The following is a conversation with George Hotz.

He's the founder of Kama AI, a machine learning based vehicle automation company.

He is most certainly an outspoken personality in the field of AI and technology in general.

He first gained recognition for being the first person to carry on lock an iPhone.

And since then, he's done quite a few interesting things at the intersection of hardware and software.

This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it 5 stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, at Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N.

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She's been a friend and an engineering colleague for many years since I was in grad school.

Your support means a lot and inspires me to keep this series going.

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

Do you think we're living in a simulation?

So if the simulation is designed in such a way that they did a formal proof to show that no information can get in and out.

And if their hardware is designed for anything in the simulation to always keep the hardware in spec, it may be impossible to prove whether we're in a simulation or not.

So they've designed it such that it's a closed system.

We're either in a simulation which can be exploited.

We're in a simulation which not only can't be exploited, but like the same thing's true about VMs.

A really well-designed VM, you can't even detect if you're in a VM or not.

So we're, it's, yeah, so the simulation is running on a virtual machine.

But now, in reality, all VMs have ways to detect.

I mean, is it, you've done quite a bit of hacking yourself, and so you should know that really any complicated system will have ways in and out.

So this isn't necessarily true going forward.

I spent my time away from comma, I learned a cock.

It's a dependently typed, like it's a language for writing math proofs.

And if you write code that compiles in a language like that, it is correct by definition.

So it's possible that the simulation is written in a language like this, in which case,

Yeah, but that can't be sufficiently expressive a language like that.

The simulation doesn't have to be Turing complete if it has a scheduled end date.

Looks like it does actually with entropy.

I mean, I don't think that a simulation that results in something as complicated as the universe would have a form of proof of correctness, right?

We have no idea how good their tooling is, and we have no idea how complicated the universe computer really is.

But the fundamental rules might be super simple.

So if you could hack, So imagine simulation that is hackable if you could hack it What would you change about the like how would you approach hacking a simulation?

I just read that you talked about escaping the simulation or something like that.

So maybe you can tell me a little bit about the theme and the message there too.

It wasn't a very practical talk about how to actually escape a simulation.

It was more about a way of restructuring an us versus them narrative if We continue on the path we're going with technology I think we're in big trouble like as a species and not just as a species, but even as me as an individual member of the species.

So if we could change rhetoric to be more like, to think upwards, like to think about that we're in a simulation and how we could get out, already we'd be on the right path.

What you actually do once you do that, well I assume I would have acquired way more intelligence in the process of doing that, so I'll just ask that.

So the thinking upwards, what kind of ideas, what kind of breakthrough ideas do you think thinking in that way could inspire.

Are you thinking sort of exploration in all forms?

The space narrative that held for the modernist generation doesn't hold as well for the postmodern generation.

Like building, like Elon Musk, like we're gonna build rockets, we're gonna go to Mars, we're gonna colonize the universe.

And the narrative you're referring, I was born in the Soviet Union, you're referring to the race to space.

It doesn't seem to hold the same weight in today's culture.

I'm hoping for good postmodern narratives that replace it.

So let's think, so you work a lot with AI.

So AI is 1 formulation of that narrative.

There could be also, I don't know how much you do in VR and AR.

That's another, I know less about it, but every time I play with it in our research, it's fascinating, that virtual world.

No, I would like to physically move there.

The apartment I can rent in the cloud is way better than the apartment I can rent in the real world.

Because others will have very nice apartments too, so you'll be inferior in the virtual world as well.

I don't view the world, I mean, it's a very like, almost zero-sum-ish way to view the world.

Say like my great apartment isn't great because my neighbor has 1 too.

No, my great apartment is great because like, look at this dishwasher, man.

You just touch the dish and it's washed, right?

And that is great in and of itself if I had the only apartment or if everybody had the apartment, I don't care.

The world first learned of Geohot, George Hotz in August 2007, maybe before then, but certainly in August 2007 when you were the first person to unlock, carry unlock an iPhone.

What was the first system you discovered vulnerabilities for and broke into?

So that was really kind of the first thing.

I had a book in 2006 called Grey Hat Hacking.

And I guess I realized that if you acquired these sort of powers, you could control the world.

But I didn't really know that much about computers back then.

You had to open it up and pull an address line high.

And it was because I didn't really know about software exploitation.

I learned that all in the next few years and I got very good at it, but back then, I knew about how memory chips are connected to processors and stuff.

You knew about software and programming, you just didn't know, oh really, so your view of the world and computers as physical, was hardware.

Actually, if you read the code that I released with that in August 2007, it's atrocious.

And in a broken sort of state machine-esque C, I didn't know how to program.

You've live streamed some of your programming.

I interned at Google after the summer after the iPhone unlock.

And I did a contract for them where I built a hardware for Street View and I wrote a software library to interact with it.

And for the first time I got feedback from people who I respected saying, no, like don't write code like this.

Now, of course, just getting that feedback is not enough.

The way that I really got good was I wanted to write this thing like that could emulate and then visualize like arm binaries because I wanted to hack the iPhone better.

And I didn't like that I couldn't see what the, I couldn't single step through the processor because I had no debugger on there, especially for the low level things like the boot ROM and the boot loader.

And I built the tool once and it was terrible.

I built the tool a second time, it was terrible.

This was by the time I was at Facebook, it was kind of okay.

And then I built the tool a fourth time when I was a Google intern again in 2014.

And that was the first time I was like, this is finally usable.

So it's essentially the most efficient way to visualize the change of state of the computer as the program is running.

So you can rewind just as easily as going forward.

Think about if you're using GDB, you have to put a watch on a variable if you want to see if that variable changes.

In Qura, you can just click on that variable, and then it shows every single time when that variable was changed or accessed.

Think about it like Git for your computers, the run log.

of the computer as the program runs and you can rewind.

Why isn't that, or maybe it is, maybe you can educate me, why isn't that kind of debugging used more often?

1, if you're trying to debug Chrome, Chrome is a 200 megabyte binary that runs slowly on desktops.

So that's going to be really hard to use for that.

But it's really good to use for like CTFs and for boot ROMs and for small parts of code.

So it's hard if you're trying to debug like massive systems.

A boot ROM is the first code that executes the minute you give power to your iPhone.

And CTF were these competitions that I played, Capture the Flag.

Capture the Flag, I was gonna ask you about that.

Look, I watched a couple videos on YouTube.

What have you learned about maybe at the high level vulnerability of systems from these competitions?

I feel like in the heyday of CTFs, you had all of the best security people in the world challenging each other and coming up with new toy exploitable things over here.

When you break it, you get like, there's like a file on the server called flag.

And then there's a program running, listening on a socket that's vulnerable.

So you write an exploit, you get a shell, and then you cat flag and then you type the flag into like a web-based scoreboard and you get points.

So the goal is essentially to find an exploit in the system that allows you to run shell, to run arbitrary code on that system.

It's like, you know, you pwn the program.

I'm going to, I'm going to say it's because I'm Russian, but maybe you can help educate me.

Some video game like misspelled own way back in the day.

I'll have to go to Urban Dictionary for it.

Okay, so what was the heyday of CTF by the way?

I think like, I mean, maybe I'm biased because it's the era that I played, but like 2011 to 2015, because the modern CTF scene is similar to the modern competitive programming scene.

You have people who like do drills, you have people who practice.

And then once you've done that, you've turned it less into a game of generic computer skill and more into a game of, okay, you memorize, you drill on these 5 categories.

And then before that, it wasn't, it didn't have like as much attention as it had.

I don't know, they were like, I won $30,000 once in Korea for 1 of these competitions.

So that means, I mean, money's money, but That means there was probably good people there.

Are the challenges human constructed or are they grounded in some real flaws in real systems?

Usually they're human constructed, but they're usually inspired by real flaws.

What kind of systems are imagined is really focused on mobile?

Like what has vulnerabilities these days?

Is it primarily mobile systems like Android?

The price has kind of gone up because less and less people can find them.

And what's happened in security is now, if you want to like jailbreak an iPhone, you don't need 1 exploit anymore, you need 9.

Okay, so it's really, what's the benefit?

Let's speaking higher level philosophically about hacking.

I mean, it sounds from everything I've seen about you, you just love the challenge and you don't want to do anything.

You don't wanna bring that exploit out into the world and do any actual, Let it run wild.

You just want to solve it and then you go on to the next thing.

Oh yeah, I mean doing criminal stuff's not really worth it.

And I'll actually use the same argument for why I don't do defense for why I don't do crime.

If you want to defend a system say the system has 10 holes Right if you find 9 of those holes as a defender You still lose because the attacker gets in through the last 1 if you're an attacker You only have to find 1 out of the 10 but if you're a criminal If you log on with a VPN 9 out of the 10 times, but 1 time you forget, you're done.

Because you only have to mess up once to be caught as a criminal.

But okay, let me, because I was having a discussion with somebody just at a high level about nuclear weapons actually, why we're having blown ourselves up yet.

And my feeling is all the smart people in the world, if you look at the distribution of smart people, Smart people are generally good.

And then this other person, I was talking to Sean Carroll, the physicist, and he was saying, no, good and bad people are evenly distributed amongst everybody.

My sense was good hackers are in general good people and they don't want to mess with the world.

But if you're good and you have these skills, you probably have a nice life too, right?

But is there an ethical, is there some, is there a little voice in your head that says, well, yeah, if you could hack something to where you could hurt people and you could earn a lot of money doing it though, not hurt physically perhaps, but disrupt their life in some kind of way, Isn't there a little voice that says?

I don't really care about money So like the money wouldn't be an incentive the thrill might be an incentive But when I was 19, I read crime and punishment,

That was another That was another great 1 that talked me out of ever really doing crime.

I'd get away with it, but it would just run through my head.

Even if I got away with it, you know, and then you do crime for long enough.

In the end, That's a good reason to be good.

I wouldn't say I'm good, I would just say I'm not bad.

You're a talented programmer and a hacker in a good positive sense of the word.

You've played around, found vulnerabilities in various systems.

What have you learned broadly about the design of systems and so on from that whole process?

learn to not take things for what people say they are, but you look at things for what they actually are.

I understand that's what you tell me it is, but what does it do?

And you have nice visualization tools to really know what it's really doing.

Oh, I wish, I'm a better programmer now than I was in 2014.

I said, Kira, that was the first tool that I wrote that was usable.

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George Hotz: Comma.ai, OpenPilot, and Autonomous Vehicles | Lex Fridman Podcast #31