artificial scarcity for the next generation right this is kind of stuff that's not great it's not great at all so conspicuous consumption fueling status games is really bad for the planet not sustainable the second thing is you can play these kinds of status games but then what it does is it renders you captured to the virtual environment the status games the really wealthy people are playing are all around the hard resources where they're gonna build the factories they're gonna have the fuel in the rare earths to make the next generation of robots they're then going to one game run circles around you and your your children so that's another reason not to play those virtual status games so you're saying ultimately the the the big picture game is won if by people who have access or control over actual hard resources so you can't you don't see a society where most of the games are um played in the virtual space they'll be captured in the physical space it's it it all builds it's just like the stat the stack of human being right if you only play the game at the cultural and intellectual level the people the hard resources and access to layer zero physical are going to own you but isn't money not connected to or less and less connected to hard resources and money still seems to work it's a virtual technology um there's different kinds of money part of the reason that some of the stuff is able to go a little unhinged is because uh the the the big sovereignties where one spends money and uses money and plays money games and inflates money um their their ability to adjudicate the physical resources and hard resources on land and things like that those have not been challenged in a very long time so you know we went off the gold standard most money is not connected to physical resources it's an idea and that idea is very closely connected to status um so why but it's also tied to like it's actually tied to law it is tied to some physical hard things so you have to pay your taxes yes so it's always at the end going to be connected to the the blockchain of physical reality so in the case of law and taxes it's connected to government and uh government is what violence is the i'm playing the monopoly on violence devil's advocates here and popping one devil off the stack at a time isn't ultimately of course it'll be connected to physical reality but just because people control the physical reality it doesn't mean the status lebron james in theory could make more money than the owners of the teams in theory and to me that's a virtual idea so somebody else constructed a game and now you're playing in the space of virtual uh in the virtual space of the game so it just feels like there could be games where status we build realities that give us meaning in the virtual space like i can imagine such things being possible oh yeah okay so i see what you i think i see what you're saying there with the idea there i mean we'll take the lebron james side and put in like some youtube influencer yes sure right so the youtube influencer it is status games but at a certain level it precipitates into real dollars and into like well you look at mr beast right he's like sending off half a million dollars worth of fireworks or something right on a youtube video and also like saving you know like saving trees and so on sure right you're trying to plant a milling tree with the mark robert or whatever it was yeah like it's not that those kinds of games can't lead to real consequences it's that for the vast majority of people in consumer culture they are incented by the i would say mostly i'm thinking about middle class consumers they're incented by advertisements they're centered by their memetic environment to treat the purchasing of certain things the need to buy the latest model whatever that need to appear however the need to pursue status games as a driver of meaning and my point would be that it's a very hollow driver of meaning and that is what creates a meaning crisis because at the end of the day it's like eating a lot of empty calories right yeah it tasted good going down a lot of sugar but man it did not it was not enough protein to help build your muscles and you kind of feel that in your gut and i think that's i mean to all the stuff aside and setting aside a discussion on currency which i hope we get back get back to you that's what i mean about the meaning crisis part of it being created by the fact that we don't um we're not encouraged to have more and more direct relationships we're actually alienated from relating to even even our family members sometimes right we're we're encouraged to relate to brands we're encouraged to relate to these kinds of things that then tell us to um do things that are really of low consequence and that's where the meaning crisis comes from so the role of technology in this so there's somebody you mentioned who's jacques elio his view of technology he warns about the towering piles of technique which i guess is a broad idea of technology yes so i think correct me if i'm wrong for him technology is a is a is bad moving away from human nature and it's ultimately destructive my question broadly speaking this meaning crisis can technology what are the pros and cons of technology can it be good yeah i think it can be i certainly draw on some of the lowell's ideas and i think some of them are are pretty good um but the way he defines technique is uh well also somandon as well i mean he speaks to the general mentality of efficiency homogenized processes homogenized production homogenized labor to produce homogenized artifacts that then are not actually they they don't sit well in the environments it's essentially you can think of as the antonym of craft whereas a craftsman will come to you know a problem uh maybe a piece of wood and then make it to a chair it may be a site to build a house or build a stable or build you know whatever and they will consider how to bring various things in to build something well contextualized that's in uh in right relationship with that environment but the way we have driven technology over the last 150 years is not that at all it is how can we you know make sure the input materials are homogenized cut to the same size you know diluted and doped exactly the right alloy concentrations how do we create machines that then consume exactly the right kind of energy to be able to run at this high speed to stamp out the same parts which then go out the door everyone gets the same tickle me elmo and the reason why everyone wants it is because we have broadcast that tells everyone this is the cool thing so we homogenize demand right and we're like beaudelard um and look other critiques of modernity coming from that direction you know the situation list as well they it's that their point is that at this point in time consumption is the thing that drives a lot of the economic stuff not the need but the need to consume and build status games on top so we have homogenized when we discovered i think this is uh this is really like bernays and stuff right in the early 20th century we discovered we can create we can create demand we can create desire in a way that was not possible before because of broadcast media and one not only do we create desire we don't create a desire for each person to connect to some bespoke thing to build a relationship with their neighbor or their spouse we are telling them you need to consume this brand you need to drive this vehicle you got to listen to this music have you heard this have you seen this movie right so creating homogenized demand makes it really cheap to create homogenized product and now you have economics of scale so we make the same tickle me elmo give it to all the kids and all the kids are like hey i got to tickle me elmo right so this is ultimately where this ties in then to run away hyper capitalism is that we then capitalism is always looking for growth it's always looking for growth and growth only happens the margins so you have to squeeze more and more demand out you got to make it cheaper and cheaper to make the same thing but tell everyone they're still getting meaning from it you're still like this is still your tickle me elmo right and we we see little bits of this dripping critiques of this dripping in popular culture you see it sometimes it's when buzz lightyear walks into the thing he's like oh my god at the toy store i'm just a toy like there's millions of other or there's hundreds of other buzz lightyears just like me right that is i think you know a fun pixar critique on this homogenization dynamic i agree with you on most of the things you're saying so i'm playing devil's advocate here but you know this homogenized machine of capitalism is also the thing that is able to fund if channeled correctly innovation invention and development of totally new things that in the best possible world create all kinds of new experiences that can enrich lives um the quality of lives for uh all kinds of people so isn't this the machine that actually enables the experiences and more and more experiences that would then give meaning it has done that to some extent i mean it's not all good or bad in my perspective you know we can always look backwards and offer a critique of the path we've taken to get to this point in time um but that's a different that's somewhat different it informs the discussion um but it's somewhat different than the question of where do we go in the future right sure is this still the same rocket we need to ride to get to the next point we'll even get us to the next point well how does this so you're predicting the future how does it go wrong in your view we have the mechanisms we have now explored enough technologies to where we can actually i think sustainably produce what most people in the world need to live we have also created the infrastructures to allow continued research and development of additional science and medicine and various other kinds of things the organizing principles that we use to govern all these things today have been a lot of them have been just inherited from honestly medieval times some of them have refactored a little bit in the industrial era but a lot of these modes of organizing people are deeply problematic and furthermore they're rooted in i think a very industrial mode perspective on human labor and this is one of those things i'm going to go back to the open source thing there was a point in time when well let me ask you this if you look at the core scipy sort of collection of libraries that's scipy numpy map plot lib right there's ipython notebook let's throw pandas in there psychic learn a few of these things um how much value do you think economic value would you say they drive in the world today that's one of the fascinating things about talking to you and travis is like it it's it's immeasurable it's like uh at least a billion dollars a day maybe a billion dollars sure i mean it's like it's similar question of like how much value does wikipedia create right it's like all of it i don't know well i mean if you look at our systems when you do a google search right now some of that stuff runs through tensorflow but when you look at you know siri when you do credit card transaction fraud like just everything right every intelligent station under the sun they're using some aspect of these kinds of tools so i would say that these create billions of dollars of value you mean like direct use of tools that leverage direct yeah yeah even that's billions a day yeah yeah right easily i think like the things they could not do if they didn't have these tools right yes so that's billions of dollars a day great i think that's about right now if we take how many people did it take to make that right and there was a point in time not anymore but there was a point in time when they could fit in a van i could have fit them in my mercedes center right and so if you look at that like holy crap literally a van of maybe a dozen people could create value to the tune of billions of dollars a day what lesson do you draw from that well here's the thing what can we do to do more of that like that's open source the way i've talked about this in other environments is when we use generative participatory crowdsourced approaches we unlock human potential at a level that is better than what capitalism can do i would challenge you know anyone to go and try to hire the right 12 people in the world to build that entire stack the way those 12 people did that right they'd be very very hard to press to do that if a hedge fund could just hire a dozen people and create like something that is worth billions of dollars a day every single one of them will be racing to do it right but finding the right people fostering the right collaborations getting it adopted by the right other people to then refine it that is a thing that was organic in nature that that took crowdsourcing that took a lot of the open source ethos and it took the right kinds of people right now those people who started that said i need to have a part of a multi-billion dollar a day sort of enterprise they're like i'm doing this cool thing to solve my problem for my friends right so the point of telling the story is to say that our way of thinking about value our way of thinking about allocation of resources our ways of thinking about property rights and all these kinds of things they come from finite game scarcity mentality medieval institutions as we are now entering to some extent we are sort of in a post-scarcity era although some people are hoarding a whole lot of stuff we are at a point where if not now soon we'll be in a post-scarcity era the question of how we allocate resources has to be revisited at a fundamental level because the kind of software these people built the modalities that those human ecologies that built this software it treats software's on property actually sharing creates value restricting a forking reduces value so that's different than any other physical resource that we've ever dealt with it's different than how most corporations treat software ip right so if treating software in this way created this much value so efficiently so cheaply because feeding a dozen people for 10 years is really cheap right that's the that's the reason i care about this right now is because looking forward when we can automate a lot of labor where we can in fact the the programming for your robot in your part neck of the woods and you're part of the amazon to build something sustainable for you and your tribe to deliver the right medicines to take care of the kids that's just software that's just code that could be totally open sourced right so we can actually get to a mode where all of this additional generative things that humans are doing they they don't have to be wrapped up in a container and then we charge for all the exponential dynamics out of it that's what facebook did that's what modern social media did right because the old internet was connecting people just fine facebook came along and said well anyone can post a picture anyone can post some text and we're gonna amplify the crap out of it to everyone else and it exploded this generative network of human interaction and then said how do i make money off that oh yeah i'm going to be a gatekeeper on everybody's attention and that's how i'm going to make money so how do we create uh more than one van how do we have millions of vans full of people that create numpy scipy that create python so you know the story of those people is often they have some kind of job outside of this this is what they're doing for fun don't you need to have a job don't you have to be connected plugged in to the capitalist system isn't that what like um isn't this consumerism the engine that results in the individuals that kind of take a break from it every once in a while to create something magical like at the edges right the question of surplus right this is this is the question like if everyone were to go and run their own farm no one would have time to go and write numpy sci-fi right maybe but that's that's that's what i'm talking about when i say we're maybe at a post scarcity point for a lot of people the question that we're never encouraged to ask in a super bowl ad is how much do you need how much is enough do you need to have a new car every two years every five if you have a reliable car can you drive one for 10 years is that all right you know i had a car for 10 years was fine you know your iphone do you have to upgrade every two years i mean sort of you you're using the same apps you did four years ago right this should be a super bowl ad this should be a super bowl ad that's great maybe you really need a new iphone maybe one of our listeners will will fund something like this of like no but just actually bringing it back bringing it back to actually the question of what do you need how do we create the infrastructure for collectives of people to live on the basis of providing you know what we need meeting people's needs with a little bit of excess to handle emergencies and things like that pulling our resources together to handle the really really big you know emergencies somebody with a really rare care form cancer or some massive fire sweeps through you know half the the village or whatever but can we actually unscale things and solve for people's needs and then give them the capacity to explore how to be the best version of themselves and for travis that was you know throwing away his shot a tenure in order to write numpy for others it's uh there is a saying in the in the sci-fi uh community that you know sci-fi advance is one failed postdoc at a time and that's you know we can do these things we can actually do this kind of collaboration because code software information organization that's cheap that those bits are very cheap to fling across the oceans so you mentioned travis we've been talking and we'll continue to talk about open source um maybe you can comment how did you meet travis who who is travis alphon what's what's your relationship been like through the years uh where did you work together how did you meet what's uh the present and the future look like yeah so the first time i met travis was at a sci-fi conference in pasadena do you remember the year 2005. i was working at again at nthot you know working on scientific computing consulting and um a couple of years later he joined us at nthot i think 2007 um and he came in as president uh the the one of the founders of and thought was the ceo eric jones um and we're all very excited that travis was joining us and that was you know great fun so i worked with travis um on a number of consulting projects and we worked on um some open source stuff i mean it was just a really it was a good a good time there and then it was primarily python related oh yeah it was all python numpy consulting kind of stuff um towards the end of that time uh we started getting called into more and more finance shops um they were adopting python pretty heavily i did some work on like a high frequency trading shop um working some stuff and then we worked together on some um at a couple investment banks in in manhattan and so we started seeing that there was a potential to take python in the direction of business computing more than just being this niche like matlab replacement for big vector computing what we were seeing was oh yeah you could actually use python as a swiss army knife to do a lot of shadow data transformation kind of stuff so that's when we realize the potential is much greater and so we started anaconda i mean it was called continuum analytics at the time but we started in january of 2012 with a vision of shoring up the parts of python that needed to get expanded to handle data at scale to do web visualization application development et cetera and that was that yeah so he was ceo and i was president for the first five years and then um we raised some money and then the board sort of put in a new ceo they hired a kind of professional ceo and then travis you laugh about that um i took over the cto role travis then left after a year to do his own thing through kwan site um which was more oriented around some of the bootstrap years that we did at continuum where it was you know open source some consulting it wasn't sort of like gung-ho product development and it wasn't focused on you know we accidentally stumbled into the package management problem at anaconda but we had a lot of other visions of other technology that we built in the open source and travis was really trying to push again the frontiers of numerical computing vector computing handling things like auto differentiation and stuff intrinsically in the open ecosystem so i think that's the the you know that's kind of the direction he's he's working on in some of his his work we remain great friends and um you know and colleagues and collaborators even though he's no longer uh day-to-day you know working at anaconda but he gives me a lot of feedback about you know this and then the other what's uh what's a big lesson you learned from travis about life or about programming about leadership wow there's a lot there's a lot travis is a really really good guy he really his heart is really in it he cares a lot um i've gotten that sense having interacted with them it's so interesting yeah such a good he's a really good dude and he and i you know it's so interesting we come from very different backgrounds we're quite different as people um but we uh i think we can like not talk for a long time and then and then be on a conversation and be eye to eye on like 90 of things and so he's someone who i believe no matter how much fog settles into the ocean his ship my ship are pointed sort of in the same direction of the same star wow so that's a beautiful way to phrase it no matter how much fog there is appointed the same star yeah and i hope he feels the same way i mean i hope he knows that over the years now um we both care a lot about the community um for someone who cares so deeply i would say this about travis that's interesting for someone who cares so deeply about the nerd details of like type system design and vector computing and efficiency of expressing this and then the other memory layouts and all that stuff he cares even more about the people in the ecosystem the community and i have um a similar kind of alignment i care a lot about the tech i really do but for me the the beauty of what this human ecology has produced is i think a touchstone it's an early version we should look at it and say how do we replicate this for humanity at scale what this open source collaboration was able to produce how can we be generative in human collaboration moving forward and create that as a civilizational kind of dynamic like can we seize this moment to do that because like a lot of the other open source movements it's all nerds nerding out on code for nerds you know um and the this because it's scientists because it's people working on data that all of it faces real human problems um i think we have an opportunity to actually make a bigger impact is there a way for this kind of open source vision to make money absolutely to fund the people involved is that yes it's hard it's hard but but we're trying to do that in our own way um at anaconda uh because we know that business users as they use more of the stuff they have needs that like business specific needs around security provenance um you know they really can't tell their vps and their investors hey we're having you know our data scientists are installing random packages from who knows where and running on customer data so they have to have someone to talk to and that's what anaconda does so we are you know a governed source of packages for them and that's great that makes some money we take some of that and we just uh take that as a dividend we take a percentage of revenues and write that as a dividend for the open source community but beyond that i really see the development of a marketplace for people to create notebooks models data sets curation of these different kinds of things and to really have a long tail marketplace dynamic with that can you speak about this problem that you stumbled into of package management python package management what is that a lot of people speak very highly of conda which is part of anaconda which is the package manager there's a ton of packages so first what are package managers and second what was there before what is pip and why is condom more awesome the package problem is this which is that in order to do um numerical computing efficiently with python there are a lot of low-level libraries that need to be compiled compiled with a c compiler or c plus plus compiler for trend compiler they need to not just be compiled but they need to be compiled with all of the right settings and oftentimes those settings are tuned for specific chip architectures and and when you add gpus to the mix when you look at different operating systems you may be on the same chip but if you're running mac versus linux versus windows on the same x86 chip you compile link differently all of this complexity is beyond the capability of most data scientists to reason about and it's also beyond what most of the package developers want to deal with too yes because your package developer you're like i code on linux this works for me i'm good it is not my problem to figure out how to build this on an ancient version of windows right that's just simply not my problem so what we end up with is we have a creator econ or create a a very creative crowdsourced environment where people want to use this stuff but they can't and so we ended up creating a new set of technologies like a build recipe system a build system and an installer system that is able to um well to put it simply it's able to build these packages correctly on each of these different kinds of platforms and operating systems and make it so when people want to install something they can it's just one command they don't have to you know set up a big compiler system and do all these things so when it works well it works great now the difficulty is we have literally thousands of people writing code in the ecosystem building all sorts of stuff and each person writing code they may take a dependence on something else and so all this web incredibly complex web of dependencies so installing the correct package for any given set of packages you want getting that right sub graph is an incredibly hard problem and again most data scientists don't want to think about this they're like i want to install numpy and pandas i want this version of some like geospatial library i want this other thing like why is this hard these exist right yes and it is hard because it's well you're installing this on a version of windows right and half of these libraries are not built for windows or the latest version isn't available but the old version was if you go to the old version of this library that means you need to go to a different version of that library and so the python ecosystem by by virtue of being crowdsourced we were able to fill a hundred thousand different niches but then we also suffer this problem that because it's crowdsourced and no one it's like a tragedy the commons right no one really needs wants to support their thousands of other dependencies so we end up sort of having to do a lot of this and of course the condo forge community also steps up as an open source community that you know maintains some of these recipes that's what conda does now pip is a tool that came along after conda to some extent it came along as an easier way for the um for the python developers writing python code that didn't have as much compiled you know stuff they could then install different packages and what ended up happening in the python ecosystem was that a lot of the core python and web python developers they never ran into any of this compilation stuff at all so even we have you know uh uh on video we have uh guido and guido van rossum saying you know what the scientific community's packaging problems are just too exotic and different i mean talking about fortran compilers right um like you guys just need to build your own solution perhaps right so the python core python community went and built its own sort of packaging technologies not really contemplating the complexity of the stuff over here and so now we have the challenge where you can pip install some things in some libraries if you just want to get started with them you can pimp and sell tensorflow and that works great the instant you want to also install some other packages that use different versions of numpy or some like graphics library or some opencv thing or some other thing you now run into dependency hell because you cannot you know opencv can have a different version of jpeg over here than pytorch over here like they actually they all have to use that if you want to use gpu acceleration they have to all use the same underlying drivers and same gpu cuda things so it's it gets to be very gnarly and it's a level of technology that both the makers and the users don't really want to think too much about and that's where you step in and try to solve this we try to solve this sub graph problem how much is that and you said you don't want to think they don't want to think about it but how much is it a little bit on the developer and providing them tools to to be a little bit more clear of that subgraph of dependency that's necessary it is it is getting to a point where we do have to think about look can we pull some of the most popular packages together and get them to work on a coordinated release timeline get them to build against the same test matrix et cetera et cetera right and there is a little bit of dynamic around this but again it is a volunteer community um you know people working on these different projects have their own timelines and their own things they're trying to meet so we end up trying to pull these things together and then it's it's just incredibly and i would recommend just as a business tip don't ever go into business where when your hard work works you're invisible and when it breaks because of someone else's problem you get flack for it because that's that's for our in our situation right when something doesn't install properly usually it's some upstream issue but it looks like condo's broken it looks like you know anaconda screwed something up when things do work though it's like oh yeah cool it's worked assuming naturally of course that's very easy to make that work right so we end up in this kind of um problematic scenario but uh but it's okay because i think we're still um you know our hearts in the right place we're trying to move this forward as a community sort of affair i think most of the people in the community also appreciate the work we've done over the years to try to move these things forward in a in a collaborative fashion so one of the sub-graphs of dependencies that became super complicated is the move from python 2 to python 3. so there's all these ways to mess with these kinds of ecosystems of packages and so on so i just want to ask you about that particular one what do you think about the move from python 2 to 3 now why did it take so long what were from your perspective just seeing the packages all struggle in the community all struggle through this process what lessons do you take away from it why did it take so long looking back some people perhaps underestimated how much adoption python 2 had i think some people also underestimated how much or they overestimated how much value some of the new features in python 3 really provided like the things they really loved about python 3 just didn't matter to some of these people in python 2. yeah because this change was happening as python scipy was starting to take off really like past like a hockey stick of adoption in the early data science era in the early 2010s a lot of people were learning and onboarding in whatever just worked and the teachers were like well yeah these libraries i need are not supported on python 3 yet i'm going to teach you python 2. it took a lot of advocacy to get people to move over to python 3. so i think it wasn't any particular single thing but it was one of those death by you know a dozen cuts which just really made it hard to move off of python 2 and also python 3 itself as they were kind of breaking things and changing these around reorganize the standard library there's a lot of stuff that was happening there that kept giving people an excuse to say i'll put off to the next version 2 is working fine enough for me right now so i think that's essentially what happened there and i will say this though the strength of the python data science movement i think is what kept python alive in that transition because a lot of languages have died in left left their user bases behind if there wasn't the use of python for data there's a good chunk of python users that during that transition would have just left for go and rust and stayed in fact some people did they moved to go and rust and they just never looked back the fact that we were able to grow by the by millions of users the python data community that is what kept the momentum for python going and now the usage of python for data is over 50 um of the overall python user base so i will put i will make i'm happy to debate that on stage somewhere icon with someone if they really want to take issue with that statement but from my where i sit i think that's true the statement there the idea is that the switch from python 2 to python 3 would have probably destroyed python if it didn't also coincide with python for whatever reason just overtaking the data science community anything that processes data yeah so like the timing was perfect that this maybe imperfect decision was coupled with the great timing and on the value of data in in our world i would say the troubled execution of a good decision it was a decision that was necessary it's possible if we had more resources we could have done in a way that was a little bit smoother but ultimately you know the the the arguments for python 3 i bought them at the time and i buy them now right having great text handling is like a non-negotiable table stakes thing you need to have in a language so um so that's great um but uh the execution you know python is the um it's volunteer driven it's like the now the most popular language on the planet but it's all literally volunteers so the lack of resources meant that they had to really they had to do things in a very uh hamstrung way and i think to carry the python momentum and the language through that time the data movement was a critical part of that so some of it was karen stick i actually have to uh shamefully admit that it took me a very long time to switch from python 2 and python 3 because i'm a machine learning person it was just for the longest time you could just do fine with python 2. right but i think the moment where i switched uh everybody i worked with and switched myself for small projects and big is when finally when numpy announced that they're going to end support uh like in 2020 or something like that right so like when i i realized oh this isn't going this is going to end right so that's the stick that's not a carrot that's not so for longest time was carrots it was like all of these packages were saying okay we have python 3 support now come join us we have python 2 and python 3 but one numpy one of the packages i sort of love and depend on uh said like nope it's over that's that's when i uh decided to switch i wonder if you think it was possible much earlier for somebody like uh like numpy or some major package to step into the cold well it's like it's a chicken and egg problem too right you don't want to cut off a lot of users unless you see the user momentum going too so the decisions for the scientific community for each of the different projects you know there's not a monolith some projects are like we'll only be releasing new features on python three yeah and that was more of a sticky carrot or yeah a firm carrot if you will a firm carrot um a stick shaped carrot yeah but then for others yeah numpy in particular because it's at the base of the dependency stack for so many things um that was the final stick that was a stick shaped stick people were saying look if i have to keep maintaining my releases for python 2 that's that much less energy that i can put into making things better for the python 3 folks or in my new version which is of course going to be python 3. so people were also getting kind of pulled by this tension so the overall community sort of had a lot of input into when the numpy core folks decided they would end of life on python 2. so as this these numbers are a little bit loose but there are about 10 million python programmers in the world you could argue that number but let's say 10 million uh that's actually where i was looking to 27 million total programmers developers in the world you mentioned in the talk that uh changes need to be made for there to be 100 million programmers so first of all do you see a future where there's a hundred million python programmers and second what kind of changes need to be made so anaconda minicon to get downloaded about a million times a week so i think the idea that there's only 10 million python programmers in the world is a little bit under counting there are a lot of people who escape traditional accounting that are using python and data in their jobs i do believe that the future world for it to well the world i would like to see is one where people are data literate so they are able to use tools that let them express their questions and ideas fluidly um and the data variety and data complexity will not go down it will only keep increasing so i think some level of code or code like things will continue to be relevant and so my my hope is that we can build systems that allow people to more seamlessly integrate python kinds of expressitivity with data systems and operationalization methods that are much more seamless and what i mean by that is you know right now you can't punch python code into an excel cell i mean there's some tools you can do to kind of do this we didn't built a thing for doing this back in the day but but i feel like the total addressable market for python users if we do the things right is on the order of the excel users which is you know a few hundred million so um i think python has to get better at being embedded you know being a smaller thing that pulls in just the right parts of the ecosystem to run numerix and do data exploration meeting people where they're already at with their data and their data tools and then i think also it has to be easier to take some of those things they've written and flow those back into deployed systems or apps or visualizations i think if we don't do those things then we will always be kept in the silo as sort of a you know expert users tool and not a tool for the masses you know i work with a bunch of folks in the adobe creative suite and i'm kind of forcing them or inspired them to learn python uh to do a bunch of stuff that helps them and it's interesting because they probably wouldn't call themselves a python programmers but right while using python i would love it if the tools like photoshop and premiere and all those kinds of tools that are targeted towards creative people i guess that's where excel excel is targeted towards a certain kind of audience that works for data financial people all that kind of stuff if they if there would be easy ways to leverage to use python for quick scripting tasks yeah and i you know there's an exciting application of uh artificial intelligence in this space that i'm hopeful about looking at open ai codex with um generating programs yeah so almost helping people bridge the gap from kind of visual interface to generating programs to something formal and then they can modify it and so on but kind of without having to read the manual without having to do a google search on stack overflow which is essentially what a neural network does when it's doing code generation uh is is actually generating code and allowing a human to communicate with multiple programs and then maybe even programs to communicate with each other via python right so that that to me is a really exciting possibility because i think there's a there's a friction to kind of like how do i learn how to use python in my life there's a oftentimes you kind of what start a class you start learning about types yes i don't know functions like this is you know python is the first language with which you start to learn to program but i feel like that's going to take a long time for you to understand why it's useful you almost want to start with a script well you you do in fact i i think starting with the theory theory behind programming languages and types and i mean types are there to make the compiler writer's jobs easier types are not i mean heck do you have an ontology of types for just the objects in this table no so types are there because compiler writers are human and they're limited in what they can do but um i think that the beauty of scripting like there's a there's a python book that's uh called automate the boring stuff which is exactly the right mentality um i grew up with computers in a time when i could uh when when steve job was still pitching these things as bicycles for the mine they were supposed to not be just media consumption devices um but they were they were actually you could you could write some code you could write basic you could write some stuff to do some things and that feeling of a computer as the thing that we can use to extend ourselves has all but evaporated for a lot of people so you see a little bit in parts and the current the generation of youth around minecraft or roblox right and i think python circuit python these things um could be a renaissance of that of people actually shaping and using their computers as computers as an extension of their minds and their curiosity their creativity so you know you talk about scripting the adobe suite with python in the 3d graphics world python is a scripting language some of these 3d graphics suites use and i think that's great we should better support those kinds of things but ultimately the idea that i i should be able to have power over my computing environment if i want these things to happen repeatedly all the time i should be able to say that somehow to the computer right now whether um the operating systems get there faster by having some you know siri backed with open ai with whatever so you just say siri make this do this and every other friday right we probably will get there somewhere and apple's always had these ideas you know there's the apple script in the menu that no one ever uses but um you can do these kinds of things but when you start doing that kind of scripting the challenge isn't learning the type system or even the syntax of the language the challenge is all of the dictionaries on all the objects of all their properties and attributes and parameters like who's got time to learn all that stuff right so that's when then programming by prototype or by example becomes the right way to get the user to express their desire so there's a lot of these these different ways that we can approach programming but i do think when as you were talking about the the adobe scripting thing i was thinking about you know when we do use something like numpy when we use things in the python data and scientific let's say expression system there's a reason we use that which is that it gives us mathematical precision it gives us actually quite a lot of precision over precisely what we mean about this data set that data set and it's the fact that we can have that precision that lets python be powerful over as a duct tape for data you know you give me a tsv or a csv and you if you give me some massively expensive vendor tool for data transformation i don't know i'm gonna be able to solve your problem but if you give me a python prompt you can throw whatever data you want at me i will be able to mash it into shape so that ability to take it as sort of this like um you know machete out of the data jungle is really powerful and i think that's why at some level we're not we're not going to get away from some of these expressions and apis in libraries in python for for data transformation you've been at the center of the python community for many years if you could change one thing about the community to help it grow to help it improve to help it flourish and prosper what would it be i mean not you know it doesn't have to be one thing but what what kind of comes to mind what are the challenges humility is one of the values that we have at anaconda at the company but it's also on the values in the in the community that it's been breached a little bit in the last few years but in general people are are quite decent and reasonable and nice and that humility prevents them from seeing the greatness that they could have i don't know how many people in the core python community really understand that they stand perched at the edge of an opportunity to transform how people use computers yes and actually pycon because the last physical icon i went to uh russell keith mcgee gave a great keynote about you know very much along the lines of the challenges i have which is you know python for a language that doesn't actually they can't put an interface up on like the most popular computing devices it's done really well as a language hasn't it you can't write a web front end with python really i mean everyone uses javascript you certainly can't write native apps so for a language that you can't actually write apps in any of the front-end runtime environments python's done exceedingly well yeah um and so that that wasn't to pat ourselves in the back that was to challenge ourselves the community to say we through our current volunteer dynamic have gotten to this point what comes next and how do we seize you know we've caught the tiger by the tail how do we make sure we keep up with it as it goes forward so that's one of the questions i have about sort of open source at communities best there's a kind of humility is that humility prevent you to have a vision for creating something like very new and powerful and you've brought us back to consciousness again the collaboration is a swarm emergent dynamic humility lets these people work together without anyone trouncing anyone else how do they you know in consciousness there's the question the binding problem how does a singular our attention how does that emerge from you know billions of neurons yes so how can you have a swarm of people emerge a consensus that has a singular vision to say we will do this and most importantly we're not going to do these things emerging a coherent pointed focused leadership dynamic from a collaboration being able to do that kind of and then dissolve it so people can still do the swarm thing that's a problem there's a question so you have you have to have a charismatic leader for some reason lioness torval comes to mind but he you know there's people who criticize you he rules that iron fist man but there's still charisma there's a charisma right there's a charisma to that iron fist uh there's uh every leader is different i would say in their success so he doesn't i don't even know if you can say he doesn't have humility uh there's such a meritocracy of ideas that like this is a good idea and this is a bad idea there's a step function to it once you clear a threshold yeah he's open once you clear the bozo threshold he's open to your ideas i think yes right but see the the interesting thing is obviously that will not stand in an open source community if that threshold that is defined by that one particular person is not actually that good so you actually have to be really excellent at what you do so the the he's very good at what he does and so there's some aspect of leadership where you can get thrown out people can just leave you know that's how it works with open source yeah they'll fork but at the same time you want to sometimes be a leader like with a strong opinion because people i mean there's some kind of balance here for this like hive mind to get like behind leadership is a big topic and i didn't you know i'm not one of these guys that went to mba school and said i'm going to be an entrepreneur and i'm going to be a leader and i'm going to read all these harvard business review articles on leadership and all this other stuff like it i was a physicist turned into a software nerd who then really like nerded out on python um i know i am entrepreneurial right i saw a business opportunity around the use of python data but um for me what has been interesting over this journey with the last 10 years is how much i started really enjoying the understanding thinking deeper about organizational dynamics and leadership and leadership does come down to a few core things number one a leader has to create belief or at least has to dispel disbelief leadership also you have to have vision loyalty and experience so can you say belief in a singular vision like what is belief yeah belief means a few things belief means here's what we need to do and this is a valid thing to do and we can do it um that you have to be able to drive that belief um and every step of leadership along the way has to help you amplify that belief to more people i mean i think at a fundamental level that's what it is you have to have a vision you have to be able to um show people that or you have to convince people to believe in the vision and to to get behind you and that's where the loyalty part comes in and the experience part comes in there's all different flavors of leadership so if we talk about linus we could talk about elon musk and steve jobs there's sandra pachai there's people that kind of put themselves at the center and are strongly opinionated and some people are more like consensus builders right what works well for open source what works well in the space of programming so you you've been a programmer you've led many programmers and now sort of at the center of this ecosystem what what works well in the programming world would you say it really depends on the people what style leadership is best and it depends on the programming community i think for the python community um servant leadership is one of the values like at the end of the day the leader has to also be um the high priest of values right so any kind of any collection of people has values of their living and if you want to maintain uh certain values and those values help you as an organization become more powerful then the leader has to live those values unequivocally and has to you know has to hold the values so in our case in this collaborative community around python i think that the humility is one of those values servant leadership you actually have to kind of do the stuff you have to walk the walk not just talk the talk i don't feel like the python community really demands that much from a vision standpoint and they should and i think they should this is the interesting thing is like so many people use python from where comes the vision you know like you have a elon musk type character who has makes bold statements about the vision for particular companies he's involved with and it's like i think a lot of people that work at those companies kind of can only last if they believe that vision because and some of it is super bold so my question is and by the way those companies often use python uh what you know how do you establish a vision like get to 100 million users right get to where you know the python is at the center of the machine learning and was it data science machine learning deep learning artificial intelligence revolution right like in many ways perhaps the python community is not thinking of it that way but it's leading the way on this like the the tooling is like essential right well you know for a while um pycon people in the scientific python and the pi data community um they would submit talks those early to early 2010s mid-2010s they would submit talks for pycon and the talks would all be rejected because there was the separate sort of pi data conferences and like well these these probably belong more to pi data and instead there'd be yet another talk about you know threads and you know whatever some web framework and it's like um that was an interesting dynamic to see that there was i mean at the time it was a little annoying because we want to try to get more users and get more people talking about these things and pycon is a huge venue right it's thousands of python programmers but then also came to appreciate that you know parallel having an ecosystem that allows parallel innovation is not bad right there are people doing embedded python stuff there's people doing web programming people do scripting there's cyber uses of python i think the ultimately at some point if your slide mode mold covers so much stuff you have to respect the different things are growing in different areas and different niches now some at some point that has to come together and the central body has to provide resources the principle here is subsidiarity give resources to the various groups to then allocate as they see fit in their niches that would be a really helpful dynamic but again it's a volunteer community it's not like that that many resources to start with what was or is your favorite programming setup what operating system what keyboard how many screens uh listening to what time of day are you drinking coffee tea tea um sometimes coffee depending on how well i slept um i used to have do you get a unite owl i remember somebody asked you somewhere a question about work-life balance and and or like not just work-life balance but like a family you know you lead a company and your answer was was basically like i still haven't figured it out yeah i think i've gotten a little bit better balance i have a really great leadership team now supporting me and so that takes a lot of the day-to-day stuff um off my plate and uh my kids are getting a little older so that helps so um and of course i have a wonderful wife who takes care of a lot of the things that i'm not able to take care of and she's she's great i try to get to sleep earlier now um because i have to get up every morning at six to take my kid down to the bus stop oh wow so there's a hard there's a hard thing yeah for a while i was doing polyphasic sleep which is really interesting like i go to bed at nine wake up at like two a.m work till five sleep three hours wake up at eight like that was actually it was interesting it wasn't too bad how did it feel it was good i didn't keep it up for years but once i have travel then it just everything goes out the window right because then you're like time zones and all these things socially was it except like were you able to live outside of how you felt were you yes able to live normal society oh yeah because like on the nights that i wasn't out hanging out with people or whatever going to bed at night no one cares yeah i wake up at two i'm still responding to their slacks emails whatever and you know uh shit posting on twitter or whatever at two in the morning is exactly right and then you go to bed for a few hours and you wake up it's like you had an extra day in the middle yes and i'd read somewhere that you know humans naturally have biphasic sleep or something i don't know but um i i read basically everything somewhere so right every option of everything every option of everything i will say that that worked out for me for a while although i don't do it anymore um in terms of programming setup i had a 27 inch high dpi um setup that i really liked um but then i moved to a curved monitor just because uh when i moved to the new house i want to have a bit more screen for zoom plus communications plus you know like various concepts it's like one large monitor one large curved monitor um what operating system mac okay yeah is that is that what happens when you become important is you stop using uh linux and windows i would no i actually have i have a windows box as well on the next table over um but uh but i have i have three desks right yes so the main one is the standing desk so that i can you know whatever what i'm like i have a teleprompter set up and everything else and then i've got my imac and then egpu and then windows pc the reason i moved to mac was uh it's it's got a linux prompt or no sorry it's got a unique it's got a unix prompt so i can do all my stuff but then um i uh i don't have to worry like when i'm presenting for clients or investors or whatever like it i don't have to worry about any like acpi related f sick things in the middle of a presentation like none of that it just it will always wake from sleep um and it won't colonel panic on me and this is not a dig against linux except that i just um i feel really bad i feel like a traitor to my community saying this right but in 2012 i was just like okay started my own company what did i get and linux laptops were just not quite there um yes and so i've just stuck with max can i just defend something that nobody respectable seems to do which is uh so i i do a boot on linux windows but in windows i have uh windows subsystems for linux or whatever ws api and i find myself being able to handle everything i need in almost everything i need in linux for basic sort of tasks scripting tasks within wsl and it creates a really nice environment so i've been but like whenever i hang out with like especially important people like they're all on an iphone and a mac and it's like yeah like what there there is a messiness to windows and a messiness to linux that makes me feel like you're still in it well the linux stuff windows subsystem for linux is very tempting but there's still the windows on the outside where i don't know where and i've been okay i've been i've i've used dos since version 1.11 or 1.21 or something so i've been a long time microsoft user and i will say that like like it's really hard for me to know where anything is how to get to the details behind something when something screws up as invariably does and just things like changing group permissions on some shared folders and stuff just everything seems a little bit more awkward more clicks than it needs to be not to say there aren't weird things like hidden attributes and all those other happy stuff on on uh on mac but for the most part um and and well actually especially now with the new hardware coming out on mac it'll be very interesting you know with the new m1 um there were some dark years the last few years when i was like i think maybe i have to move off of mac as a platform but i mean like my keyboard was just not working like literally my keyboard just wasn't working right i had this touch bar didn't have a physical escape button like i needed to because i used vim and now i think we're back so yeah so you use vim and you have a what kind of keyboard so i use the realforce 87u uh it's a mechanical as a topra key switch it's a weird shape there's a normal shape i say that because i use a kinesis and i had right you said some dark you said you had dark moments i've i've i've recently had a dark moment like what am i doing with my life i remember sort of flying in a very kind of tight space and as i'm working this is what i do on an airplane i pull out a laptop and on top of the laptop i'll put a kinesis keyboard that's hardcore man i was thinking is this who i am is this what i'm becoming will i be this person because i'm on emacs with this kinesis keyboard sitting like with everybody around emacs on windows on the wsl yeah yeah emacs on linux on windows yeah on windows and like everybody around me is using their iphone to look at tick tock so i'm like in this land and i thought you know what maybe i need to become an adult and put the 90s behind me and uh use like a normal keyboard and then i did some soul searching and i decided like this is who i am this is me like coming out of the closet to saying i'm kinesis keyboard all the way i'm going to use emacs you know you know also kinesis fan um uh uh west mckinney the creative pandas oh he he just he banged out pandas on a kinesis keyboard i believe i don't know if he's still using one maybe but certainly 10 years ago like he was if if anyone's out there maybe we need to have a kinesis support group please reach out isn't there already one is there one there's got to be an rc channel man oh no and you access it through emacs okay do you still program these days i do a little bit um honestly the last thing i did was um i had written i was working with my son to script some minecraft stuff so i was doing a little bit of that that was the last literally the last code i wrote oh you know what also i wrote some code to do some cap table evaluation waterfall modeling kind of stuff what advice would you give to a young person said your son today in high school maybe even college about career about life this may be where i get into trouble a little bit we are coming to the end we're we're rapidly entering a time between worlds so we have a world now that's starting to really crumble under the weight of aging institutions that no longer even pretend to serve the purposes they were created for we are creating technologies that are hurtling billions of people headlong into philosophical crises who they don't even know the philosophical operating systems in their firmware and they're heading into a time when that gets vaporized so for people in high school and certainly i tell my son this as well he's in middle school people in college you are going to have to find your own way you're going to have to have a pioneer spirit even if you live in the middle of the most dense urban environment all of human reality around you is the result of the last few generations of humans agreeing to play certain kinds of games a lot of those games no longer no longer operate according to the rules they used to um collapse is non-linear but it will be managed and so if you are in a particular social caste or economic caste and it's it's not um i think it's it's not kosher to say that about america but america is a very stratified and classist society there's some mobility but but it's really quite classist in america unless you're in the upper middle class you are headed into very choppy waters so it is really really good to think and understand the fundamentals of what you need to build a meaningful life for you your loved ones with your family um and almost all of the technology being created that's consumer facing is designed to own people to take the four stack you know of people to delaminate them and to own certain portions of that stack and so if you want to be an integral human being if you want to have your agency and you want to find your own way in the world you know when you're young would be a great time to spend time looking at some of the classics around you know what it means to live a good life what it means to build connection with people and so much of the status games so much of the stuff you know one of the things that i sort of talk about as we create more and more technology there's a gradient technology and a gradient technology always leads to gradient of power and this is jacqueline's point to some extent as well that gradient of power is not going to go away the technologies are going so fast that even people like me who helped create some of the stuff i'm being left behind that's on the cutting edge research i don't know what's going on in gans today you know i go read some proceedings so as the world gets more and more technological it will create more more gradients where people will seize power economic fortunes and the way they make the people who are left behind okay with their lot in life is they create lottery systems they make you take part in the narrative of your own being trapped in your own economic sort of zone so avoiding those kinds of things is really important knowing when someone is running game on you basically so these are the things i would tell young people it's a dark message but it's realism i mean it's what i see so after you gave some realism you sit back you sit back with your son you're looking out of the sunset what to him can you give as words of hope and to you from where do you derive hope for the future of our world so you said at the individual level you have to have a pioneer mindset to go back to the classics to understand what is in human nature you can find meaning but at the societal level what's your jacket when you look at possible trajectories what gives you hope what gives me hope is that we have little tremors now shaking people out of the reverie of the fiction of modernity that they've been living in kind of a late 20th century style modernity um that's that's good i think because um and also to your point earlier people are burning out on some of the social media stuff they're sort of seeing the ugly side especially the latest news with uh facebook and the whistleblower right it's quite clear these things are not all they're cracked up to be so do you believe like i believe better social media can be built because they are burning out they'll incentivize other competitors to be built do you think that's possible well the thing about it is that um when you have extractive return on returns um you know capital coming in and saying look you own a network give me some exponential dynamics out of this network what are you going to do you're going to just basically put a toll keeper at every single node and every single graph uh edge every node every vertex every edge but if you don't have that need for it if no one's sitting there saying hey wikipedia monetize every every character every byte every phrase then generative human dynamics will naturally sort of arise assuming we do we respect a few principles around online communications so the greatest and biggest social network in the world is still like email sms right yes so we're fine there the issue with the social media as we call it now is they're all they're actually just new amplification systems right now it's benefit to certain people like yourself who have interesting content um to to to to be amplified um so let's create a creator economy and that's that's cool there's a lot of great content out there but giving everyone a shot at the fame lottery saying hey you could also have your if you wiggle your butt the right way on tick tock you could have your 15 seconds of microfame that's not healthy for society at large so i think if we can create tools that help people be conscientious about their attention spend time looking at the past and really retrieving memory and culling not calling but processing and thinking about that i think that's certainly possible and hopefully that's what we get um so i'm so the bigger picture the bigger question about uh you're asking about what gives me hope is that um these early shocks of you know coveted lockdowns and remote work and all these different kinds of things i think it's getting people to a point where they are look they're they're sort of no longer in the reverie right as my friend jim rutt says there's more people with ears to hear now right with pandemic and education everyone's like wait wait what have you guys been doing with my kids like how are you teaching them that what is this crap you're giving them his homework right so i think these are the kinds of things that are getting um in the supply chain disruptions getting more people to think about how do we actually just make stuff this is all good but the concern is that it's still going to take a while for these things for people to learn how to be agentic again um and to be in right relationship with each other and with the world so the the message of hope is still people are resilient and we're build we are building some really amazing technology and i also like to me i derive a lot of hope from from individuals in that van the power of a single individual to uh transform the world to do positive things for the world is quite incredible now you've been talking about it's nice to have as many of those individuals as possible right but even the power of one is kind of magical it is it is we're in a mode now where we can do that i think also you know part of what i try to do is in coming to podcasts like yours and then you know spamming with all this philosophical stuff that i've got going on um there are a lot of good people out there trying to put um words around the current technological social economic crises that we're facing in the space of a few short years i think there has been a lot of great content produced around this stuff for people who want to see want to find out more or think more about this um we're popularizing certain kinds of philosophical ideas that uh move people beyond just the oh you're communist oh your capitalist kind of stuff like it's sort of we're way past that now so um that also gives me hope that i feel like i myself am getting a handle on how to think about these things um it makes me feel like i can you know hopefully affect change for the better we've been sneaking up on this question all over the place let me ask the big ridiculous question what is the meaning of life wow um the meaning of life yeah i don't know i mean that i've never really understood that question when you say meaning crisis you're you're saying that there is a search for a kind of experience that's could be described as fulfillment as like the ah like the aha moment of just like joy and maybe when you see something beautiful or maybe you have created something beautiful that experience that you get it feels like it all makes sense so some of that is just chemicals coming together in your mind and all kinds of things but it seems like we're building a sophisticated uh collective intelligence that's providing meaning in all kinds of ways it's it's members and it there's a theme to that meaning so for for a lot of history i think faith played an important role uh faith in god as a religion i think technology in the modern era is kind of serving a little bit of a source of meaning for people like innovation of different kinds i think the old school things of love and the basics of just being good at stuff but you were a physicist so there's a desire to say okay yeah but these seem to be like symptoms of something deeper right like why little meaning what's capital m yeah what's capital i'm meaning why are we reaching for order when there is excess of energy i don't know if i can answer the why any y that i come up with i think is gonna be um i i'd have to think about that a little more maybe maybe get back to you on that but i will say this we do look at the world through a traditional i think most people look at the world through what i would say is a subject object kind of a metaphysical lens that we have our own subjectivity and then there's there's all of these object things that are not us so i'm i'm me and this is these things are not me right and i'm interacting with them i'm doing things to them but a different view of the world that looks at it as much more connected that realizes oh i'm i'm really quite embedded in a soup of other things and i'm simply um almost like a standing wave pattern of different things right um so when you look at the world in that kind of connected sense i i i've recently taken a shine to this particular thought experiment which is what if it was the case that everything that we touch with our hands that we pay attention to that we actually give intimacy to what if there's actually you know all the mumbo-jumbo like you know people with the magnetic healing crystals and all this other kind of stuff and quantum energy stuff what if that was a thing what if when you literally when your hand touches an object when you really look at something and you concentrate and you focus on it and you really give it attention you actually give it there is some physical residue of something a part of you a bit of your life force that goes into it okay now this is of course completely mumbo jumbo stuff this is not like i don't actually think this is real but let's do the thought experiment what if it was what if there actually was some the quantum magnetic crystal and you know energy field thing that just by touching this can this can has changed a little bit somehow and it's not much unless you put a lot into it and you touch it all the time like your phone right these things gained they gave meaning to you a little bit um but what if there's something that technical objects the phone is a technical object it does not really receive attention or intimacy and then allow itself to be transformed by it but if it's a piece of wood if it's the handle of a knife that your mother used for 20 years to make dinner for you right what if it's a keyboard that you banged out your world transforming software library on these are technical objects and these are physical objects but somehow there's something to them we feel an attraction to these objects as if we have imbued them with life energy yeah right so if you walk that thought experiment through what happens when we touch another person when we hug them when we hold them and it the the reason this ties into my answer for your question is that um there's if there is such a thing if we were to hypothesize uh you know hypothetically it's such a thing um it could be that the purpose of our lives is to imbue as many things with that love as possible that's a that's a beautiful answer and a beautiful way to end it peter uh you're an incredible person thank you spanning so much in the space of engineering and in the space of philosophy i i'm uh really proud to be living in the same city and uh i'm really grateful that you would spend your valuable time with me today thank you well thank you i appreciate the opportunity to speak with you thanks for listening to this conversation with peter wang to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from peter wang himself we tend to think of people as either malicious or incompetent but in a world filled with corruptable and unchecked institutions there exists a third thing malicious incompetence it's a social cancer and it only appears once human organizations scale beyond personal accountability thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you\n"