Joe Rogan Experience #1422 - Lex Fridman

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   ... here we go.…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      ... here we go. Three, two, one. (slaps table) Lex, handsome as ever.

   2. LFLex Fridman0:05

      Thank you.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Well dressed. I always feel like a slob when I'm around you.

   4. LFLex Fridman0:08

      (laughs)

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:08

      Do you dress like that in real life? Or only when you do podcasts?

   6. LFLex Fridman0:11

      Yeah. So I have two outfits, this and black shirt and jeans.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:15

      Slick outfit.

   8. LFLex Fridman0:16

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      There's noth- nothing more classic than a, uh, dark suit with a white shirt and a black tie.

   10. LFLex Fridman0:22

       Yeah.

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:22

       Is that a black tie or is that a dark blue?

   12. LFLex Fridman0:25

       Black tie.

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:25

       Black. Black tie. Black suit, black tie.

   14. LFLex Fridman0:27

       It's armor.

   15. JRJoe Rogan0:28

       Yes.

   16. LFLex Fridman0:28

       It makes, makes me feel, uh, like it focuses the mind.

   17. JRJoe Rogan0:31

       Mm.

   18. LFLex Fridman0:32

       Somehow.

   19. JRJoe Rogan0:32

       Like a professional.

   20. LFLex Fridman0:33

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan0:33

       Yeah.

   22. LFLex Fridman0:33

       Like I'm taking this seriously.

   23. JRJoe Rogan0:34

       Yes, yes, yes.

   24. LFLex Fridman0:36

       (laughs)

   25. JRJoe Rogan0:36

       Like you're, you're, you're fucking for real, man.

   26. LFLex Fridman0:38

       Got a-

   27. JRJoe Rogan0:38

       You got notes and shit?

   28. LFLex Fridman0:39

       Yeah, I got notes and shit. But I... (laughs)

   29. JRJoe Rogan0:43

       (laughs)

   30. LFLex Fridman0:43

       But given the suit, like, I like to get, like, dirty. Like I like to work on a car or whatever.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Ma- …

   1. JRJoe Rogan15:00

      she's correct. If there's an argument there, if there's an argument, a scientific argument, a- a man is never a woman. But can a man identify v- as a woman and should you respect him, her, then-

   2. LFLex Fridman15:12

      Ma-

   3. JRJoe Rogan15:12

      ... and treat them as a woman? Yes.

   4. LFLex Fridman15:14

      So-

   5. JRJoe Rogan15:14

      Yes.

   6. LFLex Fridman15:15

      ... the- so, the question is, whether you... I mean, I- I- I'm- I'm not too deep into thinking about these specific issues, but the question is whether you should get banned for being an asshole or you should get banned for being, um, for lying. 'Cause I think lying is okay. Or the tru-... Whatever, that's-

   7. JRJoe Rogan15:30

      'Cause a lot of people lie on Twitter.

   8. LFLex Fridman15:31

      They lie-

   9. JRJoe Rogan15:32

      Yeah.

   10. LFLex Fridman15:32

       ... and sort of... Or-

   11. JRJoe Rogan15:34

       Insult.

   12. LFLex Fridman15:34

       ... or-

   13. JRJoe Rogan15:34

       You can insult people on Twitter as long as you're not specific about their gender.

   14. LFLex Fridman15:37

       But see, the- the insult thing, that's where it gets... It's the party thing.

   15. JRJoe Rogan15:41

       Mm-hmm.

   16. LFLex Fridman15:41

       Like, if you have the- the- the a- asshole, douchebag, whatever term you wanna use, they show up to the party, and then if a person shows up to the party and a lot of people leave because they're annoying or whatever-

   17. JRJoe Rogan15:52

       Yes.

   18. LFLex Fridman15:52

       ... that- that should be... Like, we should do something to discourage that behavior.

   19. JRJoe Rogan15:57

       That's a good point.

   20. LFLex Fridman15:58

       Right.

   21. JRJoe Rogan15:58

       However, let's- let's paint a different picture of a party. Let's have a party where everyone says, "My pronouns are they/them and ze/zir and zha vu."

   22. LFLex Fridman16:09

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan16:09

       And th- And- and then you come in and you go, "Come on, bro, you're a guy."

   24. LFLex Fridman16:13

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan16:13

       And like, "No, no, no, I'm a they, you fucking-"

   26. LFLex Fridman16:16

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan16:16

       "... cisgendered heteronormative piece of shit."

   28. LFLex Fridman16:19

       Yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan16:19

       And then they wanna kick you out of the party.

   30. LFLex Fridman16:21

       Yeah.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Oh. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      experience was, first of all, just i- th- he found a piece of paper that showed, like, a crime docket-

   2. LFLex Fridman30:07

      Oh.

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:07

      ... from the 1970s, all the stuff, like, ju- drugs, crime, robbery. It was all the same issues in the same neighborhoods that he was patrolling in today. And he was like, "Holy shit." And he realized, like, "Oh, this is a quagmire." And then he found out about the laws that were in place from way back in the day where you literally, if you were an African American, you couldn't buy a home in certain areas.

   4. LFLex Fridman30:35

      Right.

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:36

      They had ... What is that term? Is it redlined? Is that what the term is? Where they, um-... they designate certain areas where they literally won't sell homes to Black people. And he was becoming aware of this shit as he was a cop. And, you know, in the beginning, he was all gung-ho. He's like, "Um, I'm a cop. You know, I'm here to bust bad guys and, and do the right thing." And then along the way, he kind of recognized you're dealing with systemic racism.

   6. LFLex Fridman31:03

      You're right, yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan31:03

      Redlining.

   8. LFLex Fridman31:04

      Redline.

   9. JRJoe Rogan31:04

      Yeah. So-

   10. LFLex Fridman31:06

       Yeah, so that, that's-

   11. JRJoe Rogan31:06

       ... that hasn't been addressed.

   12. LFLex Fridman31:08

       It's all about... I mean, there's a million other things at home, education-

   13. JRJoe Rogan31:10

       Yes.

   14. LFLex Fridman31:10

       ... everything and-

   15. JRJoe Rogan31:11

       All those things.

   16. LFLex Fridman31:12

       All-

   17. JRJoe Rogan31:12

       I think Bernie Sanders, when he talks about those things, he, he seems like a guy who really cares about education, healthcare, and people that live in poverty.

   18. LFLex Fridman31:24

       Yeah. And-

   19. JRJoe Rogan31:24

       I don't, I don't know if he's gonna be able to do anything. I don't know, uh-

   20. LFLex Fridman31:27

       Well, that's, that's the main thing is, like, people say Democratic Socialists and so on is gonna... He's going to ma- make a slight move into whatever direction he's trying to advocate, which in this case is more investment into the infrastructure and so on, into our-

   21. JRJoe Rogan31:40

       Yeah.

   22. LFLex Fridman31:41

       ... at home. But like, you know, he's just one human being. There's, there has to be a Congress that represents the people.

   23. JRJoe Rogan31:47

       Mm-hmm.

   24. LFLex Fridman31:47

       And if there's anything, I think Congress is probably the most hated entity in all of the universe. Like, it, you look at all the polls of what people like and hate-

   25. JRJoe Rogan31:55

       Mm-hmm.

   26. LFLex Fridman31:55

       ... c- like, like, rats are above-

   27. JRJoe Rogan31:58

       (laughs)

   28. LFLex Fridman31:58

       ... in terms of favorability ratings. So Congress is really the broken system. Uh, Bernie won't be able to do much except take a little sort of... The role of the president as I see it is to, one, the terrifying one, is to start wars. And so this ver- it's a very serious responsibility you have to take. And the second is to inspire the population. In terms of executive power of enacting laws, there's not much power. All you can, all you can do is, um, what our current president is doing, sort of, um, inspiring the, uh, in that, in that case, the Republicans in Congress to sort of work together to work on certain legislation. So you can inspire the Congress and you can inspire the people, but you don't have actual direct power. So Bernie's not going to turn America into a socialist, uh, you know, uh, uh, haven. He's going to take a small step into maybe, he'd probably fixing, focusing on one aspect, like healthcare or something like that, like President Obama did and try to m- make a little change. And so, um, so in that sense, people that are genuine and have ideas, like Andrew Yang is another one. Just (laughs) he has, like, a ridiculous number of ideas. I don't know if you've seen, like, his website.

   29. JRJoe Rogan33:14

       He thinks all cops should be purple belts in jujitsu.

   30. LFLex Fridman33:16

       Yeah, I like it.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. LFLex Fridman45:00

      a couple of years, that's able to drive autonomously. I mean, most people would laugh at that idea. Like the most roboticists that know from the DARPA Challenge days, most of them know how hard this problem is. He said, "No, no, no. We're going to ... We're not only gonna throw away LIDAR," which is this laser-based sensor, "We're gonna say cameras only, and we're gonna use deep learning, machine learning, which is learning based system." So it's a system that learns from scratch, and we're gonna teach it to drive from eight cameras and so on. So just talking to somebody like that was the, the, the not ... The fact that he thinks like that, I think it's just fun to talk to people like that.

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:41

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman45:41

      I, I don't meet them often. Let's say, "No, no, no. Stop this bullshit of thinking that this task is impossible. Let's say why is it impossible. Is it really impossible?" Well, you find out when you start to think about most problems from first principles is that it's not actually impossible. And then you have to think, okay, so how do we make it happen? How do we create an infrastructure that allows you to learn from huge amounts of data? So one of the most revolutionary things that Tesla's doing, and hopefully other car companies will be doing, is the over-the-air software updates. Just like the update-

   4. JRJoe Rogan46:14

      Hmm.

   5. LFLex Fridman46:14

      ... that you got. The fact that just like on your phone you can get updates over time means you can have a learning system, a machine learning based system, that can learn and then deploy the thing it learned over time, and do that weekly. That sounds like maybe trivial, but it's com- nobody else is doing it and it's completely revolutionary. So cars, once you buy them, they don't learn. Most cars. Tesla learns. That, that's a huge thing. Uh, forget about Tesla autopilot, all the stuff. Just the fact that you can update the software, I think is a revolutionary idea. And then they're also doing everything else from scratch. This is this first principles type of thinking. The hardware. So the, the hardware in your car ... I don't know when you got the Tesla but it should be hardware, um, version two. But that hardware performs what's called inference. So it's already trained, it's already learned its thing, and it's just taking in the raw sensory input and making decisions. Okay. They built that hardware themselves from scratch. Again, ballsy move. Now they're building what they're calling ... Uh, again, he's such a troll. But they're calling Dojo, is the, the name of the, the specialized hardware for training the neural networks or training the models. What training is, is the learning side of it. So they're building their own like supercomputer, like Google has a TPU to improve the training. They-

   6. JRJoe Rogan47:40

      TPU? What's that stand for?

   7. LFLex Fridman47:42

      Tensor processing unit. It's the same thing as the more general. NVIDIA has graphics processing unit GPUs that all the nerds, all the people like me have been using on, um, for machine learning to train neural networks. Uh, it's what most also gamers use-

   8. JRJoe Rogan47:57

      Mm-hmm.

   9. LFLex Fridman47:57

      ... to play video games, right? But they have, they have this nice quality that you can train huge neural networks on them. Okay. TPU is, uh, is a specialized hardware for training neural networks. GPUs allow you to play video games and train neural networks. TPUs clean some stuff up to make it more efficient, energy efficient, more efficient for the kinds of computation neural networks need. Google has them, a bunch of other companies have them. You know, most com- most car companies would be like, okay, let me partner with somebody else to u- from with Google to use their TPUs or use NVIDIA's GPUs. Tesla's building it from scratch. So that kind of from scratch thinking is i- is incredible. And, uh, the other two things I really l- listen, really l- that I like about Musk is, uh, the hard work. We live in a culture ... Like so many people, like I often don't sleep. I do crazy shit in terms of just focus, stay up nights sometimes. And now o- o- often people recommend to me that, you know, balance is really important.... and taking a break is important, you know, it- it- that you re- re- rejuvenate yourself, you return to it with fresh ideas. All those things are true. Sleep is important. You had, uh, people on the podcast tell you how important sleep is. But what most people don't- don't advise me is hard work is more imp- passion is more important than all of those things. Like, that should come first. And then sleep empowers it, rest empowers it, rejuvenation empowers it. Especially in engineering disciplines. Hard work is everything. And he's sort of unapologetically about that. It's not like a "Come- come to us, come work with us. It'll be a friendly environment with free snacks."

   10. JRJoe Rogan49:43

       (laughs)

   11. LFLex Fridman49:43

       It's like, "You're gonna work the hardest you've ever worked on," whether you agree with him or not, "on the most important problems of your life." Okay. I like that kind of thinking, because it emphasizes the hard work. The- the other part, it was ... in terms of meeting him in person, I don't know if you got to interact with that off, because when he was on mic with you, he was very, um, he was very kind of-

   12. JRJoe Rogan50:10

       It was hard to bring it out of him.

   13. LFLex Fridman50:11

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan50:11

       In, in person before that, he was very jovial and friendly-

   15. LFLex Fridman50:15

       Yeah. Yeah.

   16. JRJoe Rogan50:16

       ... and huggy. He's great.

   17. LFLex Fridman50:17

       Yeah. He's fun.

   18. JRJoe Rogan50:17

       And then once he got on the microphone, I was like, "Oh, this is heavy lifting."

   19. LFLex Fridman50:21

       Yeah.

   20. JRJoe Rogan50:21

       "I gotta bring this out of him."

   21. LFLex Fridman50:22

       Yeah.

   22. JRJoe Rogan50:22

       So then we started drinking.

   23. LFLex Fridman50:23

       Drinking helps.

   24. JRJoe Rogan50:24

       And then ... Oh, yeah.

   25. LFLex Fridman50:25

       Yeah, yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan50:26

       It helps a lot.

   27. LFLex Fridman50:26

       Yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan50:26

       And then once the- the drinking, you know, then- then I got to see who he is.

   29. LFLex Fridman50:31

       Yeah. I shouldn't have- I should have done that. But-

   30. JRJoe Rogan50:33

       (laughs)
5. 1:00:00 – 1:13:44

   But Wikipedia, bro, what…

   1. LFLex Fridman1:00:00

      to undertake the effort of proving the Wikipedia article for gravity wrong. So...

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:00:06

      But Wikipedia, bro, what a terrible example.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:00:09

      Is it?

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:00:09

      Wikipedia's sketchy. It says I'm Bryan Callen's brother. It says I got celiac disease.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:00:14

      Did you see that?

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:00:14

      Says a bunch of shit that's not real.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:00:15

      How do you know you're not related? Are you sure?

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:00:17

      I know.

   9. LFLex Fridman1:00:18

      Okay.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:00:18

       I know. I'm pretty sure. (laughs)

   11. LFLex Fridman1:00:22

       (laughs) Does it still say that?

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:00:22

       I mean, he might as well be my brother. I don't know if it says it anymore, but whatever.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:00:26

       But no, Wiki- Wikipedia-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:00:26

       Someone put it in there again. Fuck it.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:00:28

       Uh, Wikipedia is actually another distributor system that's incredibly surprising to me that it works 'cause it's-

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:00:34

       Yeah, it is, right? Because even though there is a lot of misinformation in it and there's a lot of, uh, you know, falsehoods, there's a lot of really good information as well, you know, like particularly about historical figures and interesting stuff, you know, if you wanna find facts on things-

   17. LFLex Fridman1:00:48

       And on science.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:00:49

       ... it's great research. Yeah.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:00:50

       And science and technical topics are not, not like nutrition science or things where there's a lot of debates. On like physics and math and so on, it's really good.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:00:57

       Mm-hmm.

   21. LFLex Fridman1:00:57

       Like it's really, really good.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:00:59

       So it's community-supported.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:01:00

       Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:01:00

       By other physicists.

   25. LFLex Fridman1:01:02

       ... but moving back from, uh, flat earth, can we go back to why you think we're not going to be, uh, colonizing Mars?

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:01:08

       Oh, n- I'm not saying ever. I'm just saying, the problem to me is the type of people that would want to do it, 'cause they can't return, you know. That's the, the real issue with going to Mars, is that you can't return.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:01:20

       There's, you don't think there's a huge number of non-crazy explorers in this world?

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:01:25

       That wanna die on Mars?

   29. LFLex Fridman1:01:26

       Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:01:27

       I got a whole bit about it. Um, I really believe that it's th- the, the fringe of the fringe that would be willing to die on Mars.

Episode duration: 2:50:25