Michael Stevens: Vsauce | Lex Fridman Podcast #58

The following is a conversation with Michael Stevens, the creator of Vsauce, one of the most popular educational YouTube channels in the world with over 15 million subscribers and over 1.7 billion views. His videos often ask and answer questions that are both profound and entertaining, spanning topics from physics to psychology. Popular questions include: What if everyone jumped at once? Or what if the Sun disappeared? Or why are things creepy? Or what if the Earth stopped spinning? As part of his channel, he created three seasons of Mind Field, a series that explored human behavior. His curiosity and passion are contagious and inspiring to millions of people. And so as an educator, his impact and contribution to the world is truly immeasurable. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give us five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. I recently started doing ads at the end of the introduction. I'll do one or two minutes after introducing the episode and never any ads in the middle that break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. I personally use Cash App to send money to friends, but you can also use it to buy, sell, and deposit Bitcoin in just seconds. Cash App also has a new investing feature. You can buy fractions of a stock, say $1 worth, no matter what the stock price is. Broker services are provided by Cash App Investing, a subsidiary of Square and member SIPC. I'm excited to be working with Cash App to support one of my favorite organizations called FIRST, best known for their FIRST Robotics and Lego competitions. They educate and inspire hundreds of thousands of students in over 110 countries, and have a perfect rating on Charity Navigator, which means the donated money is used in maximum effectiveness. When you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use code LEXPODCAST, you'll get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, which, again, is an organization that I've personally seen inspire girls and boys to dream of engineering a better world. And now, here's my conversation with Michael Stevens. One of your deeper interests is psychology-

Yeah.

... understanding human behavior. You've pointed out how messy studying human behavior is and that it's far from the scientific rigor of something like, uh, physics, for example. How do you think we can take psychology from where it's been in the 20th century to something more like what the physicists, theoretical physicists are doing, something precise, something rigorous?

Well, we, we could do it by finding the physical foundations of psychology, right? If, if all of our emotions and moods and feelings and behaviors are the result of mechanical behaviors of atoms and molecules in our brains, then can we find correlations? Perhaps, like, chaos makes that really difficult and the uncertainty principle and all these things. Like, we can't know the position and, uh, velocity of every single, you know, quantum state in a brain probably, but I think that if we, you know, can get to that point with psychology, then we can start to think about consciousness in a physical and, and mathematical way. When we ask questions like, "Well, what is self-reference? How can you think about yourself thinking?" What are some mathematical structures that could bring that about?