Kind: captions
Language: en
the 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
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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
[Music]
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 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 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 i
don't think that corporations as people
acting like 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 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