(techno music) – Welcome to Ear Biscuits. I’m Rhett. – And I’m Link. This week, at the round table of dim lighting, we’re gonna talk about the future with Derek Muller, known everywhere on the internet as Veritasium, amazing YouTube creator and scientifically-minded person who we have had a very stimulating conversation with. – We have had it. – We’ve had it, and we’re teeing it up for you Ear Biscuits here. Lot of fun for us to speculate about things that will happen in the future. And I know that it’s speaking your love language. – I like to talk about the future. I like to talk about the future with people who know things about the future and actually have informed guesses about the future as opposed to myself, that just has formed guesses about the future. (laughing) – Formed meaning you formed it, meaning you made them up. – Meaning I formed them, meaning I’ve got lots of guesses about the future and I have formulated them, but they’re not in-formulated, necessarily. – So we get into a lot of things in our conversation with Derek. And we also clear up, I will say that you’re the one who made it awkward. But I think we cleared up something that was a little- – It all started- – An interpersonal conflict between Derek and I that’s been festering for a few years. – If you wanna lay blame here, the number one responsible party is Derek. – Ooh, okay. – Number two responsible party is you because of the way you reacted. And I’m just saying technical responsibility. He’s the one who started it. – Like scientific responsibility. – Yeah, but that doesn’t mean, but then you’ve got very close second because of the way you took it. And now I’m just a guy who likes to be entertained. I’m third on this totem pole, man. Third. – You need to invert that. – Okay. – Entirely. – All right. – You, then me, then Derek. – You can do that if you want. – But it was fun, and it was interesting, and it might have been a little awkward. I mean, his mom was watching, for goodness sakes. – Yeah, that’s what was so great. I wanted her to come out and referee. (laughing) – So that’s what you got in store for you, as you’re listening tonight. I feel like you’re listening at night, for some reason. – Well, now you just alienated everyone who doesn’t listen at night. – Even if it’s during the day… – It’s night somewhere. – It’s night in your soul right now. – Oh gosh. – You’re listening in your- – Night of the soul is like, dark night of the soul, that’s a bad thing. – So we talked about we talked about cars. – Cars. – And I did mention this, but we can get into a little bit more, the Neals got a vehicle. – Well, pretty big deal here. – A replacement vehicle for the illustrious minivan. – Now, I haven’t talked to you about this, but I wanted to- – And it does something that is very futuristic. – Right, but we’ll talk about that later, because the most interesting aspect of this is the fact that you un-minivanned, which, minivanning as a decision is already a bit of a decision, right? I’ve never made that decision. And then you un-minivanned. And I just want to know what went into the process. – I mean, I’ve been a proud minivanner for many years. Maybe seven years, maybe more than that. – More than that. – I’ve been through three minivans. – You got one right after you had your first kid. – Oh, yeah. No I didn’t. Did I? – You had a minivan- – With a second kid. – Definitely was with Lincoln. So we’re talking 12 years. – Which, two kids does not require a minivan. So yeah, we made a choice to go for it, for the spaciousness. – And the drivability, man. It drives like a car, it fits a lot of people in it, it’s very practical. – Yeah, you can get a lot of people in it. I remember right when we got it, we went on a white water rafting trip, and it was me, my dad, you, Greg, Greg’s dad, and another person. And I was like, “oh, we’ll take the minivan.” It’s perfect. – And while I appreciate all that, I have a certain level of pride. I’m not saying it’s a good thing. And I only had two kids, so I didn’t need a minivan. – You have a stigma. – Yeah, well. – You let the stigma get to you. – Minivans have a stigma. And the way that our families work is that we’ve got the car that we typically drive, and then you’ve got the car that your wife typically drives. and she’s gonna be the one that has the bigger one, cause she’s picking up the kids from school and more often dealing with them than we are, during the day. But then- – Oh, I wouldn’t be caught dead driving a minivan, just me. That’s crazy. – No, but I’m just saying that there are moments, and I’m not saying this is a healthy thing, but there are just times when I’m in a place and I don’t want people to just pigeonhole me as the guy with a minivan. So that’s the reason, I recognize how practical it is. So I was just like, “I’m gonna get an SUV.” That basically, I know it’s not as convenient. It’s harder to get in and out of all and all these things, but it was just sense of external appearance that keeps a lot of people from going to the minivan. – You made a shallow choice to not get a minivan. – Yeah. – I made a deep choice to get a minivan. (laughs) – But that is the way the world works, because people are shallow. So sometimes you have to make shallow decisions to live in a shallow world. – Okay, if that makes you feel better. – And you’ve now made a shallow decision. – Well, I’ll say that years of being a minivan driver, I think got to us. So we could only fight that good fight so long. And one day, Christy and I were just sitting down, and it’s just one of those silent moments. The kids aren’t around. Here we are just sitting down. – Moment of reflection. – And it’s, yeah I think it turned reflection, reflective. – I like reflection, you can just use that word. – And then all of a sudden, Christy was like, “I wouldn’t like another minivan.” – Oh, it was her! – (laughs) It got to her. And I was like- – Hold on, did she phrase it exactly that way? Cause it sounds so, “I wouldn’t like another minivan.” That’s an interesting way to say, or did you say that right now? – I did say it right now. I heard myself say it. I think that was her sentiment. I don’t remember conversations. – I’m willing to bet she did not just out of the blue say, “I wouldn’t like another minivan.” – And then I was like, “I, too, am in agreement.” – You guys are weird in your reflectionary moments. Reflectioning moments. – We were both feeling it. The minivan was getting a lot of miles. Once it breaks 100,000 miles, you gotta replace the transmission in that puppy. And I did that twice. – [Rhett] 100,000. – And I was like, “I’m not doing that again.” – That’s when the problems really start. – So then when were gonna get another, I was like, we’re breaking 100 grand, in terms of miles, not in terms of- – Never spend 100 grand on a minivan. – (laughs) That is quite a minivan. – It’s got gold rims. – 100,000 miles, we gotta get out from under, we gotta shed this skin. And we’re like, let’s not get another minivan. – But was there a discussion beyond that, or was it just a feeling during a reflectioning moment. – That was it. We were in agreement. – You vibed, yeah. – Yeah, we were vibing about it. With three kids, we wanted a car that had captain’s chairs in the second row. So then basically we just picked an SUV that had captain’s chairs in the second row so that the kids wouldn’t be in a bench seat. They have to have physical separation. They have to have their own seat or it’s just gonna be bad. – Oh, it’s not about access to the back row? It’s about physical separation? – The first reason is everyone has their own seat, and it’s not two people on a big bench that then, it’s like, “well, how much of the bench “are you taking?” I just didn’t want to have that argument. So that narrowed down what we were gonna go with. And I don’t even wanna say what we bought because, A, they’re not paying me, and B, I don’t care enough to say. Honestly. But I am tempted to brag a little bit, cause it’s got auto-parking. – Whoa, okay. – And I didn’t really know that cars had this cause I have a minivan with 100,000 miles on it. – Right, but I saw a Nissan commercial from like seven years ago where they were advertising this technology. – And I probably saw it and I was like, that’s stupid. I can park my own car. One of the things that I took the most pride in when I first started dating Christy was my ability to park in a space on a date. And I would always back in. – You’re a back-in-er. – I would back in. And she was really impressed with that. I would always back in my 1987 Nissan pickup. – Doesn’t take much, does it? (laughs) – Shut up. (laughing) That’s kinda like you insulted my wife. Or I can’t figure out, did you insult me or my wife? – I’m just saying, a woman who is really impressed by a man who backs in, I’m just saying- – Take it back. – Don’t insult my wife on a podcast. – I’m insulting- – Insult me. – I’m insulting you through your wife. That’s the way I went at it that way, that time. – Well, I don’t appreciate it. – Okay, I take it all back. In. (laughs) – [Link] What? I didn’t even hear. – I said I take it all back in cause you back in. (laughing) It was actually an incredible joke, and everyone in the room laughed. But you didn’t get it cause you spend too much time thinking about backing into spaces so you can get out quick. – That’s what matters. That you said something funny, not the apology. That’s fine. So anyway, this car, it only, when it parks automatically, it does it by backing in only. Did you know that? That self-parking cars back in exclusively? Or at least this one. – It will not go into a, cause I know it parallel parks, but it also goes into a regular space? – A proper parallel parking procedure is to back in. – Right. – So you can’t, the physics of how a car works, you can’t parallel park nose first. It doesn’t work nearly as well. – But you can’t even choose to pull into a space. – Yeah, it’ll automatically park in parking spaces that are like normal, cars beside each other, not end to end, but side by side. But it will only back into those. And it’s a scary thing. And it feels awesome. But I’ve lost a little bit of myself. I’ve given myself over. And that’s what we talked about, when we talk about the future, how much of ourselves are we gonna give over to the robot overlords? We discuss that in depth. And I’ve broken the seal personally now. – Well, it makes me think that maybe, again, cause we talk about this as well, about how I have this faith in AI helping us be able to solve problems. And what you’ve basically proven here, Link, is that at least with your car, the AI has determined that the best way to get into a spot is to back in, which might potentially settle our longstanding argument. – You trying to make up for insulting my wife? I will accept it. – No, I’m willing- – Yes. – I think you’re missing the bigger point here. – Finally, I’ve been right the whole time. – The whole point of appealing to AI is that it is something beyond the two people are their flawed understandings. Now, if there’s other cars out there that don’t just exclusively back in, then I’m gonna take it all back. But at least as far as this particular car company that I’m not gonna mention is concerned and this particular model that you have is concerned, if that’s the AI we’re deferring to- – [Link] I love it. – You win the argument for now. – Yup. – Until I get a car that pulls in. – And you know what? In the Book of Mythicality, which there are a limited quantity of signed versions on our store, Mythical.store, get em while the getting’s good if you want exclusive, signed book, go there. There is a full page dedicated to a photo of me and my family and our minivan. – Yeah, there it is in all its glory. – And so even though I’ve gotten rid of her, the minivan, she will live on in the book. Cause there’s a great story in the Pick a Fight chapter. – We also have an entire chapter dedicated to the future. Actually a chapter written from the future. – That’s true. – That I’m showing now. So lots of touch points to the Book of Mythicality, which can be yours everywhere books are sold and BookofMythicality.com. – And the signed ones on our website. Now on with the biscuit, our grand futuristic conversation with Derek from Veritasium. (techno music) – I remember it was in Boston, it was the daytime, and that’s where we met. So it was some YouTube event. And then there were guys who created weird vehicles, and they had a YouTube channel. But they had an accent. But I don’t know- – Yeah, they were Australian. – They were Australian. – They were these guys who do Mighty Car Mods. – And you knew them, or of them. – Yeah, cause I’m also kind of Australian. – Kind of? – Yeah, I was born there. I was born there, but I don’t have the accent. Although I could try to put one on if you like. (laughs) – I mean, just do it- – It’s too late now. – That would be really annoying. – Did you ever have it? Did you ever have the accent? – No, no, cause I moved away when I was like eighteen months old. We moved to Canada. So I’m essentially Canadian. Then I moved back when I was 21 and lived there for a decade. But I think by the time you’re 21, you’ve got your accent, you know what it’s gonna be. – Well, there are different kinds of people. Because there are definitely people- – [Derek] Who put on? – Who are- – Oh. (laughs) – No, no, there are adults- – Well, that’s a type. – Adults who go to a place, like I don’t even remember who this was, but I’ve had multiple friends who just went on a European vacation, and they come back talking differently. It’s just people are just so, they can be influenced so easily. – I mean, or they want to sound that way. I had a friend who went to London for six months and came back, and everything was like, “oh, a cup of high tea.” (laughing) – You gotta guard against that. You gotta go in guarding against that. – Exactly. – And we just met your mom. She’s here. – She is indeed, yeah. – She’s a wonderful person. – She’s keeping an eye on you. – She’s visiting, keeping an eye on you here, making sure we don’t get you into any trouble on this Ear Biscuit. (laughs) If my mom was visiting, and this wasn’t my show, I don’t know if I would bring my mom to it because I just think when it was over, she’d try to be nice, but she would just be like, “so boring.” (laughing) Yeah, I don’t. – I don’t think my mom would care too much about coming to a podcast, but she wanted to go to the doctor’s last time, remember that? – She needed to see a doctor? – No, The Doctors, the show. – Okay, yeah. – And she took Christy and Jessie. – She loved it. – Yeah. – She loved it, but she didn’t ask to sit in on a podcast. – If my mom has a superpower, it’s making everything seem the best version of itself. Like, I could do anything here. This could be an awful podcast that we could do. And she would still walk out with glowing reviews. That I can guarantee you. – You’re gonna go back and brag to your friends at your high school reunion that you’re going to next. – She is absolutely gonna do that. (laughing) And if we can get a link and stuff, she will be sharing that around that crowd. – We’ll give you some business cards. You can’t just push Derek’s channel anymore. You gotta push some Good Mythical Morning and some Ear Biscuits amongst your friends. Put in a good word for us. I’ll try really hard to be entertaining right now. More than usual on this podcast. – And we are trying to break into that demo, the demo that’s currently going to their 50-year high school reunion. (laughing) We heard they got a lot of purchasing power. (laughing) – She been buying you stuff? – No. (laughing) – Okay, she’s saving it up. She’s gonna buy some of our merch. – Now, I don’t know if Link wants to bring this up, so I feel like I can be the mediator here. – Oh, I think I know what this is, actually. – Oh, really? – There’s some beef. – There’s a little bit of beef. (laughing) – But did I talk about this? – You know what, you did mention it. Cause I could tell it was on your mind. – [Link] To you? – Yeah. – [Link] Cause I don’t remember that. – I could see it in your eyes a little bit the next time I saw you. But also, I felt bad about it. – We gotta go into backstory. – Yeah, I mean. – Man, this is good. – We haven’t talked about- – I think we have. (laughs) – I think I did mention something. Cause there’s no way that you would have known. – There was some kind of follow up. – Well, you can tell us, from your perspective. – I didn’t even know it happened when it happened. You told me about it later. – This is how I remember it. It was VidCon, and so VidCon’s kinda crazy. I’m pretty sure we were introducing people on the main stage. And it was just like, okay, we’ll introduce some people, they’ll do eight minutes, five minutes, and then they’ll come off. We’re emceeing the thing. And then we’ll come back out, we’ll crack a joke and then introduce the next person. So we introduced you, I guess. – [Derek] I got out on stage somehow. – You were out there somehow. I assume we introduced you. But then when you, when you were leaving, and we were coming out on stage to introduce the next act, you punched me. (laughing) – Oh, hey, now listen. – It’s that simple. – That makes it seem so aggressive. As I remember it- – And then you kept going backstage, and I kept going to do my job. – But it happened in my periphery. And I knew nothing had happened at the time. But you told me later that, he gave me kind of like a punch, like a “hey, do a good job” kind of punch. But it really hurt. (laughing) – Yeah, it wasn’t in the face. It wasn’t in the chest, like right in the center of the sternum. – He frogged you. – It was on the arm- – That’s what we called it. – Like where the deltoid – Did you ever call it a frog? – I’ve not called it that. – [Rhett] That’s what we called it. – I think you were aiming for the deltoid with a little, you know. – Yeah, a little fist bump to the deltoid. – Yeah, fist bump, it was a fist bump motion. – That was the attempt. – But it was a little low. So it was that spot where the deltoid ends and then the next muscle starts to pick up. – And it got right to the bone. – There’s a lot of bone there on me. – Well, look, I’m just gonna say, in my defense, I think what happened was the adrenaline- [Link] You were jacked up. – Of being onstage, exactly. You know how it can happen. And it was an attempt at a friendly gesture. – [Link] Yeah, yeah, yeah. – Between to performers entering and exiting the stage. – [Link] Yeah, yeah, yeah. – But I remember upon making the punch that it felt harder than I intended. (laughing) You know how these things, and then I was leaving the stage and I was feeling like a jerk, cause I was like, now he’s gotta go out there and he’s got a sore arm. – You had feelings about it? – I sensed immediately, you know, it’s one of those things. – You probably saw my eyes shudder. Like, “oh god.” (laughing) – Yeah, it’s one of those things where you don’t intend it, but you know immediately that you’ve done it wrong. – And I’m sure I didn’t help, because I do remember having an immediate emotional reaction. For some reason, the first illogical response was you did it on purpose, which is stupid. (laughing) – And I knew that that was not the case. – But I think it was, I’m not gonna try to defend myself with science, but let me try to defend myself with science. – Okay. – You hurt me. Unintentionally, and it was well intended. It was a brotherly… – [Derek] Gesture. – Where I’m from they call it a love lick. My grandad used to hurt me all the time, pinch me, punch me (laughing) and it was a love lick. And he’d say, “I’m giving him a love lick.” – Yeah. – That was how he showed affection. And I now believe that’s what you were doing. You were just being friendly. Let’s not make it weird. – Where’s the science? (laughing) – But you hurt me. – You went to granddads real quick. – When it hurt me, yeah, we’re getting into therapy not science. I need some help with that. I had a physical pain response that then was like fight or flight. And you know me, sometimes I’m like, even though I have no business wanting to fight anybody, my body said fight. – [Derek] Wow. – My body said (laughing) – This was a provocation. – This was part of the story – I did not know. (laughing) I did not know this. – How could you know? How could anyone assume? – Link wanted to fight you. – That somebody is a total jerk, and that would be me, in that moment. – Link wants to fight me, I’d say every 17 minutes. – It was not- – So don’t take it personally. – It was not personal, it was biological. It was, somebody just hurt me. I’m either gonna run or I’m gonna try to hurt them back. – It was your reptilian brain. – This is my reptilian brain. – Can I say I’m sorry? I didn’t mean, I’m sorry that you were hurt. And I’m also saying sorry as a Canadian, which I’m very- – Yeah, which we appreciate that. – Cognitive of at this moment. The other thing that I would offer to you is an opportunity for a love lick back. If that is something that you desire, I think it’s warranted. It’s something that I would permit right here. – Can we sell tickets to it or do we just need to do it right now? – Well. – We gonna go Conor McGregor on this thing? – I mean, hey, man. They both made 200 million. (laughing) If we could get a piece of that. – We’d do the YouTube geek off version of that. Like, I have glasses and you know a lot of stuff. So that’s really how I’m putting it. I’m lumping us together in that way. – Let’s let that be a teaser. Let’s say we’re not gonna get out of here. We’re not gonna let Derek out of here until you give him a love lick back. – Oh, I thought you were gonna say an answer. – Yeah. – An answer about whether- – Well, I’m the fight promoter here. I’m saying it’s happening. I’m not gonna set it off on a different date. I don’t wanna deal with all the publicity and the pay-per-view stuff. Total headache. – So you want me to not, you want me to suspend forgiveness? I mean, the dude said he was sorry. This is something that he didn’t even have to apologize for. – This isn’t about forgiveness. This is about revenge. This is about vengeance, man. – I think this is about audience retention. Let’s be honest. – Exactly, it’s a teaser. Of course, people can just skip to the end. – I can’t do it. I can’t let Derek sit over there and say sorry, (laughing) and me not say I forgive you. I forgive you. – Okay, I appreciate that. – But you know what? – I’m still gonna hit you. – Yeah, no. – At the end of the show. – I feel like I should apologize. – No, come on. – Because that’s ridiculous. Now, I don’t, honestly, I didn’t hold a grudge. Once my logic kicked in, I was like, that made me mad, but it would be stupid for me to think that Derek had anything to do with it. That’s a conversation we had. – But logic doesn’t always kick in. – But we did have the conversation. (laughs) – It’s actually, when logic kicks in for Link, it’s like an audible noise. (laughing) It’s like a machine turning on. – Ooh, that generator that I hadn’t started in a couple of years is starting up. (laughing) – So now that that’s out of the way, and we’re gonna do something at the end with it, so what we do often on this podcast is just the two of us talk about things. And we don’t really know anything about anything, but we like to talk like we do know things. Especially me, I can make you think I know about things. – I’m glad you said that. – I could have an incredible cult following of stupid people. There are people that can do that. I would be a great cult starter. – That’s just not something you say out loud though. – No, but it is true. – I think it’s a little bit like L. Ron Hubbard or something. – [Rhett] Yeah. – You could actually turn this into something. – Yeah, right. I’m working on my first novel right now. I’m gonna come up with my version of dianetics. – I am the only thing standing in the way of him going over some kind of edge. I won’t even give it a label. – But the exciting thing about having you here is that you actually do know stuff. – I know some things, yeah. – And so this is one of those situations where instead of just us pontificating about things and then checking ourselves later, and we usually just check ourselves on Wikipedia. We don’t even go to the source. – Sure. – So we’re bringing the source to Ear Biscuits. Now, and the cool thing about what you do is that you kind of started this career on YouTube, and now it’s gotten a lot bigger than that. And now you’ve got people like Bill Nye sending you out places to be an official correspondent. So this is legitimate. Cause here’s the thing. You know this as well as we do. That when you get invited to these places and into these environments but the number one qualifier attached to your name is YouTuber, you kind of feel like you have something to prove. We feel like we got something to prove as comedians when we show up in a place. But as a, how do you characterize yourself? As a scientist? – Yeah, I would probably just say YouTuber these days. – But do you ever feel like you have to kind of, well, I’m doing on YouTube, but it’s kinda legitimate at the same time. – Yeah, maybe I’ve kinda given up on that. When I come through customs and stuff, and they’ll ask me what I do, and I make videos on YouTube. They actually look at my visa. And the technical term for my visa, cause I’m not American, the technical term is alien of extraordinary ability. – [Rhett] Ooh, gosh, that’s incredible. – Right? – Cause we won’t let you in here unless you can do something that no one here can. – [Derek] Exactly. – Or something, there’s some sort of rationale. – And so when I say to them at the border, I say I’m a YouTuber, and they look at the visa, and they’re like, “what?” Extraordinary ability, like what can you do? – [Link] Let’s see it. – And then I have to say I’m on Netflix too. (laughing) And as soon as I say that, that’s fine. – That’s legitimate, right. – Like, I understand- – I’m on Netflix, too. – Depending on who I’m talking to, it doesn’t say alien of extraordinary ability, but it says E11, which is the category. – Now, when I said, let’s see it, I was roll playing as the guy at the gate. – Oh, okay. – But I am glad you’re showing this to me. – Cause that’s what I show the guy at the gate. – E11, extraordinary. – Extraordinary ability. That’s probably trademarked in some way. Somebody would want to make a movie about that. – That’s a good looking photo. Could be a lot worse. – It definitely could. – Could be a lot worse. (laughing) – So, yeah, I understand where you’re coming from. – When you mention Netflix, they let you right in. – That’s right. As soon as I say I’m on a show with Bill Nye on Netflix, people are like, “oh, yeah, he’s for real.” – I feel it, man, I know. But you said you’ve given up. Congrats on the Streamy win, by the way. – Thank you. – You could also say, that. I won a Streamy. I don’t know what that would do. – Yeah, if I said I won a Streamy, they’d still be like, “man, that sounds made up.” – E11, extraordinary Streamy winner. – No. – As long as I keep winning Streamies, I’m not gonna dog it. – No, yeah, I’m not gonna dog it. Only let Jon Cozart do that. (laughing) Okay, so we talk a lot about self-driving cars. We’re in the middle of the transition. But I think the question- – I would say the beginning of the transition, really. – Beginning of the transition. – Yeah. – Okay, see, I’ve already been corrected. – It’s all good. – But when can we just not think anymore? About getting from point A to point B, when is that gonna happen? – I think it’s gonna be a while. But I’m gonna say, you know, five years you could probably make it happen. That’s my horizon for, yeah. – [Link] That’s quick. – It’s soon. But I don’t think it’s gonna be widespread adoption at that time. But that’ll be your friend has one, or that’s when it’s really coming in. And then 10 years, you see more widespread adoption. But I think five years is a good time horizon for that. – And it will be a Tesla? Or by that point- – Do you guys drive Teslas? – No, I wish. – I do drive a Tesla. I drove one here today. And it drove itself most of the way here cause I was just on the 101. – So at what point… I’ve actually never, let’s see. Joe Penna had a Tesla. – A really early one, yeah. – He had an early one, and I rode it, I got in it, but then I didn’t even move it. He had to be somewhere. I was like, just let me get in it. – I been inside a Tesla. – So hang on, you guys have not ridden in a Tesla? – No. – Never? – I have not been in a Tesla. – But now John, who works here- – Has one. – Has one, so we’ve got one in the parking lot that we could probably take whenever we wanted. I mean, we are his boss. – I don’t understand why you guys haven’t done this yet. You’re sitting around talking about self-driving cars- – I know. – You haven’t even sat in one. – I’m scared. – Well, I got a car that will park itself, and I don’t want to now get in a Tesla and realize how stupid I am for getting excited about just being able, it’ll parallel park itself. – Yeah, well, that’s a useful feature. – [Link] It is. – But it’s much more useful to just drive for half an hour on an open road. – So let’s take the trip here as an example of how much of the time, when could you go into autopilot, so to speak? – Well, you can go in whenever you like. But at the moment, the Tesla does not recognize stop signs or traffic lights, so you gotta look out for those things if you’re gonna drive in that kind of situation. So the best place is the highway, cause you can just pop it in there, and you can go for an hour or more. You do have to keep sort of touching the steering wheel to let it know that you’re still there. I think that’s some legal requirement. – Okay, so it will, after a certain period of time, it will start trying to wake you up. – It flashes at you, yeah. And that time seems to depend on your speed. So if you’re on a highway and you’re crawling through traffic at like 20 miles an hour, you seem to be able to go, you know, five, 10 minutes without it alerting you. But if you’re going super fast, you know, 65, 70, it’ll ask you probably every minute or so. – But so when you get off on the surface streets, it knows that it’s on a surface street, and it doesn’t even let you engage? – No, no, you can do it. You can totally engage on a surface street. – And would it go through a stop sign if you let it? – Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, (laughs) it’ll just go up to the car in front of you, basically. And so- – See, but that’s, it’s informed by all of the other cars. So basically, it’s just, it’s a follower car. – More or less. But what if there’s no car in front of you? Then it’s not gonna stop for any stop signs, it’s not gonna stop for any red lights. But as long as there’s a car in front of you, that car stops at the stop sign, you’ll kinda stop behind it too, and you’ll do like kind of a rolling- – Is there an orientation to this? – No, it’s totally just like, “good luck, man.” (laughing) “Here it is.” – Because all I knew is that everybody that I know who has one just does that on the highway. I didn’t know it was because it didn’t work on the surface streets. I just thought it was because it wasn’t capable of doing it on the surface streets. – Yeah, it’ll do it. Just you’ll run into more potential hazards, for sure. – But you can’t program in a destination and it make any turns for you. – So the one that’s commercially available right now doesn’t do that. But Tesla has released a video showing their next generation model doing exactly that. You basically putting in your destination, and it just gets you there. – That’s the type I want. – That includes stop signs. That includes red lights. And they have the ability to do it today. But it’s not been released yet, it’s not been I think legally permitted yet. But I think, the technology is there today. It’s probably still a little rough, but it’s there. – The thing I don’t understand is that obviously there’s the resistance to it and people who just don’t trust it, which I just, I cannot, I appreciate it, but it really frustrates me when people are like, “I don’t trust it.” And it’s like, but you trust humans? You trust people to drive cars? A million people die every year in car crashes. – I think that our consciousness, I mean, tricks, I think a big thing about consciousness is that it tricks yourself into trusting yourself. Even something like “this is what I believe.” It’s like, okay, you heard that analogy too, where it’s like, okay, what do you believe about if something scares you and then you jump in, I’m blistering this analogy. – I’m not with you yet. – But you jump in the bed and you pull over the covers, and you would never say you believe that a comforter is gonna protect you from danger, yet it’s revealed in that moment what you actually believe. I think that applies to cars as well, that we, part of consciousness is believing that the most trustworthy person is yourself. But you’re saying that’s not true when it comes to driving. – But I do want to be able to have a comfort in my car. That’s the whole point. I want to be able to take a friggin nap. I want to go to bed in my car and let it drive me. – So you don’t trust yourself to drive. And you make an active decision to not trust yourself, to trust the machine. – Whoa, I feel like you’re framing this in a way that I don’t necessarily frame it, which is, I find driving just a less stressful experience when I let the car drive. And that’s not because I don’t trust myself. It’s because I can not really focus on driving as much. You can just relax a bit. You don’t have to push the pedal, do anything. It’s just going. Especially if you’re stuck in traffic. – So for the stressful yet kind of mind-numbing experience of freeway driving, bumper to bumper stuff, you’re gonna let the machine take over. – [Derek] Exactly. – But when it gets complicated, you’re gonna grab the wheel. – For now, that is absolutely true. – But at a certain point, there’s gonna be a threshold. What’s the threshold look and feel like, if you’re saying five years from now? – I think five years from now, it’s gonna be happening. Because like I say- – [Link] How do we get there, you know? – They have the cars built today that can do it. – [Rhett] The technology exists. – It’s just a matter of fine-tuning it and the software and then getting the legal approval for it. I think the big blockage is that we like a story where it’s like, oh, this guy was drunk and he hit someone. It’s obviously his fault. He caused these deaths. We can point to someone. We can say someone’s wrong and evil. But if there’s an autonomous car, and this has happened, right, the guy who got killed driving a Tesla. And who do you blame in that situation? And I think we have a real problem with that. If self-driving cars start killing people, who are you gonna be upset with? Who’s at fault there? – Yeah, there’s whatever the equation is, it’s like how many car-caused deaths equal a human-caused death. We have some weird scale that we’re willing to put up with all these people being killed by themselves in cars. – Well, the interesting thing about that, and the guy who died was behind the wheel of a Tesla, right? – [Derrick] Yep. – And the thing I remember about that is I don’t remember the details of what happened, but I remember that Elon Musk published the details in a super seemingly transparent way that was mind-blowing to me in terms of, hey, this is the actual data. This is actually what was happening and what the car was seeing. The level of transparency there that he seemed to be putting forward, I think is what’s gonna get us over the threshold because it’s not spin. There was nothing about the statement that came out from Tesla afterwards that felt like the spin zone or “oh, we gotta protect our money bags” kind of a thing. Do you remember that? – I do, I do. I didn’t dig too much into the details, but I seem to recall a stat like they can look at the miles driven with the autonomous feature and compare that to the same number of miles driven by people, and they find that it’s 40% safer, 40% fewer accidents or whatever per mile for those driven by the machines. So the machine is better. It’s more vigilant with analyzing what’s around it. And people are on their phones all the time now. I was driving behind a guy today who was just swerving all over the place cause he was on his phone. – Probably shaving and reading, too. – Exactly. – I mean, I’ve literally seen that in traffic. You know, to me it’s like whenever you started using PayPal. Remember that first feeling of “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I’mma connect- – My bank account. – “This internet site to my physical bank account.” I can see greenbacks just disappearing through this thing called PayPal. It’s even a stupid name. Why would I trust this thing? – This guy’s not my pal. I just bought something from him. – Right, but then you get over it. And you’re like, when did I not have PayPal or Venmo or whatever it is these days to pay the babysitters. You’re saying it’ll be the same way. And you say it’ll be five years. – Five years, that’s what I’m saying. – At some point before the five years, you won’t even realize that you made a decision. You’ll just get in a car, and you’ll be like, oh, I didn’t touch it. And then you’ll think back, and you’ll be like, oh yeah. There was a guy who worked with me who had a cool car, and I got in, and it was fun. – Oh, yeah. – It was fun and it looked cool. – We’ll tell our grandkids about the way we thought about driving, and it will blow their minds. They just won’t have any, they just won’t be able to comprehend that it was ever a thing, that we did really approach things in this way. – Put those wing doors on it, people wanna buy it. – That’s not gonna happen. – We already got the wing doors, the Tesla. – That’s a fad, that’s a fad, man. – Oh, that’s going away? – The wing doors are great. – You think that’s a staple of the future? – I don’t think it’s a staple, but I do love it. (laughing) – Yours has that? – Yeah, we got the wing doors. And it’s really helpful for the baby, for the baby seat, you know. – Uh huh. – Okay, maybe I’m wrong. Now, okay, so you’re kinda getting into something as well, though, that, as we transition, when all cars are autonomous, with the exception of, okay, I’ve got this really weird thing, even beyond that, when it’s completely autonomous, so they’re all talking to each other, I can’t wait for the day when a light turns green and the entire mass moves together at the same time because there’s no reaction, cause they’re all talking together in the same network. That’s gonna be like second nature, right? That kinda moves into this other subject that we wanna talk to you about, which is your perspective on AI. And all these things kind of merging, you’ve got all the cars are autonomous, all the banking is, I mean, even banking and financial management, ultimately, can be and should be and is, in a lot of ways, controlled by artificial intelligence. So what are we really up against? Where do you stand, are you on the Neil deGrasse Tyson side, which is like, this is no big deal. We’ll just unplug the machine. Are you on the Elon Musk, Sam Harris side that are so worried about it that like, this is the greatest problem, along with climate change, that we face as a species. – I feel like I’m more on the Neil deGrasse Tyson side. But that could just be because both he and I are scientists, and maybe we’re not fully immersed in where AI is right now. But I find it hard to believe that, I gotta choose my words carefully here, cause someone’s gonna be playing this tape back for me after the AI apocalypse in 2030. (laughing) – You’re assuming that you’ll be alive. – Yeah. – Okay. – I’m hoping that I made it through. – As long as you’re there to hear it when they play it back. – It’ll be a robot playing it back, though. “Listen to this.” – As they torture me. (laughing) – “Here’s what you said.” (laughing) – And the voice will sound like that. – You know, there’s a whole bunch of things, obviously not AI, that we keep contained, like very dangerous diseases and things. And we put them in quarantined environments because we don’t want them getting out. And I feel like you should be able to do the same thing with an AI. Didn’t Facebook have an AI that came up with its own language, and they shut it down? – Well, they started, I don’t know if this is the same thing, but there was two machines that were communicating with each other, and they quickly realized that language, human language, was really inefficient, and they started just communicating to each other directly with bits, just straight digital communication. And at that point- – Like, what are they saying? (laughing) – The scientists could no longer figure out what they were saying. And that is, but it’s so crazy cause- – Pull the plug! – But the reason I’m scared… – Are you more on the Elon Musk side? – I am, just because I tend to- – He’s a hypochondriac. – Yeah. (laughing) But I’m super excited about the future. I embrace a lot of things probably with less apprehension than I should have. But I think that because they’re gonna be, the moment that they have true general artificial intelligence and we can’t tell the difference between a conversation with a human and a robot, they’re already gonna be so much more advanced than us, just because of processing and all that stuff that they already have. And at that point, I just feel like they get, all the barriers that you’re talking about, like keeping things contained, the moment they just decide, well, we don’t wanna be contained, they will be- – But what are they connected to? Or do they have arms and legs? Have we given them that? – Well, they’re gonna have to be connected to the internet. – See, that’s a terrible idea. – But how are they not going to be? – Some guy working in his lab on AI, I think that’s the rule. It’s like when you go to these places that have really harmful diseases, you have three airlocks and stuff. You don’t connect them to the atmosphere because if they could get out, they would. And that would be awful. In the same way, you keep your AI really locked up. – I mean, I don’t know how we’re gonna do it, though. Because the point that you’ve got, again, I don’t think it’s gonna be a Westworld situation where you’ve got robots walking around. I mean, we will have, but that would be just for us, right? It’ll be for our entertainment or whatever. But the most powerful robots won’t be contained in the same way. But they’re gonna have to have, in order to be useful, they’re gonna have to be connected to a network that we’re using. – Yeah, well I feel like you wanna be careful about the ones you connect to your network. This could be the key plot point of the movie of how this all goes wrong. – The one guy, the mad scientist. – Yeah. – What’s he mad about? – The one guy who lets the virus out of the lab. And this isn’t like a virus, though, you know? It is, but it’s way worse. – I still wonder, you know, a server’s not gonna come after you. You know what I mean? Like a giant lumbering server, (laughing) is that gonna be the evil villain here? But I guess to look at what could go wrong, if everything’s connected to the internet, and all your stuff in the hospitals and all the autonomous cars, and they get control of those, yeah, it could be pretty bad. – But who knows. It’s gonna happen, we’re gonna be in the midst of it, and the thing is is that politicians, the guys who are making the decisions about this stuff just plain don’t know anything about it. You’ve got a few politicians who go the extra mile to kind of get briefed by some research assistant, right? But how many people who hold governmental office actually know the potential threats, right? – It’s not many, that’s for sure. Do you guys ever think about the mass unemployment that may come with the robots? I feel like that’s a clearly more pressing or it’s a more imminent issue. – [Rhett] It’s already happening. – Yeah, it’s happening. I feel like that you’re gonna deal with first before you’re gonna deal with killer AI. So we got a set of waves coming at us. – Well, let’s talk about that. I mean, it’s interesting. In Buddy System Season Two, we kind of explore, I don’t wanna give too much away. – Well, it’s the first scene. The first scene of the whole season is you losing your job. – To a robot. – To a robot. – Yeah. – It is a comically ridiculous robot who’s no more capable than a human. That’s the joke. – But it’s all, we’re not exploring what we should talk about right now, which is what you’re getting at. – But it is the kinda job that will be replaced. And the number one most common job in the US is truck driver. And Tesla is building a truck that obviously is gonna be autonomous at some point. – And at first there’ll be somebody sitting there, just in case. The laws will require it. – Yep. – And like you said, he’s gonna have to touch that big steering wheel on the big rig every so often. He’s a wheel toucher. That’s what he will be called on Monster.com. (laughing) We need some wheel touchers. They’re not drivers, they’re truck wheel touchers. And then- – But how long is that gonna last? – After a while- – Three years? – [Derek] Not even. – They’ll be gone. – Yeah. – They’ll be gone, but before they’re gone, I think that they’ll be just seat sitters. And then they will replace the seat sitters with basically a CPR dummy, someone who from the outside- – That is never gonna happen. – Yes it is. – No, no, no. – You got this big rig barreling down the road, you wanna look and see nobody in the cab? (laughing) You wanna see – What you think is somebody. – You think they’re gonna – Have a mannequin in there? (laughing) – They’re gonna have a freaking mannequin in there with a trucker hat. – How about just a sticker on the outside of the window that just shows the silhouette of a person? – Well, that’s not as believable. – That’s a lot cheaper. – That’ll be next, yeah. You’re skipping ahead. – A decal, can we just go straight, I’m straight to the decal kinda guy. Just a truck driver decal. – Can I be the decal? – It can be your profile, sure. I don’t care. I’m not making the decisions. – I do think that, really, so much of this is public perception and comfort level. – But what are those guys gonna do? – If you can make things cool, if you can make- – That’s a real question. – That is the bigger question. – What are we gonna do, as a population. – As long as we can agree that there will be dummies in seats in order to make everybody else feel okay, then we can move on. – I feel like that’s more frightening, like you’re driving up next to a truck and you look over, and you’re like, wait, hang on, that’s not a real person. That’s a dummy. – Well, that depends on your definition of beauty. (laughing) Is that what we’re talking about now? – Oh gosh. – What makes a dummy beautiful? – No, we’re not talking about that. – We’re not talking about that. (laughing) – So do you think that, cause I know some people think that they’ll just be the decal guy. They’ll be the guy who places the mannequin in the truck. There’s always something for people to do. – The new job, yeah. – You gotta run out of that eventually, right? – So something that I was really interested to see, looking back at the history of work is that the number of hours that we work has dropped a lot. So if you look at 1830, the average number of hours that someone would work would be 70 hours per week. – [Link] Really? – Yeah, and you look today, and it’s down to 40. And in 20 years, we may be down to 20 hours or something, you know. We may continue to see that decline. So maybe even if the number of jobs doesn’t decrease that much, the amount of work per job may drop. And we may just be making more and or spending less because all the work’s being done by robots, which are much cheaper than humans. So I mean, that’s the hopeful utopian future is that we can all decrease our work hours down close to zero and yet still survive and have wonderful lives because all the things that we want to buy are really cheap and so we don’t have to do that much work to get the money to pay for those things. – So what are the threats to that utopia, right? You’ve got the overpopulation problem. Eventually if you’ve got so many people, like I feel like the financial problem could be solved. People not producing, it’s like, if the robots are producing, but what about this being that many people, a limited amount of resources, and all we do is just hang out and have a good time? – Yeah, to me one of the big threats is that we sort of segment our society further into people who have and the have nots. There’re gonna be people who are making a killing off this, and there’s gonna be people who just are out of work and can’t make any money. And so I think without a big rethink of how society functions, we may be in a really tricky situation. – What do you think about universal basic income? – I think it’s interesting. And I think it’s probably the way of the future. – How does that work? – Well, you just give everyone some money. – Yeah, there’s a minimum amount that every single citizen receives automatically. – From what organization? – From the government. – From what government? The world government? – Whatever government that you’re part of. – Every nation, we assume nations still exist. – And they would have to buy into this? – I mean, the nations would in theory do it because it would be better or easier than setting up a whole bunch of other welfare systems. – And it’s being experimented with somewhere. – Finland, they’ve currently got a trial with 2,000 unemployed people, where they just picked 2,000 unemployed people at random and they said, “we’re gonna give you like 500 euros a month.” – But yeah, it seems absolutely inevitable with all the trends that we’re talking about. – It’s funny because you say it seems inevitable. And I kind of think it’s a good idea. But I was in Switzerland last year, and they actually had a ballot about it. So this is one of those things where if you get enough signatures, they’ll have a public referendum about universal basic income. They did this in Switzerland, and they voted it down, I think 75, 25. So it was pretty harshly against. And I was talking with this guy at a university. He was a smart guy, professor, and he was like, “this is the most idiotic thing ever.” To him it was obvious that this was never gonna happen. And of course the great concern with universal basic income is that nobody works anymore because they can just get income and live off that. So why would you ever work? And so the idea of disincentivizing any work. – And that’s why I think it’s inevitable, because I think it’s getting it mixed up. It’s saying that we can’t institute universal basic income because then people will no longer work. Well, what I’m saying is that people are gonna no longer work in the near future because of the advance of automation. And so you’ve gotta have an answer to that. And it can’t just be, well, these people won’t work. – Yeah, I was looking into this, actually. I made a recent video about robots taking our jobs. And I was looking at the percentage of males between the ages of 25 and 54 who don’t have a job. And if you look back in the 1960s, it’s about five or six percent. This is prime working age males, so what are they doing if they’re not working? But you look more recently, and that’s up towards 18 to 20%. So we’re looking at a tripling of males in their prime working age who just don’t have a job. And some of that may be due to globalization, outsourcing. But another part of that is automation. And I can only see that going up. So you gotta do something. – Well, let’s just say that utopia’s gonna come. We’re gonna solve all our problems with technology, and we’re gonna find a way to quit exploiting all the resources, we’re gonna solve climate change. Let’s just say all that happens. And our grandkids are sitting there. They’ve got some sort of stipend. All their needs are taken care of. At that point, what is life like? We can definitely say that we find purpose in our work, right? That you do what you do because you find purpose in it. Is it substituting other things? – Yeah, I think everyone, they could just have hobbies instead of work. – I’m gonna do the little airplanes. – Like making little airplanes? – Balsa wood? – You’re on that side of town. You know the guys over at, where are they at, across from the Japanese Garden? Over there in the Balboa Lake area. The guys with the… – Remote control. – Remote control airplanes. – [Derek] I have not seen this. – There’s a whole airport dedicated to miniature planes. – Those guys are so serious. – Hang on, hang on, a whole airport? Is it a miniature airport? – Yeah. – It’s just a slab, really. But they’re so into it. And they go out there every weekend. – There’s no terminals. It looks more like baseball dugouts cause sometimes they need to stand in the shade in order to squint up at the sun and pilot their planes. But if you lay down on your belly and spread your arms out, if you got spread eagle on the floor, they have planes that big. – That’s a pretty big plane. And these are gas powered? – Some of them are. – Yeah. – Some of them are electric. But here’s the thing. – I think they’re all powered by passion for the hobby. (laughing) – We can’t just go out and do that because then all of a sudden a guy’s gonna show up and he’s like, “I’ve got an automatic plane.” “I’ve got an autonomous plane.” And now it’s just a bunch of dudes watching autonomous planes. – No. – We can’t even have a hobby. We’re gonna watch planes make their own decisions. And that’s our hobby? All we can do is put decals on them, see, it just comes back to decals. – Why is that plane shooting down all the other planes? – I don’t know. – Find the owner. – I have no control over it. – Some robot on the corner. (laughs robotically) – So this is your idea of a utopia? (laughing) – Well, we’re exploring it, you know? If you’re saying everyone does hobbies. – I wonder if people get caught up in gossip. – Oh, certainly. – If that just explodes. – Yeah. – And the number of gossip mags out on the market is just, it’s everywhere. Whole stores dedicated to it. I guess not stores, you just get it delivered. – No, you’re right. Stores. (laughing) I think it’ll be a retro thing, where it’s like, a whole store that replicates the experience of exiting a grocery store. All of that impulse buy crap? This is a good idea. This is my business. No robot’s gonna come up with this in the future. A store that’s nothing but the last little bit of grocery aisle before you check out. (laughing) The check out rack. – Check out area. – Check out area everywhere-ea is what I’m gonna call it. – Okay, that’s catchy. – And then when you come in, you check out. When you get in, you check out again. You just keep checking out. Cause it’s like, “oh, man, I gotta make a decision. “I could grab one more thing.” And then it starts over. – Yeah. – And then you just- – You got all those little dividers, and you can be, yeah, I love it. – Yeah, you love it. – This is a great business idea. – But it’s retro, because you’re right, it would all be digital. It’ll all be in your brain. – But there’s no aisles. There’s no area to actually buy the useful staples of life. – Right. – There’s only the checkout area. – I’m basically describing the dollar store, I think, but let’s not, let’s gloss over that. – You recreated the dollar store. – A lot more conveyor belts is what we’re saying. – Now, I think one of the interesting things that is probably also gonna happen with this is, and I kind of foreshadowed this in the past in how I thought about AI and how I set it up. But basically, I think that, we’ve got all these issues that are controversial. People can’t agree on things, and then we’ve got this faulty government model that we rely on with a questionable dude in charge of the whole thing. And wouldn’t you just like to say, okay, I want to ask this robot that is completely familiar with all the data, what do you think about this issue? And then they would just spit it out, and it would be like, you can’t argue with that robot because that robot has access to all the information at once and is perfectly rational and has no bias at all except the bias that makes its way in from the programmers, which, okay. (laughing) – I think you’re describing a scientist, in its purest form. – But scientist are people, so you have that inherent distrust of people. But I think, since scientists make the machine, I don’t know if there’s any way to keep their biases out of the machine. And therein lies your problem. – It is a problem, but can’t it be a more perfect rationality than we can ever achieve? What I’m getting at is, aren’t we gonna have an AI government at some point? At least a government that is assisted by AI? So in other words, it would probably be- – You know how quick governments are to adopt technology. (laughing) They’re the early adopters. – Right. – This is distant future, so you’ve got- – I think your point is, to move, it’s like for the financial system thing, it’s that things have to get really bad for entire governments to agree to do something. We’re talking about the Switzerland vote. – Well, just think about the way that the government works right now. Think about the way that people get elected, and campaigning and influencing people’s thoughts, people who, the vast majority, don’t ever think about things on a deep level. They just go out and vote for somebody who has an ad that appeals to them in some way or some ideology that they identify with, and that person gets put in this position. They don’t know about this issue and that issue. And then they just start listening to people who don’t know about that issue tell them what they’re supposed to think about that issue, and it’s all these very, very flawed humans making all these decisions. That system, when you’ve got an intelligence that is ultimately a more capable intelligence that is growing, at some point you’re gonna have to tap into that for the sake of humanity, right? – I mean, I’m not into Star Trek enough to know more than saying you’re talking about Spock. I mean, let’s figure out, Spock was utterly logical. – Spock for president. – So what did we learn from Spock? – Sometimes his logic wasn’t enough. That’s what we learned. Star Trek. – Cause Spock didn’t write- – That’s why you have the panel of people who are keeping the AI government in check. I’m not saying it’s completely autonomous. – Touching the steering wheel. – But then they’re like, hold on, okay, we need to know what to think about this. Let’s throw the problem into the machines, see what the machine says, and then this panel of wise people decides what to do. So it’s not completely led by the AI. But you gotta be consulting it, right? – So you’re saying it’s not the president, it’s like the cabinet. And I mean literally a cabinet. – Like the president’s chief advisor is AI. – Is a cabinet. – A literal cabinet, yeah, with a server in it. – Yeah, it’s like, throw it in the top of the cabinet, and then it’ll spit something out at the bottom, an answer out of the bottom of the cabinet. – Right, yeah. – It sounds like a cool idea. I always just fear about that whole garbage in, garbage out kind of problem of technology where if you don’t phrase the question right or you don’t give it the right data, you’re not gonna get the right thing out at the end. It’s still kinda troubling. – This morning my son Lando, who’s seven, was like, “okay Google, play the slinky song,” because he was playing with a really big slinky. And it started playing a really inappropriate R and B track by some guy named Slinky or something. I was like, whoa, Google! Whoa, Google, yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard to reign her in. – I also wonder, when do we get an artificial intelligence that is truly deserving of that name? To me, artificial intelligence always meant something that was a computer that had its own consciousness. But I don’t know that we’re close to that. And I also don’t know that anyone can time that out for you. Like, oh, we’re not there yet, but give us five years and we’ll be there, or 10 years. It could be 100 years, could be 1,000 years. Because we don’t know how the human brain works yet, I think it’s really tough to make something that replicates those capabilities. – Right, we actually don’t know how we’re gonna cross that threshold. – And we’ve always been obsessed with it. I mean, Frankenstein wasn’t written a few years ago. – [Derek] No. – I don’t know when it was written. Don’t ask me. But I know it’s old. As long as we’ve been conscious, we’ve been obsessed with creating consciousness. So I think if we’re this driven, we’re bound to figure it out. – You think we’re gonna get there. – Just based on that principle alone. Just drive. – What if it’s impossible? What if it’s impossible to replicate in a machine- – That is a spiritual question. – The things that happen biologically? – That is a spiritual question. So I have no clue. It’s a very fair question. – My feeling on this, and this is just going with my gut, which could be totally wrong, cause it’s not a thinking organ, but really, I just don’t feel like we’re gonna get there, and certainly not soon. – I definitely don’t think it’s gonna be soon. So I don’t think it’s gonna be like 2045 or something. – The singularity. – Right, but I don’t know. I just feel like, I don’t think it’s gonna be like somebody’s gonna walk out one day and be like, “I got it, I got this! “Here it is, talk to it!” – Here he is, Frankie. – I think it’s gonna get so close, and we’re gonna have intelligent conversations with machines. And then after a while we’re gonna be like, well, we’ve kinda given this machine all we can give it, and I kinda think that it’s conscious now. But at the same time we’re gonna be, I mean, we keep trying to find where consciousness exists, right? In us, like where’s the self inside of a brain. – And we have no idea. – We have no idea. (laughs) So I don’t know. I agree with you that I don’t think, I don’t think it’s gonna happen in our lifetime. I really don’t. I think things will get unrecognizable in our lifetime, technology-wise. But we’re not gonna have an AI president. – Well, let me ask you, what are you most excited about the future, and it can be the distant future, and what are you most concerned about? Maybe that’s climate change, maybe that’s something else. – Wow, tough questions cause I mean, I don’t often think about the distant future. But I do like the idea of humans becoming a multi-planetary species. – [Link] Oh, let’s save the good. Start with the bad cause I wanna end with the good. – Oh, okay, great. – [Link] So we’ll come back to that one. – Start with the bad. Yeah, it’s tough to pick what’s your biggest concern. I’m not a big warrior, so I don’t have a lot of concerns. What about you guys? – You pack quite a punch though. (laughing) – It doesn’t come from a place of hate, okay? – Tend to be violent, under some circumstances. – It only comes from a place of love. – Maybe I haven’t fully forgiven you. I don’t know why that came out. – It does seem like it, right now. I can feel the tension across this table. Yeah, what are the biggest problems? – Being a guy like you are, and being an expert in the things that you are, in this particular, in America, right, we have this really weird sort of dichotomy of being super advanced and world leader, but then we also have, there’s so much resistance to scientific thinking and also a lot of resistance to just scientists in general and a lot of distrust. Where we come from, North Carolina, is just like, scientists are suspect. Scientists have agendas, and scientists are trying to get grants, and so that’s the only reason they’re talking about climate change or this or that, right? – Yeah, yeah, it’s a diverse country. You can say that. I also saw this study which looked at opinions of scientists in countries around the world. And there was a clear negative correlation between GDP, you know, how developed a country was, and its perception of scientists. So countries that are still developing, they love scientists and have this idea that they are solving problems and really helping everyone live better lives, and in countries where they’re already very developed, everyone’s quite skeptical of scientists. I think it’s interesting that sort of the more benefits science gives you, the more you don’t like it or trust it or think it’s a great thing. It’s kind of unfortunate. I consider this sometimes like the curse of prevention. This applies to things like vaccines, where people don’t know what the disease is like and so they freak out about a shot. – Right. – Cause they can’t even see, like, what am I preventing? So yeah, that is the curse of prevention doing all this good stuff. I think everyone has biases, and they really cloud your judgment. And so when you talk about people distrusting scientists, it comes from a place, I think, of not wanting to be told what to do and being told that what you do is wrong and hurting the planet and that you have to change, and that it’s gonna be painful and expensive and hard. For something that seems very intangible and deep in the future and invisible. So I can really understand where this is like a Rorschach test, where even the people on the pro, we need to do something about climate change side, can maybe be somewhat detached from the evidence. And people on the anti side are also detached from the evidence. And they just battle in the middle over some sort of ideological or virtue signaling ground or identity politics, all that sort of stuff. So everything gets really, really awful, I think. – And it seems like, and it’s interesting, cause Bill Nye is really, he tends to insert himself into these things. – For sure. – And it doesn’t really matter what issue it is. He is doing a lot of great things, but at the same time, there’s this, when he says, “okay, I’ll go and I’ll debate this guy,” or “I’ll go on this network, “and it’ll be me and then this other guy,” and it creates this false perception that there’s a real debate to be had here. And I’m not saying there’s not a debate to be had about issues, but sometimes when you just reduce it down to the two pundits, and these, what do you call it? The news bit, what do you call the thing? – Talking heads. – Talking heads, but you’ve got a news bite or whatever. – Sound bite. – Sound bite, yeah. You reduce things down to sound bites. It paints the issue wrong for a lot of people and gives you this idea that, you know. – I don’t know, I mean, I agree with you. I just don’t know what other alternative you have here. – [Rhett] What do you do? – It’s like you have no option, because either Bill goes on that show and actually debates some guy, or that guy just pontificates by himself. – [Rhett] That’s true. – And gives the same sort of bad talking points. Yeah, it’s a really tough one. – Cause the networks are gonna still do it, they’re gonna do that. That’s how they’re going to dispense the information. – Yeah. This kinda makes me think of something, a little bit of a tangent, but the people on the pro-climate change side, I don’t know, pro-climate change, you know, the people who think this is an issue and they wanna do something about it, sometimes- – [Link] Climate change acknowledgers. – Yeah, acknowledgers. They will sometimes write inflammatory rhetoric. There are some people like Naomi Klein, and I haven’t read her book about climate change, but I have read the back cover of it. And it basically says that climate change is an indication that our system is not working, that capitalism has failed, and that we need massive revolution to change everything, and let’s harness this issue as an opportunity to change everything to the way we want it to be. And I can understand that freaking out people who don’t have that sort of ideology and really getting their backs up and making them more suspicious of what scientists are talking about. So in a way, I feel like stuff like that does a real disservice, when you’re trying, like I would love for us all to just come down to the fundamental issue of raising the temperature of the planet by a couple degrees, which I don’t think is a contentious issue scientifically, and then thinking about that as kind of a risk factor. There’s a guy who’s a kind of lobbyist for republicans, and I love the way he sort of talks about it, which is, we acknowledge this as a potential risk in the future. You don’t know how bad it’s gonna be. It might be really, really bad, or it might just be kinda bad. But banks, for one, have a lot of experience with dealing with potential risks in the future. What do you do when you have a risk which has a small probability of being terrible? You hedge against it. You sort of pay in a certain amount up front to make sure that never happens. Because if it did happen, there’s nothing you could do that would make you whole. So it’s just fundamentally this sort of, it’s a risk management game. And he’s trying to talk to people and say, who cares how bad you think this is gonna be, and who cares how much you really acknowledge this? Consider that it is a risk, that it is something with uncertainty which everyone acknowledges. And what do you do in the face of an uncertain risk? Take steps to mitigate it. And that’s where I’d love to see us go, is this place where we acknowledge it as a risk, some uncertainty in the future, and something that we should probably take some measures to prevent. – Right, and you’re saying that right now, the two sides of the debate are alarmism and kind of demonizing anybody who questions it and then people who just deny it. – Yeah. – And those are the two camps. And so where’s the action gonna take place? We’ll just be like, well, guys, something could be happening. And that something that’s happening could be really bad. And what can we do? What are the practical steps that we can agree on? I think that’s a pretty reasonable perspective. – I’d love for us to get there. I feel like media has made things, and I kinda refer to the internet and social media has all made this much worse. It’s funny to think, like, where would we be policy-wise if it was 1999 now, you know what I mean, in terms of technology and everything? We didn’t have Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, obviously we wouldn’t be here. But if you know what I mean, the internet’s allowed people to find their… – [Link] Voice. – Well, and also the people like them. – [Rhett] Oh yeah. – And really get into these camps. – [Rhett] Oh yeah. – Would we be more integrated if we had fewer communications technologies? – Yeah, that is the really ironic thing that’s happened. We’re more connected and more divided than ever. I was talking with somebody about this the other day. And we were talking about what we thought about issues in the 80s, or how we learned about things. And it was just like, there was a couple of people that knew stuff. There was a couple of outlets. And of course, in one sense, that information was controlled by people who may have been deceiving the public. But in another sense, you didn’t have this “this is my guy, this is my internet guy.” “This is the website I go to,” and “these are the people that have it right.” – And I also feel like people had a greater sense of integrity for some reason. Maybe it was out of this false notion that they couldn’t push the envelope too far. Like even if someone was controlling the news back in the 80s, they would never dream of putting on false stories or anything because that’s ridiculous. Who would ever, no, we have some integrity. (laughing) And then these days, it’s like anyone can put anything out there. And then it can blow up without anyone’s oversight. So that’s a really scary position to be in. I also think media has made it so there’s a big market if you wanna be extreme on this side or extreme on this side. There’s not a lot of a market for the middle. – [Rhett] Right. – And that’s really kind of unfortunate and I think a massive disservice to the entire discourse. – Well, it’s interesting, cause podcasts have kinda changed this in one sense. I think about that all the time when I’m listening to people talk about complex issues on podcasts. Like, this would never happen on the news. – Oh, yeah. – Like, you’d never get into something like that and actually hear somebody break something down. – Yeah, not a sound bite, a sound meal. (laughing) – That’s what we should have called the podcast. – Perhaps some biscuits. – Maybe that’s what Ear Biscuit actually means, Link. Sound meal. – Let me shift gears to the speculative distant future that you’re most excited about. Like, it could be, I don’t know. It could be an autonomous beard trimmer. – Well, he said interplanetary travel. – Yeah. – Is that what it is? – Yeah, multi-planetary species, that’s my vision for the future. And it’s also really that thing of liberation from work, which is something we kinda talked on earlier in the podcast. But you think about the history of humans as a species, and from the very earliest times, we’ve been about doing the fundamental work needed to survive. Getting food, taking care of family and stuff, and that’s about all we had time for. And then you move through the agricultural revolution, and you start to get artists and writing and poetry, and things start to enrich our lives. We move through the industrial revolution, and the number of people who can do those sorts of things really increases. And now we’re going through further revolutions with this technology. So I’m imagining a future where people don’t think about, “what is my job “so I can pay for a living and I can support a family, “I can find food?” You’re thinking about people who really pursue their interests and their passions, and they have the freedom to do that and also do it in space. – Yeah, replacing desperation with hobbies. – Is that how we’re gonna overcome the population problem, is going to other planets? – I somewhat am optimistic that we can support everyone on earth. There may be a few more billion. But again, you look at the massive trends of the last few thousand years, and it is reducing the amount of work, and it’s also having fewer babies in developed countries. – Right, yeah. – So yeah, I’m hoping that we see that, I think we’re already seeing it, the birth rates starting to level off in a lot of places. And so hopefully we reach a point, and we have the capability and the technology to produce enough food. And you know, I think it is possible. But I think for the long-term survival of the human species, it’s a good idea to be on multiple planets. And I also think space exploration would be one of my top goals if I was in government. It wouldn’t be growing the military. It would be growing the NASA budget. – So what about getting to these, I mean, Mars is one thing, right, but… – Are you not excited about Mars? – No, I- – Are you like, “I’m waiting for Pluto.” (laughing) – You know, we went to JPL, and they let us walk around the Mars yard. And it was, I gotta say, it was pretty underwhelming. – I’ve been there too. – Just kind of a dirt. – I mean, it is Pasadena. (laughing) It’s not Mars, to be fair. – It’s a dirty back lot. – But if that’s what Mars is gonna be like, I’m like, well, what about the earth-like planets that we can actually get to? – Wow, yeah cause we can’t get to any right now. – Right. – So we’re gonna have to figure out some tech if we’re gonna get to an exoplanet. – So how are we gonna do that? What’s the closest one they’ve discovered? How many light years? – I mean, 20 light years is probably your best bet in terms of earth-like planets. – Is this gonna be, are we in a, what’s the movie where Chris Pratt’s on a- – [Derek] Passengers? – Yeah, Passengers. So is it that kinda situation where we’ve got people in some sort of – [Derek] Cryogenic freeze. – Some state, and it’s just propelling them across the universe. – I feel the first thing we’d send is robots. Did they send robots first in that movie? I haven’t seen it. – [Link] I heard it was bad. I didn’t watch it. – Yeah, I heard it was bad too. – It just started in the middle of the journey. So there was no robot. – I wonder if you’d just send a colony, you know, a group of people who can live and have kids, and they could have kids, and by the time you get there, it’s your fifth grandchild who settles on the planet. But your other option, the crazy thing about relativity is that if you go fast enough, the distance gets shorter. This is the crazy thing about special relativity. So for example if you could go nearly the speed of light, 0.999 the speed of light, then to someone on earth, it would seem to take about 20 years to get that distance, for that person to arrive there. But for the people inside the spacecraft, it would actually take much less time. – Right. – This is the crazy fact- – But how are we gonna get that fast? – Well, that’s the key. We’ve gotta find a good energy source. And that’s probably going to be something like fusion. Could be fission, probably gonna be fusion, nuclear fusion. So the same thing that powers the sun. – Doesn’t sound dangerous at all. (laughs) – Right, but I mean people are working on it right now. They’re trying to get a reactor up in Europe right now to actually make power out of fusion. So the same thing that happens in the sun, just combining hydrogen atoms together, squeeze them together, making helium and other assorted things. – [Rhett] And that’s happening? – Yeah, people are working on it. In fact, they’ve been working on it for decades. The problem that they’ve been having is they put so much energy in to heat the particles up and get them ready to do their fusion thing that they actually get less energy out of the fusion process. – So it’s not efficient. So it’s an input output issue, right. But I think that we’re very close to that sort of tipping point, inflection point, where we’re actually gonna start getting more out than we put in. – And at the moment that you reach that point, doesn’t that basically just, that becomes our energy? – [Derek] Yeah. – You don’t even need solar at that point. – Right, I mean, that’s like solar on earth. You’re making your own star kinda thing. But actually getting the technology to be affordable and stable, easy to use, it’ll take time. – So that’s kind of like showering so hard that you make yourself stink. – I don’t know that I get that. – You spend so much energy- – Oh, yeah. Yeah, you go hard in the shower. You gotta be careful. – Right. (laughing) – I’ve never contemplated this. – Don’t go hard in the shower. – I don’t go hard, I take it easy. (laughing) I just lay back. – Right, take a tub bath, man. You gotta get out more than you put in. – That’s right. – You don’t wanna stink coming out of the shower. – Definitely not. This is a question I’ve often had with my friends, like swimmers, when they go in the pool, do they sweat? See? – And can they answer the question? – I don’t know. – I’m no swimmer, and I’m not friends with swimmers. – All you gotta do is take a sample, man. – But how do you do it? I mean, they’re wet anyway. – That’s a good, that’s a good video for your channel, man. – Yeah, it is. It is. – Do swimmers sweat? – Hey, title, thumbnail, and everything. It’s all done, it’s all done. – Can we collab on the go hard in the shower? (laughing) – Yeah, we’ll do go hard in the shower. – That’s a good title. – On our channel. – And it’s just total clean science. – [Derek] It’s not what you think it is. – Right. – That’ll get clicks. – That’s a good one. – Okay, well, Derek, this has been a great conversation, of course. We can’t just end it here because we promised that you guys would settle your score. – Yeah. – So why don’t, before you settle your score, remind everybody where they can find you on the internet? – You can find me with the word Veritasium. – [Link] Everywhere. – Yeah. – [Link] Everywhere Verita, I can’t even say it now. Veritas- – [Derek] You can’t even say it cause of the anger. (laughing) Because of the anger that is deep inside you. – Veritasium, it’s found wherever it’s found. It’s you. – [Derek] Yes. – Hopefully no one’s impersonating you. – [Derek] No one, I got that trademarked. – (laughing) – So you want me to punch him? – Yeah. – To end to podcast? – I want you to give him a love lick. I want you to give him a love lick! – It would make you feel better, I think. Just getting that energy out. – You think that I’ve felt tense- – This would close the circle, you know what I’m saying? – But I got so much pleasure out of turning this into entertainment for everybody that I feel like I can’t punch him. – You could hug him. Real hard. – Hug it out? Listen, I’m gonna put it this way. I’m not gonna, I have no revenge in my heart. I have only love and forgiveness and respect. And I just consider it an honor to have been punched by the hand that held the world’s smoothest object. – The roundest. Roundest object. – Roundest. – Yeah. – Okay, well, you know what I mean. (laughing) – It was the most perfect sphere. – It was the most spherical. – Yeah. – You screwed it up when you touched it. – It wasn’t smooth? – Well, of course it has to be smooth in order to be the roundest. – [Link] But it’s not the smoothest? – Well, that is the question. – [Rhett] As a baby’s bottom. – [Link] We’ll collab on that too. – So you’re not gonna hit him? – No, I’m not gonna hit him. That’s stupid. I mean, they’re still listening, mission accomplished. – Okay. – But now we let them down. (laughing) Because, see, this is him, man. This is him playing producer. And it’s not really fair. – I’m Don King, man. – Yeah, now we’re gonna shake. Look at that, we’re shaking it out. – I’m Dana White. – Audio listeners, we’re giving it a nice semi-firm handshake. – Squeeze it, Link. – There’s some vibrational energy happening there. – Wow. – I love the science on this podcast. (laughing) – This is fizzling out, too. Forgiveness gives a good fizzle. – It does. (techno music)