George Hotz (geohot) is a programmer, hacker, and the founder of Comma.ai. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Comma.ai's Twitter: https://twitter.com/comma_ai
Comma.ai's Website: https://comma.ai/
George's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georgehotz
George's Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/georgehotz
George's Twitter: https://twitter.com/realgeorgehotz
Comma.ai YouTube (unofficial): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwgKmJM4ZJQRJ-U5NjvR2dg

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
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Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:31 - Will human civilization destroy itself?
5:18 - Where are the aliens?
10:05 - Tic Tac UFO and Bob Lazar
12:33 - Conspiracy theories
14:36 - The programming language of life
18:57 - The games that humans play
27:27 - Memory leaks in the simulation
29:58 - Theories of everything
31:43 - Ethereum startup story
39:30 - Cryptocurrency
48:57 - Self-help advice
52:37 - Comma.ai
54:30 - Comma two
1:03:19 - Tesla vs Comma.ai
1:12:22 - Driver monitoring
1:26:03 - Communicating uncertainty
1:27:51 - Tesla Dojo
1:34:19 - Tesla Autopilot big rewrite
1:40:37 - How to install the Comma Two
1:45:13 - Openpilot is Android & Autopilot is iOS
1:54:28 - Waymo
2:05:41 - Autonomous driving and society
2:07:53 - Moving
2:10:58 - Advice to Startups
2:24:00 - Programming setup
2:27:01 - Ideas that changed my life
2:35:06 - GPT-3
2:38:26 - AGI
2:42:29 - Programming languages that everyone should learn
2:49:02 - How to learn anything
2:51:34 - Book recommendations
2:59:57 - Love
3:01:46 - Psychedelics
3:04:07 - Crazy

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The following is a conversation with George Hotz, AKA GeoHot, his second time on the podcast.

He's the founder of Kama AI, an autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle technology company that seeks to be, to Tesla Autopilot, what Android is to the iOS.

They sell the Comma 2 device for $1,000 that when installed in many of their supported cars can keep the vehicle centered in the lane even when there are no lane markings.

It includes driver sensing that ensures that the driver's eyes are on the road.

As you may know, I'm a big fan of driver sensing.

I do believe Tesla, Autopilot, and others should definitely include it in their sensor suite.

Also, I'm a fan of Android and a big fan of George for many reasons, including his nonlinear out of the box brilliance and the fact that he's a superstar programmer of a very different style than myself.

Styles make fights and styles make conversations.

So I really enjoyed this chat, and I'm sure we'll talk many more times on this podcast.

Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.

First is 4 Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee.

Second is Decoding Digital, a podcast on tech and entrepreneurship that I listen to and enjoy.

And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet.

Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that my work at MIT on autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles led me to study the human side of autonomy enough to understand that it's a beautifully complicated and interesting problem space, much richer than what can be studied in the lab.

In that sense, the data that Comma AI, Tesla Autopilot, and perhaps others like Cadillac Super Cruiser are collecting gives us a chance to understand how we can design safe semi-autonomous vehicles for real human beings in real world conditions.

I think this requires bold innovation and a serious exploration of the first principles of the driving task itself.

If you enjoyed this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with George Hotz.

So last time we started talking about the simulation.

This time let me ask you, do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?

I've always maintained my answer to the Fermi paradox.

I think there has been intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

So intelligent civilizations existed, but they've blown themselves up.

So your general intuition is that intelligent civilizations quickly, like there's that parameter in the Drake equation, your sense is they don't last very long.

IQ required to destroy the world falls by 1 point every year.

Okay, so technology democratizes the destruction of the world.

I don't think we've seen anywhere near the worst of it yet.

The meme Lord Elon Musk fighting on the side of good versus the meme Lord of the darkness, which is not saying anything bad about Donald Trump, but he is the lord of the meme on the dark side.

I think in every fairy tale, they always end it with, and they lived happily ever after.

And I'm like, please tell me more about this happily ever after.

I've heard 50% of marriages end in divorce.

So the thing about destruction is it's over after the destruction.

We have to do everything right in order to avoid it.

And 1 thing wrong, I mean, actually, this is what I really like about cryptography.

Cryptography, it seems like we live in a world where the defense wins versus like nuclear weapons, the opposite is true.

It is much easier to build a warhead that splits into 100 little warheads than to build something that can, you know, take out 100 little warheads.

And then all the different hackers are the Davids.

And that equation is flipped for nuclear war.

Because there's so many, like 1 nuclear weapon destroys everything, essentially.

And it is much easier to attack with a nuclear weapon than it is to like, the technology required to intercept and destroy a rocket is much more complicated than the technology required to just, you know, orbital trajectory, send a rocket to somebody.

So, okay, your intuition that there were intelligent civilizations out there, but it's very possible that they're no longer there.

And just live forever in this kind of stasis.

Well, I think the reason I believe this is because where are they?

If there's some reason they stopped expanding.

Because otherwise they would have taken over the universe.

Or at least, you know, let's just talk about the galaxy, right, 70,000 light years across.

I took that number from Star Trek Voyager, I don't know how true it is.

For some possible technology that you can imagine that can leverage like wormholes or something like that.

A Von Neumann probe and a million years of sub-light travel and you'd have taken over the whole universe.

So you mean if you, right, for like a few million years, if you sent out probes that travel close, what's sub-light?

Actually, that's an interesting calculation.

So what makes you think that we'd be able to communicate with them?

Why do you think we would able to be able to comprehend intelligent lives that are out there?

Like even if they were among us kind of thing like or even just flying around

Well, I mean that's Possible It's possible that there is some sort of prime directive that'd be a really cool universe to live in.

And there's some reason they're not making themselves visible to us.

But it makes sense that they would use the same, well, at least the same entropy.

Well, you're implying the same laws of physics.

I don't know what you mean by entropy in this case.

I mean, if entropy is the scarce resource in the universe.

So what do you think about like Stephen Wolfram and everything is a computation, and then what if they are traveling through this world of computation.

So if you think of the universe as just information processing, then what you're referring to with entropy, and then these pockets of interesting, complex computation swimming around, How do we know they're not already here?

How do we know that this, like all the different amazing things that are full of mystery on earth are just like little footprints of intelligence from light years away?

I mean, I tend to think that as civilizations expand, they use more and more energy, and you can never overcome the problem of waste heat.

So we'd be able to, with our crude methods, be able to see like, there's a whole lot of energy here, But it could be something we're not, I mean, we don't understand dark energy, right, dark matter.

It could be just stuff we don't understand at all.

Or they could have a fundamentally different physics, you know, like that we just don't even

Well, I think, okay, I mean, it depends how far out you wanna go.

I don't think physics is very different on the other side of the galaxy.

I would suspect that they have, I mean, if they're in our universe, they have the same physics.

Well, yeah, that's the assumption we have, but there could be like super trippy things like our cognition only gets to a slice, and all the possible instruments that we can design only get to a particular slice of the universe.

Would people from the past be able to detect the remnants of our, would we be able to detect our modern civilization?

The humans who were lying around in the desert probably didn't even have, maybe they just barely had fire.

They would understand if a 747 flew overhead.

Oh, in this vicinity, but not if a 747 flew on Mars.

Because they wouldn't be able to see far.

Because we're not actually communicating that well with the rest of the universe.

We're doing OK, just sending out random 50s tracks of music.

And yeah, I mean, they'd have to, you know, we've only been broadcasting radio waves for 150 years.

What do you make of all the, I recently came across this, having talked to David Fravor.

I don't know if you caught what the videos that Pentagon released and the New York Times reporting of the UFO sightings.

So I kind of looked into it, quote unquote, and there's actually been like hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings, right?

And a lot of it you can explain away in different kinds of ways.

So 1 is it could be interesting physical phenomena.

2, it could be people wanting to believe and therefore they conjure up a lot of different things that just, you know, when you see different kinds of lights, some basic physics phenomena, and then you just conjure up ideas of possible, out there, mysterious worlds.

But, you know, it's also possible, like you have a case of David Fravor, who is a Navy pilot, who's as legit as it gets in terms of humans who are able to perceive things in the environment and make conclusions whether those things are a threat or not.

And he and several other pilots saw a thing, I don't know if you followed this, but they saw a thing that they've since then called TikTok that moved in all kinds of weird ways.

It could be technology developed by the United States, and they're just not aware of it on the surface level from the Navy, right?

It could be different kind of lighting technology or drone technology, all that kind of stuff.

It could be the Russians and the Chinese, all that kind of stuff.

And of course, their mind, our mind, can also venture into the possibility that it's from another world.

Yeah, I listened to the, I think it was Bob Lazar on Joe Rogan.

And like, I believe everything this guy is saying.

And then I think that it's probably just some like MK Ultra kind of thing, you know?

know, they made some weird thing and they called it an alien spaceship.

You know, maybe it was just to like stimulate young physicists' minds.

We'll tell them It's alien technology and we'll see what they come up with.

Do you find any conspiracy theories compelling?

Like have you pulled at the string of the rich, complex world of conspiracy theories that's out there?

I think that I've heard a conspiracy theory that conspiracy theories were invented by the CIA in the 60s to discredit true things.

So you can go to ridiculous conspiracy theories like Flat Earth and Pizzagate and these things are almost to hide like conspiracy theories that like, you know, remember when the Chinese like locked up the doctors who discovered coronavirus?

Like I tell people this and I'm like, no, no, that's not a conspiracy theory.

Do you remember the time that the money used to be backed by gold and now it's backed by nothing?

Well, that's 1 of my worries today with the idea of fake news is that when nothing is real, then, like, you dilute the possibility of anything being true by conjuring up all kinds of conspiracy theories.

And then like the idea of truth, of objectivity is lost completely.

So you used to control information by censoring it.

Then the internet happened and governments are like, oh shit, we can't censor things anymore.

You know, it's the old story of like tying a flag where the leprechaun tells you his gold is buried, and you tie 1 flag and you make the leprechaun swear to not remove the flag, and you come back to the field later with a shovel and there's flags everywhere.

It's like, in order to protect the contents of this conversation, for example, we could just generate millions of deep fake conversations where you and I talk and say random things.

So this is just 1 of them and nobody knows which 1 was the real 1.

Okay, another absurd question about intelligent life.

Because you're an incredible programmer, outside of everything else we'll talk about, just as a programmer.

Do you think intelligent beings out there, the civilizations that were out there had computers and programming?

Did they, do we naturally have to develop something where we engineer machines and are able to encode both knowledge into those machines and instructions that process that knowledge, process that information to make decisions and actions and so on.

And would those programming languages, if you think they exist, be at all similar to anything we've developed?

So I don't see that much of a difference between quote unquote natural languages and programming languages.

So when asked the question, what do alien languages look like?

I imagine they're not all that dissimilar from ours.

And I think translating in and out of them wouldn't be that crazy.

It's difficult to compile like DNA to Python and then to C.

There is a little bit of a gap in the kind of languages we use for touring machines and the kind of languages nature seems to use a little bit.

Maybe that's just we just haven't understood the kind of language that nature uses well yet.

So I think In that sense, we actually completely understand it.

The problem is, you know, well, simulating on these CAD models.

If you want to go down to like the molecular level, where you need to go to see a lot of these phenomenon, like protein folding.

So yeah, it's not that we don't understand it, it just requires a whole lot of compute to kind of compile it.

For our human minds, it's inefficient both for the data representation and for the programming.

And when we try to build emulators or simulators for that, well, they're mad slow.

It runs in, yeah, you've commented elsewhere, I don't remember where, that 1 of the problems is simulating nature is tough.

And if you want to sort of deploy a prototype, I forgot how you put it, but it made me laugh, but animals or humans would need to be involved in order to try to run some prototype code on, like, if we're talking about COVID and viruses and so on, if you were trying to engineer some kind of defense mechanisms, like a vaccine against COVID and all that kind of stuff, That doing any kind of experimentation like you can with like autonomous vehicles would be very technically and ethically costly.

I think you can do tons of crazy biology in test tubes.

I think my bigger complaint is more, oh, the tools are so bad.

I'm not pipetting shit, like you're handing me a, I gotta, no.

Like automating stuff and like the, yeah but human biology is messy.

Well but like, look at those Duranos videos, they were a joke, It's like a little gantry, it's like a little XY gantry high school science project with the pipette.

You can't build like nice microfluidics and I can program the computation to bio interface?

But like right now, if you are asking me to pipette 50 milliliters of solution, I'm out.

OK, let's get all the crazy out of the way.

So a bunch of people asked me, since we talked about the simulation last time, we talked about hacking the simulation.

Do you have any updates, any insights about how we might be able to go about hacking simulation if we indeed do live in a simulation?

a lot of people misinterpreted the point of that South by talk.

The point of the South by talk was not literally to hack the simulation.

I think that This is an idea is literally just I think theoretical physics.

You want your grand unified theory, but then, okay, build a grand unified theory, search for exploits, right?

I think we're nowhere near actually there yet.

My hope with that was just more to like, are you people kidding me with the things you spend time thinking about?

You are bytes and God's computer, really?

The things that people get worked up about, you know?

So basically, it was more a message of we should humble ourselves.

That we get to, like, what are we humans in this byte code?

Yeah, and not just humble ourselves, but like I'm not trying to make people guilty or anything like that.

I'm trying to say like literally, look at what you are spending time on,

I'm referring to, no, the Kardashians, everyone knows that's kind of fun.

You know, this idea that we gotta up our stock price.

Or what is the goal function of humanity?

Like you don't like the games we've constructed for ourselves as humans?

I don't think that's really the game we're playing right now.

I think we're playing a different game where the rules are

Okay, which games are interesting to you that we humans have constructed and which aren't?

Actually, maybe that's the real point of the talk.

It's like, stop playing these fake human games.

The real game is, you know, Nature wrote the rules.

But if you look at, sorry to interrupt, I don't know if you've seen the Instagram account, Nature is Metal.

The game that nature seems to be playing is a lot more cruel than we humans want to put up with, or at least we see it as cruel.

It's like the bigger thing eats the smaller thing and does it to impress another big thing so it can mate with that thing And that's it.

Well, there's no art, there's no music, there's no comma AI, there's no comma 1, no comma 2, no George Hotz with his brilliant talks at South by Southwest.

I think nature just provide it basically a open-world MMORPG.

I mean, if that's the game you want to play, you can play that game.

They used to have, I think, cow level where everybody will go, just they figured out this, like the best way to gain experience points, is to just slaughter cows over and over and over.

And so they figured out this little sub-game within the bigger game that this is the most efficient way to get experience points.

Everybody somehow agreed that getting experience points in RPG context where you always want to be getting more stuff, more skills, more levels, keep advancing, that seems to be good, so might as well spend, sacrifice actual enjoyment of playing a game, exploring a world, and spending like hundreds of hours of your time in cow level.

I mean, the number of hours I spent in cow level, I'm not like the most impressive person because people have probably thousands of hours there, but it's ridiculous.

So that's a little absurd game that brought me joy in some weird dopamine drug kind of way.

You don't think that's us humans feeling the nature.

Immortality is the good objective function to you?

I mean, start there and then you can do whatever else you want because you've got a long time.

What if immortality makes the game just totally not fun?

I mean, like, why do you assume immortality is somehow...

A true immortality where I could not die, I would prefer what we have right now.

But I want to choose my own death, of course.

I don't want nature to decide when I die.

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George Hotz: Hacking the Simulation & Learning to Drive with Neural Nets | Lex Fridman Podcast #132