Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis — Solving the Impossible (Plus Kevin Kelly)

1. 0:00 – 0:56

   Start

   1. SPSpeaker0:00

      Feynman said, "No, none of my students are crazy enough to work on something like that. I mean, that's nuts. [laughs] It's just a kooky idea." That's what he said, "That's a kooky idea." Well, he says, "Well, actually, maybe there's this one guy I know that would work on it. You might hire him for a summer job, but he doesn't really know much about computers, but he's a really hard worker, and I think he's pretty smart." And I was like, "Okay, well, that's good enough recommendation for me. What's his name?" He said, "Richard Feynman." [laughs]

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:36

      [laughs]

   3. SPSpeaker0:36

      And he shows up the first day, he salutes, he says, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty, sir."

   4. TFTim Ferriss0:41

      [upbeat music]

2. 0:56 – 3:09

   How Danny and Kevin first met through Stewart Brand.

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:57

      Gentlemen, Kevin, Danny, thank you for making the time for the three amigos to gather. I know, Danny, it's a little presumptuous for me to call us amigos just yet, but [laughs] hopefully by the end of the chat. And Kevin, I must say, you know, your headline that I crafted for our podcast long ago, which was the real-life most interesting man in the world-

   2. SPSpeaker1:17

      [laughs]

   3. TFTim Ferriss1:17

      ... I think you might have some competition for that particular headline in Danny, and we'll certainly-

   4. SPSpeaker1:24

      Yeah

   5. TFTim Ferriss1:25

      ... explore a lot of facets of that. But maybe we'll start with how the two of you met or connected in the first place. Do you wanna take a stab at that, Kevin?

   6. SPSpeaker1:33

      Yeah, I was wondering. I think my recollection is that our mutual friend, Stewart Brand, went to MIT Media Lab to write a book, and I think Danny was one of the people that was embedded in that circle of the Media Lab and MIT. And at one point, Stewart kind of dragged him back to Sausalito, where I was editing the Whole Earth Review at the time, and we met, and I was impressed, but that was it. And then later on, when I was running WIRED, Danny had a dream of a clock that would tick for 10,000 years as a sort of, um, way to think about the future, and he wrote a proposal, which I ran in WIRED, and I thought that was really very interesting and a great way to frame the future, and that was it. But our mutual friend, Stewart Brand, decided that he would try to help Danny actually build the clock-

   7. TFTim Ferriss2:34

      Mm-hmm

   8. SPSpeaker2:34

      ... and made a little nonprofit called... Well, we didn't have a name. It was called the Clock Library Foundation, and I was part of that original group. And then for the past almost 30 years, it seems like we've been working together on the Long Now's mission to encourage long-term thinking, and I've seen Danny in action in all those years. And so I think that's, that's my recollection. Danny, does that meet with yours?

   9. TFTim Ferriss3:07

      Sounds right to me. [laughs]

   10. SPSpeaker3:08

       Okay. [laughs]

3. 3:09 – 7:17

   The funniest person who ever opened Danny's interview box of unusual objects.

   1. TFTim Ferriss3:09

      So I'm gonna throw a bit of a wild card into things because I can't resist not doing it. So Danny, there are a million places to start with you. We could try to do something chronological, like we could start with homeschooling, we could talk about AI, we could talk about [laughs] dark sky weather apps. There are so many points of entry. I thought, though, I might be the first to begin with a Mogen clamp, if that's the right term to use. [laughs] So this device, this terrifying looking device-

   2. SPSpeaker3:42

      [laughs]

   3. TFTim Ferriss3:43

      ... and a silver briefcase full of devices, how does this fit into your story? [laughs]

   4. SPSpeaker3:51

      You might need to explain 'cause I have no idea what this is.

   5. TFTim Ferriss3:53

      [laughs]

   6. SPSpeaker3:53

      Okay. Well, at some point, I realized that I really wasn't going to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up and that I always [laughs] enjoyed new problems that I didn't know about, so I started a company called Applied Invention with Brand Verin that kind of worked on everything. And so how do you recruit people for a company like that? So one of the things that we did, we had this box of just weird stuff like a space shuttle tile or a piece of synthetic diamond or that weird sort of clamp cutter thing that you just [laughs] mentioned.

   7. TFTim Ferriss4:38

      Mm-hmm.

   8. SPSpeaker4:39

      And what we'd do as part of the interview process is we'd sit people down, and we'd just open up the box, and immediately you could tell was this person a likely fit for the company because a lot of people would sort of wait for instructions.

   9. TFTim Ferriss4:54

      [laughs]

   10. SPSpeaker4:57

       [laughs] But most of the people that we hired would look at it and say, "Whoa, is, is that a Mogen clamp?

   11. TFTim Ferriss5:03

       [laughs]

   12. SPSpeaker5:04

       Is that a, is that a laser gyro? Is that... What is this?" You know? [laughs] And they would start picking up the pieces and talking about them and asking about them, and those were the kind of people that we wanted to hire, and it wasn't a test so much of knowledge. It was more a test of curiosity and engagement and ability to learn, although it was amazing how many of them people recognized. That was a particularly weird one that a lot of people did not get because as you probably know by now, it's basically the device that is used for circumcision to make sure you don't cut off too much. [laughs]

   13. TFTim Ferriss5:46

       Ugh, God. It's horrifying but also beautiful in how sterile it looks, and I appreciated the German on it that says, "Rostfrei," which means rust-free, which is really what you want-

   14. SPSpeaker5:57

       [laughs]

   15. TFTim Ferriss5:59

       ... I would imagine.

   16. SPSpeaker5:59

       Yeah, yeah. Rust-free. It has a limited opening, you know, so really it's-

   17. DHDanny Hillis6:04

       It's hard to overdo it

   18. TFTim Ferriss6:05

       Oh, God. Squirming in my ergonomic chair just thinking about this.

   19. DHDanny Hillis6:09

       The funniest person who ever opened that box was Robin Williams.

   20. TFTim Ferriss6:13

       [laughs]

   21. DHDanny Hillis6:13

       And you can imagine where he sort of went with, like, space aliens, sex toys, and things like that. He, he knew what everything was and gave us a elaborate description of it. [laughs]

   22. TFTim Ferriss6:24

       All right. I can't resist taking the bait. There are a lot of things I'm not gonna be able to resist in this conversation. Why on earth was Robin Williams looking through this suitcase or this briefcase?

   23. DHDanny Hillis6:33

       Brand and I had met Robin at The Walt Disney Company, and so it was actually the only job I ever had. I worked for a while as, as something called Disney Fellow and Vice President of Imagineering.

   24. TFTim Ferriss6:49

       Mm-hmm.

   25. DHDanny Hillis6:50

       And it was a job in the sense that I got a paycheck, which was actually kind of a novel experience for me 'cause I usually pay the paychecks. When I saw benefits, it... I suddenly realized what benefits meant because always previously, benefits was something I had to pay. [laughs] That was a kind of a second education for me after my MIT education and completely different kinds of things. But part of it, how big companies were,

4. 7:17 – 12:47

   Danny's transition to Disney as a Disney Fellow and Vice President of Imagineering.

   1. DHDanny Hillis7:17

      part of it-

   2. TFTim Ferriss7:18

      So I'd like to hear, Danny, a little bit about that progression, where you got your degree in, I know, math or computer science, and then you, you started a company, uh, as you said yourself before that. That progression to work for Disney is not an obvious step for anybody. What were you thinking, and what was your-

   3. DHDanny Hillis7:37

      Your plan? [laughs]

   4. TFTim Ferriss7:39

      I mean, you're kind of over-educated for the role in some ways.

   5. DHDanny Hillis7:43

      Well, I've never really had a plan, I will admit. I, I... it would be nice if people know where they're going in life, and maybe I'll figure that out someday, but opportunities present themselves, and that was a moment in my life. When I went to MIT, I studied... I knew I wanted to work for Marvin Minsky, which is a whole other story, and I studied AI under Marvin Minsky in the early days of AI. But I realized that AI was not going to happen without big, fast parallel computers, which didn't exist at the time. So I started to build one, which I had to build, like, from designing the chips, the operating system, everything from scratch. And it rapidly became too big a project for a graduate student to do at a university. Even though DARPA was giving me the money, the university didn't like a graduate student having this many employees. [laughs] And so I did what was at the time a very unusual thing, which is started a company as a graduate student, and in fact, MIT told me I couldn't do it. And I said, "Well, I don't see how you can say that, 'cause I'm paying you money. You're not paying me money."

   6. TFTim Ferriss8:58

      [laughs]

   7. DHDanny Hillis8:59

      So they forbade me from doing it, and I just did it anyway. And in fact, I started hiring a bunch of faculty members and-

   8. TFTim Ferriss9:06

      [laughs] Just salt in the wound. [laughs]

   9. DHDanny Hillis9:09

      When I hired the ex-president of the university, which was Jerry Wiesner-

   10. TFTim Ferriss9:13

       [laughs]

   11. DHDanny Hillis9:13

       ... they stopped bothering me. [laughs]

   12. TFTim Ferriss9:15

       Oh. Brought in the power lobbyists. [laughs]

   13. DHDanny Hillis9:20

       Right. And that was a huge success from a technical standpoint, but honestly, me and the other people that started the company had no idea about how to make a company work. I made a lot of mistakes in how I set up the business 'cause I was really mostly wanting to just build this computer. I wasn't trying to build a company. And so we successfully built what was the first big parallel computer. It was something that people, all the experts said was impossible for various reasons, and it became the fastest computer in the world. For many years, we built the fastest computers in the world. But we never made a great business out of it. And actually, interesting enough, somebody who worked for one of our chip suppliers had a much better idea of how to make a business out of it, and he took very similar chips to what we were making and he made them for video games. And that company actually took 30 years, but it finally managed to do what we set out to do, and that was Nvidia.

   14. TFTim Ferriss10:22

       [laughs] I've heard of it. [laughs] One of those chips is probably the power of one of your machines, right?

   15. DHDanny Hillis10:29

       Oh, yeah. I mean, and Moore's law really worked, and got to watch it play out. I mean, that was 30 years ago, so think of how many times Moore's Law has doubled since then.

   16. TFTim Ferriss10:39

       So you were describing this, uh, as how you wound up at Disney.

   17. DHDanny Hillis10:44

       Oh, yeah. Well, when the company didn't work out, I kind of worked it out. I got all the, the hardware people that were working on it. He hired at Sun Microsystems and exchanged their options in Thinking Machines for options in Sun Microsystems, which this was just before the web took off, and that worked out well for them. But I decided that I'd had enough of the computer business and I just wanted to do something different, and I had twin babies and a daughter that was born on the, the day the company closed down. So I just kind of wanted a job for a little while, and I had always had this kind of childhood dream of being an Imagineer. And then I was like, "Well, just let me, you know, be an Imagineer." And they're like, "Well, no, I think we have to give you more of a title than that." I didn't want a title anybody knew what I was supposed to do. [laughs]

   18. TFTim Ferriss11:40

       [laughs]

   19. DHDanny Hillis11:41

       So I asked for Disney Fellow, which it turns out Salvador Dali had been the only previous Disney Fellow.

   20. TFTim Ferriss11:46

       [laughs]

   21. DHDanny Hillis11:46

       So I thought it was... I was on pretty safe ground there. But they also, they made me a vice president just so that... It turns out that's very important at a big company for some people, so they talked me into that. But it was a good thing because nobody takes you seriously unless you have some title that they understand. But- It really was true that nobody knew what I was supposed to do. And actually, the guy that had approved my hiring was Frank Wells, and he unfortunately died in a helicopter crash before I showed up.

   22. TFTim Ferriss12:18

       Hmm.

   23. DHDanny Hillis12:19

       So really nobody knew what I was supposed to do. But that turned out to just be a fantastic way to get an education because I could say, you know, "I wanna be in the meeting where we decide what we're going to build in Florida that became Animal Kingdom, or what we're gonna build in Paris, or what..." You know? So I would insist on being in a meeting, and everybody would be a little bit worried that maybe I had some authority [laughs] and nobody would say no to me.

5. 12:47 – 22:51

   The contrast between engineering and artistic approaches to problem-solving.

   1. DHDanny Hillis12:47

      So.

   2. TFTim Ferriss12:47

      [laughs]

   3. DHDanny Hillis12:47

      I learned a huge amount about kind of storytelling and the kind of, I would say, the artistic way of looking at things rather than the engineering way of looking at things.

   4. TFTim Ferriss12:59

      What would be an example of that, Danny, of something that you learned in terms of being able to tell, tell a story?

   5. DHDanny Hillis13:04

      I mean, some of them shocked me as kind of bad because, you know, in some sense show business is about basically making stuff up, which is a nice way of saying lying about things. [laughs] Um, and so it's not really tethered to reality. So, you know, in science, you can have an argument, somebody's right, but in show business that's not really true, just somebody wins the argument.

   6. TFTim Ferriss13:30

      [laughs]

   7. DHDanny Hillis13:31

      And you never really know who was right. So there's a completely different way people relate to each other. So basically, you know, you make a movie and it either is a flop or it's a great hit, and if it's a great hit everybody who was in the room at the time they decided to make the movie gets promoted. But, you know, nobody really knows why it was a hit or who was responsible or so on. Very different from engineering where there's a sort of ground truth. Here's an example. Like, one of my first days, early on they knew they needed to get into online spaces and they said, "You know, we need to make some kind of online service or Disney Online." They didn't know what it was, but they knew online was a big thing. This was kind of the, the Sillywood period when Hollywood and Silicon Valley were dancing with each other. And so they sat down and said, "Okay, everybody just, like, write down on a piece of paper, you know, just, like, some sketches of what you think this thing's gonna look like." And so I draw the kind of block diagram of the servers and the services and the... You know, you've gotta have ways for people to log into it and a database that, you know, has a typical kind of engineering block diagram. Then everybody else at the table, we go around the table and everybody else holds up, like, a picture of a magic castle or... It's all, like, images of things that you would look at. Nothing about how anything would work.

   8. TFTim Ferriss15:01

      [laughs]

   9. DHDanny Hillis15:02

      And, and I hold up mine, everybody's like, "You think it should be a bunch of boxes with lines?" They s- they didn't [laughs] know. It was just a complete disconnect. But they knew something and they focused on different things than I did. And after a while, I came to appreciate the things they were focusing on were extremely important and, in fact, probably the most important things to making things successful or not successful in, in show business. So it, it was a second education for me.

   10. TFTim Ferriss15:30

       Could you say a little bit more about the artistic way of seeing things versus the engineering way of seeing things or looking at things? And we may end up coming back at some point to Richard Feynman. I own a number of place mats [laughs] that he used to use-

   11. DHDanny Hillis15:49

       [laughs]

   12. TFTim Ferriss15:50

       ... for drawing practice in his somewhat mature friendships with one painter in particular. Uh, but I remember their debates about sort of seeing through the eyes of science versus seeing through the eyes of an artist, and I'm wondering if, if that artistic way of looking at the world has translated to things after Disney for you.

   13. DHDanny Hillis16:12

       Oh, well, it definitely has, and I'll focus on the part of it that influenced me the most. I mean, it was really interesting to be around people who knew how to draw, and I took drawing classes and things like... But the thing that really stuck was learning what they meant by storytelling. So, you know, when Disney, like, designs a theme park, they don't think of it so much as a piece of architecture or a map, they think of it as a story. And by a story, it means kind of a, a sequence and a narrative of going into it and experiencing it so it sort of makes sense-

   14. TFTim Ferriss16:47

       Mm-hmm

   15. DHDanny Hillis16:47

       ... to the people that are going through it, and they sort of know where they are, they know what to expect, they know when it's over. And a ride is like that, but actually the whole theme park is like that. And that way of thinking of things as a understandable emotional experience that connects with someone is very different than sort of looking at-

   16. TFTim Ferriss17:09

       Right

   17. DHDanny Hillis17:09

       ... you know, the mechanics of how the rides work and... Which is also very interesting.

   18. TFTim Ferriss17:13

       Mm-hmm.

   19. DHDanny Hillis17:14

       But it's very subjective, and yet it can be done well and it can be done badly. And we've all been moved by watching a film or listening to a piece of music or something like that. We all know that it does affect us, it does connect with us. And so, for example, the most obvious way that's influenced it was that's how I started to think about designing the 10,000-year clock.

   20. TFTim Ferriss17:39

       Mm-hmm.

   21. DHDanny Hillis17:40

       When I first thought about it, I was thinking about, well, mechanical problem. How do I keep it wound? How do I... You know, what materials do I use? But after a while, I came to realize that really the m- most important thing about this clock, and the thing that will really determine how long it lasts, is what do people think about it? How do they experience it? How do they relate to it?

   22. TFTim Ferriss18:07

       What's the story? What is it about?

   23. DHDanny Hillis18:09

       What is the story? I'll give you a simple example. In the beginning when I designed it, it was like an ordinary clock. It would- Always show you what time it was. But then I realized if it's ticking away in a mountain someplace, and it doesn't care if you exist, then why should you care if it exists? So instead, I thought much more about the story of somebody going to visit the clock, and what did they see? What's the sequence of things? Where did they get confused? Where did they get frightened of, like, I'm in the wrong place? And then when they get to the clock, instead of showing what time it is, it actually shows the time the last person was there.

   24. KKKevin Kelly18:48

       Hmm.

   25. DHDanny Hillis18:48

       Shows the time and the date that the last person was there. And then when they wind the clock, it catches up to the current time.

   26. KKKevin Kelly18:56

       Hmm.

   27. DHDanny Hillis18:56

       And then, of course, this is sort of an idea that's obvious for anybody that's been to Disney, but people wanna take home a souvenir. So what it does is it, it has a place on the date where you can take a rubbing. And so you can go home with a rubbing of the date that you were there.

   28. KKKevin Kelly19:12

       [laughs]

   29. DHDanny Hillis19:14

       You know, things like that I don't think I really would have thought about without that education at Disney, whereas with that education, those-- it's obvious that those things in some sense are much more important than how you solve the technical problems.

   30. KKKevin Kelly19:27

       And by rubbing, do you mean almost like taking paper, putting it on a wood carving, and rubbing on top of it to create an imprint?
6. 22:51 – 31:47

   The development of parallel computing and founding Thinking Machines.

   1. KKKevin Kelly22:51

      So Danny, you have been doing AI for a very long time. You made the first computers that were in parallel. You called it Thinking Machines.

   2. DHDanny Hillis23:02

      Our slogan was, "We want to make a machine that will be proud of us." [laughs]

   3. KKKevin Kelly23:05

      Right. Exactly. So what is the story on AI that we're not getting right now? There's a lot of focus on all these LLMs and neural nets, which are very old actually. What do you think the story is, and what's the story that we're not hearing?

   4. DHDanny Hillis23:24

      Well, I'll tell you a story I told a long time ago about AI, which I call the Songs of Eden, which is in some sense it was a story about where human intelligence came from, and it was a story about a bunch of monkeys that kind of grunted and repeated each other's grunts for-- they sung along with each other, didn't really mean anything. But they started noticing the mood of the other monkeys by the grunts that they were making, and their brains began to develop to keenly notice the moods of the other monkeys because they're social animals.

   5. KKKevin Kelly23:59

      Mm-hmm.

   6. DHDanny Hillis24:00

      And, and so they started evolving the ability to distinguish sounds. But at the same time, there was another kind of thing that was evolving, which there was no name for it then, but we call it memes now, which is, you know, sort of- things that got repeated and that were very catchy tunes and things like that. And, and so there was this kind of co-evolution of these two things. One of them with the monkeys got sort of better and better at distinguishing between the grunts, and the ideas got better and better at helping the monkeys because that's how they got repeated. And so we're sort of a symbiosis of those two things, of the monkeys and the song. So the, the songs in some sense evolved into human culture and human ideas and, you know, we evolved into the monkeys that were able to hold those ideas and transfer those ideas. And so I kind of told the story that that was the way that human intelligence evolved and predicted that that might be the way that artificial intelligence evolved, that we would build machines that were sort of powerful enough, but then we'd kind of infect them with human culture. So now the internet didn't exist then, but I wasn't quite sure where you were gonna get the human culture or how you were gonna do that. But I think that's sort of what's happened is what we've got is not so much artificial intelligence, but we've sort of got a, a substrate on which human intelligence can live that's not human. And so human intelligence is all of the things that was learned from all the data that we train on in some sense. And this is the early stages, so you might say it's just kind of imitating right now, but it's got so many examples it's really good at imitating. When you get good enough... And that's always sort of the first part of intelligence is imitation. I mean, a child begins with imitation, then they understand more and more.

   7. TFTim Ferriss26:05

      Mm-hmm.

   8. DHDanny Hillis26:06

      So I think we're in that imitation stage right now where we've built machines that are able to do a pretty good job of imitating, and they'll go beyond. They're just beginning to peek beyond the imitation stage, reason, things like that. But in the end, it's not really an artificial intelligence. It's a, it's human intelligence on an artificial substrate.

   9. TFTim Ferriss26:29

      That's a new phrasing and lens that I've not heard before.

   10. DHDanny Hillis26:33

       Yeah. And that's not the only possible form of AI.

   11. TFTim Ferriss26:35

       Oh, for sure. Yeah. We will almost certainly come back to that, but I wanna zoom out for a second. You said earlier at some point, "I never really had a plan," but there are people who don't have a plan and have no direction and end up, I think as Marc Andreessen put it once, as a sort of a rabbit pivoting every 10 seconds going a different direction in the maze and not making any progress. Clearly, you are not that rabbit. So it seems that there is-

   12. DHDanny Hillis27:04

       [laughs]

   13. TFTim Ferriss27:04

       ... some underlying scent trail or way in which you choose projects or what you will do next. How do you do that? What is your guiding sense of how you choose where to direct your attention, right? And you said at some point that you were tired of... You wanted to do anything other than the computer stuff, so you shifted to-

   14. DHDanny Hillis27:28

       Right

   15. TFTim Ferriss27:28

       ... the Imagineering, right? And there were other lifestyle factors, but I'm just wondering, broadly speaking, how do you choose what you're gonna do next? And then once you decide on that, and I'm borrowing from something that I'm stealing from Kevin here, but how do you proceed once you decide that you wanna get into a new field?

   16. DHDanny Hillis27:47

       So first of all, right, since I sort of love the process of invention, I have to say that I think it's a misunderstood process because what the inventor does is actually a very small piece of it. What society does is it creates these preconditions for invention, and once those preconditions are in place, then it's just a matter of sort of putting together the puzzle pieces and making it work. So I always love to see those moments where all the pieces are around and somebody just needs to... And usually they're not recognized 'cause they're looked at by different people. They're in dis- different disciplines and things like that.

   17. TFTim Ferriss28:27

       Could you give an example?

   18. DHDanny Hillis28:29

       Yeah, I was just gonna say that. [laughs] A perfect example was parallel computers. Parallel computers, it sort of now seems totally obvious, like how could anybody have not built parallel computers? But at the time, there were some pieces that weren't quite there yet until you got the ability to put multiple processors on a piece of silicon. Yet that required a certain level of complexity of the silicon production technology. So nobody had done that, so I made the first multi-core chips. There were proofs that computers became less and less efficient the more processors that you added to them. There was something called Amdahl's law that was how IBM basically pooh-pooh'd parallel computers, or people like Cray said you didn't need them and so on.

   19. TFTim Ferriss29:22

       Danny, just for people listening, could you define what parallel computing is?

   20. DHDanny Hillis29:26

       Yeah. Parallel computing is what you do in the cloud when you have lots and lots of computers that you put onto a problem, or you do it on a single chip now that is a multi-core chip that has multiple processors on it. It's so obvious now, it doesn't seem like an idea.

   21. TFTim Ferriss29:41

       [laughs] But just to be clear, the, the traditional way was you have a sequence and you would just do one thing at a time.

   22. DHDanny Hillis29:47

       Right.

   23. TFTim Ferriss29:47

       That was the von Neumann. That was the standard way, and this is you're gonna do things multiple at the same time, which is very complex because you have to do all kinds of things to coordinate, to, you know, converge. There's... The complexity is incredibly more difficult at when you're doing things in parallel.

   24. DHDanny Hillis30:07

       Yeah. And also there were all these kind of reasons why people thought it was impossible, and it's hard to believe, and it took a while to understand why they were wrong. And so, you know, it hadn't been done, but I knew it was possible because I knew the human brain worked.

   25. TFTim Ferriss30:21

       [laughs]

   26. DHDanny Hillis30:22

       So, you know, the human brain has these very slow components, much slower than- ... transistors. So I was like, well, maybe they won't be general purpose computers, but if you're gonna make AI, certainly that's the way to do it. So I had some confidence that doing the thing in the unexpected way was going to work, and the preconditions were there that I could design CMOS chips, make those work, build 'em. People had... Compiler technology was at the right place. Television cameras were starting to produce digital things so that you could have eyes, digital eyes on machines. So all the preconditions of converting audio to bits were there. All the pieces were kind of coming together, and the only reason it wasn't being done was this sort of prejudice that it was impossible, which was sort of created for commercial reasons, I think. And so it was out there to be done, and I had a reason to believe that it would work. So that's a kind of example of sort of seeing the preconditions are all there. Now, that required an incredible amount of work on tens of thousands of great engineers to get it to that point. So in some sense, all I had to do was take advantage of each of those pieces that were already there and put them together.

7. 31:47 – 34:06

   The three criteria by which projects are chosen at Applied Invention.

   1. DHDanny Hillis31:47

      Right now, it's very formal what we decide to work on because our, our partners at Applied Invention, we put three tests on things. So one of them is that one of the senior partners has to be really excited about it, which is usually because it has some big impact on the world, or sometimes it's 'cause it's just really cool technology. But, you know, usually it's because they see it has potential for big impact. And then the partners that are not the one that's the most excited about it, and often I'm the one that's excited about it, so the other partners [laughs] get to look at it and say, "Does this make any financial sense?" And it can make financial sense 'cause it's... We're guaranteed not to lose too much money on it.

   2. TFTim Ferriss32:37

      [laughs]

   3. DHDanny Hillis32:38

      Or it could make financial sense 'cause there's a small chance of making a lot of money on it, or... You know, you have to have a portfolio of those things. But that sort of has to be evaluated by different people than the one that's most excited about it.

   4. TFTim Ferriss32:51

      Good idea. [laughs]

   5. DHDanny Hillis32:53

      [laughs] So there's a kind of practical aspect to it that I probably didn't do in the early days. I tended to do things way too early before they made any financial sense. So now we have that bit of discipline that added to it. But then the third thing that we do, this is the hardest thing to do, and we call it the non-redundancy criterion, which is... 'Cause by then you've got a project somebody's excited about and you know it's gonna make money or you make... And why would you say no? Well, the answer is, you would say no if it's gonna happen anyway.

   6. TFTim Ferriss33:28

      [laughs]

   7. DHDanny Hillis33:29

      In other words, if somebody else is gonna do it, why should you do it? You're wasting your time. There's some reason nobody's doing it.

   8. TFTim Ferriss33:35

      Mm-hmm.

   9. DHDanny Hillis33:36

      And you know, in the case of the parallel computing thing, it was this crazy thing called Amdahl's law, which seemed to prove that it was impossible. And so you have to say there's a unique reason why we're gonna do this. We're doing something that won't get done otherwise or won't get done for a long time or won't get done right. And so we only take projects like that, and that one's a tough self-discipline to enforce, but we do

8. 34:06 – 40:37

   Zero-trust packet routing (ZPR) and the future of cybersecurity.

   1. DHDanny Hillis34:06

      do it.

   2. TFTim Ferriss34:06

      Quick question on the parallel computing example. So you mentioned, if I'm getting the pronunciation right, Amdahl's law, which indicated it was impossible. You mentioned as a perhaps counter example, obviously in a different substrate, the human brain does it, but was there other... Were there other pieces of evidence that led you to believe, given the constraints of the technology at the time, that it was possible?

   3. DHDanny Hillis34:33

      No, I think that was the one that really made me have faith in it. But there's something wrong with Amdahl's law, 'cause I... Actually, at the time, I couldn't tell you what the flaw was in the proof of Amdahl's law. It was pretty convincing. I mean, now I can go back and tell you that the flaw was it assumed that you just kept doing the same size problem, but of course, if you have a bigger, faster computer, you do a bigger problem.

   4. TFTim Ferriss34:57

      Mm-hmm.

   5. DHDanny Hillis34:57

      And so you don't just use the same problem, and that's the reason cloud computing works and, you know, the, these giant parallel machines work is because you use gigantic problems on them.

   6. TFTim Ferriss35:09

      Mm-hmm.

   7. DHDanny Hillis35:09

      And if you tried to use the little problem that you were running on a single computer, they wouldn't be very efficient.

   8. TFTim Ferriss35:15

      Mm-hmm.

   9. DHDanny Hillis35:16

      But anyway, I didn't see that flaw at the time. But I, I'll give you an example of something we're doing now that sort of fits that. Cybersecurity.

   10. TFTim Ferriss35:24

       Mm-hmm.

   11. DHDanny Hillis35:25

       Everybody agrees cybersecurity is a mess. Ransoms are going up. Nobody knows even how big it is 'cause everybody hides, you know, the break-ins and so on. But, like, everybody agrees it's getting worse rapidly, and the defense is losing against offense. And if you step back and really look at it, the reason that it's bad is because the internet was built on a sort of flawed foundation. The basic idea of IP, internet protocol, was that you'd look at a packet, and if it wanted to go someplace, you'd move it in that direction. And it was explicitly stated in the design principles that security was not the problem of the networks, 'cause security was the problem of the thing that got the packet. So you have this thing where... And the packet can kind of claim to be from anywhere.

   12. TFTim Ferriss36:22

       Mm-hmm.

   13. DHDanny Hillis36:23

       So you get this flood of packets being delivered to you. You have no idea really where they came from, and you have to kind of guess which are the good ones and which are the bad ones.

   14. TFTim Ferriss36:31

       Right.

   15. TFTim Ferriss36:32

       Unmarked packages from everywhere

   16. DHDanny Hillis36:34

       Exactly. You can come up with very clever ways of guessing, but then as soon as you do that, somebody can come up with a very clever way of getting around your heuristic of guessing. And ultimately, the attackers have the advantage if the packets are anonymous. And so clearly the right thing is to have the network have a policy of what it delivers. In some sense, we did that a little bit with firewalls. If you try to see, oh, this is a bad packet, I'll cut it off or something. But again, you sort of have to guess where it came from or what it's doing to do that. So I got together a bunch of people that had been involved in the early days of the internet and had built all kinds of things on top of it and had used it for very high security applications and things like that, and, and said, "How, how would we have designed internet protocol if we knew what we knew today? If we actually understood what cybersecurity was like, how people were really using computers, things like that?" And you know, that's a non-starter for anybody, any normal commercial company to ask that question, because obviously you're not going to replace internet protocol. But it was a great hypothetical that kind of captured a bunch of very smart people's imagination, and we got together and invented something called Zero-trust packet routing, where every packet carries a kind of a passport and a visa that proves it has permission to go where it's going. So the network itself kind of has a policy. It doesn't try to deliver everything to everything. It delivers things that are allowed to go to where they're allowed to go. And, and then it turned out after we built that, that actually we looked at it and said, "You know, we could build this as kind of an overlay to start on the current internet." And so people are starting to do that now. Now Oracle just announced a product that their cloud is going to start using this protocol, and so I think that that's going to cause a big shift in the internet eventually because it is sort of gets at the foundational problem that sort of no sane company would have looked at as a business opportunity. And it probably isn't a business opportunity because it probably has to be open and a standard or something like that. But I think it's gonna actually help the good guys eventually make the world a better place.

   17. TFTim Ferriss39:13

       What do you think, Danny, the... and I'm gonna keep this pretty broad, but the future of cybersecurity potentially looks like? And you can choose the timeframe, five years, 10 years, three years, whatever you want to paint. But I mean, there could be the dystopian sort of Cormac McCarthy version of what cybersecurity looks like. Then there's the utopian kind of island Aldous Huxley version, and then there's probably something in between, but what do you think?

   18. DHDanny Hillis39:38

       I think you will actually shift to this, and what this is, there's sort of two completely different layers of cybersecurity that have nothing to do with each other. So you'll have the kind of layer that we have right now that we depend on, which is the endpoints kind of protect themselves.

   19. TFTim Ferriss39:53

       Mm-hmm.

   20. DHDanny Hillis39:53

       So they force you to log in and identify yourself or whatever the, the exchange certificates or-

   21. TFTim Ferriss40:03

       Right

   22. DHDanny Hillis40:03

       ... that will all still exist. But completely independently of that will be something like it'll be zero trust packet routing or something like that, where the network itself is kind of aware of who's sending the messages, what permissions they have, and it's actually aware of the identity and sort of strongly authenticated identity of it. That's a completely different system than we have now. So I think that two-layer system, actually the defender has the advantage instead of right now the attacker has the advantage.

   23. TFTim Ferriss40:36

       That's cool.

9. 40:37 – 53:37

   Learning by "hanging out" with experts like Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Feynman.

   1. TFTim Ferriss40:37

      So Dan, I love your idea of the three criteria for deciding whether your company does things. I assume maybe that's also your personal one too, where it's am I excited? Is there some viable means to keep it going? And then thirdly, would it happen without me? That last one supposes a certain amount that you know something or you have some ability that other people don't have to do it. And so going back to, to you with the chips, like you're a young graduate student, "Oh, I'm just gonna design a chip. I'm gonna make chips." That's, that requires either a lot of knowledge about chip making. It's not every graduate student who says, "I can make a chip," and how am I gonna make... I mean, so how do you enter into this area of chip design that I'm, that you don't have, but you're confident that you can make a chip? So tell me about how you get there.

   2. DHDanny Hillis41:35

      [laughs] Maybe it just requires a lot of overconfidence. So of course it always turns out to be harder than you think.

   3. TFTim Ferriss41:40

      Right.

   4. DHDanny Hillis41:40

      But I guess I am gravitated toward learning new things, and I've also developed the ability to kind of search out the people who really know the things and hang out with them. So find the people that really understand it, hang out with it, learn it. And so it's not that I know things other people don't, but maybe I know a different combination of things that other people do know.

   5. TFTim Ferriss42:12

      Mm-hmm.

   6. DHDanny Hillis42:12

      And I'm kind of willing to learn the things I don't know and kind of have a technique of doing it, which is hanging out with people who are smarter than I am.

   7. TFTim Ferriss42:21

      Yes. Let me open that up a bit. So I feel like there, there are many different species of hanging out with people, right? So I could have as many group dinners with wine and banter with experts in AI-

   8. TFTim Ferriss42:35

      ... as humanly possible. And who knows? Maybe I'd have a hangover and a few great ideas I thought were great, at least, jotted down in a notebook. Could you give a few examples of how you interact with people? Maybe because the name was invoked earlier, you could start with Marvin Minsky and maybe your first meeting.

   9. DHDanny Hillis42:55

      [laughs]

   10. TFTim Ferriss42:57

       Because maybe that'll lead us somewhere interesting.

   11. DHDanny Hillis42:59

       Okay, so Marvin Minsky is the person who named artificial intelligence. He and John McCarthy kind of founded the field. And so when I went to MIT, I kind of knew that I wanted to do artificial intelligence, and I had read about Marvin Minsky, so I knew I wanted to work for Marvin Minsky.

   12. TFTim Ferriss43:20

       Mm-hmm.

   13. DHDanny Hillis43:21

       And I was... I had to figure out how to do it, and the AI lab was sort of locked up in Technology Square. It was hard to even physically get into it, and you couldn't get into it unless you had a key, and you couldn't get a key unless you had a job there. So I decided, okay, first thing I gotta get into the building. [laughs]

   14. TFTim Ferriss43:43

       [laughs] It's like Ocean's 11. Yeah.

   15. DHDanny Hillis43:45

       Well, I did slip in a few times, but that wasn't gonna work. It was pretty high security.

   16. TFTim Ferriss43:50

       Yeah.

   17. DHDanny Hillis43:51

       DARPA was paying for all of the lab, and I got their proposals and the proposals to NSF, and I read their proposals to see what is it I could possibly offer here, and I read their proposals.

   18. TFTim Ferriss44:02

       And you read those proposals because those were publicly available in some format? Because they were g- because they were government funded.

   19. DHDanny Hillis44:08

       Well, they were actually in the library that was in the lobby of the building, which you could get to.

   20. TFTim Ferriss44:13

       Okay. Here we go. [laughs]

   21. DHDanny Hillis44:15

       Okay. So I'm in the lobby, so I can read the proposal.

   22. TFTim Ferriss44:19

       With the Groucho Marx nose and mustache.

   23. DHDanny Hillis44:22

       [laughs]

   24. TFTim Ferriss44:23

       Cup of coffee. Don't mind me. Right.

   25. DHDanny Hillis44:26

       So I read them, and there was one thing where they said, "We think it's actually important that young kids program computers."

   26. TFTim Ferriss44:33

       Mm.

   27. DHDanny Hillis44:33

       "And we think even kids that can't read and write should program. We don't know how to do that yet, but we think it's important." I was like, "Ah, they don't know how to do it yet."

   28. TFTim Ferriss44:40

       [laughs]

   29. DHDanny Hillis44:41

       So I will invent a way for kids who can't read and write to program computers. And then so I went off and I invented this sort of picture way where you manipulated blocks and-

   30. TFTim Ferriss44:56

       Hmm.
10. 53:37 – 1:02:16

    Danny's work in biotechnology and cancer research with David Agus.

    1. TFTim Ferriss53:37

       How did you, Danny, get into biotechnology or just the biological sciences?

    2. DHDanny Hillis53:44

       Well, the biotechnology was once I set up these invention companies, people would start to come to me with problems that [laughs] kind of as a last resort.

    3. TFTim Ferriss53:57

       The engineer of last resort. [laughs]

    4. DHDanny Hillis53:59

       If you knew that you wanted to solve a problem and nobody else could solve it. [laughs] So, so that was the way that I got into biology is a, a doctor named, uh, David Agus, who was an oncologist-

    5. TFTim Ferriss54:14

       Mm

    6. DHDanny Hillis54:15

       ... who was really frustrated with his abilities to diagnose and treat cancer, came to me and said, "You know, we got a problem here. People call cancers all these different things, and the paradigm we have for treating things just isn't working for it." And I started talking with him about it, and that led to a big collaboration. One of the things that we realized was, in some sense, cancering isn't something you have, like a disease. It's something that you do. You know, like your body does, and your body's constantly doing it. Your body is probably cancering right now in three or four different ways, but usually it deals with it and stops it, and occasionally it gets out of control. So if you start thinking of it more like a verb, and then where's the action happening? Well, the action is happening at the levels of proteins being expressed and proteins interacting. And so even if I knew all your genes, I don't know what your proteins are doing. I know maybe what possible proteins are, but proteins, after they get produced by the genes, they modify each other, and they also come in by food, in the bacteria in your gut and everything like that. So what you really wanna see is the proteins, what's happening in the proteins, and nobody had a way of looking at the proteins. So we started developing a way that you could take a drop of blood or eventually a cell and look at all... just measure all the proteins in it and see how that changed with time, and we started doing it with mice and studying, you know, as they got cancer, we could see how the proteins changed and the cascades and then you could look at ways of interfering with this process, which is different in every form of cancer. So once you start looking at it as kind of a runtime thing rather than-

    7. TFTim Ferriss56:15

       Mm-hmm

    8. DHDanny Hillis56:15

       ... something that you have.

    9. TFTim Ferriss56:17

       What do you mean by runtime?

    10. DHDanny Hillis56:18

        In other words, there's two ways of looking at what's going on in a computer. I mean, I could stare at the code for a long time, but if a better way of debugging the program is to try to run the program and look at what's actually happening.

    11. TFTim Ferriss56:32

        Yep.

    12. DHDanny Hillis56:33

        And in some sense, if you look at genetics, you're looking at the program.

    13. TFTim Ferriss56:37

        Yeah.

    14. DHDanny Hillis56:38

        But if you had a way of looking at all the proteins, that's the equivalent of the debugger to see what's actually happening.

    15. TFTim Ferriss56:44

        I understand.

    16. DHDanny Hillis56:44

        And so, you know, this kind of became a different way of looking at, at cancer, and the National Cancer Institute got interested in it and gave us the money to actually do, you know, make some real progress and then, and so on. So that's how I got in, into that one.

    17. TFTim Ferriss57:02

        Mm-hmm. So going back to that, as you got into working with this doctor, is your idea... Well, you probably said, "I don't know that much about proteins, so I'll start to hire people who will be the expert in this. My job will be to find the people who know the most and then start to work with them." Or are you trying to bring yourself up so that you're now an expert on proteins as well?

    18. DHDanny Hillis57:24

        First of all, he was one of the world's experts.

    19. TFTim Ferriss57:27

        Right.

    20. DHDanny Hillis57:27

        So first step was just, like, learn from him, but then he knew people that were other interesting people to talk to and introduced me to them and, you know, it was the same thing with Marvin. Marvin introduced me to other people or the same thing with-

    21. TFTim Ferriss57:41

        Mm-hmm

    22. DHDanny Hillis57:42

        ... Feynman. Once Feynman introduced me to his arch enemy, Murray Gell-Mann.

    23. TFTim Ferriss57:48

        [laughs] Keep him close, Danny. Keep him close. [laughs]

    24. DHDanny Hillis57:54

        [laughs] So in that case, it was really David Agus was the doctor that was my mentor and helping me, and I think with all these people, they like explaining it to somebody who doesn't understand it-

    25. TFTim Ferriss58:05

        Mm-hmm

    26. DHDanny Hillis58:06

        ... because they get to sort of go back to the fundamentals, and then that's a process. If you've ever taught somebody something, you know how much you learn-

    27. TFTim Ferriss58:16

        Mm-hmm

    28. DHDanny Hillis58:16

        ... teaching somebody something. So that was, in some sense, what I had to bring to the party was I was the blank slate that didn't know anything, that was asking the dumb questions.

    29. TFTim Ferriss58:26

        How did the doctor find you, Danny, at that point? How did he end up calling you or emailing you?

    30. DHDanny Hillis58:32

        It was funny. He kept calling me, and I didn't... 'cause you get a lot of incoming calls.
11. 1:02:16 – 1:11:16

    Staying sustainable with systems-oriented thinking in agriculture — as nature intended.

    1. DHDanny Hillis1:02:16

       Yeah, I think that's a much better way of doing it.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:02:19

       Right.

    3. DHDanny Hillis1:02:19

       So you definitely have to... You have to have something that's sustainable, otherwise you're going around begging all the time.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:02:25

       So your fourth one is I'm gonna also learn something. This is a way for me to learn.

    5. DHDanny Hillis1:02:30

       Well, I'll tell you what, like right now, I've gotten very interested in agriculture, which part of it I got interested in it because during COVID, I moved out to a farm in New Hampshire, and I started realizing... I mean, we just grew food in our own greenhouse, and I started realizing how much better this food was than what I could get shopping at Whole Foods, and started thinking about the whole supply chain and why was it food was so bad and expensive. And the more you looked at it, the way we do food today kind of relies on finding some place where you can pay somebody an unfairly low wage to do something [laughs] and bringing the food from there, and that's not really a sustainable future. And the land in which you can do that and just the social justice of doing that is not gonna hold up. And people want more protein, people want better food. And it's incredibly energy inefficient for... I mean, you're better off in California, but here you go to a grocery store, most of the vegetables you find in the grocery store are many weeks old. They've been shipped across thousands of miles in refrigerator trucks, great cost in energy. They're just about to spoil by the time they put them on the supermarket shelves. They've had all the flavor and everything bred out of them so that they can optimize their ability to withstand shipping long distances. The rest of the world couldn't repeat this inefficient system that we've done, and yet the rest of the world wants to eat much better food, wants to eat more protein. Climate is changing so...

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:04:19

       So Danny, when you're looking at a space like this, you have the seed of an interest that is prompted by this time spent in New Hampshire, where I've also spent a bunch of time.

    7. DHDanny Hillis1:04:30

       [laughs]

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:04:30

       And then you start asking questions, and the peripheral vision widens to include all of these different facets that you just mentioned, right? So someone could get lost in that and just the sheer volume and complexity of all these different problems and challenges.

    9. DHDanny Hillis1:04:50

       Yeah.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:04:51

        How do you, how do you brainstorm questions and then choose which questions to pursue?

    11. DHDanny Hillis1:04:58

        Well, I guess what I'm interested in, and maybe it's because of the technique I've developed of learning things, is are there ways to change the system rather than solving individual point problems within the system?

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:05:11

        Mm-hmm. You have a very systems view of the world.

    13. DHDanny Hillis1:05:14

        Yeah.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:05:15

        Okay.

    15. DHDanny Hillis1:05:16

        So agriculture is like the oldest technology, so it's amazing all the solutions people have come up with, like the point problem of how do you pull out a weed or pick a tomato or any one problem has been looked at in a lot of ways and lots of inventions around it and so on. But it's surprising how few people kind of think in terms of what's all the things that have to happen for food to get grown and it end up on the table, and a lot of it is stuff that you don't imagine, like predicting the weather or mining fertilizer or shipping things in refrigerator trucks and, you know, it's not things that you would think of first when you're thinking of agriculture, but that's actually what a lot of the activity is. And people have point optimized out most of the specific solutions, done a pretty good job of that, but very few, if anybody, have kind of tried to look at it as a system and how could you rearrange the system.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:06:22

        Now by system you don't mean, I assume, which is always a dangerous habit, but you're not talking about, say... Some people might think of permaculture as a system, right? But you're extending the system to include many other aspects of food production, transport, supply chain.

    17. DHDanny Hillis1:06:42

        Yeah. Permaculture would be like a natural system.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:06:45

        Right.

    19. DHDanny Hillis1:06:46

        And so nature does think in terms of or build things in terms of systems.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:06:49

        Mm-hmm.

    21. DHDanny Hillis1:06:50

        Ecologies are systems. But typically, we engineer things in terms of point solutions that get put together into systems.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:07:00

        Kind of cobbled together.

    23. DHDanny Hillis1:07:02

        Yeah, cobbled together. And that's because that's probably, you know, that's the commercial opportunities. If you make a better point solution to something, you've got a market and you can build up expertise and a competitive advantage and so on. So there's a reason why people do that.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:07:17

        Mm-hmm.

    25. DHDanny Hillis1:07:19

        And the system things are more complicated and more likely to fail. And a lot of times I do look at it and just decide this is too complicated, I can't do anything. But sometimes you look at it and say, "Wow, a lot of the easy things haven't been done. If you change this and you change that at the same time and..."

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:07:36

        Did you find that in agriculture? There was some low-hanging fruit?

    27. DHDanny Hillis1:07:40

        Oh, yeah. In agriculture, very, very much like that.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:07:43

        Pun intended.

    29. DHDanny Hillis1:07:44

        A lot more things if you could do it right. So clearly, for instance, things should be grown much closer to where they're eaten. I mean, they don't have to be grown like in vertical farms in the city, but they could be grown a few hours away out in the suburbs, and they'd be a whole lot better.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:08:03

        Mm-hmm.
12. 1:11:16 – 1:12:53

    Danny's superpower.

    1. DHDanny Hillis1:11:16

       me.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:11:16

       Mm-hmm.

    3. KKKevin Kelly1:11:17

       So you have s- many talents, Danny, so many talents. I'm wondering which one do you feel is your superpower?

    4. DHDanny Hillis1:11:23

       I don't know. Maybe not being afraid to learn new stuff.

    5. KKKevin Kelly1:11:27

       Hmm.

    6. DHDanny Hillis1:11:28

       In some sense, maybe it's the superpower we're all born with so-

    7. KKKevin Kelly1:11:31

       [laughs]

    8. DHDanny Hillis1:11:31

       ... maybe I've kept a superpower that kids have, right?

    9. KKKevin Kelly1:11:35

       Mm-hmm.

    10. DHDanny Hillis1:11:35

        So kids, they're not afraid to go in and see something new and strange and start playing with it. And then after a while, there's a lot of things in the world that that gets sort of beat out of you, that [laughs] you learn not to do that, and you get told not to do that in lots of different ways, and I guess I was lucky enough to be around people that didn't beat it out of me.

    11. KKKevin Kelly1:12:00

        Wow. Well, here's what one of your kids told me.

    12. DHDanny Hillis1:12:03

        Uh-oh. [laughs]

    13. KKKevin Kelly1:12:04

        They said your superpower was a mind shifter, someone who can easily shift into different mindsets and view things from multiple perspectives. And I think I would agree with that. I think that your lateral thinking is, to me, one of your superpowers.

    14. DHDanny Hillis1:12:21

        That may have come from my childhood because my father was an epidemiologist, so we lived pretty much any place there was a hepatitis epidemic, which often came with a war and a famine too. So I lived in a lot of strange places around strange cultures, so you sort of had to mind shift into, like, what are things like in the middle of the Congo or what are things like in Calcutta? Maybe that's how I sort of got that habit of being willing to shift my mind a bit.

13. 1:12:53 – 1:17:26

    Homeschooling, education on the move, and the influence of Mrs. Wilner.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:12:54

       So maybe a- an angle into this. Danny, my understanding is that you homeschooled your three kids. How did you... Why did you do it, and how did you approach it, and how did that turn out?

    2. DHDanny Hillis1:13:07

       Well, first of all, I can't take personal credit for homeschool. I mean, my wife did a lot, and also we hired a bunch of tutors and-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:13:17

       Okay

    4. DHDanny Hillis1:13:17

       ... we worked with a bunch of other homeschoolers.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:13:20

       So you guys jointly decided?

    6. DHDanny Hillis1:13:21

       Yeah. And I taught them some things, but it definitely takes a village, so. When I was a kid, I did bounce around all these schools, and I remember sitting, kind of being miserable in school and thinking... 'Cause I had some great teachers. I had some really bad teachers too. And I remember sitting in school and thinking, "I will never do this to my kids." And so I didn't, you know? [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:13:50

       Mm.

    8. DHDanny Hillis1:13:51

       But when you had a great teacher, they would kind of listen to where you were and, and help you, stretch you a bit. One of my favorite teachers was, uh, actually a woman named Mrs. Wilner. She was a librarian. And I was really interested in collecting rocks wherever I went, so I would always go in and ask for books on rocks. And she said, "Okay, well, here's some books on rocks, but here's a book on electricity too."

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:14:19

       [laughs]

    10. DHDanny Hillis1:14:21

        I was like, "Whoa. This is..." I never would have asked for a book on electricity, but she kind of led me there. "And, and here's a, here's a science fiction book." I was like, "What's science fiction?" And-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:14:33

        [laughs]

    12. DHDanny Hillis1:14:33

        ... you know, it was like a juvenile science fiction book called The Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet, but, you know, that was like-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:14:40

        [laughs]

    14. DHDanny Hillis1:14:41

        ... brought me into this whole other world. So great teachers are like that. They kind of see where you are and they stretch you to some place you can get to.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:14:51

        Mm-hmm.

    16. DHDanny Hillis1:14:52

        That was wonderful, and you just have a lot more opportunity to do that in homeschooling than you do in a, in a classroom.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:14:58

        Were there any aspects of cognitive development, curiosity or otherwise, that you cultivated through the homeschooling, understanding that it wasn't just you as a lone operator doing it? But were there things that you wouldn't really emphasize or touch in traditional schooling that you guys included or emphasized?

    18. DHDanny Hillis1:15:20

        We did, but it was interesting for me. Like, sometimes I would sit down to teach something that I thought was really simple.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:15:27

        [laughs]

    20. DHDanny Hillis1:15:28

        And then as I started teaching it, I realized, well, actually, this isn't so simple. There's, like, this other thing underneath it, and another thing under... So I was actually not such a great teacher necessarily. [laughs]

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:15:38

        [laughs] Wait, wait, wait. I know two plus two equals four, but let's back up a minute.

    22. DHDanny Hillis1:15:43

        Yeah, exactly. You can back up. It sort of reminded me, I saw this happen in college was, I had a math professor named John Colarota, and he was at the blackboard once and he's writing along and he says, "So, so you can see that it's obvious that this is true," and he stops, and he sits there for a long time.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:16:02

        [laughs]

    24. DHDanny Hillis1:16:03

        It felt like 10 minutes or something. We're all just, like, waiting. And he's like-

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:16:07

        [laughs]

    26. DHDanny Hillis1:16:08

        ... "Yes, it's obvious." [laughs]

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:16:11

        [laughs]

    28. DHDanny Hillis1:16:11

        And then he goes on. But I think that's one thing that you realize about teaching is how much you don't know or what that depends on or-

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:16:20

        Yeah.

    30. DHDanny Hillis1:16:20

        And that was a wonderful thing. I think Dick Feynman was really inspirational in that, of he really admitted when he didn't understand something, and he'd like, "Well, wait a minute," like, "what's a one and a zero?" Right? I don't get... You know. And you sort of have to back up and sort of explain that you never really thought about it before, but digital computers need to disambiguate, so they force everything to be the one or zero. If it's in between, they force it one way or the other. That's what digital means, right?
14. 1:17:26 – 1:21:35

    The failure of Thinking Machines and other regrets/surprises.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:17:26

       Mm-hmm. Danny, I was just wondering, what are you trying to optimize in your life these days?

    2. DHDanny Hillis1:17:32

       Well, I wish I had a lot more time ahead of me. So right now, time seems like the most precious thing to me.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:17:40

       Yeah.

    4. DHDanny Hillis1:17:41

       And you start realizing how much of it you squandered. [laughs]

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:17:45

       It doesn't sound like you squandered very much time. I'm not seeing that.

    6. DHDanny Hillis1:17:48

       [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:17:48

       Where were you squandering? When did you squander anything? Come on.

    8. DHDanny Hillis1:17:53

       Yeah. [laughs] Danny, based on your bio...

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:17:55

       [laughs] Your bio.

    10. DHDanny Hillis1:17:56

        Objection, Your Honor.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:17:58

        Yeah. [laughs] Right.

    12. DHDanny Hillis1:17:59

        Yeah.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:18:00

        [laughs]

    14. DHDanny Hillis1:18:02

        I did a lot of things that didn't work out.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:18:04

        Okay. So let's talk about some failures. What were some of the failures?

    16. DHDanny Hillis1:18:07

        Well, I think that Thinking Machines was my first big failure because if I had paid more attention to the... If I had asked that financial sustainability question, really treated that as a problem of serious thought like I was thinking about the machines, I would've done a much better job. That company didn't have to fail.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:18:29

        Mm.

    18. DHDanny Hillis1:18:29

        It was awful when it did. It had, like, 500 people, almost none of whom had had another job. It was like I was hiring people straight out of MIT, and we were building the fastest computer and everything was going great, and we just did a bunch of dumb things in how we set up the business that we didn't pay enough attention to laws that were getting passed by our competitors in Congress that were making it illegal to export our products or-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:18:56

        Mm-hmm

    20. DHDanny Hillis1:18:56

        ... making it hard for people to acquire our products, and yeah, we were just kind of blindsided by that. We did stupid stuff. We were going up, up, up, and so it didn't occur to us that we might have a... Something might cause a downturn and we might not have enough cash in the bank, and-

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:19:16

        Mm-hmm

    22. DHDanny Hillis1:19:17

        ... going back, we just managed it badly. So I learned from that.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:19:23

        Mm-hmm.

    24. DHDanny Hillis1:19:23

        It's sad because it was a terrible moment for me. I felt like I had let down all of these people. And I had let them down.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:19:32

        So Danny, you look back on this life review and lessons learned, and flash forward to today, you said focusing on... Well, you look back and realize how much time you've squandered. What rules do you have for yourself, or how do you think about not squandering the time you have left? Have you changed anything?

    26. DHDanny Hillis1:19:52

        Well, the non-redundancy is a piece of it.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:19:54

        Right, if someone else can do it and will do it-

    28. DHDanny Hillis1:19:56

        Don't work on things that are gonna happen anyway.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:19:58

        Mm-hmm.

    30. DHDanny Hillis1:19:59

        I still think hanging out with extraordinary people is the right thing, but there's a, a interesting problem with that which I've realized, which is I tended to hang out with a lot of people that were older than I was-
15. 1:21:35 – 1:26:39

    The "Entanglement" that blurs natural and technological boundaries.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:21:35

       So Danny, this is gonna be a, a fast left turn, but I've been staring at this the whole time we've been chatting, [laughs] and I don't know why. Uh, I c- I, I can use the term OCD because I, I have been diagnosed with it [laughs] , although I think it's actually a superpower in a bunch of respects. I've been staring at this prompt, what is the entanglement, with a capital E, [laughs] for like an hour and a half here.

    2. DHDanny Hillis1:21:58

       Oh. [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:22:00

       Just waiting for the right segue, but I'm, I don't know if I'm gonna find the right segue. So what is the entanglement?

    4. DHDanny Hillis1:22:06

       So one of the things that I've noticed about the world is it used to be that nature and technology were very different things. Technology was something that we designed and we understood and we controlled. Nature was this mysterious, complicated thing that we didn't understand at all and pretty much had to take and work around and kind of riff with. But I think those two things are becoming entangled in sort of both directions. So things that used to be natural, like the atmosphere [laughs] or, you know, our genes or our minds or [laughs] my knee joint [laughs] , um, are now technological artifacts, right?

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:23:00

       Mm-hmm.

    6. DHDanny Hillis1:23:01

       And the things that used to be technological and controlled and designed are actually kind of evolved and happening, like the internet. Nobody can draw you a wiring diagram of the internet. Nobody can really tell you how ChatGPT came to that conclusion. I mean, they could sort of make up a story about it, but they don't really understand it in the way that you used to understand a computer when it produced an answer because it wasn't really designed. It was kind of a combination of designed and evolved and learned and... And so what's happening is that a lot of people's use of computers is now they kind of know the magic incantations that cause this library to do that, but they don't really know, like, all the things that are going on underneath that, that make it work. And so it's becoming more like nature. Nature, we used to kind of know, well, here's the magic incantations we use for making beer. We don't know really why this makes good beer and this makes bad beer or this makes champagne, but we sort of know when we do this, it does that, and that, that's kind of becoming our relationship with computers. So I think that what's happening is the distinction between the natural and the artificial is becoming entangled.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:24:25

       Mm.

    8. DHDanny Hillis1:24:26

       That idea may just kind of go away, so there is sort of almost is no pure nature and there almost is no pure technology that we fully understand, at least not in the technology that we're using to have this conversation.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:24:41

       Right.

    10. DHDanny Hillis1:24:41

        For example, there is nobody who understands every piece of it.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:24:44

        Mm-hmm.

    12. DHDanny Hillis1:24:45

        I want to put in a plug for my very first book, Outta Control-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:24:50

        Which-

    14. DHDanny Hillis1:24:51

        ... was about that entanglement.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:24:53

        Yeah, and I think you're one of the people that really got me thinking about that entanglement.

    16. DHDanny Hillis1:24:58

        Right.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:24:59

        That book was probably what a lot of what got me thinking about these ideas, and Artificial Life got me thinking about it.

    18. DHDanny Hillis1:25:05

        The way I would say it is there's one thing with two different faces, and those basically we had two different faces to this single thing, and we're recognizing that there's only one class which has kind of two different perspectives on the same thing.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:25:20

        You're saying natural and synthetic or nature and engineered?

    20. DHDanny Hillis1:25:24

        Yeah. They're basically different faces of the same thing going on in the long arc of the universe.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:25:31

        Yeah.

    22. DHDanny Hillis1:25:31

        Danny might say they're being entangled. I would say that they've always been entangled.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:25:35

        Mm-hmm.

    24. DHDanny Hillis1:25:36

        But we had two separate views of them, and now our

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:25:39

        We have a better view of it.

    26. DHDanny Hillis1:25:40

        I think there's also something very special about this instant in time, and by this instant in time, I mean plus or minus a century.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:25:48

        [laughs] The long now.

    28. DHDanny Hillis1:25:50

        [laughs] Yeah. But I think when people look back at history, even really our lifetimes... I mean, over my lifetime, you know, the population has more than doubled, the climate has changed, computers have come out. Everything is really very, very different in a way that that's never happened before. Things have not cha- you know, population hasn't doubled in a single lifetime before, and I don't think it, it will again.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:26:15

        Right. Right.

    30. DHDanny Hillis1:26:17

        I think we are at a special moment where our sort of technological powers have gotten enough to make these things that are more complicated than we can understand, and that's kind of a qualitative change. We weren't building stuff that was more complicated than we understood before.
16. 1:26:39 – 1:30:36

    The current state of AI versus true intelligence.

    1. DHDanny Hillis1:26:39

       Right.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:26:39

       Danny, so question about the entanglement, and, uh, this actually relates to a name you mentioned earlier, Jeff Bezos. So he's described AI, I don't think it was specific to LLMs, I mean, it was broader than that, as a discovery and not an invention. You know, something akin to electricity or fire. How do you think about AI?

    3. DHDanny Hillis1:27:05

       I'm gonna make a distinction between AI and what's called AI right now.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:27:13

       Great. Please.

    5. DHDanny Hillis1:27:15

       Intelligence is a very complicated, multi-factored thing, like life.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:27:19

       Mm-hmm.

    7. DHDanny Hillis1:27:20

       It's not just one thing. In the beginnings of AI, we thought the things that were hard for us to do were the intelligence. So we thought playing chess would be intelligent or solving calculus tests-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:27:37

       [laughs]

    9. DHDanny Hillis1:27:38

       ... would be intelligence.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:27:39

        Or translating languages.

    11. DHDanny Hillis1:27:42

        Well, that came later. But the things that were hard for us, we thought, "That's intelligence."

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:27:47

        [laughs]

    13. DHDanny Hillis1:27:48

        That was the stuff that early AI concentrated on.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:27:51

        Mm-hmm.

    15. DHDanny Hillis1:27:52

        And actually, it turns out that was really the easy part. The hard part was the stuff that was... we were so good at, we didn't even notice, like recognizing a face, jumping to a conclusion, you know, having an intuition about something. Those things were way, way harder. So we, we thought producing speech would be hard. We didn't think listening would be hard.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:28:20

        Mm.

    17. DHDanny Hillis1:28:20

        [laughs] Right? Because we just sort of did that without apparent effort. But listening to speech turned out to be way harder than producing speech. [laughs] And so, so there was this period, there was always... in the early days, there was always a box called sometimes a... well, it was the neural network, the pattern recognizer, that was sort of looked at, was gonna guess the obvious thing that was gonna happen next and recognize the pattern. And we thought that was gonna be the easy part, 'cause it was just gonna be some neural networks that got trained. No. It turns out that those neural networks had to be much, much bigger than we were guessing, way bigger than we were guessing, and you had to train them, or at least so far we've only know how to train them with way more data than we were imagining training them with, and so on. But sure enough, that box has now gotten built. That's what we call AI right now, is that little box in intelligence, and it's actually really good at kind of imitating human intelligence. And, and imitating is kind of a good first step. That's, that's what my granddaughters do first. I have a granddaughter that can sit and talk to an electrician as if she knows what electricity is just by using the right words and saying-

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:29:46

        [laughs]

    19. DHDanny Hillis1:29:46

        ... phrases that she's heard before and so on, and she can kind of fake it pretty well, but she has no idea what she's talking about. [laughs]

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:29:55

        [laughs]

    21. DHDanny Hillis1:29:56

        And that's kind of mostly where AI is right at this moment. I mean, it'll be at a different place a year from now and starting... when people understand that and putting it in different places. But it's just one little part of intelligence. It's a good start, but it's not gonna do all of the things that we do that we consider intelligence until people come up with some other ideas. But people will come up with other ideas. The other big change is we got a lot more smart people working on it than we ever had before. So those are the people that are gonna come up with all those other ideas to make it work. So I do think AI's gonna happen pretty fast just because we have so many smart people working

17. 1:30:36 – 1:35:58

    How AI may help humanity better understand its place on the intelligence spectrum.

    1. DHDanny Hillis1:30:36

       on it.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:30:36

       Is there anything you think people are, broadly speaking, overestimating and underestimating with respect to the development of AI? AI not in quotation marks.

    3. DHDanny Hillis1:30:50

       I think they're overestimating the capabilities of what we have now, but underestimating what we'll be able to accomplish over the long run.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:31:03

       Hmm.

    5. DHDanny Hillis1:31:04

       It's interesting. I think that people get mixed up on timescales a lot. In general, I'm kind of a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. [laughs]

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:31:14

       [laughs]

    7. DHDanny Hillis1:31:14

       I think that that's... [laughs] that probably applies to, to AI- [laughs]

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:31:18

       Yeah

    9. DHDanny Hillis1:31:19

       ... as much as, as anything.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:31:20

        I'll make an observation that I've been reading the early history of the discovery of electricity.

    11. DHDanny Hillis1:31:27

        Mm-hmm.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:31:28

        Way before Tesla and Edison. I mean, like, you know, Faraday and Davies and these guys. And what was remarkable was how the smartest people at the time, like Newton and others, were just so wrong. I mean, just so far off. The strangest ideas about what electricity was, and they really hadn't a clue.

    13. KKKevin Kelly1:31:47

        And, and it was just many, many years of going through, and they would... And actually before they had the scientific journals, they had scientific demonstrations every week where they were demoing the latest discoveries in electricity for paying tickets. And each time they would, week would go along, they'd have another discovery, and what they were discovering was far more complex, far more unintuitive than what they thought. And I think that's exactly where we are with intelligence. We have no theory of intelligence. We have no idea what it is. We're just discovering some of the earliest primitives of what it might be. But I think we're as far from knowing what intelligence is as they were from understanding what electricity was in the 1700s.

    14. DHDanny Hillis1:32:30

        I think that's fair, except maybe it's actually quite possible we'll never understand what intelligence is, and that was, that was sort of part of the prediction of the Songs of Eden papers. It may be easier to actually make intelligence than to understand intelligence.

    15. KKKevin Kelly1:32:45

        Yeah. We used plants for thousands and thousands of years without understanding how they work.

    16. DHDanny Hillis1:32:52

        Yeah.

    17. KKKevin Kelly1:32:52

        We use the natural world without understanding how actually they're made and are governed. So we can use things that we don't understand. So what's first is us being able to make things that we can use and don't understand. [laughs]

    18. DHDanny Hillis1:33:06

        Yeah.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:33:07

        So a quick question on intelligence, though. Is that a term that is... Is it a useful term if we can't understand it, or is it just so broad a label applied to so many things that it's kind of useless and should just be replaced by-

    20. KKKevin Kelly1:33:23

        Yeah

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:33:23

        ... thin slicing and using more precise labels or concepts?

    22. KKKevin Kelly1:33:27

        I think we're gonna start to unbundle-

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:33:30

        Mm-hmm

    24. KKKevin Kelly1:33:30

        ... the concepts as we discover more things. I mean, my hypothesis is that we'll discover more about how our mind works through AI than 100 years of neurobiology has.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:33:40

        Mm-hmm.

    26. KKKevin Kelly1:33:40

        And we'll come to understand that intelligence is not a single dimension. I think it's a very high-dimensional space in which there's lots of different primitives or elements, and part of what we're doing right now is we'll begin to, to discover some of those elements and that intelligence is basically compounds.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:33:58

        Mm-hmm.

    28. KKKevin Kelly1:34:00

        We have a compounded intelligence that's made up of lots of different kinds of cognition and stuff. And so I think we're on that path to not replace it as much as to, uh, unbundle it.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:34:11

        Mm-hmm. Danny, what are your thoughts?

    30. DHDanny Hillis1:34:13

        I would absolutely agree with what Kevin said, but I'd take it one step further, which is even if we unbundled human intelligence and did all of those things, there's still more to intelligence than that.
18. 1:35:58 – 1:47:18

    What the future looks like to a short-term pessimist/long-term optimist.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:35:58

       So Danny, I have a question for you related to the short-term pessimist, long-term optimist. So I'm sad to report that there are lots of people my vintage, younger, I'm 47, so close to my age or even quite a bit younger, mid-30s, who are on the fence with respect to having kids or have decided not to have kids because they look at climate change, they look at the, what they might fairly consider some of the unpredictability around AI and the fear around Skynet.

    2. DHDanny Hillis1:36:34

       Mm-hmm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:36:35

       And we could go down this list of concerns they have that they cite as compelling evidence that they do not want to bring a life into this world because the future to them looks so bleak. How do you think about the long-term future? I mean, there is a value in optimism. There's like utilitarian function to optimism.

    4. DHDanny Hillis1:36:56

       Yeah.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:36:57

       But if we're able to put that aside, and maybe we can't, like how do you think about 100 years from now, 200 years from now?

    6. DHDanny Hillis1:37:04

       So I understand that, but I also understand that like when I was a kid, we were like taught to hide under our desk for when the atomic bomb was gonna get dropped.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:37:14

       Right.

    8. DHDanny Hillis1:37:14

       And thinking even as a kid, like-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:37:16

       [laughs]

    10. DHDanny Hillis1:37:17

        ... this isn't gonna work. I mean... [laughs] I knew people who died of smallpox.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:37:27

        Right.

    12. DHDanny Hillis1:37:27

        That disease doesn't exist anymore. When I was a kid, most other kids-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:37:32

        Mm-hmm

    14. DHDanny Hillis1:37:33

        ... were hungry and were malnourished, were likely to die of childhood diseases. That's not true anymore.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:37:41

        Mm-hmm.

    16. DHDanny Hillis1:37:43

        So when I was a kid, I had friends I now understand were gay friends and on- only understood later and understood what they were going through, but they couldn't even- They couldn't say that to anybody.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:37:56

        Mm-hmm.

    18. DHDanny Hillis1:37:57

        So there were so many things to be frightened about, and yet there were so many ways in which the world just got so much better.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:38:03

        Mm-hmm.

    20. DHDanny Hillis1:38:04

        And even in my lifetime it did. And it's true that we've created a lot of problems in that process, but we've always created a lot of problems.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:38:14

        Sure.

    22. DHDanny Hillis1:38:14

        So I guess if I just look at the sweep of history, there isn't any time when you'd say, "Uh, oh I, I would do better going back 100 years," or at least not in history. [laughs] You would not wanna be alive 100 years ago compared to being alive now.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:38:35

        Especially if you're gonna be born in a random place and sex. Yeah.

    24. DHDanny Hillis1:38:40

        I wouldn't wanna be a king 100 years a- Much better to be a peasant today than to be a king a couple of centuries ago in terms of your health, your food that you ate, how you spend your time, so on. So your comfort, everything. So I think that there is a general trend. It is possible that some catastrophic setback that could happen, but even if that happens, I kind of believe that humans are adaptable enough or nature is adaptable enough that it'll pick up and start up again. I suppose there's a scenario where it's without humans and something else, but certainly optimistic the earth is gonna be fine. [laughs]

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:39:27

        Yeah, sure.

    26. DHDanny Hillis1:39:28

        And I actually do believe that there are people that are gonna see that 10,000-year clock, decide what to do with it when it comes to the end of this 10,000 years.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:39:39

        Mm-hmm.

    28. DHDanny Hillis1:39:40

        But it won't be steady progress. It never has been. And so there's a bunch of things to worry about. I see why people are worried, but the bigger the picture you look at, the more you realize you do... I guess progress isn't a steady upwards thing. It's kind of two steps forward, one step back.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:40:02

        Mm-hmm. So let me ask you just a question about rank ordering sort of existential concerns because I-

    30. DHDanny Hillis1:40:09

        Mm-hmm
19. 1:47:18 – 1:49:58

    The cone of silence we never heard from again.

    1. KKKevin Kelly1:47:18

       [laughs]

    2. DHDanny Hillis1:47:19

       [laughs]

    3. KKKevin Kelly1:47:19

       [laughs]

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:47:19

       We can all watch Danny glitching on video six months from now. Beta tester. So I wanna come back to something, and I'm gonna steal some cliff notes from Kevin here, but you mentioned talking in restaurants on cell phones, and I'm very, very sensitive to sounds. And I see something in notes that Kevin and I were sharing. I don't know anything about this, but the name is descriptive enough that I feel like I kind get the idea. Babble the cone of silence.

    5. KKKevin Kelly1:47:50

       [laughs] Yeah. I wondered what happened to it.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:47:55

       What is this? [laughs] Is it like a Jetsons helmet that you plop on loud kids? What happened?

    7. DHDanny Hillis1:47:59

       No, it's actually a cool thing that somebody should do, but it was originally the problem of open offices and people overhearing each other's conversations.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:48:09

       Mm-hmm.

    9. DHDanny Hillis1:48:09

       And so it turns out that the best thing to mask a conversation is somebody talking in exactly the same voice saying something different. And so this was a little machine that people could put on their desk, and, and we tested it. It, it worked, which is that it sort of listened to you talking for a while, and then it started talking kind of in your voice, but saying... just making up s- kind of babble.

    10. KKKevin Kelly1:48:41

        [laughs]

    11. DHDanny Hillis1:48:43

        But in your voice and kind of your intonation and so on, and sort of talked over you out to the people around you. So the phenomenon was that the room got a little bit louder, but mostly people didn't notice that. Mostly there was just kind of a little buzz, but if you actually try to listen in on the conversation of the person at the desk next to you-

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:49:07

        Can't do it

    13. DHDanny Hillis1:49:08

        ... you actually couldn't under- it sort of-

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:49:09

        Yeah

    15. DHDanny Hillis1:49:10

        ... seemed like you could hear it, but you couldn't actually understand it.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:49:12

        Got two violins playing. Yeah.

    17. DHDanny Hillis1:49:14

        And then what happened with that was Herman Miller bought that technology for use in offices, and then it was actually a very sad thing. They set up a company to, to start it. Much to my surprise, the restaurants got very interested in it, which sort of bugs me 'cause I hate all of the noise in re- you know, restaurants, but-

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:49:38

        Hmm

    19. DHDanny Hillis1:49:39

        ... and things like healthcare line, the line at the pharmacy was interested and so on. But it was very sad because the CEO had a heart attack, and n- nobody had the heart to keep going, so-

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:49:55

        Hmm

    21. DHDanny Hillis1:49:56

        ... we'll never know if the technology would've worked.

20. 1:49:58 – 1:55:13

    Debugging dementia and other diseases.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:49:59

       Kevin, what would you like to see Danny work on? If Danny was like, "I'm out of... my idea bag is empty."

    2. KKKevin Kelly1:50:04

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:50:04

       He, he showed up and he said, "Boss Kelly, reporting for duty."

    4. KKKevin Kelly1:50:08

       [laughs]

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:50:10

       "What do you want me to do?"

    6. KKKevin Kelly1:50:12

       Yeah, another way to think about that is-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:50:15

       Danny is the inventor, and he has a company that invents things. And what would I like-

    8. KKKevin Kelly1:50:20

       Yeah

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:50:20

       ... Danny to invent?

    10. KKKevin Kelly1:50:21

        Exactly.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:50:21

        If I had to make a commission, I had a billion dollars. Oh my gosh.

    12. KKKevin Kelly1:50:25

        Robot beard trimmer.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:50:27

        No. [laughs]

    14. KKKevin Kelly1:50:28

        Yeah, exactly. Something that's, would meet all his criteria.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:50:32

        Well, no, no, no. No, just for you. This doesn't have to meet his criteria.

    16. KKKevin Kelly1:50:36

        No, but I mean something he would accept, so...

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:50:38

        Well, he's got no ideas in this hypothetical situation, so-

    18. KKKevin Kelly1:50:40

        [laughs]

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:50:42

        ... beggars can't be choosers.

    20. DHDanny Hillis1:50:43

        How about you, Tim? What would, what would you like?

    21. KKKevin Kelly1:50:45

        You have an idea, right?

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:50:46

        Well, it's very front of mind for me, no pun intended in this case, but I have neurodegenerative disease on both sides of my family. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and more. It's quite the collection, and I've been interested and followed neuroscience. I was originally a neuroscience major way, way back in the day, and would love for you to take your blank canvas, no question is dumb, and apply it to neurodegenerative diseases. That's one that immediately leaps to mind.

    23. DHDanny Hillis1:51:23

        Yeah. Yeah, I know how to go about that.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:51:25

        All right.

    25. DHDanny Hillis1:51:25

        And somebody should do it, which is, it's the same thing with cancer, with the cancer thing. What we really need is we need a way to read out the proteins in your body dynamically, like we can read out your genes.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:51:43

        Mm-hmm.

    27. DHDanny Hillis1:51:44

        And if we could really monitor that and read it out, you could find the processes that create disease before disease happens.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:51:54

        Mm-hmm. Right.

    29. DHDanny Hillis1:51:54

        So right now, when we treat disease, the cat's out of the bag.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:52:00

        Yeah.
21. 1:55:13 – 1:58:03

    The MRI alternative Danny's tackling.

    1. KKKevin Kelly1:55:13

       So Danny, I thought of two inventions I'd like to have from you. One is sort of profound, the other one is sort of trivial. So the profound one was I recently had an MRI, which is an amazing piece of technology, but man, what a pain.

    2. DHDanny Hillis1:55:29

       [laughs]

    3. KKKevin Kelly1:55:29

       What a unpleasant experience. And I just imagine like in a hundred years from now, there has to be some way that they're gonna have a machine that does this in a much more comfortable, easy, quick way.

    4. DHDanny Hillis1:55:44

       I got one I'm working on on that.

    5. KKKevin Kelly1:55:46

       Okay. There you go. [laughs] All right.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:55:48

       I just had two MRIs today, so I sympathize.

    7. DHDanny Hillis1:55:51

       My sympathies.

    8. KKKevin Kelly1:55:52

       There has to be a better way, right?

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:55:54

       I've had so many of these things, and every time I'm like, "Wow, this is a terrible experience."

    10. KKKevin Kelly1:55:58

        Yeah.

    11. DHDanny Hillis1:55:59

        I am working on something. It won't do everything an MRI do, but I think it'll be more useful based on ultrasound.

    12. KKKevin Kelly1:56:04

        Okay.

    13. DHDanny Hillis1:56:06

        And here's the funny thing. MRI, the great thing about an MRI is it produces this 3D image-

    14. KKKevin Kelly1:56:12

        Right

    15. DHDanny Hillis1:56:13

        ... and it can go to the doctor or the radiologist and they can interpret it, or an AI can interpret it because you've got- An output that is some disconnected from the process of measuring it. Ultrasound these days is not like that. Ultrasound really, the, the person that's doing the ultrasound has a lot more information than is captured in a picture or video.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:56:42

        Mm.

    17. DHDanny Hillis1:56:43

        They know how they're moving it around. They know what they're shoving in this direction. They're using this muscle to be a lens to magnify the thing behind it. They have the intent of where they're moving it, why they're moving it, and so they can perceive a whole lot more, and then they have to take what they perceive and write it into a report with maybe a few numbers measured or something like that. But it's not nearly as satisfying. What gets to the physician is not as useful as an X-ray or an MRI or a CT scan or something like that. Well, there's no reason that ultrasound has to be like that. If you had, if you had a, either a sensor on it or a robot moving it around, or you had the information of the pressures and the motion and, uh, and you had a model of tissue deformation and speed of sound through tissue and things like that, you could produce a three-dimensional image, like from an MRI with ultrasound, that would actually have information, uh, that you don't get from MRI, and that just hasn't been done yet. I'd love to meet people who are doing that. If they don't do it, I might have to work on it myself.

22. 1:58:03 – 1:58:34

    Why don't we have a freezer version of the consumer microwave oven?

    1. DHDanny Hillis1:58:03

       [laughs]

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:58:04

       So the second trivial invention, Danny, that I'm gonna assign to you is we, we all love a little microwave, which will instantly heat something up. I want the reverse.

    3. DHDanny Hillis1:58:14

       [laughs]

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:58:15

       I want to put it in the machine and have it instantly ice cold.

    5. DHDanny Hillis1:58:18

       [laughs] There's a way of doing that as laser cooling.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:58:21

       Okay. [laughs]

    7. DHDanny Hillis1:58:22

       [laughs] You do it atom by atom.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:58:26

       Okay. [laughs] It'd take a while to get that half chicken done, Kevin.

    9. DHDanny Hillis1:58:28

       That'd be a fun one.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:58:29

        Yeah, that would be.

    11. DHDanny Hillis1:58:30

        No, I don't know how to do that one.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:58:31

        That would be a billion dollars, for sure.

    13. DHDanny Hillis1:58:33

        Yep. Don't know how

23. 1:58:34 – 2:02:22

    Danny's place in pinch-to-zoom iPhone innovation history.

    1. DHDanny Hillis1:58:34

       to do that.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:58:34

       So Danny, if the sort of divine treasurer of the universe just bestowed upon you twenty billion dollars, so one of your criteria can vanish, right? In terms of the sustainability, you're covered for the foreseeable future and beyond, and let's say then it came down to only what gets you the most excited. So it could be sort of focused on that, and you were allowed to indulge for every, like, one or two serious projects that would have an impact, you had to do one trivial.

    3. DHDanny Hillis1:59:08

       [laughs]

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:59:10

       Not trivial. Not trivial. I feel like, you know, that's underestimating how important something seemingly trivial could become later, so.

    5. DHDanny Hillis1:59:18

       Well, I'll tell you one that is a history, one that's already happened, but I'll... It was like that for me.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:59:24

       Great.

    7. DHDanny Hillis1:59:25

       Is traveling all over the world. I... Chris was super interested in maps and looking at maps of where I was and so on, and I always wanted to, like, take a map and expand it and just-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:59:38

       Mm-hmm

    9. DHDanny Hillis1:59:38

       ... go into it. I had that dream since I was a kid.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:59:44

        Mm-hmm. So like an infinite zoom.

    11. DHDanny Hillis1:59:46

        Yeah, like a pinch-to-zoom.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:59:48

        Yeah. Here we go.

    13. DHDanny Hillis1:59:49

        But there was no such thing, right, at that time. But I really wanted that. I knew I wanted pinch-to-zoom.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:59:56

        Mm-hmm.

    15. DHDanny Hillis1:59:57

        And so as I started building it, you know, and actually, I had worked with Steve Jobs, and I got a, kind of a prototype of it working, and I, I invited him over to, to look at it, and, and he said, "Ah, you know, people, people won't want, like, fingerprint smudges all over their screen." [laughs]

    16. TFTim Ferriss2:00:21

        [laughs] He wouldn't like my screens very much.

    17. DHDanny Hillis2:00:24

        I kept on working on it. Eventually, I made this touch table thing, and it was v-very expensive. It actually went into the Situation Room of the White House. So during the Obama administration, Obama would show people, like he had this map that he could pinch to zoom, right? [laughs] It was... And then, then of course, Apple came out with the iPhone, and you know, other people were working on it. And then, and then and fortunately, when I did the table thing, I, I filed a patent, and, and then when the iPhone came out, of course, it did a very beautiful job of pinch-to-zoom, a very refined version of it, and people started using it. And then the other phone companies started doing it, and Apple sued them. Apple tried to... A- Apple filed a patent on pinch-to-zoom and sued them and actually, I think, won like a billion dollars from Samsung. So, but I had filed this patent, and Samsung went back and sued... Went to the patent office and said, "Wait a minute. Danny's patent predates all of this." So the patent office said, "Oh yeah, it does," and it invalidated Apple's patent. So everybody who had Androids or Samsung phones or whatever, they could use pinch-to-zoom too. So I think that's the invention that I'm kind of proudest of because even though I never got paid a dime for it, I see, like, little kids who have that same instinct that I had.

    18. TFTim Ferriss2:02:00

        Mm-hmm.

    19. DHDanny Hillis2:02:00

        I see them going to, like, a magazine and just trying to, to zoom out the picture. And I know that, like, nobody will ever remember that as ever having been invented-

    20. TFTim Ferriss2:02:12

        Yeah

    21. DHDanny Hillis2:02:12

        ... because it's like kids are born with it. It's become so much of a, of a part. So when you innately want something like that and you know you want it...

    22. TFTim Ferriss2:02:21

        Right.

24. 2:02:22 – 2:05:28

    The pros and cons of patents for inventors and society.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:02:22

       So Danny, how about some practical advice for people who are listening who may be inventor types about patents? 'Cause I know you have a complicated relationship with patents.

    2. KKKevin Kelly2:02:30

       Here's a ca- here's a case where patents may have done some good. I know other times you're not so sure about the worth of patents. What would you suggest to people who are inventive? For instance, at WIRED, we were involved with inventing the web, and WIRED invented the click-through ad banner, right? You know, I mean, Brian Bailenhof was the guy who coded that, and not one of us ever thought about patenting it. It just seemed obvious. It seemed like a really good thing. It was entirely patentable, but, but it just never even was in our vocabulary. And I'm, I'm not sure how much it would've been worth if we had, but Danny, what do you think about patents and people who are inventing? What would you suggest?

    3. DHDanny Hillis2:03:17

       Well, so first of all, I think patents might be good for inventors, but I don't think they're very good for society.

    4. KKKevin Kelly2:03:23

       [chuckles]

    5. DHDanny Hillis2:03:24

       So if I had a choice, I would eliminate the patent system. Now, there might be particular things like pharmaceuticals and things like that where you could make the trade-off the other way, but I think in general, around computers and... I'm happy software patents are kind of getting rejected much more and so on. So I've always felt a sense of, uh, I guess, ambivalence about patents.

    6. KKKevin Kelly2:03:51

       So why are you patenting if you don't believe?

    7. DHDanny Hillis2:03:53

       So I patent because, remember, I'm often solving problems for other people.

    8. KKKevin Kelly2:03:57

       Hmm.

    9. DHDanny Hillis2:03:58

       I mean, they have paid for something to happen, and so they want to own something at the end.

    10. KKKevin Kelly2:04:02

        [chuckles]

    11. DHDanny Hillis2:04:03

        And I know inventors that have made lots of money on patents, but you have to sort of sue people, and so they end up wasting an awful lot of their life in courtrooms, and I hate it. I occasionally get dragged into court for something that I patented that somebody else owns, and you have to get deposed and it's a big waste of time. It's a big waste of society's resources. And the whole idea of patent system was initially to help society. It was to get inventors-

    12. KKKevin Kelly2:04:37

        Yeah

    13. DHDanny Hillis2:04:37

        ... to disclose their patents. But I think the things that are sort of self-disclosing, like pinch-to-zoom, once somebody sees it, you don't need to do any more disclosure about it, right? Or maybe you do about how you made it work or something, but they could take it apart and see how you made it work. So I would say that we sh- ought to definitely narrow down the things-

    14. KKKevin Kelly2:05:01

        Mm-hmm

    15. DHDanny Hillis2:05:01

        ... that we allow to patent. And I think that to inventors, I typically say, [sighs] maybe file patents is trading fodder in this ridiculous game that's going to have to happen. But don't go off and sue people for violating your patent. And yeah, you might get rich that way, but it's not worth your time. It's not the way to spend your life.

25. 2:05:28 – 2:07:37

    Inventors Danny finds inspiring.

    1. KKKevin Kelly2:05:28

       Are there any inventors, could be past or present, who really inspire you? If a [sighs] intrepid inventor looked at you and they said, "Danny, who are some people I should pay attention to or study in the world of inventing, broadly speaking?" Anybody stand out to you?

    2. DHDanny Hillis2:05:51

       So the ones that I admire the most, and some of them have been my mentors, are people like Claude Shannon, who kind of look at something really complicated and messy and get a take on it that makes it simple and understandable in a way that gives everybody else power to do something about that.

    3. KKKevin Kelly2:06:15

       Who is Claude?

    4. DHDanny Hillis2:06:15

       Claude Shannon invented the bit. Actually, another one of my mentors named the bit, but he invented it. So he's invented information theory. So he invented a way of measuring information and encoding information.

    5. KKKevin Kelly2:06:29

       He worked for Bell, Bell Telephone, and they were-

    6. DHDanny Hillis2:06:31

       Yeah

    7. KKKevin Kelly2:06:31

       ... interested in what was the theoretical limit to the amount of information you could put down a wire.

    8. DHDanny Hillis2:06:37

       Even before that, like, his master's thesis was the application of Boolean logic to switching circuits.

    9. KKKevin Kelly2:06:43

       [chuckles]

    10. DHDanny Hillis2:06:43

        He just had this way of thinking about things that was so powerful that it gave everybody else a way of thinking about things and everybody else a way of solving problems that we just take for granted when we measure things in megabytes and-

    11. KKKevin Kelly2:06:59

        Mm-hmm. Right

    12. DHDanny Hillis2:07:00

        ... stuff like that. Somebody I lived to know, somebody that was on my thesis committee-

    13. KKKevin Kelly2:07:06

        [chuckles]

    14. DHDanny Hillis2:07:06

        ... invented the bit-

    15. KKKevin Kelly2:07:08

        Yeah

    16. DHDanny Hillis2:07:08

        ... right? Invented or discovered it or whatever. But those are the kind of people that I imagine, that I admire the most because they give everybody else the power to imagine new things and do new things.

    17. KKKevin Kelly2:07:26

        Mm-hmm.

    18. DHDanny Hillis2:07:27

        Newton did that in physics. Feynman did that in physics with Feynman diagrams. So those are the real wows of, of history.

26. 2:07:37 – 2:12:32

    Danny's cause-and-effect heresy.

    1. KKKevin Kelly2:07:37

       So speaking of people that you admire, I have a favorite question. What is a heresy that you have? And I define the heresy as something that you believe that the people you most admire don't believe.

    2. DHDanny Hillis2:07:49

       This is a little strange one. You're not gonna like it.

    3. KKKevin Kelly2:07:52

       [chuckles] Well, because that's the whole point. [laughs]

    4. DHDanny Hillis2:07:58

       I don't believe in cause and effect.

    5. KKKevin Kelly2:08:00

       Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Okay. Explain what that is for, for people who don't know.

    6. DHDanny Hillis2:08:07

       Okay, so we look at an equation like F equals ma, and we say, "Oh, force causes masses to accelerate when you push on it." Okay? That's seems to be what F equal ma says, just going back to Newton.

    7. KKKevin Kelly2:08:21

       Mm-hmm.

    8. DHDanny Hillis2:08:22

       But I think that's just a story. I think that we like to tell stories in which there are agents that cause change because we're social creatures, and we like to sort of personify nature.

    9. KKKevin Kelly2:08:36

       Mm-hmm.

    10. DHDanny Hillis2:08:38

        But I could rewrite F equal ma to be a equals F over m and say mass is caused by force acting on acceleration, and that creates mass just as easily as I could say that the force causes the acceleration, right? It's just a way we tell the story, and some stories are intuitive to us and sort of make sense and fit with our intuitions and some stories don't. And so when we can tell a story about something that's kind of explanatory and helps us guess at what's gonna happen next or things like that, it's a useful story, then we believe it's true in some fundamental sense. And so it's the way our brain works. We're wired to look for causes and effects and that's like why we're kind of wired to believe in God because if you have a chain of causes and effects, then there sort of has to be a first cause at the beginning causing all the rest of it. But I think that's just kind of the way our brain works and the way we tell stories about reality. I don't think reality actually has causes and effects.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:09:53

        Let me poke on that a little bit. So is it that cause and effect doesn't exist or is it that we simply overapply cause and effect? And I was thinking back to the proteomics discussion and identifying changes in proteins over a sufficient data set such that you could have some predictive ability or ability to intervene earlier, right? To hopefully mitigate or prevent disease states like-

    12. DHDanny Hillis2:10:25

        Mm-hmm

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:10:25

        ... Alzheimer's disease or otherwise. So does that mesh with what you are saying or does it not?

    14. DHDanny Hillis2:10:34

        I'm not saying that thinking in terms of causing and effects isn't a useful way of thinking.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:10:39

        Right.

    16. DHDanny Hillis2:10:40

        Just like I'm all for storytelling. I believe in storytelling as a useful way. But we are, when we tell a story about a protein pathway causing something, we're making up a story and we really look at what's happening in the physics, all those things work in the other direction too and the story isn't, isn't really what the physics is doing. It's a sort of simplified thread of things that we can understand-

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:11:10

        Mm-hmm

    18. DHDanny Hillis2:11:10

        ... in what it's doing. So it is useful to kind of abstract out these threads that we can tell stories about because that gives us a handle on it and helps us manipulate it. So I'm not saying that that's not a helpful trick of thinking, but it's a trick. It's not really how the universe works and we shouldn't, we shouldn't fool ourselves into that and we shouldn't get too enamored-

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:11:33

        Mm

    20. DHDanny Hillis2:11:33

        ... by it. In fact, maybe when we get new kinds of AI-

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:11:38

        Mm-hmm

    22. DHDanny Hillis2:11:38

        ... maybe they'll be able to think without using that trick.

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:11:42

        Mm-hmm.

    24. DHDanny Hillis2:11:42

        Right now, we can pretty much only think using that trick.

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:11:45

        Got it. Yeah.

    26. DHDanny Hillis2:11:46

        That's what digital is, okay? So computers are all about kind of playing out this fantasy of cause and effect. So by forcing everything to either be a zero or a one and nothing in between and making everything digital, we can kind of make things that almost work perfectly as if this and this caused that to happen. And so in some sense, the computer is the ultimate fantasy of putting together causes and effects and piling causes and effects and engineering them into long chains that we write with programs and control them.

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:12:23

        Right.

    28. DHDanny Hillis2:12:24

        This comes so close to doing exactly what our fantasy is that it's hard to believe it's not true,

27. 2:12:32 – 2:16:33

    Quantum computing and its implications.

    1. DHDanny Hillis2:12:32

       but-

    2. TFTim Ferriss2:12:32

       This is way outside of my areas of expertise, so who knows if I'm painting us into a corner here. But how does quantum computing affect that presentation of computing and the forcing into one, one binary option or another?

    3. DHDanny Hillis2:12:48

       That's exactly the right question to ask. If you really look at true quantum computers, it's much harder to sort of explain it in terms of causes and effects like we do as a digital computer.

    4. TFTim Ferriss2:13:02

       Mm-hmm.

    5. DHDanny Hillis2:13:03

       You operate on it and it causes this state to turn into that state is a sort of a cause thing, but actually the cause also involves observation of the states and just looking at it changes it. And so what we'll do first with quantum computers is we'll do little bits of quantum that fit in with our quantum... For instance, we'll do, uh, one of the early things will be quantum key generation where we'll sort of have a module and say, "If we do this, we get a cryptographic key that has the right properties." Now, how that magic happens, I don't think anybody... Very few people will have any intuition of how that happened and the people who do have really deep intuition will realize that it's actually not causes and effects in the way that we're used to thinking about it.

    6. TFTim Ferriss2:14:02

       I have a half-baked amateur hunch and prediction about quantum computing, which is I think in a hundred years from now that we'll realize that quantum does not want to do computation. It's actually not gonna be used a lot for computation, but there'll be something else that we'll discover that it's really incredibly useful for other than computation because I think computation does want to be much more cause and effect.

    7. DHDanny Hillis2:14:28

       Sometime in the '90s, I wrote a little book about how computers work.

    8. TFTim Ferriss2:14:32

       Patterns in the Stone.

    9. DHDanny Hillis2:14:34

       Patterns in the Stone, that's right. A high school student that was interested in computers- couldn't understand. Now, it turns out mostly who likes reading the book are people who already understand everything in the book, but they like [laughs] they like seeing it all explained. But [laughs]

    10. KKKevin Kelly2:14:49

        [laughs]

    11. DHDanny Hillis2:14:50

        but it had a chapter on quantum computing. This was written in the early '90s, and I got this funny call from the publisher and said, "You know, there's this weird thing. Your book is the only computer book we have from the last century that's continuing to s- sell."

    12. KKKevin Kelly2:15:09

        Oh. [laughs]

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:15:10

        [laughs] That should be on the cover, I feel like.

    14. DHDanny Hillis2:15:12

        [laughs] I don't know. It kind of made me feel pretty weird, like... [laughs] Fortunately, they didn't say the last millennium, right? [laughs] But they said, "Would you like to revise it?" I went back, and, you know, there are a lot of things that's happened since then. Uh-

    15. KKKevin Kelly2:15:32

        [laughs] Understatement.

    16. DHDanny Hillis2:15:34

        It was interesting because it... most of the stuff I had in the book didn't change at all. In fact, some of it would have talked about certain things more and certain things less and so on. But one of the things I talked about was quantum computing, and really, even in quantum computing, there wasn't much I would change. I mean, it's like I... what I said about it is if you want to look for where something could be a real game changer, it's quantum computing, and it's got all this potential and all these hints that it could work, and there's good theoretical reason to believe that it would be revolutionary. But nobody's actually gotten it to be useful yet, and that's pretty much still the state that it's in.

    17. KKKevin Kelly2:16:21

        Mm-hmm.

    18. DHDanny Hillis2:16:21

        I was surprised that in the end I decided it was sort of more interesting as an historical document of how computing looked in the '90s, and I didn't, didn't change it, but most of it wouldn't have changed anyway.

28. 2:16:33 – 2:21:23

    The scientific pursuit of understanding consciousness.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:16:33

       At the risk of this going sideways, I introduced a really slippery term. But we were discussing earlier the possibility, if my memory serves me, that AI and developing AI, different type, types of AIs could help us get a better understanding of intelligence writ large, different types of intelligence. We might, as Kevin mentioned, discover we're on the edge of the [laughs] galaxy or universe.

    2. KKKevin Kelly2:17:01

       Possibility space, yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:17:03

       Exactly. Possibility space, not in the center. Is it possible that through AI or quantum computing or other aspects of studying quantum phenomena, that we will get a better grasp of what consciousness is? Recognizing, again, that that is a term that begs definition, and, I mean, there are a lot of people who take different stabs at it, but sort of what it is to be aware that we're aware perhaps would be one possible way of offering that. Also, how that emerges from simpler constituent pieces that maybe at some requisite level of complexity suddenly have this emergent phenomenon, which is consciousness.

    4. DHDanny Hillis2:17:53

       Certainly that's possible. My guess, and this is really just a guess, is that consciousness is going to turn out to be way less important than we think in the sense that it's going to be a very small piece of intelligence, and it might just be a kind of a hack. For example, I have a complicated idea in my mind-

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:18:16

       Mm-hmm

    6. DHDanny Hillis2:18:17

       ... and I turn it into a series of grunts and grunt at you and whistle and grunt, and somehow you listen to those grunts and you construct an idea in your mind.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:18:30

       Mm-hmm.

    8. DHDanny Hillis2:18:30

       And so we sort of went through this translation process, and so a lot of... we have a lot of our brain is devoted to that compression process of turning the idea into grunts and turning the grunts into an idea.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:18:43

       Mm-hmm.

    10. DHDanny Hillis2:18:44

        So given you've got all the hardware lying around, you've probably had the experience of misunderstanding somebody, but what you misunderstood is actually more interesting than what they said. [laughs]

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:18:57

        Right. Sure.

    12. DHDanny Hillis2:18:58

        Or vice versa. Your brain took the thing that they said and expanded into a, a sensible idea.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:19:05

        Mm-hmm.

    14. DHDanny Hillis2:19:05

        And maybe it was more sensible than the one that they had in the first place.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:19:09

        Mm-hmm.

    16. DHDanny Hillis2:19:10

        Well, so you could do that within your own brain just by talking to yourself.

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:19:15

        Right.

    18. DHDanny Hillis2:19:15

        Probably, given you got all this hardware lying around for compressing and decompressing ideas, a good thing to do with the idea is to compress it, tell it to yourself, and see if you misunderstand it in an interesting way.

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:19:31

        Mm-hmm.

    20. DHDanny Hillis2:19:31

        And maybe consciousness is just some hack like that.

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:19:34

        Yeah.

    22. KKKevin Kelly2:19:35

        I've often thought that one of the main benefits of language was not so much that we could enable collaboration with other people, but that it gave us access to our own thoughts. Can you imagine trying to think without language? It's just like it almost doesn't seem possible. So language, I think, was a dual purpose invention that mostly gave us the power of accessing our own... communicating with ourselves, basically.

    23. DHDanny Hillis2:20:06

        Yeah. And then so I think consciousness may be that. I think consciousness may be our access to our own thoughts, and that may be useful, but it may not be the most critical thing in-

    24. KKKevin Kelly2:20:20

        Mm-hmm

    25. DHDanny Hillis2:20:20

        ... intelligence. Like maybe you could not have it, and you'd still be very smart, and maybe I wouldn't even be able to tell the difference.

    26. KKKevin Kelly2:20:28

        I think in that space of possible minds, we could think like things are really, really s- intelligent. They have very little consciousness. Things that have a lot of consciousness that can't communicate, things that communicate, but I think consciousness is another kind of elemental primitive in that

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:20:45

        Where you make compounds

    28. DHDanny Hillis2:20:47

        Yeah, and I think you could have multiple entities that have access to each other's thoughts in-

    29. TFTim Ferriss2:20:52

        Hmm

    30. DHDanny Hillis2:20:52

        ... ways that... And that might be even richer. The, the super consciousness that might be better. So I think this might be another case of us looking at what's apparent to us when we think of our thinking, and we're very impressed with the-
29. 2:21:23 – 2:23:56

    The question Danny asks himself before investing time in a project.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:21:23

       Right. The proverbial, like, drunk guy looking for his keys under the, under the, the streetlight at night, and they're like, "Wait, I thought you left that in the bar." And he's like, "Yeah, this is where all the light is." I could keep going for another three hours. We're coming up on three hours now, which has gone by very, very quickly.

    2. DHDanny Hillis2:21:39

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:21:40

       Kevin, do you have any closing, as we start to land the plane, questions for Danny, comments or, or questions, complaints, old feuds you'd like to revive? [laughs]

    4. DHDanny Hillis2:21:54

       [laughs]

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:21:54

       I might want to go back to the question of what are you trying to optimize in your life, because you were saying you were trying to optimize your time. Are there any other things, the general trajectory of your life, maybe in particularly recent years, where you feel this is what you're trying to optimize, maximize? Or another way of saying it is, like, again, when you're deciding what to do, how to spend your time, the little time that we have, what's something that you are trying to make more of?

    6. DHDanny Hillis2:22:25

       I guess I try to ask the question: Will this make a difference over how much time? You know, how long will that difference matter?

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:22:36

       Okay.

    8. DHDanny Hillis2:22:37

       If it makes a lot of difference after I'm dead, I'd rather do that.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:22:42

       Yeah. Okay.

    10. DHDanny Hillis2:22:43

        And I think a lot of people think, "I want to make a difference," but I think they weight it too much to the near term.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:22:51

        Hmm.

    12. DHDanny Hillis2:22:52

        For instance, I really admire Bill Gates as a philanthropist. He works really hard, and he's super smart about it, but one thing that bothers me about some of the things that they do is because they try to measure everything, they try to do things that make a difference in the time that they can measure them.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:23:13

        Mm-hmm.

    14. DHDanny Hillis2:23:14

        And I think that that is maybe not the right metric to be optimizing, 'cause it doesn't allow for the long tail of time of impact of things. It's like when Claude Shannon, like, invents the bit, that's just, you know, the differences that that makes are just becoming apparent now-

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:23:41

        Mm-hmm

    16. DHDanny Hillis2:23:41

        ... after he's dead. That's something that over time makes a huge difference. But if you tried to measure it during his lifetime, it would've been really hard to, to give it any credit.

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:23:55

        The long tail

30. 2:23:56 – 2:28:31

    Danny's 10,000-year billboard.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:23:56

       of impact. All right. I'll pick from my, my grab bag of favorite questions. One of them is pretty simple. It's a metaphor, but if you could put anything on a giant billboard to get a message, an image, question, anything to many, many people, hundreds of millions, billions of people, let's just assume they understand the language... Could be a quote, could be a quote from someone else, could be a motto that you or philosophy that you live by, could be anything at all. What might you put on that billboard?

    2. DHDanny Hillis2:24:30

       Could be an ad for your company.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:24:31

       No ads. That's the one rule. [laughs]

    4. DHDanny Hillis2:24:36

       [laughs] In a sense, I think I've, I've answered that, because I think the most successful example of that was Stewart Brand having a picture of the whole Earth. I think he realized that when people saw that picture of the whole Earth, like, floating in space, they would think about everything differently, and they did.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:24:57

       Mm-hmm.

    6. DHDanny Hillis2:24:58

       And so to me, there's no picture like that of the future.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:25:05

       Hmm.

    8. DHDanny Hillis2:25:06

       There's nothing... You can't conjure up an image. You can conjure up the image of the past of maybe the pyramids or something like that, but there is no iconic image of, like, the future.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:25:19

       Mm-hmm.

    10. DHDanny Hillis2:25:20

        If you could imagine something to put on a billboard that sort of made people see the future and believe that there was that future-

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:25:30

        Mm-hmm

    12. DHDanny Hillis2:25:30

        ... that's what I'd do. And the clock, the 10,000-year clock is the best approximation I can do to that. But I think that that's what the world needs. I think it needs that picture that puts the context of everything today in the context of a, the development of humanity over tens of thousands of years, and I think that would make, you know, a much more optimistic picture for everybody.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:26:01

        And let me just add, 'cause I don't think we have, this clock is real. It, it exists right now. It's inside a mountain in West Texas. It's inside a vertical tunnel with a spiral staircase carved into the rock, and it's hanging almost 500 feet. It's a mammoth, mammoth monumental clock that is gonna tick for 10,000 years, and my impression of having visited it is that it feels like the clock has always been inside the mountain. [laughs] It feels ancient.

    14. DHDanny Hillis2:26:42

        Yeah. The scale, the scope, the ambition, the tooling required, like the site identification, everything is-

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:26:50

        Yeah

    16. DHDanny Hillis2:26:51

        ... is pretty [laughs] beyond belief.

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:26:53

        And I know we haven't spent a lot of time on it. I'll, we'll link to a few things for people who are listening also. Wasn't sure how much you could say about certain aspects of it, so we spent a lot of time on other things. But Danny, is there anything else that you would like to say about the 10,000 Year Clock?

    18. DHDanny Hillis2:27:11

        No, actually, I think it's good that we spent time on other things. I think it will speak for itself.

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:27:16

        Mm-hmm.

    20. DHDanny Hillis2:27:17

        And it's a story. And actually, my favorite thing about the 10,000 Year Clock is I run into people regularly who've heard about it, but assume it's just a myth.

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:27:29

        [laughs] Have you seen Bigfoot? No. Bigfoot?

    22. DHDanny Hillis2:27:33

        [laughs]

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:27:33

        In West Texas? [laughs]

    24. DHDanny Hillis2:27:36

        Yeah. Well, you get all kinds of versions of it. It's in Nevada. Ran into somebody who said it was in China.

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:27:41

        [laughs]

    26. DHDanny Hillis2:27:43

        That to me is very satisfying because stories are actually what really lasts and-

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:27:47

        Yeah

    28. DHDanny Hillis2:27:48

        ... and really, your question about the billboard is like that of, you know, what do you, what's an idea you wanna put in people's head that-

    29. TFTim Ferriss2:27:55

        Mm-hmm

    30. DHDanny Hillis2:27:55

        ... sort of s- stays there? An idea has a lot more sticking power than any physical thing you could build.
31. 2:28:31 – 2:29:40

    Parting thoughts.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:28:31

       And Danny-

    2. DHDanny Hillis2:28:32

       Yeah

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:28:32

       ... people can find Applied Invention at appliedinvention.com. Is that the best-

    4. DHDanny Hillis2:28:35

       Yep

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:28:36

       ... website? Is there anything else?

    6. DHDanny Hillis2:28:38

       But there's nothing there. It'll just say Apply... It'll have our address and zip code, but [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:28:41

       All right. For those fans of zip codes, you can go to Applied Invention.

    8. DHDanny Hillis2:28:47

       But they can contact me with that way.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:28:49

       All right, perfect.

    10. DHDanny Hillis2:28:50

        And I do wanna meet smart people. I told you that that's like what I'm seeking for is the-

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:28:54

        Yeah

    12. DHDanny Hillis2:28:55

        ... the brilliant people with different ways of looking at the world, so.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:28:59

        Have you spent any time with Derek Sivers before? Have you guys met before? Derek Sivers, do you know this name?

    14. DHDanny Hillis2:29:05

        No.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:29:05

        All right. Well, Kevin and I both know Derek. I feel like you guys would make for a, a fun meeting.

    16. DHDanny Hillis2:29:10

        Okay.

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:29:10

        Danny, Kevin, thank you for taking the time. This has been absolutely fantastic. I have tons and tons of notes. We didn't even get to the giant robot dinosaurs. Another time.

    18. DHDanny Hillis2:29:18

        [laughs]

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:29:20

        And for people listening, you will be able to find links to everything that we've discussed at the show notes on tim.blog/podcast as per usual. And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.

Episode duration: 2:29:51