Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
george hotz a.k.a
geohot his second time on the podcast
he's the founder of comma ai an
autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle
technology company
that seeks to be to tesla autopilot what
android is
to the ios they sell the
comma two device for one thousand
dollars that when installed
in many of their supported cars can keep
the vehicle centered in the lane
even when there are no lane markings it
includes
driver sensing that ensures that the
driver's eyes are on the road
as you may know i'm a big fan of driver
sensing i do believe tesla autopilot and
others
should definitely include it in their
sensor suite also
i'm a fan of android and a big fan of
george for many reasons
including his non-linear out of the box
brilliance
and the fact that he's a superstar
programmer
of a very different style than myself
styles make
fights and styles make conversations so
i
really enjoyed this chat i'm sure we'll
talk many more times on this podcast
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by some thoughts related to the episode
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note
let me say that my work at mit on
autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles
led me to study the human side of
autonomy enough
to understand that it's a beautifully
complicated and interesting problem
space
much richer than what can be studied in
the lab
in that sense the data that comma ai
tesla autopilot
and perhaps others like cadillac super
crews are collecting
gives us a chance to understand how we
can design safe
semiautonomous vehicles for real human
beings
in real world conditions i think this
requires bold innovation
and a serious exploration of the first
principles of the driving task
itself if you enjoy this thing subscribe
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twitter at lex friedman
and now here's my conversation with
george
hotz so last time we started talking
about the simulation
this time let me ask you do you think
there's intelligent life out there in
the universe
i've always maintained my answer to the
fermi paradox i think there
has been intelligent life elsewhere in
the universe
so the intelligent civilizations existed
but they've blown themselves up so your
general intuition is that intelligent
civilizations quickly like there's that
parameter
in in the drake equation your senses
they don't last very long
yeah how are we doing on that like have
we lasted pretty
pretty good i don't know we do oh yeah
i mean not quite yet
well what telly has your caskey the iq
required to destroy the world falls by
one point every year
okay so technology democratizes
the destruction of the world when can a
meme destroy the world
it kind of is already right somewhat
i don't think i don't think we've seen
anywhere near the worst of it yet
world's going to get weird well maybe a
mu can save the world
you thought about that the meme lord
elon musk fighting on the side of good
versus the uh the meme lord of the
darkness which is uh not saying anything
bad about donald trump
but he is the the lord of the meme on
the dark side he's a darth vader of
memes
i think in every fairy tale
they always end it with and they lived
happily ever after and i'm like please
tell me more about this happily ever
after i've heard
50 percent of marriages end in divorce
uh why doesn't your marriage end up
there you can't just say happily ever
after so
it's the thing about destruction is it's
over after the destruction
um we have to do everything right in
order to avoid it
and uh one thing wrong i mean actually
that's what i really like about
cryptography
cryptography it seems like we live in a
world where the defense wins
um versus like nuclear weapons the
opposite is true
it is much easier to build a warhead
that splits into 100 little warheads
than to build something that can
you know take out 100 little warheads uh
the offense has the advantage there
um so maybe our future is in crypto but
uh so cryptography right the goliath is
the
the defense and then all the different
hackers
are the uh are the davids and that
equation is flipped for nuclear war
because there's so many like one nuclear
weapon destroys everything
essentially yeah and it is much easier
to uh
attack with a nuclear weapon than it is
to like the technology required to
intercept and destroy
a rocket is much more complicated than
the technology required to just you know
orbital trajectory send a rocket to
somebody
so okay your intuition that the there
were intelligent
civilizations out there but it's very
possible that they're
no longer there that's kind of a sad
picture they
enter some steady state they all
wirehead themselves
what's wirehead um stimulate stimulate
their pleasure centers
uh and just you know live forever in
this kind of stasis
they become well i mean i think the
reason i believe this is because where
are they
if there's some reason they stopped
expanding
because otherwise they would have taken
over the universe the universe isn't
that big or at least you know
let's just talk about the galaxy right
70 000 light years across
uh i took that number from star trek
voyager i don't know how true it is but
um
uh yeah that's not big right 70
000 light years is nothing for some
possible technology that you can imagine
that could leverage like wormholes or
something like that
you don't even need wormholes just a von
neumann probe is enough a von
neumann probe and a million years of
sublight travel and you'd have taken
over the whole universe
that clearly uh didn't happen so
something stopped it
so you mean if you right for for like a
few million years
if you sent out probes that travel close
what's sublight
meaning close to the speed of light
let's it just spreads
interesting actually that's an
interesting calculation
huh so what makes you think that would
be able to uh communicate with them
like uh yeah what what's
why do you think we would able to be
able to comprehend
intelligent lives that are out there
like
even if they were among us kind of thing
like
or even just flying around well
i mean that's possible it's possible
that there is some sort of prime
directive
uh that'd be a really cool universe to
live in um and there's some reason
they're not making themselves visible to
us
but it makes sense that they would use
the same
well at least the same entropy well
you're implying the same laws of physics
i don't know what you mean by entropy
in this case oh yeah i mean if entropy
is the scarce resource in the universe
so what do you think about like stephen
wolfram and everything is a computation
and then what if they are traveling
through this world of computation so
if you think of the universe as just
information processing
then uh what you're referring to with
with entropy
and then these these pockets of
interesting complex computations
swimming around
how do we know they're not already here
how do we know that this like all the
different
amazing things that are full of mystery
on earth
are just like little footprints of
intelligence from
light years away maybe i mean
i tend to think that as civilizations
expand they use more and more energy
uh and you can never overcome the
problem of waste heat so where is their
waste heat
so we'd be able to with our crude
methods be able to see like there's a
whole lot of
energy here but it could be something
we're not i mean we don't understand
dark energy right dark matter
it could be just stuff we don't
understand at all or they could have a
fundamentally different physics
you know like that that we just don't
even compromise well i think
okay i mean it depends how far out you
want to go i don't think physics is very
different on the other side of the
galaxy
i would suspect that they have i mean if
they're in our
universe they have the same physics well
yeah that's the assumption we have
but there could be like super trippy
things like
like our cognition
only gets to a slice oh and all the
possible instruments that we can design
only get to a particular slice of the
universe and there's something much
like weirder maybe we can try a thought
experiment
um would people from the past
be able to detect the remnants of our
uh we would be able to detect our modern
civilization i think the answer is
obviously yes
you mean past from 100 years ago well
let's even go back further let's go to a
million years ago
right the humans who were lying around
in the desert probably didn't even have
maybe they just barely had fire uh
they would understand if a 747 flew
overhead
in in in this vicinity but not um
if the if a 747 flew on mars
because they wouldn't be able to see far
because we're not actually communicating
that well
with the rest of the universe we're
doing okay we're just sending out random
like
50s tracks of music true
and yeah i mean they'd have to you know
the we've only been broadcasting radio
waves for
um 150 years and well there's your light
cone
so yeah okay what do you make about all
the
i recently came across this uh having
talked to
david fravor i don't know if you caught
what the
the videos that pentagon released and
uh the new york times reporting of the
ufo sightings
so i kind of looked into it quote
unquote and
there's actually been like
hundreds of thousands of ufo sightings
right
and a lot of it you can explain away in
different kinds of ways
so one is it could be interesting
physical phenomena
two it could be people wanting to
believe
and therefore they conjure up a lot of
different things that just you know when
you see different kinds of lights some
basic physics phenomena
and then you just conjure up ideas of
possible
out there mysterious worlds but you know
it's also possible like you have a case
of
david fravor who is a navy pilot
who's you know as legit as a guest in
terms of
humans who are able to perceive
things in the environment and make
conclusions whether those things are a
threat or not
and he and several other pilots saw
a thing i don't know if you followed
this but they saw a thing that they've
since then called tick tock that moved
in all kinds of weird ways
they don't know what it is it could be
technology developed by by the united
states
and they're just not aware of it and the
surface level from the navy right it
could be
different kind of lighting technology or
drone technology all that kind of stuff
it could be the russians and then
chinese all that kind of stuff
and of course their mind our mind
can also venture into the possibility
that it's from another world
have you looked into this at all what do
you think about it
i think all the news is a psyop
i think that the most closing is real
yeah i listened to the uh i think it was
bob lazar
um on joe rogan and like i believe
everything this guy is saying and then i
think that it's probably just some like
mk ultra kind of thing you know
uh what do you mean like they they uh
you know they made some weird thing and
they called it an alien spaceship you
know maybe it was just to like
stimulate young physicist minds we'll
tell them it's alien technology and
we'll see what they come up with right
do you find any conspiracy theories
compelling like have you
pulled at the string of the of the rich
complex world of conspiracy theories
that's out there
i think that uh i've heard a conspiracy
theory that conspiracy theories were
invented by the cia
in the 60s to discredit true things yeah
um so you know you can go to ridiculous
conspiracy theories like flat earth and
pizzagate
and uh you know these things are almost
to hide like
conspiracy theories that like you know
remember when the chinese like locked up
the doctors who discovered coronavirus
like i tell people this and i'm like
no no that's not a conspiracy theory
that actually happened
do you remember the time that the money
used to be backed by gold and now it's
backed by nothing this is not a
conspiracy theory this actually
happened that's one of my worries
today with the idea of fake news is that
when nothing is real
then like you dilute the possibility of
anything being true by
conjuring up all kinds of conspiracy
theories and then you don't know what to
believe and then
like the idea of truth of objectivity is
lost completely
everybody has their own truth so you
used to control information by censoring
it
then the internet happened and
governments are like oh we can't
censor things anymore
i know what we'll do you know it's the
old story
of uh the story of like tying a flag
where the leprechaun tells you the gold
is buried
and you tie one flag and you make the
leprechaun swear to not remove the flag
and you come back to the field later
with a shovel and there's flags
everywhere
that's one way to maintain privacy right
is like
in order to protect the contents of this
conversation for example we could just
generate like millions of deep fake
conversations where you and i talk
and say random things yeah so this is
just one of them and nobody knows which
one was the real one
this this could be fake right now
classic steganography technique
okay another absurd question about
intelligent life because uh
you know you're you're an incredible
programmer outside of everything else
we'll talk about just as a programmer
uh do you think intelligent beings out
there the civilizations that were out
there
had computers and programming
did they do we naturally have to develop
something where we engineer machines
and are able to encode both
knowledge into those machines and
instructions that
process that knowledge process that
information to to make decisions and
actions and so on
and with those programming languages if
you think they exist
be at all similar to anything we've
developed
so i don't see that much of a difference
between
quote-unquote natural languages and
programming languages
um yeah i think there's so many
similarities so
when asked the question what do alien
languages look like
i imagine they're not all that
dissimilar from ours
and i think translating in and out of
them
uh wouldn't be that crazy well it's
difficult to compile
like dna to python and then to see
i mean there is a little bit of a gap in
in the kind of languages we use for
for uh touring machines and the kind of
languages
nature seems to use a little bit maybe
that's just
we just haven't cr we haven't understood
the kind of language that nature uses
well
yet dna is a cad model
it's not quite a programming language it
has no sort of
serial execution it's not quite a
yeah it's a cad model um so i think in
that sense
we actually completely understand it the
problem is um you know
well simulating on these cad models i
played with it a bit this year
is super uh computationally intensive if
you want to go down to like the
molecular level
um where you need to go to see a lot of
these phenomena like protein folding
um so yeah it's not that it's it's not
it's not that we don't understand it it
just requires a whole lot of compute to
kind of
compile it for our human minds it's
inefficient both for the pro
for the data representation and for the
programming yeah it runs well on raw
nature
it runs well in raw nature and when we
try to build uh emulators or simulators
for that
uh well then manslaughter and i've tried
it
it runs in yeah you've commented
elsewhere
i don't remember where that uh
one of the problems is simulating nature
is tough
and if you want to sort of deploy a
prototype
i forgot how you you put it but it made
me laugh but animals or humans would
need to be involved
in order to in order to try to run some
prototype code on um
like if we're talking about covid and
viruses and so on yeah
if you were trying to engineer some kind
of defense mechanisms
like a vaccine uh against coven or
all that kind of stuff that doing any
kind of experimentation like you can
with like autonomous vehicles would be
very
technically cost technically and
ethically costly i'm not sure about that
i think you can do tons of
uh crazy biology and in test tubes i
think
my bigger complaint is more all the
tools are so bad
like literally you mean like like i'm
not libraries and i'm not pipetting
like you're handing me a i gotta no no
no no there has to be some
like automating stuff and like the
yeah but human biology is messy like it
seems like
look at those toronto's videos they were
a joke it's like it's like a little
gantry it's like a little xy gantry high
school science project with the pipette
i'm like
really gotta be something better you
can't build like nice microfluidics and
i can program the you know
computation to bio interface i mean this
is going to happen
but like right now if you are asking me
to pipette
50 milliliters of solution amount
this is so crude yeah okay
let's get all the crazy out of the way
uh so a bunch of people ask me
since we talked about the simulation
last time we talked about hacking the
simulation
do you have any updates any insights
about how we might be able to go about
hacking simulation if we indeed do live
in a simulation
i think a lot of people misinterpreted
the point of that south by talk
the point of the south by talk was not
literally to hack the simulation
uh i think that this
we this is this is an idea is literally
just i think theoretical physics i think
that's the whole
you know the whole goal
right you want your grand unified theory
but then okay build a brand new five
theory search for exploits
right i think we're nowhere near
actually there yet
my hope with that was just more to like
like are you people kidding me with the
things you spend time thinking about
do you understand like kind of how small
you are
you are you are bites and god's computer
really and the things that people get
worked up about and
you know so basically it was more
a message of uh we should humble
ourselves
that we we get to uh like what
what are we humans in this bite code
yeah
and not just just humble ourselves but
like like i'm not trying to like make
you feel guilty or anything like that
i'm trying to say like literally
look at what you are spending time on
right what are you referring to you're
referring to the kardashians what are we
talking about
from twitter to no the kardashians see
everyone knows that's kind of
fun i'm referring more to like the
economy
you know this idea that
we gotta up our stock price like
or or what is what is the goal function
of humanity
you don't like the game of capitalism
like you don't like the games we've
constructed for ourselves as humans
i'm a big fan of of capitalism i don't
think that's really the game we're
playing right now i think we're playing
a
a different game where the rules are
rigged
look at which games are interesting to
you that we humans have constructed and
which aren't
which are productive and which
are not actually maybe that's the real
point of the
of the talk it's like stop playing these
fake human games there's a real game
here
we can play the real game the real game
is you know nature wrote the rules
this is a real game there still is a
game to play
but if you look at sergeant drop i don't
know if you've seen the instagram
account nature is metal
the game that nature seems to be playing
is a lot
a lot more cruel than we humans want to
put up with or
at least we see it as cool it's like the
bigger
thing eats the smaller thing and uh
does it to impress another big thing
so it can mate with that thing and
that's it that
seems to be the entirety of it well
there's no art there's no music there's
no
comma ai there's no comma one no comma
two no george
hotz with his brilliant talks at south
by southwest
see i disagree though i disagree that
this is what nature is i think nature
just provided basically a uh
open world and mmorpg and um
you know here it's open world i mean if
that's the game you want to play you can
play that game but
isn't that isn't that beautiful i know
if you play diablo they used to have uh
i think cow level
where it's
so everybody will go just they figured
out this like the best way to gain
like experience points is to just
slaughter cows over and over and over
and uh so they figured out this little
sub game within the bigger game that
this is the most efficient way
to get experience points and everybody
somehow agreed that getting experience
points in
rpg context where you always want to be
getting more stuff
more skills more levels keep advancing
that seems to be good
so might as well spend sacrifice
actual enjoyment of playing a game
exploring a world
and spending like hundreds of hours of
your time in cow level i mean
the number of hours i spent in cow level
i'm not like the most impressive person
because people have probably thousands
of hours there but it's ridiculous
so that's a little absurd game that
brought me joy in some weird dopamine
drug kind of way
yeah so you you don't like those games
you don't
you don't think that's us humans failing
the the yeah nature i think so
and that was the point of the talk yeah
so how do we hack it then
well i want to live forever and wait
i want to live forever and this is like
the goal well that's a game against
nature
yeah immortality is the good objective
function to you
i mean start there and then you can do
whatever else you want cause you got a
long time
what if mortality makes the game just
totally not fun
i mean like why do you assume
immortality
is uh somehow uh it's not
a good objective function it's not
immortality that i want a true
immortality where i could not die
i would prefer what we have right now um
but i want to choose my own death of
course
i don't want nature to decide when i die
i'm going to win i'm going to be you
and then at some point if you choose
commit suicide
like how long you think you'd live
until i get bored see i don't think
people
like in like brilliant people like you
that really
ponder living a long time
are really considering how
how meaningless life becomes well i want
to know everything and then i'm ready
to die
as long as why do you want isn't it
possible that you want to know
everything because
it's finite like the reason you want to
know quote unquote everything is because
you don't have enough time to know
everything
and once you have unlimited time then
you realize like
why do anything like why learn anything
i want to know everything and i'm ready
to die so you have yeah
well it's not it's not a like it's a
terminal value it's not
it's not in service of anything else i'm
conscious of the possibility this is not
a certainty
but the possibility is of that engine of
curiosity that you're speaking to
is actually a
a symptom of uh the finiteness of life
like
without that finiteness
your curiosity would vanish like like a
like a morning fog
all right cool then you talked about
love like that then um
let me solve immortality let me change
the thing in my brain that reminds me of
the fact that i'm immortal tells me that
life is finite maybe i'll have it
tell me that life ends next week
right i'm okay with some self
manipulation like that i'm okay with
with deceiving oh change
oh rico changing the code if that's the
problem right if the problem is that i
will no longer have that
that curiosity i'd like to have backup
copies of myself
uh which yeah well which i check in with
occasionally to make sure they're okay
with the trajectory and they can kind of
override it
maybe a nice like i think of like those
wavenets those like logarithmic go back
to the copies yeah but sometimes it's
not reversible like uh
sure i've done this with video games
when once you figure out the cheat code
or like you look up
how to cheat old school like single
player
it ruins the game for you absolutely i
know that feeling but again
that just means our brain manipulation
technology is not good enough yet remove
that cheat code from your brain
what if we all so it's also possible
that if we figure out immortality
that all of us will kill ourselves
before we advance
far enough to uh to be able to revert to
change
i'm not killing myself till i know
everything so
that's what you say now because your
life is finite
you know i think yes self-modifying
systems gets
comes up with all these hairy
complexities and can i promise that i'll
do it perfectly no but i think i can put
good safety structures in place
so that talk in your thinking here is
not literally
referring to uh a simulation in that our
our universe is a kind of computer
program running in a computer
that's more of a thought experiment um
do you also think of the potential of
the sort of uh
bostrom elon musk
and others that talk about an actual
program
that simulates our universe oh i don't
doubt that we're in a simulation i just
think that it's not
quite that important i mean i'm
interested only in simulation theory as
far as like it gives me power
over nature uh if it's totally
unfalsifiable then
who cares i mean what do you think that
experiment would look like like somebody
uh
on twitter asked ask george what signs
we would look for to know whether or not
we're in the simulation
which is exactly what you're asking is
like
the step that precedes the step of
knowing how to get more power
from this knowledge is to get an
indication that there is some power to
be gained so
get an indication that there you can
discover
and exploit cracks in the simulation or
it doesn't
you know in the physics of the universe
yeah
show me i mean like a memory leak would
be cool
like some scrying technology you know
what what kind of technology
scrying what's that oh that's a weird uh
this crying is the
is the uh paranormal ability to uh
like like remote viewing like being able
to see somewhere where you're not
um so you know i don't think you can do
it by chanting in a room but um
if we could find as a memory leak
basically
yeah you're able to access parts you're
not supposed to yeah yeah yeah and
thereby discover shortcut
yeah maybe memory leak means the other
thing as well but i mean like yeah like
an ability to read arbitrary memory
yeah right and that one's not that
horrifying right the the right ones
start to be horrifying
read right so the the reading is not the
problem yeah
it's like heartbleed for the universe oh
boy the writing is a big big problem
it's a big problem it's the moment you
can write anything even if it's just
random noise that's terrifying
i mean even without even without that
like even some of the you know the
nanotech stuff that's coming i think is
i don't know if you're paying attention
but actually eric weinstein came out
with the theory of everything
i mean that came out he's been working
on a theory of everything in the physics
world
called geometric community and then for
me from computer science person
like you stephen wolfram's theory of
everything of like hypographs is super
interesting and beautiful
but not from a physics perspective but
from a computational perspective i don't
know have you paid attention
to any of that so again like what would
make me pay attention and like why like
i hate string theory is okay make a
testable prediction
right i'm only interested in i'm not
interested in theories for their
intrinsic beauty i'm interested in
theories that give me power over the
universe
so if these theories do i'm very
interested um can i just say how
beautiful that
is because a lot of physicists say i'm
interested in experimental validation
and they skip out the part
where they say to give me more power in
the universe
i just love the um yo i want i want i
want the clarity of that
i want 100 gigahertz processors i want
transistors that are smaller than atoms
i want like
power
that's uh that's true and that's where
people
from aliens to this kind of technology
where people are worried that
governments like who owns that power
is it george hearts is it thousands of
distributed hackers across the world
is it governments you know is it mark
zuckerberg
there's a lot of people that uh
i don't know if anyone trusts any one
individual with power so they're always
worried
it's the beauty of blockchains that's
the beauty of blockchains
which we'll talk about on twitter
somebody pointed me to a story uh
a bunch of people pointed me to a story
a few months ago
where you went into a restaurant in new
york and you can correct me fame this is
wrong
and ran into a bunch of folks from a
company in a
crypto company who are trying to scale
up ethereum
and they had a technical deadline
related to a solidity to ovm compiler
so these are all ethereum technologies
so
you stepped in they recognized you uh
pulled you aside explained their problem
and you stepped in and helped them solve
the problem
uh thereby creating legend status
story so uh can you uh
tell me the story the little more detail
it seems kind of incredible
this did this happen yeah yeah it's a
true story it's a true story i mean they
wrote a very flattering
account of it um they
so optimism is the spin the company's
called optimism
spin-off of plasma they're trying to
build l2 solutions on ethereum
so right now uh
every ethereum node has to run every
transaction
on the ethereum network um and this kind
of doesn't scale right because if you
have n computers
well you know if that becomes two n
computers you actually still get the
same amount of compute
right this is this is like like o of one
scaling
um because they all have to run it okay
fine you get more
blockchain security but like the
blockchain's already so secure
can we trade some of that off for speed
uh so that's kind of what these l2
solutions are
they built this thing which kind of um
kind of sandbox
uh for ethereum contracts so they can
run it in this l2 world and it can't do
certain things in l world
in l1 i can ask you for some definitions
what's l2
oh l2 is layer 2. so l1 is like the base
ethereum chain
and then layer two is like a
computational layer that runs
um elsewhere but still is kind of
secured by layer one
and i'm sure a lot of people know but
ethereum is a cryptocurrency probably
one of the most popular cryptocurrencies
second to bitcoin
and a lot of interesting technological
innovations there
maybe you can also slip in
whenever you talk about this any things
that are exciting to you in the
ethereum space and why ethereum well i
mean
bitcoin uh is not turn complete
well ethereum is not technically a
terrain complete with a gas limit but
close enough
well the gas limit what's the gas limit
resources
yeah i mean no computers actually turn
complete right right
you're fine at ram you know what if i
can actually solve this gas limit you
just have so many brilliant
words i'm not even gonna ask but that's
what that's no that's not my word that's
ethereum's word
gasoline ethereum you have to spend gas
per instruction
so like different op codes use different
amounts of gas and you
buy gas with ether to prevent people
from basically ddosing the network
so uh bitcoin is proof of work and then
what's ethereum it's also proof of work
uh they're working on some
proof-of-stake ethereum 2.0 stuff but
right now it's
it's proof of work usually a different
hash function from bitcoin that's more
asic resistance because you need ram
so we're all talking about ethereum 1.0
yeah so what uh
what were they trying to do to scale
this whole process so they were like
well
if we could run contracts elsewhere um
and then only save the results of that
computation
uh you know well we don't actually have
to do the computer on the chain we can
do the compute off chain and just post
what the results are
now the problem with that is well
somebody could lie about what the
results are
so you need a resolution mechanism and
the resolution mechanism can be really
expensive
uh because you know you just have to
make sure that like
the person who is saying look i swear
that this is the real computation
i'm staking ten thousand dollars on that
fact and
if you prove it wrong yeah it might cost
you three thousand dollars in gas fees
to prove wrong
but you'll get the ten thousand dollar
bounty so you can secure
using those kind of systems um
so it's effectively a sandbox which runs
contracts
uh and like just like any kind of normal
sandbox you have to like replace
syscalls with um you know calls into the
hypervisor
uh sandbox this calls hypervisor what do
these things mean
uh as long as it's interesting to talk
about yeah i mean you can take like the
chrome
is maybe the one to think about right so
the chrome process that's doing a
rendering
uh can't for example read a file from
the file system yeah
it has if it tries to make an open
syscall in linux the open system
you can't make it open says call no no
no uh you have to request
from the kind of uh hypervisor process
or
like i don't know what's called in
chrome but um
the canoe hey could you open this file
for me and then it does all these checks
and then it passes the file handle back
in if it's approved
um so that's yeah uh so what's the in
the context of ethereum
what are the boundaries of the sandbox
that we're talking about um well like
one of the calls that you
actually reading and uh writing any
state to the ethereum contract
to the ethereum blockchain um
writing state is one of those calls that
you're going to have to sandbox
in layer two because if you let layer
two just
arbitrarily right to the ethereum
blockchain um
so layer two is except is really sitting
on top of
layer one so you're gonna have a lot of
different kinds of ideas that you can
play with
yeah and they're all they're not
fundamentally changing
the source code level of ethereum
well you have to replace a bunch of
calls
with calls into the hypervisor so
instead of doing the syscall directly
you you replace it with a call to the
hypervisor
so originally they were doing this by
first running the so solidity is the
language that most ethereum contracts
are written in
it compiles to a byte code and then they
wrote this thing they called the
transpiler and the transpiler took the
byte code
and it transpiled it into ovm safe
bytecode
basically bytecode that didn't make any
of those restricted syscalls and added
the calls to the hypervisor
this transpiler was a 3000 line mess
and it's hard to do it's hard to do if
you're trying to do it like that because
you have to kind of like deconstruct the
byte code
change things about it and then
reconstruct it
and i mean as soon as i hear this i'm
like why don't you just change the
compiler
right why not the first place you build
the bytecode just do it in the compiler
uh so yeah you know i asked them how
much they wanted it
uh of course measured in dollars and i'm
like well okay
um and yeah and you wrote the compiler
yeah i modified i wrote a 300 line diff
to the compiler
uh it's open source you can look at it
yeah it's yeah i looked at the code last
night
[Laughter]
yeah exactly cute good is a good word
for it
uh and it's um c plus plus
see if it's lost yeah so when
asked how you were able to do it you
said
you just gotta think and then do it
right
so can you break that apart a little bit
what's what's your process of uh
one thinking and two doing it right
you know they they the people i was
working for are amused that i said that
it doesn't really mean anything
okay i mean is there some
deep profound insights to draw from like
how you problem solve from that because
this is always what i say i'm like do
you want to be a good programmer do it
for 20 years
yeah there's no shortcuts yeah
what are your thoughts on crypto in
general so would
what what parts technically or
philosophically do you find especially
beautiful maybe
oh i'm extremely bullish on crypto long
term not any specific crypto project
but this idea of
well two ideas one um
the nakamoto consensus algorithm is
i think one of the greatest innovations
of the 21st century
this idea that people can reach
consensus you can reach a group
consensus
using a relatively straightforward
algorithm
um is wild and
like you know satoshi nakamoto people
always ask me who i look up to it's like
whoever that is who do you think it is i
mean
elon musk is it you it is definitely not
me and i do not think it's elon musk
but yeah this idea of uh
groups reaching consensus in a
decentralized yet formulaic way
is one extremely powerful idea from
crypto
maybe the second idea is this idea of
smart contracts
when you write a contract between two
parties
any contract um this contract
if there are disputes it's interpreted
by lawyers
lawyers are just really shitty overpaid
interpreters
imagine you had let's talk about them in
terms of a in terms of like let's
compare a lawyer to python
right so lawyer well okay that's really
oh i never thought of it that way it's
hilarious
so python i'm paying i'm paying um
you know even 10 cents an hour i'll use
the nice azure machine i can run python
for 10 cents an hour
lawyers cost a thousand dollars an hour
so python is is is
10 000 x uh better on that axis um
lawyers don't always return the same
answer
um python almost always does
uh cost
yeah i mean just just cost reliability
everything about python is so much
better than lawyers um so if you can
make smart contracts
this whole concept of code is law
i i love and i would love to live in a
world where everybody accepted that fact
so so maybe uh you can talk about what
smart contracts
are so let's say um
let's say you know we have a uh
even something as simple as a safety
deposit box
right safety deposit box that holds a
million dollars
i have a contract with the bank that
says two out of these three parties
uh must uh be present to open the safety
deposit box and get the money out
so that's a contract for the bank and
it's only as good as the bank and the
lawyers right
let's say you know somebody dies and now
oh we're going to go through a big legal
dispute about whether oh well was it in
the will was it not in the well
what like it's just so messy and the
cost
to determine truth is so expensive
versus a smart contract which just uses
cryptography to check if two out of
three keys are present
well i can look at that and i can have
certainty
in the answer that it's going to return
that's what all businesses want
certainty you know they say businesses
don't care viacom youtube
youtube's like look we don't care which
way this lawsuit goes
just please tell us so we can have
certainty yeah i wonder how many
agreements in this world because we're
talking about financial transactions
only in this case correct the smart the
smart contracts oh you can go to you can
go to anything
you can go you could put a prenup in the
theorem blockchain
a married smart contract sorry divorce
lawyers sorry you're going gonna be
replaced by
python uh
okay so that's uh
so that's that's another beautiful idea
do you think
there's something that's appealing to
you about any one specific
implementation
so if you look 10 20 50 years down the
line
do you see any like bitcoin ethereum
any of the other hundreds of
cryptocurrencies winning out is there
like what's your intuition about the
space are you just sitting back and
watching the chaos and look who cares
what emerges
oh i don't i don't speculate i don't
really care i don't really care which
one of these projects wins
i'm kind of in the bitcoin as a meme
coin camp i mean why does bitcoin have
value
it's technically kind of you know
what yeah not great like the block size
debate or
when i found out what the block size
debate was i'm like are you guys
kidding what's the block size debate
you know what it's really it's too
stupid to even talk about people
people people can look it up but i'm
like wow you know ethereum seems the
governance of ethereum seems much better
um i've come around i've been on proof
of stake ideas
uh you know very smart people thinking
about some things yeah
you know governance is interesting it
does feel like uh
vitalik it could just feel like an
open in even in these distributed
systems leaders and
are helpful because they kind of
help you drive the mission and the
vision
and they put a face to a project it's a
weird thing about us humans
geniuses are helpful like mattel right
yeah
brilliant
leaders are not necessarily yeah
so you think the reason he's uh he's the
face
of a theorem is because he's a genius
that's interesting
i mean that was um
it's interesting to think about that we
need to create systems
in which uh the quote unquote leaders
that emerge
are the geniuses in the system i mean
that's
arguably why the current state of
democracy is broken is the people who
are
emerging as the leaders are not the most
competent are not the superstars of the
system
and it seems like at least for now in
the crypto world oftentimes
the leaders are the superstars imagine
at the debate they asked
what's the sixth amendment what are the
four fundamental forces in the universe
right what's the integral of two to the
x
yeah i i'd love to see those questions
asked and that's what i want as our
leader
it's it's a little bit of a bayes rule
yeah i mean even oh wow you're hurting
my brain
it's that my standard was even lower but
i would have loved to see just this
basic
brilliance like i've talked to
historians there's just these
they're not even like they don't have a
phd or even education history they just
like a dan carlin type character who
just like
holy how did all this information
get into your head
they're able to just connect uh genghis
khan to
the entirety of the history of the 20th
century they
they know everything about every single
battle that happened
and they know the the the like
the game of thrones of the of the
different power plays and all that
happened there
and they know like the individuals they
know all the documents involved
and it's and that they integrate that
into their regular life it's not like
they're ultra history nerds they're just
they know this information that's what
competence looks like yeah
because i've seen that with programmers
too right that's what great programmers
do
but yeah it would be uh it's really
unfortunate that those kinds of people
aren't emerging as as our leaders but
for
now at least in the crypto world that
seems to be the case
i don't know if that always uh you could
imagine that in a hundred years that's
not the case right the crypto world has
one very powerful idea going for it and
that's the idea of forks
right i mean
you know imagine uh
we'll use a less controversial example
um this was actually in my joke
uh app in 2012 i was like barack obama
mitt romney let's let him both be
president right like imagine we could
fork america
and just let them both be president and
then the americas could compete
and you know people could invest in one
pull their liquidity out of one put it
in the other
you have this in the crypto world
ethereum forks into ethereum and
ethereum classic
and you can pull your liquidity out of
one and put it in another
and people vote with their dollars um
which forks companies should be able to
fork
i'd love to fork nvidia you know
yeah like different business strategies
and yeah and then try them out and see
see what works like even take uh
uh yeah take comedy i that closes its
source
and then take one that's open source and
see what works
take one that's purchased by gm and one
that remains
android renegade and all these different
versions and see the beauty of comma ai
is someone could actually do that
yeah please take come ai and fork it
that's right
that's the beauty of open source so
you're i mean
we'll talk about autonomous vehicle
space but it does seem that
you're really knowledgeable about
a lot of different topics so the natural
question a bunch of people ask this
which is
uh how do you keep learning new things
do you have
like practical advice if you were to
introspect
like taking notes allocate time
or do you just mess around and just
allow your curiosity to drive i'll write
these people a self-help book and i'll
charge 67
for it and i will i will write i will
write chapter one i will write on the
cover of the self-help
book all of this advice is completely
meaningless you're gonna be a sucker and
buy this book anyway
yeah and the one lesson that i hope they
take away from the book
is that i can't give you a meaningful
answer to that
that's interesting let me translate that
is you haven't really thought about what
it is you do
systematically because you could reduce
it and there's some people i mean i've
met
brilliant people that this is really
clear with athletes
some are just you know the best in the
world that's something
and they they have zero interest in
writing like a self-help book
but or how to master this game and then
there's
some athletes who become great coaches
and they love the analysis
perhaps the over analysis and you right
now at least at your age
which isn't interesting you're in the
middle of the battle you're like the
warriors that have zero interest in
writing books
uh so you're in the middle of the battle
so you have yeah
this is this is a fair point i do think
i have a certain aversion
to um this kind of deliberate
intentional way of living life
here eventually the hilarity of this
especially
since this is recorded
it will reveal beautifully the absurdity
when you finally do publish this book
and i guarantee you you will the story
of comma ai
would be maybe it'll be a biography
written about you
they'll be they'll be better i guess and
you might be able to learn some cute
lessons if you're starting a company
like comma ai from that book
but if you're asking generic questions
like how do i be good at things
dude i don't know well learn i mean the
interesting do them a lot
i do them a lot but the interesting
thing here is
learning things outside
of your current trajectory which is what
it feels like from an outsider's
perspective i mean that
uh you know that i don't know if there's
an advice on that
but it is an interesting curiosity when
you become really busy
you're running a company
part time yeah
but like there's a natural inclination
and
trend like just the the the momentum of
life
carries you into a particular direction
of wanting to focus and this kind of
dispersion that curiosity can lead to
gets harder and harder with time because
you're
you get really good at certain things
and it sucks
trying things that you're not good at
like trying to figure them out
you do this with your live streams
you're on the
fly figuring stuff out you don't mind
looking dumb
you just figured out figure it out
pretty quickly sometimes i try things
and i don't figure them out
my chest rating is like a 1400 despite
putting like
a couple hundred hours in it's pathetic
i mean to be fair i know that i could do
it better if i did it better like don't
play you know don't play five-minute
games play 15-minute games at least like
i know these things but it just doesn't
it doesn't stick nicely in my knowledge
tree
all right let's talk about comma ai
what's the mission of the company
let's like look at the biggest picture
oh i have an exact statement
solve self-driving cars while delivering
shippable intermediaries
so long-term vision is have
fully autonomous vehicles and make sure
you're making money along the way
i think it doesn't really speak to money
but i can talk i can talk about what
solve self-driving cars means
solve self-driving cars of course means
um
you're not building a new car you're
building a person replacement
uh that person can sit in the driver's
seat and drive you anywhere a person can
drive
with a human or better level of safety
speed quality comfort
and what's the second part of that
delivering shippable intermediaries
um is well it's a way to fund the
company that's true but it's also a way
to keep us honest
uh if you don't have that it is very
easy
with this technology to think you're
making progress when you're not
i've heard it best described on hacker
news as
you can set any arbitrary milestone
meet that milestone and still be
infinitely far away from solving
self-driving cars
so it's hard to have like real deadlines
when you're like
cruz or waymo
when uh you don't have uh revenue
is that i mean is revenue essentially
the thing we're talking about here
revenue is
is capitalism is based around consent
capitalism the way that you get revenue
is kind of
real capitalism commas in the real
capital is in camp there's definitely
scams out there but
real capitalism is based around consent
it's based around this idea that like if
we're getting revenue
it's because we're providing at least
that much value another person when
someone buys a thousand dollar comment
two from us
we're providing them at least a thousand
dollars of value where they wouldn't buy
it brilliant
so can you give a whirlwind overview of
the products that come i
provides like uh throughout its history
and today
i mean yeah the past ones aren't really
that interesting it's kind of just been
refinement of the same idea uh
the real only product we sell today is
the comma two which is a piece of
hardware
with cameras um so the comet to
i mean you can think about it kind of
like a person uh you know when future
hardware will probably be even more and
more person-like
um so it has uh you know eyes
ears a mouth a brain
uh and a way to interface with the car
does it have consciousness
just kidding that was a trick question
because i don't have consciousness
either
me and the common two are the same
they're the same i have a little more
compute than it
it only has like the same computer
interesting b
uh you know you're more efficient energy
wise
for the compute you're doing far more
efficient energy-wise
huh 20 paid flaps 20 watts crazy you
lack consciousness
sure do you fear death you do you want
immortality
does comey i fear death i don't think so
of course it does it very much fears
while it fears negative loss