Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality | Lex Fridman Podcast #250

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. support it please check out our sponsors. in the description and now here's my. conversation with peter wang.

you're one of the most impactful humans. in the python ecosystem. so you're an engineer leader of. engineers but you're also a philosopher. so let's talk both in this conversation. about programming and philosophy. first programming. what do you is the best or maybe the. most beautiful feature of python or. maybe the thing that made you fall in. love or. stay in love with python well those are. three different things what i think is.

most beautiful what made me fall in love. with me stay in love when i first. started using it. was when i was a c plus computer. graphics performance nerd in the 90s and. yeah in late 90s and that was my first. job out of college. um. and we kept trying to do more and more. uh like abstract and higher order. programming in c plus which at the time. was quite difficult with templates the. the compiler support wasn't great etc. so when i started playing around with. python that was my first time. encountering really first class support.

for types for functions and things like. that and it felt so incredibly. expressive. so that was what kind of made me fall in. love with a little bit and also. once you spend a lot of time in a c plus. dev environment the ability to just whip. something together that basically runs. and works the first time. is amazing so really productive. scripting language i mean i i knew pearl. i knew bash i was decent at both but. python just made everything it made the. whole world accessible right i could. script this and that and the other.

network things. you know little hard drive utilities i. could write all these things in the. space of an afternoon and that was. really really cool that's what made me. fall in love is there something specific. you could put your finger on. that you're not programming in perl. today like why python for scripting. i think. there's not a specific thing as much as. the design motif of both the the creator. of the language and the core. uh group of people that built the. standard library around him. um. there was definitely.

there was a taste to it i mean steve. jobs you know used that term you know in. somewhat of an arrogant way but i think. it's a real thing that it was designed. to fit a friend of mine actually. expressed this really well he said. python just fits in my head. and there's nothing better to to say. than that now now people might argue. modern python there's a lot more. complexity but certainly as version 5. 152 i think is my first version. that fit in my head very easily so. that's what made me fall in love with it. okay so. the most beautiful. feature of python that made you stay in.

love it's like over the years. what has like you know you do a double. take you you return too often as a thing. that just brings you a smile i really. still like the um. the ability to play with meta classes. and express higher order things when i. have to create some new. object model to model something right. it's easy for me because i'm i'm pretty. expert as a python programmer i can. easily put all sorts of lovely things. together and use properties and.

decorators and other kinds of things and. create something that feels very nice so. that that to me i would say that's tied. with the numpy and vectorization. capabilities i love thinking in terms of. the matrices and the vectors and these. kind of. data structures so i would say those two. are kind of uh tied for me so the. elegance of the numpy data structure. like slicing through the different. multi-dimensions yeah there's just. enough things there it's like a very. it's a very simple comfortable tool just.

it's easy to reason about what it does. when you don't stray too far afield. can you uh put your finger on. how to design. a language such that it fits in your. head. certain things like the colon or the. certain notation aspects of python that. just kind of work is it uh something you. have to kind of write out on paper look. and say it's just right is it a taste. thing or is there a systematic process. what's your sense. i think it's more of a taste thing.

but one one thing that should be said is. that. you have to pick your audience right so. the better defined the user audience is. or the users are the easier it is to. build something that fits in their minds. because their needs will be more compact. and coherent it is possible to find a. projection right a compact projection. for their needs the more diverse the. user base. the harder that is yeah and so as python. has grown in popularity that's also. naturally created more complexity as.

people try to design any given thing. there will be multiple valid. opinions about a particular design. approach and so i do think that's the. that's the downside of popularity it's. almost an intrinsic aspect of the. complexity of the problem well at the. very beginning aren't you an audience of. one isn't ultimately aren't all the. greatest projects in history were just. solving a problem that you yourself had. well so clay shirky in his um book on. crowdsourcing or his kind of thoughts on. crowdsourcing he identifies the first. step of crowdsourcing is me first.

collaboration you first have to make. something that works well for yourself. yeah it's very telling that when you. look at all of the impactful. big project well they're fundamental. projects now in the scipy and pi data. ecosystem they all started with. the. people in the domain trying to scratch. their own itch and the whole idea of. scratching your own itch is something. that the open source or the free. software world has known for a long time. but in the scientific computing areas. you know these are assistant professors. or electrical engineering grad students.

they didn't have really a lot of. programming skills necessarily but. python was just good enough for them to. put something together that fit in their. domain right so it's almost like a it's. a necessity as a mother invention aspect. and also it was a really harsh filter. for. utility and compactness and. expressiveness like it was too hard to. use then they wouldn't have built it. because it was just too much trouble. right it was a side project for them and. also necessity creates a kind of. deadline it seems like a lot of these. projects are quickly thrown together.

in the in the first step and that even. though it's flawed. that just seems to work well for. software projects well it does work well. for software projects in general and in. this particular space um well one one of. my colleagues uh stan siebert identified. this that all the projects in the scipy. ecosystem. um you know if we just rattle them off. there's num pai there's scipy built by. different collaborations of people. although travis is the heart of both of. them um but numpy coming from numeric. and numero these are different people.

and then you've got pandas you've got. jupiter. or ipython there's um there's matplotlib. there's just so many others i'm you know. not going to justify trying to name them. all but all of them are actually. different people. and as they rolled out their projects. the fact that they had limited resources. meant that they were humble about scope. um a a great famous hacker jamie zawiski. once said that every every geek's dream. is to build. the uh the ultimate middleware right and. the the thing is with these scientists.

turned programmers they had no such. theme they were just trying to write. something that was a little bit better. for what they needed the matlab and they. were going to leverage what everyone. else had built so naturally almost in. kind of this annealing process or. whatever we built a very modular. cover of the basic needs of a scientific. computing library. if you look at the whole human story how. much of a leap is it. we've developed all kinds of languages. all kinds of methodologies for. communication he just kind of like grew. this collective intelligence the.

civilization grew it expanded. wrote a bunch of books and now we tweet. uh how big of a leap is programming if. programming is yet another language is. it just a nice little trick that's. temporary in our human history or is it. like. a big. leap in the uh. almost us becoming. uh another organism at a higher level of. abstraction something else i think the. act of programming or. using.

grammatical constructions of some. underlying primitives. that is something that humans do learn. but every human learns this anyone who. can speak learns how to do this. what makes programming different has. been that up to this point. when we try to give instructions to. computing systems. all of our computers well actually this. is not quite true but i'll first say it. and then i'll tell you to tell you why. it's not true but for the most part we. can think of computers as being these. iterated systems. so when we program we're giving very.

precise instructions to uh iterated. systems that then run at um. incomprehensible speed. and run those instructions in my. experience. some people. are just better equipped to model. systematic iterated systems. well whatever iterated systems in their. head. [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.