David Sussillo (on foster care and neuroscience)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi Today we have David Sassillo. He is a neuroscientist, a technologist and an author, but don't let that sway you. This isn't a tech heavy. No, this is a very personal story. Correct. I'm very moving one. Incredibly moving one about really growing up in a lot of public housing or boy homes and homes. It's very connected to the episode we had on foster care. Yes. He mentions that a lot. He felt very seen by that episode. And this is kind of like that episode, a personal story. Yes, mixed with turning out to be a neuroscientist. Yes. He has a book out. It's a memoir. It's called Emergence, a memoir of boyhood computation and the mystery of mine. It's quite an incredible story. I was riveted. It's very moving and touching. Please enjoy David Sassillo. This episode of Armchair Expert is presented by Apple TV, the new US home of Formula One. Starting March 7th, you can watch complete all access live coverage of every Grand Prix, including practice, qualifying, and sprints, all in one place. Watch every race live only on Apple TV. I watched that episode with Claudia Rowe. Oh, the foster care. Oh, great. Thank you. That's going to come up. I felt so seen. I was like, you go, girl. Oh, good. No one had really just all put it in one place. I was like, wow. So props to you. Thank you. Now props to her. She is incredible. And we're so happy that we were helpful in telling that story. Yeah, I heard two kind of novel things for me. That blew my mind as one that poverty looks a lot like neglect. Half the kids by her count are in there probably when they're just poor. So that's really trouble. That's really troubling. And then what we know, yeah, about brain development knowing we can't give the result we need with this system. Just acknowledging that it's a great framing. It's simple too. It's a very straightforward thing to say. This is pathological because XYZ. Yeah, it almost can't get a different outcome. And if you do, it's going to be an anomaly. That's right. Uh, you. So David, where do you live normally? I live in Bay Area. I live right near Stanford University. How do you like it up there? How many years have you been there? I've been there since 2010. I moved out for postdoc at Stanford University. My wife and I had been in New York City in Manhattan for the last 10 or 12 years and she really didn't want to go. But we went out and you'd have to drag me kicking. Oh, I love it. Yeah, first off, it's California, but you know, it's a place that's filled with innovation, filled with smart people. You don't have to apologize to be a nerd. It's multicultural in its own sort of technical way. So I really like it there. So you and I are both children of 1975. I saw that. Yes, that's right. What month? March 26. You precede me by two and a half year elder and I expect to be treated as you beat me on the high. How have you done with turning 50? I have to admit, it hasn't been great for me psychologically. Tell me. Well, just feeling like you see the end. I want to be measured here because I'm not 70. But for all of that, you know, fantasy you live in about life going on forever. You can't have that at 50. There's something really, really troubling about knowing in the best case scenario, which I doubt will make it to 100 or more than half a day. That's right. That's a bummer. You were an Agjun professor. You're still an Agjun professor. What is an Agjun professor? An Agjun professor just means you're affiliated with the university. It's a credential. So in my case, see there's a dean or even a provost that had to actually sign off on it. But you're not a 10 year line professor. So professors in today's academic world are largely leading research groups based off of money they get from the government through grants and also through private foundations. And so as an Agjunct, I cannot lead those. I can be on them and I can participate. And that's largely what I do. Everyone thinks I teach. I don't teach. I lead research. Okay. So you'll join an existing grant. That's right. And then your professional work was Google Brain in his now meta. That's right. At Google Brain, this was like the early skunk works of the neural networks. Then it became deep learning. And now it's called AI. Maybe we'll get into some of that. I'm not sure where you want to take the conversation. But that was for about six years. And then I joined Meta reality labs. You've seen these classes that they have. The new version has this wristband and that wristband reads out your muscle signals. It's basically like controlling a device just by gesturing or like writing. So you can text with your fingers. Whoa, that's wild. That doesn't seem on prima facia that hard in that we know what signals are going to get sent to the message just to move the hands in some way. Conceptually, it doesn't seem abstract. Conceptually, if the signals are there, you can machine learn them and pull it out. There are reasons it's hard. But first let me meet you on the conceptually. No, it's not it's not like doing brain machine interfaces where you have no idea what's going on. Right. Because it's very like end of river. Exactly right. It is true that your motor cortex projects to your spine, spine projects to your wrist. The muscle is driven by electricity when you move. And that's an aggregate signal of neurons. Those are the cells in your brain that fire electrically and cause you to be you. But to meet your point what's coming down the line here is not your pancakes that you had for breakfast. It's the stuff that you do to move your hand. Yeah. And so in that sense, it's an applied problem. The body has simplified it quite a bit by the time we get to the wrist. That's right. The challenges of it are how do you get something to work on every single person when they put it on the first time? That's a really hard application problem. Because it has been determined that people won't have the tolerance to let it learn from it for some period. The consumer doesn't want a learning phase. Yeah, we call that personalization. So we so far have not gone down that road. Uh-huh. We've just have a general model. You put it on and it works. And what that means is you have to collect quite a bit of data. We wrote a paper actually published in nature about some of this work. And so what we learned was that if you get a bunch of people come in and you have them do the gestures and you machine learn the hell out of it, then with a lot of effort and clever engineering, you can make it work. So what probability, like what percentage would you say it's accurate? For the things that we've released, it's very, very accurate. You have the 99 somethings. Oh, yes. I don't actually know what the numbers are, but they're very high because you want to have something out there that's quality. Yeah. Yeah. When is this getting released? It is released. What? It was released in the fall. So the Rayban Metas, the glasses that have been around a while. And the Meta Rayban displays, they actually have a little display in there, right? So you control that with a wristband that comes with it. I think it's sold out now, but I think it's out there. You've landed in all these places and it's quite improbable and your story is heartbreaking and hopeful and wonderful. And I enjoyed it so much. When I was listening, do you say it verbally? You were out some kind of a Zoom in 2022. That's right. Yeah. Growing up in science lecture, Professor NYU, Waiji Moss started this and so lots of people are out there telling their stories about how they got into science. And I was invited to do one of them. But okay, so mom and dad are both addicts. Yes, that's right. So maybe I guess we start with you at probably five. At that point, they're still married. You guys live in Albuquerque. So my parents were both Christian hippies. They may have actually lived on like a Christian commune. They took the only fun part out free love. That's right. It just durred. It just all you got left is the durred. By the time I'm coming online, I only know this in hindsight. They're using drugs regularly. They're crashing drugstores and stealing, grab and run type of stuff. If there's heroin, they're taking it. If there's painkillers, they're taking them. They were just legit addicts. In a pinch, they're making your older sister, pretend she has a cough so we can get a prescription for coding. That's right. And is he second generation Albuquerque? Your mother is. My mother, she was actually born in Bakersfield. She grew up in Albuquerque. Her parents, your grandparents live there. My father is from Brooklyn. There's definitely tragedy on his side of the family. My grandfather, I think he was a captain in the Navy. And he died in a plane accident over Phoenix in the 50s. My grandfather on my father's side and my grandmother, these were serious practicing Catholics. So they had a family of five kids, very serious. He passes away. And now my grandmother is left with five kids aged seven through three months. Oh. At home. Oh, mully. So she hauls back to where she's from, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. And that's where my aunts and uncles and my father grew up. Father the middle child, bigger pain. So basically what happened is the two oldest were sort of saddled with, "Hey, you need to help me raise this family." And the two youngest were very young. And so my father's as middle kids do, fell through the cracks. Yeah. So my father was 100% messing around with heroin by the age of 13. Wow. I am certain based on talking to my aunts and uncles, he was addicted to heroin at 15. It's really early, right? And so I grew up in the 80s. There was this war on drugs. We can talk about that from a political point of view. But it succeeded in helping me understand that there were places and things you don't want to go and things you don't want to do. Yes. And I don't know if my father had access to that information. And so he got busted with an ounce of marijuana at 17. They told him to go to Juvis. That's screw that I'm out. And he split to New Mexico never to return. Okay, so he was absconding from justice. That's right. When you're five, there's an incident. Yes. So briefly with my mother, my mother's story is a mystery. I don't know why she ended up as she did. The one story I have came from my sister was that they used to have upjar of pills at school. Keep in mind, this is the 60s. Well, I don't mean free love by that. I mean, a sense of ignorance about how powerful pharmaceutical drugs are. They just have a jar and they would go take them out of the jar. That, right? That's crazy. So to the degree that that story is true, You can point at something. But largely speaking, I don't know why my mother ended up with the problems that she had. By the time I'm five, my father already tried to kill himself. He gets really, really high. And he threatens to set the place on fire. The apartment on fire. Breaks up bottles bleeding out. Cops have to come to ambulance comms. Can you remember it? I don't remember it well, but I have vague memories of it. And you have an older sister? You have an older sister. I don't know if I keep having to call your members, Mark. Yeah, exactly. So what happened there is the whole thing fell apart because my father is like, I'm going to burn the place down and my mother is like, we're out. And so that resulted in a divorce. So I ended up living alone with my mother near my grandparents for that year. And I never really lived with my father again, although he would come in and out of my life here in there. Right. And mom decides she's going to start the nursing program up in Santa Fe. And then you guys up and move to Santa Fe. And you're in extreme poverty at this point. The way I would say it is, we weren't like Albania in the '60s, poor. But for the United States, we were poor on a level that many people have a hard time relating to. And where there's a constant, nying, corrosive worry about making ends meet, about eating. Yeah, all day consumed by this anxiety. Yeah, that's right. And then your buddy, Shiloh, who you meet, they don't have water at home. Right, so I meet my buddy, Shiloh, who is immediately my best friend in the book, very briefly. I talk about my experiences in Santa Fe at some length because it was this period of just pure perfect childhood. I had one year of childhood. And that was this year when I'm in second grade. And I have this buddy, Shiloh, he's my best friend. You can look at all the things that happened to me in the new day, what are the interventions? It's a complicated question, but surely, making a best friend when I met such a young and shapeable age was one of the major things in my life that happened to me. So we're out there just cutting up and just being crazy. Well, when I would argue, 'cause I'm a big proponent of best friendship, because I think when you have that buddy, and things are tough, the way that you can elicit joy and ride joy and how much that's needed medicine. It's really quintessential to, and you think he really learned a ring joy out of things in a very specific way. Yeah, I agree with that. And your guys was video games, yeah? We were obsessed with video games. So my age here is really relevant. I'm born in '75. So I'm five years old when Pac-Man is coming up. Which means I'm seven years old, roughly speaking, when Miss Pac-Man is coming up, Mario Bros. Donkey Kong, all these absolute gem video games. We were poor, we couldn't afford them, but we'd scrounge up quarters and try to get quarters and just do crazy things. But we were obsessed with video games. And as I talk about in the book, video games became this escape from all the things that were happening in my life. And I could just always just space out and go try to drum up a quarter to go play a video game. Yes. Have you thought about what the appeal is? I know I'm sure you have a lot of connection between the technical aspect, which has became enthralled with your whole life. But just the notion that in this little box, the rules were the same all the time. Yes. They were immovable. I know the rules. And then if I'm clever enough, I can outsmart this. It's very satisfying in a world of a lot of variables. I totally agree with that. When you're seven, you're not thinking that right. But it is still a thing. And so just to list it off there quickly, deep concentration, nothing else exists. You're right here for as long as you can make that quarter last. The fun of it, the challenge, ecstasy through sensory overload. You know, I'm a researcher, right? Like I actually think, when did I start researching? How to play video games better? How to make a quarter last longer? That whole spectrum is how I think about it now when I was doing those things as a kid. Yeah. Was your mom still struggling during this whole time with drugs? Yes. Because of the divorce, she went to try to get a nursing degree and really pull herself together. She really gave it a shot. And the whole thing was sort of financed at a very low level by my grandparents. She went there and it started off all right. It didn't really go very well. You know, honestly, she met Shia's mother and they would just go get high together. It just kind of fell apart. You moved back to Albuquerque, though, at seven or just before third grade. So we moved back to Albuquerque. We moved to a neighborhood that is formally on the map called the La Mesa in the colloquial, like rebranding. It's the international district. And everybody in Albuquerque calls it the war zone. Oh, boy. We're talking about a very, very bad neighborhood. I don't even have the words. It's dangerous. People are murdered there in fairness to Albuquerque. It's one of those large, spread out towns where it just depends on where you live. Yeah, it's also got wonderful, incredible areas. I'm not in one of those wonderful, incredible areas. And so it felt unsafe and it was unsafe. And during that time, my mother's mental health was really falling apart. Turns out she was really suffering from severe depression. It's so bad. She doesn't even enroll us for school. So we could get these teachers going, "Oh, you know, you got to enroll your kids in school." And so we ended up going to school. And that fall, we had somebody come to take care of us. I think her name was Karen. Why is it my mother here? She's taking a break. Oh, boy. Yeah. So what happened was I was not used to Karen's care, which was, frankly, excellent. And I didn't know how to handle that. Yeah. Perfectly. I didn't know how to handle it. So I'm getting into trouble. For me, neglect is the thing here. I legitimately believe both my parents loved me and my sister. These people are serious drug users. And that comes with major spectrum of problems. I decide to run away after getting in trouble. I had no plans of actually running away. I was just trying to piss this woman off. Yeah. Right. But she freaks out and she calls my grandparents. And the next thing you know, both my sister and I, Esther, are in a car or clothing in a trash bag going to the Albuquerque Christian children's home. Oh, boy. Now, so I had a question here. What is your judgment of your grandparents? When I read that they were called in their solution or their combined thought was, well, let's get them in this home. And they lived in Albuquerque. Instead of taking you guys in. Yeah, I know. It's hard not to look at their behavior as at the very least negligent-- A bandit, Matt. A bandit, and if there are villains in that book, it's hard not to point that thing. Yeah. And then also maybe explains a bit of why mom had problems. So that's the vibe that existed at that point. That's right. The only thing I could say is when you retirees, I've shared this book now with the number of early readers, and like to a person, any woman of grandmotherly age, has said, fuck that, I would have taken you in. Yeah. It's hard to swallow. So there's that. That is my knee jerk. And I can't imagine my children would have children. And I would say, yes. And I'm off to a home. Also, I have means. Also, I've not been dealing with a troubled child for 11 years, which they probably were. So I don't know what their fatigue and their capacity-- Yeah, how overwhelmed they felt with just the first kid. And now this kid has got two other kids. It's hard to know where their mindset was at. So was Karen a foster? Karen was just a friend. A friend of my mother who came to visit. And did the best she could. But I think David is honest admirable. So you were also a shithead. You had never had rules or anything. You were a feral kid. I was feral. Yeah. Two things can be true. I felt like I was good at heart and yet behaviorally speaking, a total piece of shit. Well, I mean, your contacts, how could you not be? One of the things I resonated in the conversation with Claudia Rao was these kids. I include myself here, maybe not to the same degree of some of the people she was talking about. They're coming with major, major problems. Yeah, they're not the easy kids to deal with. No, but to say it that way isn't giving it the truth. When people sign up to do foster care, they're not signing up to have their daily lives induced with constant non-stop stress for 10 years. It's just very hard. And so when I try to forgive my grandparents, it's in that light. Yeah. But it's a huge undertaking. Not only have you related it all to this, but I also think at a very young age, as social primates, we are justice machines. We look around and why did they get that night and get this? That is how the whole system functions. Is your monitoring, who's getting what? And my status entitles me to this. And so I think even when you're young and you're looking around, some kids have all this shit and I don't. I think you feel deputized to get what yours. Yeah, so I was not blessed with that thing. And I should say I was not cursed with that thing. Curse, yeah, yeah. Because I just had my head down. I was just too young and dumb or too into the video games or whatever it is that little boys of eight years old are. My sister, especially as we got a little bit older into middle school, we were going to a public middle school. And she would look at these girls. And way before the word privilege became this weird, she was like, these girls are privileged. Yeah. They have these things. I want to be a pretty girl. I want to have these things. Yeah, yeah. And so for her, this constant comparison, this justice machine thing, I think was a huge, huge problem. I mean, middle school is hard enough. If you've got all the shit. If you have everything, like, oh. So yeah, you go to this Christian home. You're making an incredible analogy. Try to remember the feeling of being lost at the mall as a kid. Yeah. If that went on for an hour, how absolutely dysregulating and uncomfortable that was. Now imagine that goes on for two days. That's right. And imagine that goes on for a week and two weeks and two years. And you were there for five years? There for five years. Oh, man. David, I am so sorry. That's fucking rough to feel lost. I mean, that's a great word for you. Completely lonely and scared. And who's coming? Do you even write about neglect? Because it's all the things that aren't happening. It's all the things that didn't happen. That you don't just fill 10 pages with-- And then I stared at the wall. And then I stared at the wall again. So what happens is you deal, right? And part of that is you work within the little social system that you have there, which is you make friends, if you can. Figure out what the house parents are all about, right? Part of it is your emotions begin to change in ways [BLANK_AUDIO] Even an adult, I don't think would fully understand what was happening to them. The other thing that's hard to relate to is you're a child. So you don't know what's happening. You have zero saying any of this. You can't construct a plan that's going to get you out of this. No, but we would though. I ended up meeting a kid named Omar. He was older than me. Mexican American kid. He was Miguel at one point. Yeah, so I got his permission. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Omar is from downtown Albuquerque, also a very bad neighborhood. As an adult, he would say, you know, I was just a scared 12-year-old and I was doing the things that I needed to do to survive. But the perception that I had of him was that this like fucking gangster who would literally kick the shit out of me and happen many times. But through all of that, we became friends. Speaking of being powerless or how do you think you can get out of it, we would think about this. At this point, he's probably 13, I'm 10. I really planned my escape at 10 years old. We would just sit down. Well, you know, Dave Smart Kid, maybe you could go to college, and like college, you know, what's college? You can get money for college. The funny thing about the ACCH or volunteerism in general is people do it for a short amount of time. So for about a month, we had this karate instructor come and teach us a few moves of karate. He went to college on the GI bill. That karate instructor had, yeah. You can get scholarships is the upshot. And so from that moment on, the way I describe it is, it's like an Harry Potter, the patronus spell. I had like a shield. I did a future guide, a sense of self pride. Dare I say self love about this thing, my intelligence. From that moment on, I was going to make it no matter what. Come hell, come high water. You know, this idea of like having a future or of thinking about what the future could mean for you, I think is a big differentiation in some of the kids. This came up in that other interview. The frontal one is like, yes, this is exactly right. Like some inability to model the future seems to be the outcome. Why would you think it's atrophy? Why model out the future? Nothing's going to happen. I'm just sitting this fucking Christian home for the next seven years. I'm not planning whether I start racing BMX or I try to do this with that. Just a quick caveat about the ACCH. And also, it goes the same way for Milton Hershey School, which I was in in high school. These institutions, if you read my story, they don't come off particularly well. But these are basically practicing Christians doing very, very difficult work. I would have been on the street otherwise. Self-funded and voluntarily. Yeah, it's just a little bit of nuance there. What you need is a sense of permanence with a caregiver. There's one dude for 16 kids and one woman for 16 kids and three houses of 16 kids. And the house parents turn over. We thought, I don't know if it's true, but we had the idea that we would have loved to be in foster care. That we thought that was a better outcome than the situation that we were in. So 16 kids, very depending, but a lot. And the house parents come and go because the job is impossible. It's too hard. It's just built for failure. So when I was there, maybe seven or eight different sets of house parents in five years. And so this sense of impermanence and the ACCH, I don't know what it's like now, but in the '80s, it was not meant to be a permanent living facility. It was meant to be a transitory care. Well, mom got done resting. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. But for some of us, we were there longer than the admin staff was there. Nobody knows what your situation is. Right? Literally, nobody knows that in the second grade, you freaked out in the middle of the night because you thought some person was going to come kill you. And then in the third grade, you were in a fight. Nobody knows any of this. And I think deeper than no one knows, no one cares. That's the fear. That's the heartbreaking part. The people working their care. But I'm saying when they leave and you're not there, and no one present knows anything about your history, I think the conclusion you make is a kid is like, yeah, no one cares at all about me. And how is your sister fairing? She's passed away. Oh, she is. Yeah, I'm sorry, you were asking the past tense, but so she's since passed away. No, she's doing terribly at the time. One of the major outcomes of the kind of neglect that she and I suffered from is emotional dysregulation. For me, that became anger. For her, ice or hot. She loves you or she hates you. That's very hard for her to regulate her emotions in and around other people. Kind of like borderline personality type. Yeah. Terrified everyone's going to leave her. Overly attracted to people immediately. That's right, that's all of that. I'm just not making the diagnosis. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, leave that to me. [LAUGHTER] You were asked to tutor. That was, yeah. And it's insane what that can do to your life trajectory. So basically through school in a number of different ways I was invited to the Gifted and Talented Program. I was asked to be a tutor here and there. I became known as the smart kid. And so I sort of have this simplistic psychology that all these kids in these circumstances have their survival strategy. Omar was the tough kid. My sister, Esther, was like the pretty girl. And so on and so forth. And what ends up happening is you take those behaviors into adulthood and some are more or less adaptive than others. Yes. You must have looked forward to going to school. Oh my god, yes. Right? That's the sanctuary. I was good at it. I actually enjoy knowledge. It did not come hard to me. I got a kick out of it. I got attention. You had self-esteem. Positive attention. Positive self-esteem. And so I was one of these loud men who never shut up. So I'm sure my teachers really couldn't stand me. But I was personally getting a lot out of it. Yeah, again, we shouldn't have. You have behavioral issues. I had major behavioral issues. How did you get on with other boys? Well, the way that usually worked was we'd have a fight. I would lose. [LAUGHTER] And anybody would either be friends or we wouldn't be friends. I was not a fight in my life that I couldn't lose. [LAUGHTER] And you were tall, so I got to imagine like, were you always tall? No. Oh, you weren't. One of the great curses of my life. I didn't start growing till I was 17. Oh. 17. The math teacher in high school, he's the basketball coach. And I'm a senior in high school. He's like, if I had known you were going to be this tall, I would have coached you in ninth grade. Oh, yeah. It's too late. Oh, man. Oh, man. OK, so around this time, to-- Well, let's say seventh grade, your mom dies. That's right. You've gotten a got even now yet another round of some sense of permanent loneliness on your plate. My mother passes away. It's a huge catastrophe for me. And what's interesting about that is, like, if you would ask me at that time, I don't give a shit about my mother. She's not my life. She's been my life for five years. You and Ciner. She would take us out on weekends here and there. There is a sense of connection there. It's a very thin tether, but it's a tether. And that has a couple of knock-on effects. Number one is, turns out, I really love my mother. And so she dies. Like, where's my emotional space at this point? I have no way of relating to this. So I basically start having minor panic attacks. I just don't even know what's going on. I have no one to talk to. Therapy would have been completely culturally untenable at the ACCH in the '80s, not that they could have afforded it in the first place. I am just completely out of control. You're now on an island by yourself. My sister and I didn't really get along. That possibility was not really there, but the only person I was talking to, though, not about my mother was Omar, my buddy and my roommate. So she passes away, and it's a good thing in some sense. This is the tether. I have this phrase, it's not my phrase, but I use it orphaned by the living. In any functional sense, my sister and I and many of the kids in the ACCH were orphans, except that our parents were alive. But functionally, they were unable to take care of us or unwilling to take care of us, be it mental illness, drug addiction, incarceration, you name it, right? So she passes away. All of a sudden, my aunt and uncle feel like they can get involved. These are my father's, brothers and sisters. Who didn't want to intervene with mom who expressed goal was to have them. But now she's out of the picture. In hindsight, I can't help but wonder. Again, I'm sort of casting shade on my grandparents. If the situation was reversed, if we were not kept around on the hopes of making my mother better. But one way or the other, there was a symbiosis there. That's severed. And so my aunt and uncle, Elliot and Moira, they had come out a couple years earlier. Semif Great is when my mother dies. I'm backtracking to save fourth, fifth grade. They come to check us out. They're like, this isn't good. This ain't great. An adult could easily observe our sort of intellectual and emotional stagnation. They start lobbying then over the summers for my sister and I to come out to the East Coast, basically centered in and around New York City, where all of my father's siblings live. So we start doing that in the summer times. This happens a couple of times before then my mother passes away. So because of this, some of my aunt and uncles, I guess all of them have. I've gotten to know Esther and I pretty well. So my mother passes away and my uncle James. He was one of the older kids who was tapped to raise his siblings. He took responsibility seriously as an adult. He joined the Navy. He's like, I'm doing this. Oh, wow. You're already 12. And on top of that, he's a newlywed. Oh, wow. OK. Tell his brand new wife, hey, so my brother-- Yeah. Exactly. No, but it's also hard because I'm also like, why didn't they do that sooner? But the mom was-- I know. --in theory one day. Well, that is it. When you saw your mom on the weekends, was there all these promises of like, I'm going to get you guys out of here soon? I think that stopped. My mother was very ill. And I think she knew it. She was in and out of a psych ward. I came to know as an adult that she was basically under constant suicidal ideation. She's probably Medicaid with the fucking hell. Oh, yeah. That's ultimately what she died from. There's a mix-up of methadone and whatever she was on. Mm. [MUSIC PLAYING] Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Apple TV, the new US home of Formula One. You can now watch complete all access live coverage of every Grand Prix, including practice, qualifying, and sprints all in one place. I will be consuming all of those things, Monica. I know you will. I kill for Friday to start watching practice one, following it on a sprint weekend. Oh my gosh, two races. 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But now that I'm hearing a little bit more about Esther, maybe that was just more than they thought they could handle. I'm 12. I've got, I would say moderate behavioral problems. My sister on the surface looks fine. On a closer examination is beginning to have major behavioral problems. In and around her relationships with other people, she was regularly threatened suicide. She's one of those people who would just go, "I will ruin my life to ruin yours." "I'll ruin you." "I'll hurt you." She's 14. So Sophie's choice type of thing. Who can we help here and so my aunt and uncle chose to take me in? I still bear guilt over this. I was going to say, you didn't get along with her great, but did you still have guilt? Totally. But they had a solution for her. They sent her to a boarding school. Yeah. So there's a number of ants in uncles flying around here. Just view them sort of collectively as finding a solution for the two of us. You can imagine them all having family dinner and they got together to discuss this. Can you imagine that? So she ends up at a boarding school called the Darrow School, which is actually a really nice school. It's a private school. It's funded by Elliot and Moira, I believe. It's just a boarding school. It has nothing to do with financial instability or kids at risk, however you want to say it. So I go to live with my aunt and uncle. It's an immediate disaster. What kind of things were you doing that made it hard for them? I was obsessed with no longer being poor. We got toys from like going to the retirement home and we'd get handouts from the retirees. It was poor. And so I'm in Virginia. There's a pool here. There's a fitness center over there. There's a community garden. So I kind of won't shut up about it. And so I think that just kind of irritated them. They're short to anger. My uncle has never raised a children before. Right. So it didn't quite work out. Is that a strange thing that happened? He was a go-getter. He went to school PTA meetings. Like, okay. David should have 20 minutes of homework every night. Except I didn't need it. I do my homework in school. So all of a sudden there's a major lie. I'm lying to them about this thing. So he settles that I should sit at the table for an hour and night to do my homework. It's just one anecdote. Except it happened all year long. So was this constant source of tension between us? Well, I can say for me not having a dad around and then intermittently having stepdads, I just fucking hated men. I hated mal authority. I was so stubborn and I would die over these power struggles. I just hated outside mal authority. Are you having any issues now with having an authoritarian father figure? I think of it more as me needing more from my aunt. She was not by blood. It wasn't her family. My mother has just passed away. Yeah. And she agreed to do it. But did she really sign up for that? I think that's where a lot of the tension that I felt came from. That makes sense. Yeah, you were probably expecting something that wasn't coming. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Actually, you would just come from a situation where you had way too much independence. It's funny because I didn't know how to live alone. I was always around other kids. Oh, that's interesting. Right, so all of a sudden I'm living alone by myself. I have a bedroom. And paper sounds great, but I'm used to bunking with three other people. Right. You're probably as fucking as I am. Yeah, totally. To the opposite of everything you do. It's the opposite of everything I've ever known. So it was really difficult. They send you to the Hershey school in Hershey, Pennsylvania. That's right. I like the history of this. This is lovely. So this is the, in some sense, the Hogwarts you're looking for. Oh, it is? For the listeners, Dax made a point like, hey, maybe all these foster kids should have a place. Like Hogwarts that they can go and be their children. So great. Yeah, so there's almost a lore to this at this point. Milton Hershey, the chocolateeer, became very successful, stupendously wealthy, and discovered that he and his wife couldn't have children. So they start an orphanage. I believe it's 1906 called the Hershey Industrial School. By 1909, he's left effectively all his money to this school, which back then I believe was $60 million, which today is about $17 billion. Wow. He used that currently has a $15 billion dollar endowment. Yeah, exactly. Frankly, they're so wealthy. They don't know what to do with the money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They saw me get in there and start Hogwarts and up the place. Exactly. Give me my wand. So that's the backstory there. And it just grew from that through the '60s, basically black kids were led in and girls. And it's like about 2,000 kids that are there? That's right. Yeah. I know there's 2,000 kids there when I was there. There was more like 1,000. It dominates the town of Hershey. There's basically the chocolate factory in Milton Hershey School. Wow. This is all very Willy Wonka. I know. It is. Yeah, totally. It's crazy how fucking rich the candy folks were, like the Mars family, the M&Ms, and the Riggles, and they had these mansions in Pasadena. Like there was so much money in candy. I'm beginning of the 1900s. And Milton actually left his money to kids. That's amazing. Yeah, that's really sweet, but it wasn't just sweet playing a last. No, so again, I want to be nuanced here. It's a huge school. There are lots of experiences. It's almost like when you work at a company, your experience is almost purely dictated by your manager. At a place like Milton Hershey School, your experience is almost purely dictated by your house parents. And my house father was a true piece of work. He was a control freak. You know, now that I'm an adult, I look at it like, you know, what happened in his life as a child that made him the way he was. Why did he want to control a bunch of young men? That's right. He was universally despised by the boys. So because he was so difficult, it was this weird sort of spiral where all the worst kids in school, keep in mind, this is aggregating over all of the Northeast corridor, all the basically fucked up families, right? Yeah. So you take all the worst kids and you put them into one student home because you know the house father can handle it. He's a warden. Yes, that he's a true piece of work. How old are you at this point? I'm there from early in my freshman year until I graduate high school. Oh, okay. I've been very bad place. I was beaten badly. I was beaten multiple times by many boys, you know, like full on gang beating type of stuff without the racial connotations there. Just multiple boys kicking the shit out of me. Yeah. So it was not a great place. I checked out. Yeah, you start really kind of disassociating now. Dissociation is a big word. I would say that I was just meditating. So keep in mind, I had an idea that I was going to college. I found the classes at Milton Hershey School to be quite easy. I didn't work at them at all. I got all ace, so I'm just waiting it out. In all honesty, I feel like the best outcome would have been for me in a perfect world just to send me up to college at 16. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Get you away from all those boys. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. God, they can be strong. So this controlling man wasn't good at his job either then if you're getting beat up all the time. Well, so I mean, he basically sicked these boys on me once. Huh. Albuquerque Christian Children's Home. There were four kids per room. The MHS, there were two kids per room and the standard rule was you could not enter anyone's room ever. My house father felt like that was too strict. So he allowed his own ad hoc room privilege where if you could on their permission, one kid go in three all in, right? Right. So one day after church, I'm like farting around and like I'm leaning against the door jams and my tie is going into the room and he busts us right. He walked his beat about once every hour. So he catches me leaning into the room. I was certainly violating his role in a spiritual sense. I was definitely obeying the spirit of this role. - Yes. - And so through what he considered to be a little bit of back talk, he cancels the room privilege for everybody. You know, there's a sort of group punishment for one person's actions. - Setting up a code red base. - Exactly, and so then I'll never forget it. We had these student home meetings truly boring. It's like, you know, you guys should teach him a lesson. So that night I woke up to half the student home kicking the ever-living shit out of me. - Oh, yeah. - And that's what that place was like for me. - Especially the first two years. It got easier in the second two years. - Okay, so I watched a lot of kids get bullied into oblivion. Now, there seems to be some predictable outcomes. A lot of kids try to make themselves invisible. And then another branch of kids weirdly become agitators. - Yes, that was me. - I had a hunch. So my roommate, Bob, you know, he was this really heavy kid. He had no chance of competing in the social hierarchy. He just didn't do it. In hindsight, I'm looking at that. I'm like, that is really noble. That is one way to go, but wasn't in my personality. I was raised around kids my whole life. So I became a suck up to exactly these fuckers who had kicked the shit out of me. And that's who I was in high school. Just not even close to the kid I was before. The last year or two definitely got a little easier, but it was really, really tough spot. - You're doing a lot of dust off. - Yeah. - And for people who haven't done dust off, this is where I'm going to extend great compassion to you. It's a terrible heart. - Yes. - You have to have a really shitty resting state and consciousness for that to be an improvement. - But the air does do, yes. My memory is not fabulous. And I look back at some of those experiences. - Yeah, you blast it. - You blast it. - And then obviously you get all wall. - That's what I know nothing about. - You know, you clean like a keyboard. - Oh, like the aerosol. - Yeah. - Turns out now they're hip to it. So they add a bit or so you can't do it. But in the 90s now, this is 91.92, something like this. You could just pound that shit. - And it's a little bit like a nitrous eye, but not nearly as nice. And you're just all of a sudden you're getting like, like the wall, wall, wall, wall. You've left your current time in space. - Yes. - Which is what the relief is. - But then the headache that ensues after a dust off bench is excruciating, cause benefit on dust off is terrible. - Just terrible. I'll tell you why I stopped doing it. I did so much of it. I passed out and I fell off my bed. I laughed now because I survived. So this is a process that makes the can cooler. - Well, like it gets ice on me outside. - It's spraying on my leg and I freeze my leg solid. - Basically like frozen chicken. - Oh wow. - And I freeze it. - Yeah, and like, okay, I'm out. - And my dust off career. - Okay, so again, you're still hell bent on this college fantasy, which is great. And you are specifically hell bent on MIT. - I had read all these magazines, basically Caltech Stanford and MIT end up as like, almost characters in these stories about these scientists who do all these amazing things. I viewed programming and coding and physics and chemistry and biology and math as basically magic. This was a form of power through some grace of God that I was given the ability to comprehend. - It's the Prometheus. - And I'm going for it, right? So from a very early age, I hear about this place called MIT. - And I'm like, I'm going to MIT. Newsflash, I did not get into MIT. - Oh, MIT, dumb for them. - You have your first experience and there's waves of realizing this. There's a big gap between intelligence and preparation. - The first thing I noticed is when I'm applying, I'm in the academic system now. I know how this stuff works. I just went and took my SAT. I had no idea that people prepared for this SAT. No one had ever told me this. - Monica, I had like four or five workshops. - I did go to a class, a cabling class. - Or the application, I just like all point pen right there, I just started writing about like swimming. - No outline, no outline, no nothing. - Yeah, no one's telling you. - No, I had no idea. - It was completely lost on me that my own experiences in my childhood might reflect well on me. If I explain them in the world. - Exactly. - I went in a fucking group home for the last nine years. - Yeah. - That could help, but you're going to focus on your swimming. - Did you do well on SATs? - It okay. - 1320. - 1310, yeah, good. - 1310 going in one way. - 710 in English. - Yes. - Wow. - But people at MIT have 1520. - Yeah, I know it's not a big deal. - It's not a big deal. - You're not getting it in time. - So I was accepted to Carnegie Mellon, which it turns out to be a fabulous school. I worked probably a little too hard, but it was this moment for me of just absolute freedom. Self-realization. I had a really hard time my first semester. - Let's first though talk about the euphoria. I think it's really rare. You get put in a dorm. You have a cafeteria to eat at. You're allowed to sit on the roof of your dorm. - Yeah. - And you just sit up there and you get to gaze upon this campus that you're now a part of. And you're out of prison. - Yes. - That is so profound. I can't even imagine the elation you've felt. - Yeah, my first buddy, Sport, I think he walked by me. He's a lifelong friend. I met him the first day of college. And I'm like sitting, I'm cackling. - And you're like, "Yeah." - Oh my god. I don't know how to explain it. Like, P after a five-hour car ride. Just like this huge sense of relief. - You hadn't even let yourself fantasize that you could now have it as good as you currently have. That's quite a unique feeling. And it was amazing. I was going to make the best of that circumstance, right? - And you had a scholarship, I assume. - Yeah, for a swimming. - For a swimming. (laughing) - I was the worst swimmer. I was swimming in high school. I couldn't stand it. I was terrible at it. - My uncle takes me to Penn State just to look around as a prospective school. And we sit down with a financial aid advisor who clearly had some very broad authority. So this guy starts asking me about my life. And he's kind of like, "Dumbster diving through my childhood." But I tell him all this stuff. You get independent status. Now, I'm no longer associated with my family from the perspective of the government. So I'm going to get the maximal amount of financial aid from the government. I'm going to get the maximal financial aid from Carnegie Mellon. And when I say full ride, that's what I mean. - Yeah. - Great. - And you go there with the original intention of doing physics, but quickly you get into computer science. - Yeah. - You've timed this kind of nicely. - Yeah. - Tell me if you can relate to this. We're the same age. I feel like my whole life has been writing on the crest of a technological wave. I'm five years old when personal computers come out. Before personal computers, working with a computer was a colossal pain in the ass. - Yeah. - Right? Then the video games come out. And then all of a sudden you can tinker with basic programs. And then there's Pascal. And then I get to college. - And there's the internet. - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah. You weren't ever playing catch-up. - No. - You were learning at the same time, everyone else. - It was always just happening. - Yeah, that's a huge advantage. I imagine now, if you're 17 and you imagine, entering this thing and you've now got 40 years to catch up on. - Well now with AI, maybe not. - Maybe not, yeah. Up until 18 months ago it was incumbent upon you to catch up. And that must have felt a little overwhelming. - Yeah. - You're already right at the precipice. So a new thing comes out and you're interested in that. And you already can't understand the receding thing. And so you're like really well positioned for this. - So I'm taking my classes really seriously. Now computer science classes, just mind-bending, just awesome. Now what starts to happen is that the negative side of my childhood survival strategy starts to show itself. Basically when I'm 10 years old to survive these truly desperate circumstances, I'm telling myself I'm a fucking genius. So there's a fine line between self-love and narcissism. And so I get to Carnegie Mellon and I'm like, "Wait a minute, there's a lot of very smart kids." And I mean like even after the first semester where I sort of acculturate and begin to figure out how to get things done. I'm just like, "Okay, I was big fish small pond, that whole thing and now I'm in the big pond." So I begin to go into self-prove mode. I'm not certainly not gonna fail my classes. I have to convince no matter what group I'm in, I'm the smartest and all this just weird pathological stuff. - Hard to be around maybe a little bit. - I'd like to think I wasn't too hard to be around, but I was definitely intense. - Okay. - To think about living in group homes, you learn how to be around people. - Yeah. - Adapt. - Like right now, what's going on between the three of us? I know you guys are picking up. I watched a bunch of your episodes. I'm also doing that. - Yeah. - And so that's keeping me from being a complete jerk. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, that's a good skill. - A.A. says it best, like alcoholics are megalomaniacs with an inferiority complex or the piece of shit that the world revolves around. Like I can very much relate to these dramatic swings in my ego. I mean, they're worthless or now I'm from you. - You know, totally yes. - And I think it's like to buff it and get you out of this other cycle. I just think this weird bipolarity of it is a little predictable. - You're describing my experience perfectly. And I'm guessing quite a few people's given social media and all the other things that are going on. - Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's one or the other. - That's right. - I mean, the worst or the best. - That's right. - There's no middle ground whatsoever. - I gotta try. (laughs) - So as these things start burbling up, how are you coping? The fact that you're not an addict or you're not a sex addict or you're not a gambling addict? - The well-worn modulators of these feelings, you're not really using. - To be perfectly clear, in college, I did a lot of drinking. - Maybe just 'cause my parents were heron addicts, but the word addict to me has very specific meanings. - You're very extreme. - Definition for you. - Well, you know, I'm drinking on Friday and Saturday night. - Yeah, but that's not saying that's your entoulted. - Yeah, I'm not binging or anything. So I had a couple of friends, we'd hang out. And the other thing that I was doing was, I'm busy all the time. - There we go. So you're kind of maybe regulating with kind of a work addiction. - There's something that's a few. - That's right, yeah. - Yeah, no, that's insightful. Because when I stopped going to college, things really fell apart. - Right, 'cause you're in discomfort and humans don't sit in discomfort forever. They figure out something to alleviate that. And so obviously when you were killing yourself, working, and then you meet somebody and this is a match made in heaven, right? You have a professor that very much from your perspective, you're developing kind of a father's son. That's right. So the beginning of my junior year, and it is there, and now people are starting to think about how can we do stuff with this. He had this at the time, what I thought was a brilliant idea, and hindsight would never have worked, but it's like social media company for exchanging information where like you ask a question, and if anyone in the world knows it, then through your social network, you potentially get an answer, and everyone along the chain would get a cut. Very clever idea, never ever gonna work. We didn't know it at the time. Kind of Reddit. Really? I mean, don't you think it's sort of like Reddit now? People like. I could even say Wikipedia in some fashion. That's true. That's true. I could write. I put down my math, close my textbooks, and I go to the computer lab, we start building this thing out. It becomes a company, and I'm like the tech lead. Oh, wait, Jam? Oh, all of a sudden I'm like the big man on campus. I cannot tell you how great. Like, to have money, my classes were paid for, and like I could go to the cafeteria to eat, but I was truly scrimping by. Yeah. And you've never had money. And I've never in my life had money. You know, like a basketball player, so I found the. Yeah. No, I do what's going on, like, "Ahhhh!" So, Pittsburgh is a beautiful and very inexpensive city. I don't even have to spend my money, my classes, like I'm just like buying pianos. Wow! Catching up? Just doing it all, so. Yeah. That's Freudian, because your mother drug a piano, right? Yeah, yeah. So, that was the experience, and I started burning out after two years of this. And this relationship was not what you were hoping it was going to be additionally. That's right. So, I think this is probably very common. I found this person to be like a father figure, and I don't know where his mental state on that or emotional state on that was. He was a hot shot in computer science. And he had pivoted from, like, a theory career to a more applied career, so we're building out this company. It turns out that he did not, I believe, have the same sense of mentoring me. Father figure's a funny word. There was clearly some kind of transference on my part of feelings that were not really meant for him. Right. But I was giving them to him. Yes, right. And then unwittingly farming expectations of how that would be reciprocated, I'm sure. And when it wasn't, I felt hurt and the company is very stressful. I mean, it was a very empowering experience. Yeah. You had a team of like 20 kids working under you? 15 kids under me. I'm 22, 23. Well, get a money are you making? I need to know. Yeah, by that point I'm making 50,000 bucks. Oh, I got in college in '96. That's insane. It's so much money. That's like two and a grand a year right now. It's so much money. Yeah, totally. I get burnt out and I rage quit. And it was the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life because now I'm still have to take classes, but I'm past my senior year, so I got to pay for it myself. How do I pay for it? All my grants are gone. Before when I was making that 50K, I could swing it. No problem. But now I can't swing it. So in a very rash and dumb move and exactly the kind of shit you wouldn't do if you had parents to talk to, people don't understand. These kids, me, I'm not talking to someone. You get to come up with a very dumb idea you have. And execute it. So I moved to Boston. Four credits short of graduating. For this whole life goal, if I'm going to graduate, isn't this heartbreaking and so predictable? I know. I had educated myself, right? I didn't actually care about the degree per se. So in my mind, I had viewed it as basically done because you are employable now. I was employable now. It's a night followed a AI and video game company to Boston. They wanted to relocate from Pittsburgh to there. And so I followed them up and I had without a doubt the worst year of my life. Oh my God. I discovered that there is hell on earth. So I'm living alone for the first time. I think a lot of this, again, I just want to emphasize, was so avoidable. And if I had anyone to talk to, I'm not in therapy at this point. I'm not talking to any of my aunts and uncles. Obviously no parents. I'm just raw dogging the entire experience. Well, by the way, for me, my ego would have been saying like, you know what? I didn't need any of you. I'm here now. I didn't get a fucking chance to know who was here and now I'm doing it all on my own. That would have been fuel for me. You didn't have that. It doesn't seem like your personality. Yeah. I was just like, wait, my whole childhood. That was just ingrained in who I was. It wasn't like saucy. It was just like, yeah, I'm going to go do it myself. Right. Right. But you knew you needed people because you also grew up doing that. So I discovered in Boston. And so when you go to college, even in the 90s, there's orientation. They set you up here, your friends. My still best friend in life is my first buddy from my first day of college. Yeah. So they really work hard to make these environments successful, right? Yeah. I moved to Boston. I'm living in a suburb by myself for the first time ever at like a truly nerdy 12 person company. I'm not really relating to anyone there. The job is without a doubt the hardest thing technically I've ever done. What do they call a thing you're building? Compiler. Compiler translates the high level human code. 10 print monoco is cool. 20 go to 10 run. Monoco is cool. Monoco is cool. Monoco is cool. Turn that into machine code that runs. Wow. It's a very difficult program to write or reason about. And so I ended up working as the junior guy with one of these like fucking geniuses who had written this thing. So I have to learn what he did. He's going to go off to become an assistant professor. He's a PhD. So I have to learn all of this. I'm basically just well beyond my abilities here. And so within three or four months, my life just starts falling upon. I start having panic attacks. This is one of those things you either experienced it or you haven't. Because you can't explain to people what a panic attack is if they've never had one they won't get it. This is a thing that happens where it has the prominence of overwhelming pain. Whatever you were thinking about before, you don't care about that anymore. It's like you're being tortured, except it's coming from inside of you. And you don't know why you're having it. For me, you last it anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. And then after that's done, you sort of have this overwhelming exhaustion because your body is just like completely freak out. So I started having these panic attacks once a day. Well, then you talk about the cycle of your fears. Well, yeah, I've had them. And that's the worst part. It's like, when's it coming today? You know it. Like, oh my God. So I'm alone. I don't have any support whatsoever. I don't even know what to do. I should just go to a hospital. But what I learn is that I don't need to go to a hospital. I can just keep going and keep going. And as the year progresses, I move there in early fall. Now it's maybe spring or so. My panic, it's like doing like this, completely uncontrollable. Your short circadian. Yeah, right on the edge of being able to function in society. So I go up to the top of the roof, another roof story. And I'm smelling the trees and the flowers and bloom. I'm like, look over the edge. Like I could do this. And I immediately realized I have a problem. Oh, we're here now. Yeah, I did not have suicidal ideation forever and ever. I had it once. And I was like, this means something. I'm fucking smart. I'm going to take this seriously. Yeah. Because I'm just miserable. And I'm thinking, if I throw myself over the roof, I'm going to cease this pain. Yes. The suffering will stop. Couple of things I try, try a little bit of acupuncture, which is actually fairly helpful in the short term. I ultimately reach out to my uncle Elliott. He was a therapist. Uncle Elliott, my aunt Moira, they were the first people to come check out with a situation for my sister and I at the Albuquerque Christian children's home. They're therapists. They knew right away. They were like, you need to get into therapy. And I really didn't want to get into therapy. Can you remember your reservation or the story you had about it? Some combination of, I knew it wouldn't be much fun. I was just in so much pain. But because I am, I am going to do this. This guy, Dr. The Quersha, one of my uncle, Elliott's close collaborators. So I give this guy a call and he agrees to see me. And so that really is like close the chapter because everything that happens afterwards, my life just starts taking off. And so the first thing that happens, it takes a while actually six months to about a year is the cessation of this absolutely unbearable panic. I quit that job and I moved to New York. This is where my uncle live. I'm just trying to be close to anybody. I am full on tale between my legs. I don't know when it went wrong with my life. Something's messed up. I need to figure this out. Also, can I say, you have no more story. So you had a story that was getting you through the previous 15 years, which is, I'm going to go to college and I'm going to acquire this knowledge and that is going to liberate me. And now you have it. You have the solution, which is kind of the scariest point when you have the solution and yet things are at their worst point. It's, I would say, triple-e scary. This is a moment in an addict's life when you have all the medicine you're supposed to have and it's no longer fixing the thing. It is very, very, very discouraging. You nailed it. This is exactly right. I'm in Boston. I'm done. I did the thing. I know I had four classes left. But in my mind, I've achieved the goal and it turns out that it was the having the goal was the solution. So now I just have lots of goals. The achievement. Yeah. So I moved down to Manhattan and a couple of things happen. I start going to therapy on a weekly basis. That's very, very helpful. I tried a little bit of Prozac didn't like how it made me feel, so I discontinued that. But right around the same time, I started running. I was a nerd. I never really got into fitness. And all of a sudden, I'm like, hey, I felt really good after running. It buys me three, four hours of feeling good. Yeah, so I discuss it with my therapist. The agree we should probably turn this into a habit. So between exercise and this therapy and being closer to family, I start to pull myself out of a very, very dark place. And things really start going much better for me after that. Yeah, you start a master's program at Columbia. The rest of the fellowship. What were you doing over there for three years? Because you weren't accomplishing any-- anything towards your PhD, I know that. - Yeah, so I have to finish up my degree. I got to get those four classes, luckily my student advisor at Carnegie Mellon was helpful with that. So I get the degree a couple of years later. Now I actually did a chief technology officer. It was a grossly overblown title, but anyways we were building some.com thing. That blows up in the.com bubble. So now like everyone else, I gotta go back to school. I want to go back to school. I go up to Columbia University and I get a job as a UNIX Systems Administrator, just fixing the computers. And they'll pay me a living wage and they'll let you take free classes. - Oh nice. - Great gig being administrator on a university campus, get a free master's degree. It's a very good way to go. So that's just what I was doing. I then apply for a PhD program in neuroscience. - The breakthrough hasn't happened yet, right? To remind people we had the Godmother of AI. - They failee. - They failee. - Oh yeah sure. - Yeah, and AI had all these stutter stops. It had like big periods of progress, then total stagnation for years. But the last big breakthrough, which we're on the shoulders of, is starting to design AI in the same way a neural network works in the brain. Had that happened yet? - No, it's all earlier than that. But again, convenient you get interested in neurology. - It all goes back to, I want to do something that helps the world. That sounds a little cliche, but dammit, I'm earnest. - Yeah, yeah. - This is what I want to do. And well, what are my gifts and technical. So there's this branch of neuroscience called computational neuroscience, which is sort of like the math of how brains work. The brain is a complicated thing and so it's an organ, it actually builds itself, it grows. So there's all kinds of things that happen as like a purely sort of organ. But there's this other thing, this view. I can say, "Amonica count to 10." You can do it. - Some days. - Yeah, totally. - We can figure out the rules of Scrabble together. So this arbitrary ability to reason about new things that you've never ever thought about before, that sure sounds like a computer. So I was interested in getting into that kind of work. - Yeah, maybe did you have the realization, like, "Oh yeah, it's a big gooey biological entity, but it is in fact very mechanized. It's a machine, it runs on electricity. We know the parts of the electrical circuits. It's actually more mechanical than I think you grow up thinking of the brain." - So I think that's right. I'd say there is a machine in there. It's an electrical machine. - Yeah. - But how does that work? Is one of the great mysteries of our time. And I want to think about it. I think that's super interesting. And maybe it'll help. Maybe mental illnesses, maybe drug addictions are, we would say, like a network apathy, that is to say, even though some of these things change because of molecules, how the neural network function breaks and the pathology is at the network. So if that's really true, of course you can go try to fix the molecules, but you could also try to understand what's broken about the network. Sort of how the machine is no longer functioning. - Yeah, yes. - Right, so I found that very interesting. I applied to a bunch of schools. I got into Columbia. Columbia, it turns out, has a truly world class neuroscience program. - It's now called the neural-- - Right, so it's a big program. They have a subprogram called the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. - Yeah, which is now very reputable. - Yeah, it's very, very reputable. It was started by my mentor, my PhD. - Larry? - Larry Abbott, yes. And another researcher, Ken Miller. And so they start this by now or 2003, 2004. I join and this is just the best thing ever. And the full bite was part of that. - Okay. - So then you get your PhD. You start working with Larry, who you guys hit it off famously. You had to have another advisor that you guys did not work out well. - It did not work out well. - Yeah. - And then you leave and then you go and you work at Google Brain. But you have a desire still to be in academia. How do we figure out how to go from Google Brain back to academia? - Yeah, so to answer that, I wanna just back up a little bit and talk about where is the state of AI in neural networks. - Yeah, yeah, let's do that. - The broad consensus moment for when people thought that neural networks are here, there was a neural network that had a name, we gave it a name, it's called Alex Net after Alex Kachevsky, the Associates gave her, Jeff Hinton. Anyways, they built this network that beat hand designed networks at a really hard image recognition task. This is 2012. - Is this ImageNet? - This is ImageNet. Fei-Fei League or Lab Collective, that data. - Yeah. - Right, so this hugely impactful thing she did really drove all of this work in neuroscience. So that happened in 2012. But the real moment, something called a restricted Boltzmann machine, this was like 2006, 2007, 2008. Again, out of Jeff Hinton's lab, I believe apologies if I don't have it exactly right. Nowadays, we don't use any of those approaches, but it was this moment where like, okay, when you combine these simple systems, these simple neurons together, an artificial neuron is really simple. It takes inputs, adds them up, and if they're above a certain value, it emits a one, and if they're below a certain value, it emits a zero. And so that's a very simple computational device. When you connect a Gagillion of them together in just the right way, it turns out you can compute anything that is computable. That's what our brains are doing on some abstract level. And so that's where it's all coming from. I'm finishing my PhD in this restricted Boltzmann machine happens, and I'm thinking about what are called recurrent neural networks, which have feedback loops. Feedback loops are important because that's actually how your brain is working. Instead of a feed-forward processing of like, an assembly line of information processing, it's people talking back at each other and all this really complex kind of-- Could you give like a literal example of how it works? If I wanted to make a system that could flexibly pick up my soda, that is going to be a recurrent system-- we call it a dynamical system-- where what's happening as I lift this can is coming back through, so-called proprioception, through signals that are telling my brain what's actually happening as well as my vision. So that's all one big feedback. It's like self-correcting at all time. The information's flowing both directions. That's right. So it's sending info and it's receiving info, and it's making adjustments real time. That's right. It doesn't send like the full blueprint down to the hand to accomplish that task. It's going to check in all the time to see how we're doing. Exactly. So this is the kind of thing that I'm thinking about right as these networks are starting to become prominent. So I then apply those approaches in a postdoc at Stanford, and then I go to Google Brain. And in Google Brain, this is when people with money-- it was because of AlexNet now we're like 2012. The top brass at Google figured out that neural networks-- We got to be in this. Number one are going to work. There's been this long, many decades history of promise with no delivery. That is changing. They knew that then. They basically purchased all the talent on the planet. Give or take. They get all these researchers together and just go do what you want. Develop these neural networks. Neural networks, because we started stacking these networks together, it became known as deep learning, deep neural networks. That was the catchphrase from like 2015 to 2020. If the mind was one-- And deep mind was all built off of deep networks. So sorry, the naming is playing off of that Keshe. Yeah. I'm part of that scene. And now coming finally back to your question, I wanted to apply all of these neural networks approaches to understand actually how brains work. I care about the brain. Now we're in this weird zone currently, where we're trying to understand the brain to design the machine, but now the machine's kind of working in a way that we might be able to answer some of the ways that the brain works. That's exactly right. Modern AI. AI is sort of the rebranding of deep networks. There's some technical changes there. Applied to language, because the big surprise was that it's a really interesting thing actually. If you ask a neural network to spit out the next word in English, and you do that for all of the text on the internet, it learns something about the world. You can think about it in terms of context, like I'm going to the-- now ask me to fill in the next blank could be fridge bathroom store. But if you said, I need some milk, I'm going to the-- then you know it's going to be the fridge or store. Now you just expand that out to a full thing. And the computer has the capacity to go through every single written word in the world and come up with the most probabilistic next word in that sentence. Whereas a human can't scan the known written language. But the computer can. We don't learn anything like this, but this is how the computers are learning is just to predict one step ahead. That's really the magic of large language models. And that's where we've now rebranded to AI because it turns out doing this makes these things intelligent in some way. So coming back to your point, the origins of AI really go back to studying the brain all the way back to McCulloch and Pitts. They made this artificial neuron in the 40s. And they showed that if you connected them, you could build a arbitrarily powerful computer. And it was revolutionary because no one had ever figured out. They abstracted away the details. But these squishy neurons in your brain could actually behave like a computer. It was just a revolutionary idea. And that began decades of research to study that ultimately through neuroscience results sort of led to different types of networks and so on and so forth. So where are we today? It's exactly what you said. It's the opposite. I'm a huge proponent of using artificial intelligence for science discovery. And it's much broader than neuroscience. My particular love is neuroscience. I think we're in for some huge and positive changes here. If you look at it that way, there's a whole other conversation to be had. We build a device that can help us understand our own intelligence. That's right, yes. So now forecasting in the future, which is always dangerous, but super fun, you could imagine that once we know how the brains work, we begin to actually include even more detail to align these AI models to more how we think. Yeah, because there was a single thing I write I wanted to bring up to you, which is I do think people misunderstand AI a little bit. And maybe I'm wrong about this. But I read this interesting thing they did. It doesn't think they're not going to create. They're going to predict. So the example that this article I read was is that they trained an AI model on all of the known scientific literature of the 1300s. And then they asked the AI, do we revolve around the sun? Or does the sun revolve around the planet? Is it a heliocentric or a geocentric model of the universe? and the AI said it's. geocentric, the sun revolves around us. So in that way, it's not super intelligent. It can't be Galileo. If you give it the information that was known at that day, it's going to give you the highest probability, prediction of that information, but it can't be Galileo. It can't think beyond what it knows, at least currently. - Currently. - Oh yeah. - So what do we think about that? Like how do we define thinking and then is that just one category within intelligence and how do we account for that? - I have a different opinion. So I wanna be really nuanced here because I can't stand AI freak out and I don't wanna be a part of that. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But I don't think these AI's are alive. I don't think they're conscious. So to the degree that this makes any sense, I do think they're thinking. I think they're like the first example of like daycar being dead wrong in that sense of like I think therefore I am. These things are thinking in the reductive sense of manipulating language for the purposes of reasoning and conceptualizing. I think they're doing it, but there's nothing behind the machine. There's just automated process. But how can they go forward, I guess is my question, unless we command them in a certain way? It's our original thought that was creative and what I would put in quotes thinking. And then we'll now use this device as a great pattern recognition machine to substantiate this creative thing we had. But on its own, it can't come up with the heliocentric. - I acknowledge your example. That's a very hard example. But if we pull back, I do think that there is quite a bit of novelty that these things are capable of generating. But I agree with you that there are unsolved problems in and around that kind of scientific progress. So this is an enormous conversation. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But what I would say is it's in the air right now that like something has changed in AI. I don't know if you've caught wind of this, right? Like in the last say three or four months, all of a sudden these things are coding much better. And all of a sudden there's this sense that the top brass at major tech companies are taking it much more seriously. Again, I'm hesitant to make predictions. But what's happening is that these tools are becoming much, much better. But there's still a real sense of supervision of these tools. They're compounding though as the point, right? - Exactly. So the question is if you believe that they've moved on from single token prediction to other more technical methods involving reinforcement learning. It's another conversation. But the idea is that if they're self-improving at what pace and so on and so forth. - Yeah, yeah. - And what we see at least in early 2026, they are getting better. And that I think a lot of the discussion that's happening is really more about people adjusting to this idea than it is the technology itself. - What is your signpost you look at? So for me obviously, egocentrically, I'm really tracking AI's progress through what I see that is digitally created. We just had an ad nauseam talk about getting sent videos and should you tell the person, "Hey, I think that's air." - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. - Because they're at the level where two people in film and television. - Can't tell. - Can't tell. And so that bridge has been crossed out. I still think they don't have the human voices when they do dialogue and they try to do the cadence of human speak. That to me is still the giveaway. But fuck, the visuals, there's no more six fingers. That's my layman's version of tracking where we're at, just what I'm seeing done visually, digitally. What are the things you look at? - In my world, it's all coding. - Oh, okay. - So if there is just interface, I'm gonna go build a little web browser to go make a little video game. AI is just gonna do that for you. - In a second. Yeah, a couple minutes. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Right, so where these things I think are still struggling is if it's, we would say, technically out of distribution. If it's not something it's seen a lot of before, if it's integrated into a much, much larger code basis what you see at these large companies, but it's getting better at those things too. And so we're still I think in this mode where like the human and the computer together, the human and the AI together, are really the best. - To go on. - And so what I would look for in New York, it's very similar in my shoes actually, is when does that clip become a movie? For me, it's when does that chunk OUI code, user interface code become the whole program? - And a product. - Exactly. And to be honest with you, I just don't see humans leaving that process anytime soon. - Yeah, yeah. - I think that's a risky opinion. - Well, there's a lot of money been bet on the fact that they will get more efficient. - There's a lot of hype out there, but in some sense you have to take it seriously because these tools are getting much, much better. And what I would say to any of your listeners is like, if you're not checking these things out, you absolutely should be. I really mean it. - You can't sit it out. - In a positive way. - Yeah. - Imagine all the things that you could do with these kinds of creation tools. For me and my science career, so there's this thing called Google Scholars, where academics have their papers listed. Just go read every one of my papers and tell me what you think I should work on next. - What? - Shit, you know, it gave me the same idea that I had. - Whoa. - Really? - Yeah, yeah, really. Now I don't want to be disagreeable, but go ahead. - Therein lies also in Achilles of it, which is, - It came to the same conclusion you came to. - Ah. - Because it made a probabilistic prediction about you, which it can do well. - I gotta say, I find it pretty impressed. I don't view that as a fail. - Well, why? - Because it had to be that way. It was like the only thing it could have done. - Right. - Well, no, no, that's not actually my concern is that I'll make it more artistic. So yeah, go read the 35 scripts I've written. What should I write next? All that that would ensure is that I stay within my creative pattern. And in fact, what I probably need to do isn't the thing that was obvious to me. I mean, this is very philosophical. - I accept that critique. - But you know what I'm saying? - I see where you're coming from. - What it can do is advise on more of the same in some sense. And depending on what your career is if your career is to disrupt yourself and your work should constantly be trying to 180 at all times, oh, fuck, well, let's jump way over here for this perspective and see what I can bring with that and come up with a new thing. And that way I think it can be stunting for progress. - I see. - In science, jumping around 180 too many times is not fabulous because it's one step to the news. - You lose your reputation. - It's hard, it's hard, right? - Yeah, yeah. - I mean, same in art too. We don't like to think of it like that, but we have skills. - Yeah. - We have things we're better at than others and what it's doing is saying, you're best at this. So maybe you should do more of that. And I think that's not a good idea. - I'm not the other one. - Take it better by saying I fear that it could be a reproduction instead of an iteration. Does that make sense? - Yeah, it makes sense. - Does it get us out of the true creative mindset? - Right, I'll tell you the one thing that I am aligned with with people who are thinking about this more deeply than I am is I think the world is in for some very large changes. - Oh, yeah. - And especially like the science discovery, optimization process, business to business applications. - It's all on the table. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - We had a guy on David Faganbaum. He has a foundation where they're repurposing drugs that are already out on the market for other cures. He cured himself with this disease and it's an incredible story. And they're using AI obviously to like process all these drugs and see exactly what they do. And they just got like a huge grant. He emailed me. - Oh, wonderful. - That's so amazing. - Well cured diseases that cannot be cured based on this. It's happening. It's not like something in the future that's currently going on. It's awesome. - We're going to see this experiment play out. Like it or not, that's what's going to happen. So I don't even sit around. Well, what if, what if I'm like, well, let's see. Allow myself to be as optimistic as I would be pessimistic. We don't fucking know. So why am I going to have an opinion on something that none of this really is. - Yes, it's true. Nobody knows. - You know what's so fun? We're going to see. - That's right. - It's been to have been born in a period of time. - Well, we're going to see. - That's my mentality for sure. - Yeah. Well, David, this was lovely. - Thank you for having me. - Yeah, yeah. Thanks so much for sharing your story. I think it's obviously so important. - Yeah, really have. - Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you for hearing it. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Such a pleasure. Anyone ever tell you look like James Hatfield. - These days probably once every three months. - There we go. - Oh, wow. - Great. I would be flattered. - I think it's the beard I actually took a close look. - We don't actually look anything alike. - Well, every three months, some people disagree. - Yeah, it's a fail. - Yeah, it's a fail. - Yeah, I'm a stress. - David's book, Please, Please Read It. It's beautifully written and very, very honest. It's called Emergence, a memoir of boyhood, computation, and the mysteries of the mind. - Be well, David. - Thank you very much. - Stay tuned for the Fact Check. It's Reza Parvisa. - Did you get my text? - Which one? - I just sent you in a very important text. - Oh my goodness, no. - About five minutes ago. - Oh, I don't think that was me. - Rob, was it Rob? Were you in the not in the clubhouse? - I wasn't in the clubhouse. - Yeah, I could hear you. - Wow, I don't even remember if anything, my current assessment is I haven't been blowing my nose much. - Oh, I heard that too. There was a loud one at the end there. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, really fun. - It sounded like you had a die. - Exactly. - So the text I sent was, are you okay? - I hear you. - I hear you. - I hear you. - I hear you. - For you throat cleaning, more extreme than normal. - Yeah. - Yeah. - I can confirm. - Thank you. - Okay. - I subconsciously did. - It was real. - It was hard to be me. - It was, it was scary sounding. - Oh, really? You might need to perform the Heimlich maneuver? - Yeah, it's not like something was stuck in there. - Tell me you're wrestling a bear maybe. - Okay. - Oh no. - So it was really-- - When you were a poke, he was putting his finger in his butt and poke their eyes out. - I had that fantasy at the airport in New Orleans. At this restaurant, I heard a woman coughing and sweating. - Don't say what someone could need the Heimlich. - I don't want that. - Okay. - But I heard this. - Lady. - I didn't know if it was choking or coughing. It was like three tables over. - Oh. - And I just thought, I bet no one in here is going to be willing to do it. Like that was just my first thought. Not that I want to. Just like, I got a hunch. If I look over here. when I see that she's choking, I think her female companion she's dining with isn't gonna jump behind her and start. - Oh my gosh. - Bratcheting her diaphragm. - She just didn't give a fuck. - Well I looked over and she had a paralyzed look on her face. - Wait, which one? The copper or the-- - The associate. - Oh shit. - Yeah, so I was like, she getting up. And then I found myself trying to evaluate, this is a copper choke. - Okay. - And then it passed. - Okay. - But I did have a whole thing. I was just like, you know, your mind thinks so fast. It's like, I saw that, is that that? That's her from she not gonna help. Look around the restaurant. I don't see anyone like else paying attention. Fuck. If this is a choke, I gotta get on the move. - Yeah. I will say I'm grateful that there are people like you. I really am in the world and at restaurants because I don't know what happens to me, but I like-- - Because you wanna disappear. - I do. I really don't wanna act. It's like when I hear what I think is a car crash. - Yeah. - And you of course run towards as a lot of people do. And you should. You should go check. - Well, it's not everyone's nature. - But I like-- - You shouldn't be who you're not. - I'm just like praying some, but what if no one's, I have to. I could be the only one. It's like bad. - You do have to assess. 'Cause look, I'm thrilled if a doctor stands up. Inhale, I don't know that I know how to do the heim. Like I know some attempt at it will be better than nothing. That's all I think. - Yeah. (laughing) You do know that, okay. I can relate to being the friend. - Uh-huh, okay. - It's so-- - Was it the running into the store that time with Kelly? - Oh, that was so horrible. - Who there was almost been assaulting people? - He was assault, he was coming towards us. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - He was screaming at us and I-- - And you left her. - Well, no. - Oh, this isn't the example. - Okay, I just thought that might be the example you were. - No, no, thanks for bringing that up. - Okay. - So I-- - There's more than one thing. - Everyone can relate to this when you're at dinner with somebody and then they get like the water down the wrong pipe. - Oh, sure. - Okay, and then the coughing and then like they can't stop. And you want to, you don't want to make a big deal 'cause you know that I get very co-dependent. I'm like, they feel so embarrassed. So I'm just gonna act like I don't even notice and I'm gonna keep talking and like I'm not even saying. - I approve of that technique. - Yeah, and then, 'cause when it happens to me and then people are like, are you okay? I hate that. - It's worse, yeah. - And then it gets worse. And you have to say, yeah. Like you're like dying and you're saying, yeah. - Really quick question. I just popped into my mind. Do you think that I would turn blue before you would because you're brown and I'm white? Do you think like I have some evolutionary advantage in a choking situation where it would be obvious, more obvious that I know I have an airway obstruction. - Maybe. - Do brown people turn blue? - That's my question. - I mean, if there's no blood. - Oh no. (laughing) Oh my God, ever. - Hey, is your chat getting to know you in a way that like you like without any effort? Like here's an example. - What is sin? - Oh, you wanted to talk about something just like that. - I have something written down. - Okay, then I'll save it. Oh, ear market, I won't put a pen in it. - For the listener, we have a different of a opinion of what those do mean. - We have different interpretations. - Right. - Hold on, I think we should put a pen in the blue skin and go to-- - It says no. - No, what, they can't turn blue or-- - They do not turn blue. - No, that's not what it says. - Do you have two different answers? - Yeah. - Oh my God, his white, his chat knows he's white, yours knows he's brown. - Oh my God, this is brown skin people can turn blue or grayish blue. Do you imagine-- - They just have to be dead. - I search Indian people specifically, and it tell me Indian people do not turn blue. - You're lying. - I can, I'll put up on the screen. (laughing) - Oh my God, literally-- - He's an on whitenationalist.com. - It says it occurs when blood is low, and yeah, get off that side. - Oh, this is just the Google AI. - Yeah. - Indian people do not turn blue with no blood as a natural or racial trait. Well, certain Hindu deities like Krishna or Shiva are famously depicted with blue skin to symbolize divine cosmic nature or the absorption of poison. This is not a representation of a living biological condition. However, there are rare medical conditions that can cause anyone regardless of race to appear blueish. - Yeah, exactly. - Argaria, a rare skin condition caused by silver buildup. Yes, I've we've seen this, too much silver. There was this, there was a movement, I feel like it was primarily in the deep right where people drinking colloidal silver. - Oh, I remember that. - Right, it was like, it was real heavy in the right. - It was during COVID. - I just love how these medicines are politically. - I know. - Right, like if, anyways. - That's on a mess. Okay, yeah, but wait, hold on. The now there's pins everywhere, okay? - No, there's bookmarks everywhere. - Earmarks. - Earmarks. (laughing) - Yeah, this says yes, brown skin people can turn blue or grayish blue due to a medical condition known as cyanosis. That was on there. Which occurs when blood is low in oxygen. So that's what's happening when you're choking. - Blood is low in oxygen. - Yeah, so same sitch. Oh, Rob, you're, and I is literally racist. - I think your lips also can turn blue if you have too much oxygen. - You're over, I see you. - Let me look it up. - Yeah, okay. - Get brown people to lip. - Well, you're good brown. - You see, do lips turn blue. - Your AI knows you. - That's right. - Well, mine's telling me, don't worry, like you can turn blue, like don't-- - Good news. - Turn, lips turn blue. - This is just it. - With too much oxygen. - Blue lips can result from a lack of oxygen in the blood. This may happen when you're at a high altitude or if you are choking or chronic underlying condition, bring up cyanosis again. - Sure, see in cyanosis. That's a recovery. - I'm not seeing much about 'em. - Okay. - Okay, back to-- - Your AI knowing you. - Yes, that was so similar that you brought it up because today I used email AI for the first time. - Oh, how does that work? - You don't have this yet. Like when you're responding to an email, it gives you an email response. - Oh, it suggests an entire email. - Yes, and by the way, I don't know how to turn it off and I actually hate it. Because then I keep having to delete it. - This little button, Monica. - That's what you can turn it off. - That's the AI thing. So if you click that, it should give you settings for it. - Oh, oh. - Okay, yeah, because-- - I'm still good with computers. - I know he is very good at computers. - Normally, I hate it. I delete it and that adds a step and I'm already like Russian emails, so I'm mad at it. But today the email was perfect. - Perfect, yeah. - And so I sent it. - Oh, here's an okay code that your marks are flying. So we had a real life experience that was hilarious in this exact space, which is, I wrote to you, Amy and Ryan, "Night in the Seven Kingdom at 7 p.m. tomorrow. "Stu, question mark?" - Right. - "You wrote back, yes please." Ryan wrote back, "By Trump, it's calling clashing goblets. "We shall attend the revelries. "Cure mightily for the valiant night "of the Seven Kingdoms in part take joyfully "of the most noble and steamy stew." I mean, I wanna see the delay here. Okay, so he wrote that, it's okay. I don't think we've said no, I didn't. That's came in at 6.56 p.m. and it's at 6.56 p.m. Did AI write that? It's a masterpiece. - It was so clearly. - And you go, I was just about to ask that. And I love Ryan Hansen, he wrote absolutely. - Yeah. - And then we got into, "For you, as most notable and steamy stew "as the giveaway," and I said, I thought revelries was the smoking gun. (laughing) - Yeah. - But that's the first time I caught someone cold blood in. - Oh yeah. - It was so good. I mean, he's so clever, but it was too fast and good. - It was too old, timey words. He would have had to take time to look up a lot of the words. - I'm not thinking knows how to use the word revelries. - Yeah, and whatever I said. - For a precise, I'm not, I don't, I wouldn't throw around revelries. - You wouldn't wanna look it up for it. - Yeah, I'd have some hesitation. - I, give it a second. - Okay, so these are different AI issues, but okay. - Exactly, so you do need to make sure it's something you could have done. - If you're trying to fool people. - Right. (upbeat music) - Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. (upbeat music) - And then you're being asked to assess how other people assess you. This is, this is, this is theory of mind and metacognition. I can think about how you think about how I think. - Yeah. - And so you better be good at that if you're gonna try to sneak one by us. - You know what was kind of interesting? So it's signed by name with the lowercase M. - Oh cool. - Which I don't do. - Okay, yeah. - But I am pretty willing, milly about my sign-offs. - Right. - Sometimes I'll sign MP. Sometimes maybe just M, sometimes no sign-off. So maybe it was trying to mimic being casual. - Yeah, I think so. Look, it's good. There's no question about it. - What's like, yeah. - But here's what I loved. I, I, I, I, I'm gonna screw up the details precisely, but it went something like this. Lincoln and I were looking at a map of Italy. And we stumbled upon, and I'm so embarrassed to have already forgotten the name of it, but there is a country inside of Italy, do you know this? - Well, I don't know. - And it's like, 48 square miles other than the Vatican. So you have the Vatican, which is its own country inside of it early. But then you have this other country like Santa Maria's. San Marino. San Marino. Marino? San Marino. Republic of San Marino. We're like looking at places to visit and then there's like, you know, on a map where it says Italy on one side, it says Italia and then it says San Marino, but it looks like a city. And I'm like, why is the city? We're both like, what is the city? She's like, I think it's a country. I'm like, I don't think there's two mile long country in the middle. Right. And so we look it up sure enough it's a country. It had been a country since the 1300s and Italy only became a country in the 1800s. And they had all these diplomatic relationships. So they never absorbed it. They always honored it. So there's this tiny little country. So then we got interested in what are the five tiniest countries in the world? Oh. And the Vatican's of course, it's less than up square mile. San Marino, I think was four. Oh, uh, Lichtenstein is in there. Really? It's that small. It's very, very, very small and monaco, of course. Oh, sure. Been there. Yeah. That's a tiny little country. And then once it had that list, it said knowing how much you like F1, would you like me to tell you what drivers live in Monaco? Oh, no. And you weren't even talking about F1. No, but I loved that because that could have been a next search. So it's like, it wasn't just answering my question. It was encouraging me to learn more, but it knows my interests. I loved that. Oh, God. You don't like it. Well, because it's like, it's like, it's been, it's telling you what to think. Oh, now you're going to think about F1 right now. No, it's, it's trying to predict what I'll be interested in and it's doing a good job. What if it didn't know that you had a New Year's resolution, lunar New Year's resolution to never think about F1 ever again. It was destroying your life. You were addicted. And then it would have said, why did you ask what the schedule was yesterday for that? Because you slipped off the wagon, but you're trying to get back on. I could tell it, hey, I'm trying to quit my obsession with F1. It would immediately adjust. I know, but it carries out whatever your desires. Yeah, but your desire versus your, your need versus your want might be different. Your first order versus your second order. That's right. Yeah. Wow. Wow. What else do we put up? Yeah, there are a few pins. You're freaking out when people cough. You go invisible. Yeah. So your friend was coughing and you kept asking questions. Oh, just, yeah. I thought, could you turn blue? That's right. And we're not, and we have a determined, but also, you know, if you're choking, choking for real choking, need the Heimlich choking. There's no air through your path. Yeah. And so you can't cough. So you can still be in a lot of distress. I also think you could have reduced air. I think you could have 80% blockage, 90, 100. Yeah, but if you have 100, then you need the Heimlich, right? If you have 50, there are other things you can do to get the thing out. And you don't need the Heimlich because you can still get oxygen. Do you when you hear Heimlich, do not think about how close it is to Heimlich? No, I don't. Do you rob? No, like a, like a body. What even is that? Like a Heimlich? Like, like, like, like, someone's Heimlich. What? No, not Heimlich. No, what? No, not Heimlich. Oh, my. And Heimlich, remember, the maneuver is the only result there. Okay. First of all, I've never heard it called Heimlich. Only Heimlich. Heimlich is not a Heimlich. You're Heimlich. You've heard that? I thought that was H-I-N-D. You're Heimlich. Yeah. Okay. Oh, Heimlich is Heimlich. Hei, any why or something like that. Yeah, I don't know a lot about Heimlich, but I know Heimlich and so Heimlich maneuver sounds like someone's choking you quickly, like, their Heimlich, which freaks them out and then they spit out the cue. I always pitch our cue but stake in someone's throat. Do you have it? Do you go to a specific item? Oh, food? Oh, that's funny. No, I don't really think specifically, but yeah, in the movies, it's always stayed. A big cue mistake. Yeah. Yeah. Chicken or something. Wow. Heimlich. The Heimlich maneuver. I mean, I should pat net. Oh my god. Oh, guess what? What? Chicken butt. I started creotene last night. You did? Yeah. Oh, tell me more. How do you think I look? Like, you have a lot of water in your muscles and in your brain. Oh, it brings water there? That's what it does. Well, fuck, that's end-tethetical to my water drinking. No, I would argue with your reduced water consumption, you should have something helping you keep water in your muscles. Okay. And then I don't know the function of how it has all these huge impacts on your brain, which tons of data about it, but I don't know if the mechanism is also allowing more water to be in your brain cells or not. But I do know that that's why it works for muscles. Do I have like big muscles today? Did you lift? You can't just take it. I am curious how much you've used your gym because you're. It's big. Monica's a nice gym now. I know, I want to use it. I want to. I've only lived there a month. Give me a month. You haven't like, thought I should want a day or an hour. No, I think it all the time. Okay. I just don't do it. You don't do it. My dad used it. He did. Yeah. Oh, great. Did he get a good pump in? He's a treadmill. He's the treadmill. So I took it last night after my long walk. Okay. Okay. You're feeling like you're now you're on a virtuous cycle. Yeah. The upward trajectory. Yeah. And also it was the walk. It wasn't that long. Oh, I just didn't know. You're poking holes at my virtuous cycle. That is that presumes that I think it was low. That's not my position. I felt like it was not a long enough walk. Okay. Did you walk in the neighborhood? Yeah. Oh, fun, right? Yeah. I love it. Oh, what a blessing. Really hot out. Yeah. It's okay. Last night, but it was great. I walked for 35 minutes. You did. That's great. It's not my normal. I like to go an hour, but I was getting too hot. So it's been very warm here in California. Yeah. And so we have taken two walks this last five days down to Hillhurst to have dinner. Oh, nice, which is shockingly fun. Oh, yes. It's easy. It's shockingly fun. And on the way home two nights ago, you know, all I do is scan for threats. And one of the threats I scan for is like paparazzi. I don't want pictures of our kids. So I'm constantly looking on the do got a camera is that right? A little bit of a preoccupation. So I said to the family, we're all walking. I said, gang, okay, here is the game playing of I spot a paparazzi ahead of us. I'm going to scream baby duck formation. Oh, and then mom gets directly behind me. Lincoln, you get behind mom Delta. You get behind Lincoln. Okay. And all the photographer will see is a picture of me walking on the street. I said to them, which is valueless. Okay. There's no one's going to buy a picture. What about from the side? So we baby duck formation can just pivot to wherever the photographer tries to go. Okay. Got it. So that became this hilarious game. They wanted me to run drills. So it just became me screaming baby duck formation. A lot. And everyone's scampering to get in position. And it didn't go well. I'm glad we ran drills. Lincoln constantly was, you know, she wanted to be directly behind me. I think she wanted to be number two in the line. Yeah. She's like, she's up first place finished her type of person. So it's like, whatever I'm supposed, you know. And then I forget why we had to do a reverse baby back baby duck formation. Wow. That one doesn't make any sense, but we had to run it just to get good at the drill. Well, yeah, you got to practice lots of iterations because you just don't know what will happen. Oh, it's very fun. Anyway, I love walks. And I took, so I took my walk, my hot walk. It was about 35 minutes. So then I got back and I did. I was like, I'm tired. And then I was like, like, I'm really have not been moving my body enough if I, if I feel tired. Yeah. And then I took a hot bath. Oh my gosh. Went the other direction. Yeah. Because I wanted to continue my sweat. So I took a hot bath that just really nice. Also shorter than I wanted. Because I was hot. Too hot. And then I took my crazy. To remind the listener also, you don't ever feel hot. I know. Yeah. Yeah. If I were you and I was feeling hot, I might have like health concerns. Well, I, yeah. So I took my creatine to clear yourself down. Yeah. And I'm, I guess I'm taking it for my brain more than my body. So I can take it without lifting. I should still lift. Yeah, it's great for your brain regardless. Yeah. That's what I want to do. And for perimenopause. But you should definitely start lifting. I know. I know. I know. I'm sorry. I know. Okay. Okay. I want to start seeing some like some guns. Look. I want to be like, oh wow. Monty's got some fucking guns. I've been a freckle. I probably got it last night because it was hot out. Pist. Okay. I'll do some facts. Yeah. We're going to do some facts now. Now you don't know if I'm looking at your hair or your shoulder. You're looking at me either. You pass the test. I was looking at you directly. - Yup. (laughing) - You can see more to those things. - The game's not as fun as I want to answer the, I need some mirror, I need some like cop mirror sunglasses. - Uh-huh. Okay. This was another huge sim, unexpected. This really is doppelganger month. At the end of this episode, you said, does anyone ever tell you you get James Hatfield? - Oh my god. - He says, "Yeah, once every three weeks." - Oh, you're right. - I kinda hope it continues. - Me too. - And that was a pop out, I mean. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah. - I'm just speaking of which. Mary told you that Metallica's going in the sphere. - That's exciting. - Oh my god, me, Erin and Erin. - You're gonna go. - Oh, fuck yes. I can't imagine a funer night to be have than the three of us at Metallica. - That's a great plan. - Oh, I can't wait. - I gotta wait all the way to November or October. I think they're like October through something. - Okay, that's so fun. - You didn't happen to see them if it wouldn't be in your algorithm. The announcement when they did it, but they made the outside of the globe Metallica. - Oh, that's cool. - Oh, the song they played, oh, it's so cool. - I'm trying to think like what band would I see there that would like get me there? - I mean, you should be willing to see anybody there. 'Cause I went to see you too. - Yes. - And although I was a great YouTube fan in my youth, I wouldn't necessarily go see them in concert. But I was like, well, I wanna go to the sphere. - In the sphere makes it. - I know, I'm just like, the sphere makes it for next. - Oh, look at that. - That'll be really fun. - That's so cool, isn't it? - It is. I just feel anxious about the sphere for some reason. - A lot of stimuli. - Yeah, I'm a little nervous. I'll have a seizure, I think. - That's a fear. Maybe you should do a mushroom-serving - A lot of my users are passive to help with that. - Yeah, maybe. So I would maybe see Coldplay there. - There you go. - I love Coldplay. You know what? Everyone wants to shit on Coldplay. - Who does? - If they didn't also love Coldplay. - Who doesn't like Coldplay? - You'll just hear when people talk about it. They're the type of person that likes Coldplay. And I'm like, oh my God. - See, they're every type of person. - Exactly. - The only knock on Coldplay I've ever heard is from super music nerds that are like, they're just ripped off radio head, right Rob? - Yeah. - That's the complaint against Coldplay in the music geek world. - Oh my God. - But I like it real, everybody. - Whatever, I'm here to say I love Coldplay. - Oh, I love Coldplay. I would say as a group, they have had more songs that have ended up on repeat for me for months on end. - Same. Okay, well anyway, so if Coldplay goes, then maybe I'll go. - You'll be there. - You're swift, you'd see there, right? - Oh yeah. Yep. Okay, the Hershey School, Milton Hershey School, cost-free boarding school for low income children is supported by a massive endowment exceeding $17 billion. Funded by a controlling stake in the Hershey Company, established in 1909. The trust holds approximately 28% of the company's stock generating immense wealth for the school's operations. It's really cool. I mean, I know it's complicated. - Man. - He had a bad experience. But I think it was also good about saying there are other experiences that have there. - Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was really great. - Although I don't know why it's not Hogwarts. It sounds like it's funded enough to be straight up Hogwarts. - It does, it's sounded. - But the experience in sound Hogwarts. - Well, his guys. - Maybe like way more advisors. But that kind of money, when we get like, you know, a buddy for every four kids or something. - Well, in Hogwarts, they have a headmaster, you know, they have like a house per lady or whatever. Sometimes they're bad, even in Hogwarts. - Okay. - Remember that. - Remember that. - Remember that. - Totally. That's all I think about is the umbridge. - I saw, I think about it. You talked about how rich the candy like- - People were? - People were, yeah. - Yeah, Rigglies. - Yes. - Mars. - Mars is still. The Mars are the second richest family in America. - Family. - Family. - Yeah, not person. - But family, that's from business insider. - Behind the Walten's, right? - I don't know. - Yeah, the Walmart dynasty. - Yeah, I know that. - Okay, sorry, I brought it up. - I already know that, but I don't know if that's the one, but it probably is. - They always make like, when there's a top 100 billionaire, there's like five Walten's on the list. - Oh, we hear the 25 richest families in the US. This is from Yahoo, find it. This is 2021, a lot's changed. - Sure. - Okay, I'm gonna go to the front. Here, I gotta go from 25. The Gallo. - Oh, Ernest Gallo, wine. - Joseph Gallo. - Wine people, right? - Yeah, wine business drink prohibition. That was good. How do you know that? - Thank you, Ernest Gallo. - It says Joseph Gallo. - I know, but the brand is Ernest Gallo. - Oh, yeah, Ernest, yeah. Cutting that, you shouldn't know more about wine than me. (laughing) The Rollins family, do you know what that is? - Rollins. - Or Rollins, maybe? - Rollins family, no. - Rollins broadcasting. - Oh. - A radio and TV biz. - Okay. - Okay. Then the Goldman family. - Goldman Sachs. - I'm guessing, yes, sold Goldman. Striker family, they're from Michigan. - Are they an automotive supply company? - No, this makes no sense. - We are seeding. - An orthopedic surgeon? Oh, to decide to invent his own medical devices to meet his parents, his parents, his patients needs. One of them is the mobile hospital bed. - Oh, boy. - That's like when the people made the Ziploc bag, you know? - Or the Styrofoam cup that drops down in a coffee machine. - Oh, that's cool. Okay, the Kathy family, Chick-fil-A. - Ah. - Wow. - Okay, great. - Ziff family, media conglomerate, Ziff Davis LLC. - Mm-hmm. - Okay. - Dorrance family, do you know what this is? - Dorrance? - Uh-huh. - Condensed soup. - Oh, okay, but not Campbell's. - Campbell's. - Campbell's, oh, sure. - A court. - Trusted fucking brand. - Very. - And most trusted. - Hunt, the Hunt family. - Sure, the ketchup family. - Actually, cotton trader, let's see. Oil. - Oh. - This is a different hunt. - Okay. - DuPont. - Yeah. - We know that. - Yeah, 3M. - Ooh, scary. - Bell Laboratories. - What was it called again? - Foxcatcher. - Yeah. - Yeah, great. - Steve Correll, Channing Tatum. - Beautiful film. Oh, Mark Ruffalo. Bring in all the heart. - God, I know. Okay, Bush family. - Beer, ding, ding, ding, ding. - That's right, Anheuser Bush. Oh, no, but family, beauty, tea. He invented hearts. - Wow, wow. Those are free, aren't they? I'm rich if they're, if you can charge for them. - I guess this is a grocery store. - Oh, okay. - I've never heard of it. - Maybe they own like, they own crogr or something. - I know, it doesn't say that. Yeah, it says HEB. Celebrate as one of America's top groceries. - Oh yeah, HEB. That's a Southern thing. - Never heard of it. - Oh, okay. - I've never seen one. - You haven't seen a HEB in Texas? - Oh, that makes sense. Marshall family. Marshall's the discount store. - Well, originally a department. - It's not that. Brown family. - You were of his EPS. (laughing) - Brown Foreman Corp. Kentucky Bay Spirits and Wine Producer that gave us Jack Daniels, Finlandia. - Ooh. - That's cool. And George Foreman is involved, or you know, is part of that. Hurst. - Okay. - Duncan family. - Not Duncan, don't it. - No. - Pipeline giant enterprise products partners. - Okay. - Newhouse family. - Oh, clue. - Advanced publications publishing company that owns condonast. - Mm. - That's cool. - Pritzker. - Oh, I feel like I should know that one. - Hyatt, created the Hyatt. - Hyatt Regency. - And it invested an industrial holding company, Marmon Group. - Oh, okay, I don't know. - Cox family. - Cable. - Evening news. Yeah. Johnson family. - Fucking Johnson, yeah. Very trusted, Brown. - Donald Swabs. - Donald Swabs. - Well, I don't know if this is Johnson and Johnson, 'cause it's the Johnson's on half, almost half the mutual fund giant fidelity investment. - Okay, not those Johnson's. - Oh, SC Johnson is next. - Oh, wonderful. - Yeah. - Windex, glass, ziplock. - Yeah. - Yeah, they're basically proctor and gamble size. - 37 bill. - Bill. - 370. - Blotter. - Estay, lotter. - Mm, nice. - Cargol McMillan family. Grains storage business in Iowa. - Of course. - Wow. - Mars family number three, we got there. - Yeah. - 94 billion. - Nice, congratulations guys. - Two, the Coke family. - Mm, mm. - 100 billion. - Mm, wow. Number one, you got it. - The wall. - The wall. - 247 billion. - Yeah. - I wish the Costco family had more, 'cause they're really upstanding. - They are, they're great, they're great. - All right, let's see. That was unexpected, didn't mean to do that. - Well, add a cool thing the Walons do. - Okay. - To get their inheritance, they have to do a party. public works project in Bentonville, or their headquarters. So Bentonville has all this impossibly great stuff because of this weird-- - That's funny. - So they have like a crazy good museum with like an impossibly good art collection. They have a crazy public park bicycle network. Like they have a bunch of cool things because they have to take on a public works project to get their money. I like that. - That's cool. - I wish it could be country wide and not just in Bentonville. - Well, you know that's a conservative liberal thing where conservatives believe you make your community good and everyone makes their community good. The whole place will be good. - And when not everyone can make it good because I don't have 247 billion dollars. - When do you got to move to Bentonville? - Oh my God. - Okay, how much was $50,000? That's what he was making in '96. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said like 200 maybe? - Yeah, 103,649 dollars. - Oh, okay. - Okay, well look what we haven't done in a while. Bitcoin. - Oh yeah, we missed a huge cliff. - Oh, we missed-- - Around the Super Bowl, it lost like half of its value and we did not report on that. - Well, it's not that far. - It's probably as far as too sensitive at that time. - Well, it's up today. - What's it at? - It's at 70,392. - Okay. - But when we were talking-- - About six or 12 or something. - Okay, the restricted Boltzmann machine, he said he thought it was out of Jeff Hinton's lab but wasn't 100% sure, but he is right. - Oh, good. - But I'm gonna give credit to Paul Smolensky. He rose to prominence after Jeffrey Hinton and collaborators used fast learning algorithms for them and then mid-2000s. Okay, and then that's it. - That's everything. - The last one was doppelgangers, but I already talked about it. - Covered, he covered that. - Yep. - Okay, great. - Yeah, good stuff. - Love you. - Love you. (upbeat music)