The following is a conversation with Charles Isbell and Michael Litman.
Charles is the Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech,
and Michael is a computer science professor at Brown University.
I've spoken with each of them individually on this podcast,
and since they are good friends in real life, we all thought it would be fun
to have a conversation together. Quick mention of each sponsor,
followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Thank you to
Athletic Greens, the only one drink that I start every day with to cover all my
nutritional bases. AteSleep, a mattress that cools itself and
gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep. Masterclass,
online courses from some of the most amazing humans in history
and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends.
Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount
and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that
having two guests on the podcast is an experiment that I've been meaning to do
for a while. In particular, because down the road I
would like to occasionally be a kind of moderator for debates
between people that may disagree in some interesting ways.
If you have suggestions for who you would like to see debate on this podcast,
let me know. As with all experiments of this kind,
it is a learning process. Both the video and the audio might need
improvement. I realized I think I should probably do
three or more cameras next time as opposed to just two
and also try different ways to mount the microphone for the
third person. Also, after recording this intro,
I'm going to have to go figure out the thumbnail for the video version of the
podcast since I usually put the guest's head on the thumbnail
and now there's two heads and two names
to try to fit into the thumbnail. It's a kind of
bin packing problem, which in theoretical computer science
happens to be an NP-hard problem. Whatever I come up with, if you have
better ideas for the thumbnail, let me know as well.
And in general, I always welcome ideas how this thing can be improved.
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on top of
podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
And now here's my conversation with Charles Isbell
and Michael Litman. You'll probably disagree
about this question, but what is your biggest, would you say, disagreement
about either something profound and very important or something completely not
important at all? I don't think you have any disagreements at all.
I'm not sure that's true. We walked into that one, didn't we?
So one thing that you sometimes mention is that, and we did this one on air too,
as it were, whether or not machine learning is
computational statistics. It's not.
But it is. Well, it's not. And in particular, and more importantly,
it is not just computational statistics. So what's missing in the picture?
All the rest of it. What's missing? That which is missing.
Oh, you can't be wrong now. Well, it's not just the statistics.
He doesn't even believe this. We've had this conversation before.
If it were just the statistics, then we would be happy with where we are.
But it's not just the statistics. That's why it's computational
statistics. Or if it were just the computational.
I agree that machine learning is not just statistics.
It is not just the statistics. We can agree on that.
Nor is it just computational statistics. It's computational statistics.
It is computational. What is the computational and
computational statistics? Does this take us into the realm of computing?
It does, but I think perhaps the way I can get him to admit that he's wrong
is that it's about rules. It's about rules.
It's about symbols. It's about all these other things.
But the statistics is not about rules? I'm going to say statistics is about rules.
But it's not just the statistics. It's not just a random variable that you
choose and you have a probability. I think you have a narrow view of statistics.
Okay. Well, then what would be the broad view of statistics that would
still allow it to be statistics and not say history that would make computational
statistics okay? Well, okay. So I had my first sort of research mentor,
a guy named Tom Landauer, taught me to do some statistics.
Sure. And I was annoyed all the time because the
statistics would say that what I was doing was not statistically significant.
And I was like, but basically what he said to me is,
statistics is how you're going to keep from lying to yourself,
which I thought was really deep. It is a way to keep yourself honest in a
particular way. I agree with that. Yeah. And so you're trying to find rules.
I'm just going to bring it back to rules. Wait, wait, wait. Could you possibly try to
define rules? Even regular statisticians, non-computational statisticians do spend
some of their time evaluating rules, right? Applying statistics to try to understand,
does this rule capture this? Does this not capture this? You mean like hypothesis testing kind of
thing? Sure. Or like confidence intervals? I think more like hypothesis. I feel like
the word statistic literally means like a summary, like a number that summarizes other numbers.
But I think the field of statistics actually applies that idea to things like rules,
to understand whether or not a rule is valid. Do software engineering statistics?
No. Programming languages statistics?
No. Because I think it's useful to think about a lot of what AI and machine learning is,
or certainly should be, as software engineering, as programming languages.
Just to put it in language that you might understand, the hyperparameters
beyond the problem. The hyperparameters is too many syllables for me to understand.
The hyperparameters. That's better.
That goes around it, right? It's the decisions you choose to make. It's the metrics you choose to
use. It's the loss function. You want to say the practice of machine learning is different
than the practice of statistics. Like the things you have to worry about and how you worry about
them are different. Therefore, they're different. Right. At the very least, it's that much is
true. It doesn't mean that statistics computational or otherwise aren't important.
I think they are. I mean, I do a lot of that, for example. But I think it goes beyond that.
I think that we could think about game theory in terms of statistics, but I don't think it's
very as useful to do. I mean, the way I would think about it, or a way I would think about it,
is this way. Chemistry is just physics. But I don't think it's as useful to think about
chemistry as being just physics. It's useful to think about it as chemistry. The level of
abstraction really matters here. There are contexts in which it is useful.
Finding that connection is actually helpful. I think that's when I emphasize the computational
statistics thing. I think I want to befriend statistics and not absorb them.
Here's the a way to think about it beyond what I just said. What would you say, and I want you
to think back to a conversation we had a very long time ago, what would you say is the difference
between, say, the early 2000s, ICML and what we used to call NIPS, NURPS. Is there a difference?
A lot of it, particularly on the machine learning that was done there.
ICML was around that long. Oh, yeah.
So I clear as the new conference, new-ish. Yeah, I guess so.
And ICML was around the 2000. Oh, ICML predates that.
I think my most cited ICML papers from 94.
Michael knows this better than me because, of course, he's significantly older than I am.
But the point is, what is the difference between ICML and NURPS in the late 90s, early 2000s?
I don't know what everyone else's perspective would be, but I had a particular perspective at
that time, which is I felt like ICML was more of a computer science place and that NURPS, NURPS
was more of an engineering place, like the kind of math that happened at the two places.
As a computer scientist, I felt more comfortable with the ICML math, and the NURPS people would say
that that's because I'm dumb, and that's such an engineering thing to say.
I agree with that part of it, but I do a little differently.
We actually had a nice conversation with Tom Dietrich about this in public on Twitter just
a couple days ago. I put it a little differently, which is that ICML was machine learning done
by computer scientists, and NURPS was machine learning done by computer scientists trying
to impress statisticians, which was weird because it was the same people.
At least by the time I started paying attention, but it just felt very, very different. I think
that that perspective of whether you're trying to impress the statisticians or you're trying to
impress the programmers is actually very different and has real impact on what you choose to worry
about and what kind of outcomes you come to. I think it really matters. I think computer
statistics is a means to an end. It is not an end in some sense, and I think that really
matters here in the same way that I don't think computer science is just engineering or just
science or just math or whatever. I'd have to now agree that now we agree on everything.
The important thing here is that my opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I'm right,
I think is what we just came to. My opinions may have changed and not the fact that I'm wrong.
That's right. I lost me. I think I lost myself there too.
This happens sometimes. We're sorry. How does neural networks change this,
just to even linger on this topic, change this idea of statistics,
how big of a pie statistics is within the machine learning thing? Because it sounds like
hyperparameters and also just the role of data. People are starting to use the terminology of
software 2.0, which is like the act of programming as a, you're a designer in the hyperparameter
space of neural networks, and you're also the collector and the organizer and the cleaner
of the data. That's part of the programming. How did, on the NeurIPS versus ICML topic,
what's the role of neural networks in redefining the size and the role of machine learning?
I can't wait to hear what Michael thinks about this, but I would add one.
But you will.
That's true. I will force myself to. I think there's one thing I would add to your description,
which is the software engineering part is what does it mean to debug, for example.
But this is a difference between the computational statistics view of machine learning and the
computational view of machine learning, which is, I think, one is worried about the equation
as it were. And by the way, this is not a value judgment. I just think it's about perspective.
But the questions you would ask, when you start asking yourself what does it mean to
program and develop and build the system, is a very computer science-y view of the problem.
I mean, when, if you get on data science Twitter and econ Twitter, you actually hear this a lot
with the economist and the data scientist complaining about the machine learning people,
well, it's just statistics. And I don't know why they don't see this, but they're not even
asking the same questions. They're not thinking about it as a kind of programming problem.
And I think that that really matters, just asking this question. I actually think it's
a little different from programming in hyperparameters space and sort of collecting
the data. But I do think that that immersion really matters. So I'll give you a quick example
of the way I think about this. So I teach machine learning. Michael and I have co-taught a machine
learning class, which has now reached, I don't know, 10,000 people, at least over the last
several years, or somewhere there's abouts. And my machine learning assignments are of this form.
So the first one is something like implement these five algorithms, K and N and SVMs and boosting
and decision trees and neural networks. And maybe that's it. I can't remember. And when I say
implement, I mean, steal the code. I am completely uninterested. You get zero points for getting
the thing to work. And once you're spending your time worrying about getting the corner case right
of what happens when you are trying to normalize distances and the points on the thing. And so
you divide by zero. I'm not interested in that, right? Steal the code. However, you're going to
run those algorithms on two data sets. The data sets have to be interesting. What does it mean
to be interesting? Well, data sets interesting if it reveals differences between algorithms,
which presumably are all the same, because they can represent whatever they can represent.
And two data sets are interesting together if they show different differences as it were.
And you have to analyze them. You have to justify their interestingness and you have to analyze them
in a whole bunch of ways. But all I care about is the data in your analysis, not the programming.
And I occasionally end up in these long discussions with students. Well, I don't really,
I copy and paste the things that I've said the other 15,000 times it's come up, which is, they
go, but the only way to learn, really understand is to code them up, which is a very programmer
software engineering view of the world. If you don't program it, you don't understand it,
which is, by the way, I think is wrong in a very specific way. But it is a way that you come to
understand because then you have to wrestle with the algorithm. But the thing about machine learning
is it's not just sorting numbers, where in some sense, the data doesn't matter. What matters is,
well, does the algorithm work on these abstract things, one to less than the other. In machine
learning, the data matters. It matters more than almost anything. And not everything, but
almost anything. And so as a result, you have to live with the data and don't get distracted by
the algorithm per se. And I think that that focus on the data and what it can tell you and what
question it's actually answering for you, as opposed to the question you thought you were asking,
is a key and important thing about machine learning and is a way that computationalists,
as opposed to statisticians, bring a particular view about how to think about the process. The
statisticians, by contrast, bring, I think I'd be willing to say, a better view about the kind of
formal math that's behind it and what an actual number ultimately is saying about the data.
And those are both important, but they're also different. I didn't really think of it this way,
is to build intuition about the role of data, the different characteristics of data by having
two data sets that are different, and they reveal the differences and the differences.
That's a really fascinating, that's a really interesting educational approach. The students
love it, but not right away. They love it later. They love it at the end. Not at the beginning.
Not even immediately after. I feel like there's a deep, profound lesson
about education there that you can't listen to students about whether what you're doing is
the right or the wrong thing. Well, as a wise Michael Lippmann once said to me about children,
which I think applies to teaching, is you have to give them what they need without bending to their
will. And students are like that. You have to figure out what they need. You're a curator.
Your whole job is to curate and to present, because on their own, they're not going to
necessarily know where to search. So you're providing pushes in some direction and learn space,
and you have to give them what they need in a way that keeps them engaged enough so that
they eventually discover what they want, and they get the tools they need to go and learn other
things off of them. What's your view, let me put on my Russian hat, which believes that life is
a supplement. I like Russian hats, by the way. If you have one, I would like this. Those are ridiculous, yes.
But in a delightful way, but sure. What do you think is the role of, we talked about balance a
little bit, what do you think is the role of hardship in education? I think the biggest things
I've learned, what made me fall in love with math, for example, is by being bad at it until I got
good at it. So struggling with a problem, which increased the level of joy I felt when I finally
figured it out. It always felt with me, with teachers, especially modern discussions of
education, how can we make education more fun, more engaging, more all those things?
Well, from my perspective, it's like, you may be missing the point that education, that life is
suffering. Education is supposed to be hard, and that actually what increases the joy you feel when
you actually learn something. Is that ridiculous? Do you like to see your students suffer?
Okay, so this may be a point where we differ. I suspect not. I'm going to do go on.
Well, what would your answer be? I want to hear you first. Okay, well, I was going to not answer the
question. You don't want the students to know you enjoy them suffer? No, no, no, no. I was going to
say that there's, I think there's a distinction that you can make in the kind of suffering, right?
So I think you can be in a mode where you're suffering in a hopeless way versus you're suffering
in a hopeful way, right? Where you're like, you can see that you can still imagine getting to the
end, right? And as long as people are in that mindset where they're struggling, but it's not
a hopeless kind of struggling, that's productive. I think that's really helpful. But it's struggling,
like if you break their will, if you leave them hopeless, no, sure, some people are going to
whatever lift themselves up by their bootstraps, but like mostly you give up and certainly it takes
the joy out of it. And you're not going to spend a lot of time on something that brings you no joy.
So it is a bit of a delicate balance, right? You have to thwart people in a way that they
they still believe that there's a way through. Right. So that's a that we strongly agree,
actually. So I think, well, first off, struggling and suffering aren't the same thing, right?
Yeah, just being poetic. Oh, no, I actually appreciate the poetry. And one of the reasons
I appreciate it is that they are often the same thing and often quite different, right? So you
can struggle without suffering. You can certainly suffer pretty easily. You don't necessarily have
to struggle to suffer. So I think that you want people to struggle, but that hope matters. You
have to they have to understand that they're going to get through it on the other side. And it's very
easy to confuse the two. I actually think Brown University has a very just philosophically has
a very different take on the relationship with their students, particularly undergrads from say
a place like Georgia Tech, which is which universities better? Well, I have my opinions on
that. I mean, remember, Charles said, it doesn't matter what the facts are, I'm always right.
The correct answer is that it doesn't matter. They're different. But
he went to a school like the school where he is as an undergrad. I went to a school specifically
the same school, though it was changed a bit in the in the intervening years. Brown or Georgia Tech?
No, I was talking about Georgia Tech. And I went to an undergrad place that's a lot like the place
where I work now. And so it does seem like we're more familiar with these models. There's a similarity
between Brown and Yale. Yeah, I think that I think they're quite similar. Yeah. And Duke. Duke has
some similarities too. But it's got a little Southern draw. You've kind of worked your you
sort of worked at universities that are like the places where you learned. And the same would be
true for me. Are you uncomfortable venturing out inside the box? Is that what you're saying?
Joining out? That's what I'm saying. Yeah, Charles is definitely. He only goes to places that have
Institute in the name, right? It has worked out that way. Well, academic places anyway. Well,
no, I was a visiting scientist at UPin or visiting, visiting something at UPin. Oh,
wow. I just, I just understood your joke. Which one? Five minutes later. I like to set the sort
of time bomb. The Institute is in the that Charles only goes to places that have Institute in the
name. So I guess Georgia, I forget that Georgia Tech is Georgia Institute of Technology. The
number of people who refer to it as Georgia Tech University is large and incredibly ear
to ear. It's one of the few things that genuinely gets under my skin. But like schools like Georgia
Tech and MIT have as part of the ethos. Like there is, I want to say there's a there's an
abbreviation that someone taught me like IHTFP something like that. Like there's a there's an
there's an expression which is basically I hate being here, which they say so proudly. And that
is definitely not the ethos at Brown. Like Brown is there's a little more pampering and empowerment
and stuff. And it's not like we're going to crush you and you're going to love it. So yeah, I think
there's a I think the ethoses are different. That's interesting. Yeah. We had Drone Prover.
What's that? Drone Prover. I wanted to graduate from Georgia Tech. This is a true thing. Feel
free to look it up. If you. A lot of schools have this, by the way. No. Actually Georgia Tech was
barely the first. Brandeis has it. Had it. I feel like Georgia Tech was the first in a lot of things.
It was the first in a lot of things. Had the first Master's degree. First Bumblebee mascot. Stop that.
First Masters in Computer Science actually. Right. Online Masters. Well that too, but way back in the
60s. NSF grant. Yeah, yeah. We had the first information and Computer Science Masters degree
in the country. But the Georgia Tech, it used to be the case that I had to graduate from Georgia Tech.
You had to take a Drone Proving class where effectively they threw you a water to hide you up.
If you didn't drown, you got to graduate. Hide you up? I believe so. No. Basically there were
certainly versions of it. But I mean, luckily they ended it just before I had to graduate because
otherwise we would have never graduated. It wasn't going to happen. I want to say 84, 83,
someone around them, they ended it. But yeah, it used to have to prove you could tread water
for some ridiculous amount of time. Are you two minutes? You couldn't graduate. No, it was more
than two minutes. I bet it was two minutes. Okay, well we'll look. And it was in a bathtub.
It was in a pool. But it was a real thing. But that idea that, you know, push you-
Fully clothed. Yeah, fully clothed. I don't think, I bet it was that and not tied up. Because like,
who needs to learn how to swim when you're tied? Nobody. But who needs to learn when to swim when
you're actually falling into the water dressed? That's a real thing. I think your facts are getting
in the way with a good story. Oh, that's fair. That's fair. I didn't mean to. All right. So they tie
you up. The narrative matters. But whatever it was, you had to, it was called Drone Proving for a
reason. The point of the story, Michael, is that it's, well, no, but that's good. It doesn't bring
it back to struggle. That's a part of what Georgia Tech has always been. And we struggle with that,
by the way, about what we want to be, particularly as things go. But you sort of, how much can you
be pushed without breaking? And you come out of the other end stronger, right? There's this saying
we used to have when I was an undergrad there was Georgia Tech, building tomorrow the night before.
It's just kind of, kind of idea that, you know, give me something impossible to do and I'll do it
in a couple of days because that's what I just spent the last four or five or six. That ethos
definitely stuck to you. Having now done a number of projects with you, you definitely will do it
the night before. That's not entirely true. There's nothing wrong with waiting until the last
minute. The secret is knowing when the last minute is, right? That's brilliant. That's brilliantly
put. Yeah. That is a definite Charles statement that I am trying not to embrace.
Well, I appreciate that because you helped move my last minute. That's the social constrict
the way you converge together what the definitional last minute is. We figure that all together. In
fact, MIT, you know, I'm sure a lot of universities have this, but MIT has like MIT time that everyone
has always agreed together that there is such a concept and everyone just keeps showing up like
10 to 15 to 20 depending on the department late to everything. So there's like a weird drift
that happens. It's kind of fascinating. Yeah, we're five minutes. Five minutes. In fact,
the classes will say, you know, well, this is no longer true actually, but it used to be
a class to start at eight, but actually it started at eight or five. It ends at nine,
actually it ends at eight, 55. Yeah. Everything's five minutes off and nobody expects anything
to start until five minutes after the half hour, whatever it is. It still exists. It hurts my head.
Well, let's rewind the clock back to the 50s and 60s when you guys met. I'm just kidding,
I don't know. But what, can you tell the story of how you met? So like the internet and the world
kind of knows you as connected in some ways in terms of education of teaching the world.
That's like the public facing thing, but how did you as human beings and as collaborators meet?
I think there's two stories. One is how we met and the other is how we got to know each other.
I'm going to say that we came to understand that we had some common something. Yeah,
it's funny because on the surface, I think we're different in a lot of ways, but there's something
that's just consonant. There you go. Afternoons. So I will tell the story of how we met and I'll
let Michael tell the story of how we met. Okay. All right. So here's how we met. I was already at
that point, it was AT&T Labs. There's a long interesting story there, but anyway, I was there
and Michael was coming to interview. He was a professor at Duke at the time, but decided for
reasons that he wanted to be in New Jersey. And so that would mean Bell Labs slash AT&T Labs.
And we were doing interviews very much like academic interviews. And so I had to be there.
We all had to meet with him afterwards and so on, one-on-one. But it was obvious to me
that he was going to be hired. Like no matter what, because everyone loved him. They were just
talking about all the great stuff he did. Oh, he did this great thing. And you had just won
something at AAAI, I think, or maybe you got 18 papers in AAAI. I got the best paper award at
AAAI for the crossword stuff. Right, exactly. So that had all happened and everyone was going
on and on and on about it. Actually, Satinder was saying incredibly nice things about you.
Really? Yes. He can be very grumpy. Yes. That's very, that's nice to hear. He was grumpily
saying very nice things about you. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense. So, you know,
so it was going to come. So why were we, why was I meeting him? I had something else I had to do.
I can't remember what it was. Probably involved comic books. So he remembers meeting me as
inconveniencing his afternoon. So he came, so eventually came to my office. I was in the middle
trying to do something. I can't remember what. And he came and he sat down. And for reasons that are
purely accidental, despite what Michael thinks, my desk at the time was set up in such a way that
had sort of an L shape. And the chair on the outside was always lower than the chair that I
was in. And, you know, the kind of point was to... The only reason I think that it was on purpose
is because you told me it was on purpose. I don't remember that. Anyway, the thing is that, you
know, it kind of gives... His guest chair was really low so that he could, yeah, he could look down
at everybody. The idea was just to simply create a nice environment that you were asking for a
mortgage. And I was going to say, no, that was a very simple idea here. Anyway, so we sat there
and we just talked for a little while. And I think he got the impression that I didn't like him.
It wasn't true. I strongly got that impression. The talk was really good. The talk, by the way,
was terrible. And right after the talk, I said to my host, Michael Kearns, who ultimately was
my boss. I'm a huge fan. I'm a friend and a huge fan of Michael, yeah. Yeah, he is a remarkable
person. After my talk, I went into the... He was a table with a basketball.
Racquetball. He's good at everything. No, basketball. No, but basketball and racquetball...
Squash. Squash. Squash, squash, not racquetball, that's right. Yeah, squash, which is not...
Racquetball, yes. Squash, no. And I hope you hear that, Michael.
You mean in terms of, as a game, not his skill level, because I'm pretty sure he's...
All right, there's some competitiveness there. But the point is that it was like the middle
of the day, I had full day of interviews. I met with people, but then in the middle of the day,
I gave a job talk. And then there was going to be more interviews. But I pulled Michael aside and
I said, I think it's in both of our best interests if I just leave now, because that was so bad that
it'd just be embarrassing if I have to talk to any more people. You look bad for having invited
me. Let's just forget this ever happened. So I don't think the talk went well.
That's one of the most Michael Lippman set of sentences I think I've ever heard. He did great,
or at least everyone knew he was great. So maybe it didn't matter. I was there. I remember the talk
and I remember him being very much the way I remember him now, in any given week. So it was
good. And we met and we talked about stuff. He thinks I didn't like him, but...
Because he was so grumpy. Must have been the chair thing. The chair thing and the low voice,
I think. And that slight skeptical look. Yes. I have no idea what you're talking about.
Well, I probably didn't have any idea what you were talking about. Anyway, I liked him.
He asked me questions. I answered questions. I felt bad about myself. It was a normal day.
What's a normal day? And then he left. And then he left and that's how we met.
Can we take a... And then I got hired and I was in the group.
Can we take a slight tangent on this topic of... It sounds like... Maybe you could speak to the
bigger picture. It sounds like you're quite self-critical. Who, Charles? No, you.
Oh, I think I can do better. I can do better. I'll try me again. I'll do better.
Yeah, that was like a three out of 10 response. So let's try to work it up to five and six.
I remember Marvin Minsky said on a video interview, something that the key to success
in academic research is to hate everything you do. For some reason...
I think I followed that because I hate everything he's done.
That's a good line. That's a six. Maybe that's a keeper. But...
But do you find that resonance with you at all in how you think about talks and so on?
I would say it differently. It's not that... No, not really.
That's such an MIT view of the world though. So I remember talking about this when,
as a student, you were basically told, I will clean it up for the purpose of the podcast.
My work is crap. My work is crap. My work is crap. My work is crap.
Then you go to a conference or something and you're like,
everybody else's work is crap. Everybody else's work is crap. And you feel better and better
about it, relatively speaking. And then you sort of keep working on it. I don't hate my work.
That resonates with me.
Yes. I've never hated my work, but I have been dissatisfied with it.
And I think being dissatisfied, being okay with the fact that you've taken a positive step,
the derivative is positive. Maybe even the second derivative is positive.
That's important because that's a part of the hope, right? But I haven't gotten there yet.
If that's not there, that I haven't gotten there yet, then it's hard to move forward,
I think. So I buy that, which is a little different from hating everything that you do.
Yeah. I mean, there's things that I've done that I like better than I like myself.
So it's separating me from the work, essentially. So I think I am very critical of myself,
but sometimes the work I'm really excited about. And sometimes I think it's kind of good.
It doesn't happen right away. So I found the work that I've liked that I've done,
and most of it, I liked it in retrospect more when I was far away from it in time.
I have to be fairly excited about it to get done.
No, excited at the time, but then happy with the result. But years later,
or even I might go back, you know what, that actually turned out to matter.
That turned out to matter. Oh gosh, it turns out I've been thinking about that.
It's actually influenced all the work that I've done since without realizing it.
Boy, that guy was smart.
Yeah. That guy had a future. Yeah.
Yeah. He's gone places.
I think there's something to it. I think there's something to the idea.
You've got to hate what you do, but it's not quite hate. It's just being
unsatisfied. And different people motivate themselves differently.
I don't happen to motivate myself with self-loathing.
I happen to motivate myself with something else.
So you're able to sit back and be proud of in retrospect of the work you've done?
Well, and it's easier when you can connect it with other people,
because then you can be proud of them.
And then you can still safely hate yourself.
Yeah, that's right.
It's win-win, Michael, or at least win-lose, which is what you're looking for.
Oh, wow. There's so many brilliant minds in this.
There's levels.
So how did you actually meet me?
So the way I think about it is, because we didn't do much research together
at AT&T, but then we all got laid off. So that was...
By the way, sorry to interrupt, but that was one of the most magical places, historically speaking.
They did not appreciate what they had.
And how do we...
I feel like there's a profound lesson in there, too.
How do we get it? Why was it so magical?
Is it just a coincidence of history?
Or is there something special about...
There were some really good managers and people who really believed in machine learning
as this is going to be important.
Let's get the people who are thinking about this in creative and insightful ways
and put them in one place and stir.
Yeah, but even beyond that, right, it was Bell Labs at its heyday.
And even when we were there, which I think was past its heyday.
And to be clear, he's gotten to be at Bell Labs. I never got to be at Bell Labs.
I joined after that.
Yeah, I should have been 91 as a grad student.
So I was there for a long time, every summer, except for...
So twice I worked for companies that had just stopped being Bell Labs.
Right.
Bell Core and then AT&T Labs.
So Bell Labs was several locations or for the researchers or is it one...
Definitely several...
...Jersey's involved somehow.
They're all in Jersey.
Yeah, they're all over the place.
But they were in a couple places in Jersey.
Murray Hill was the Bell Labs place.
So you had an office at Murray Hill at one point in your career.
Yeah, and I played Ultimate Frisbee on the cricket pitch at Bell Labs at Murray Hill.
And then it became AT&T Labs when it split off with Luce during what we called Trivestiture.
So you're better than Michael Korn's at Ultimate Frisbee?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
But I think that one's not boasting.
I think that...
I think Charles plays a lot of Ultimate and I don't think Michael does.
No, I was...
Yes, but that wasn't the point.
The point is yes.
Sorry.
I'm finally better.
Oh, yes, yes, sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Okay, I have played on a championship-winning Ultimate Frisbee team or whatever,
Ultimate team with Charles.
So I know how good he is.
He's really good.
How good I was anyway when I was younger.
But the thing is...
I know how young he was when he was younger.
That's true.
That's true.
So much younger than now.
He's older now.
Michael was a much better basketball player than I was.
Michael Korn's.
Yes.
No, not Michael.
Let's be very clear about that.
To be clear, I've not played basketball with you.
So you don't know how terrible I am,
but you have a probably pretty good guess.
That you're not as good as Michael Korn's.
He's tall and athletic.
And he cared about it.
He's very athletic, very good.
Probably competitive.
I love hanging out with Michael.
Anyway, but we were talking about something else,
although I no longer remember what it was.
What were we talking about?
How you met all Bell Labs.
But also Labs.
So this was kind of cool about what was magical about it.
The first thing you have to know
is that Bell Labs was an arm of the government, right?
Because AT&T was an arm of the government.
It was a monopoly.
And every month you paid a little thing on your phone bill,
which turned out was a tax for all the research
that Bell Labs was doing.
And they invented transistors and the laser
and whatever else that they did.
The big bang or whatever the cosmic background radiation.
Yeah, they did all that stuff.
They had some amazing stuff with directional microphones,
by the way.
I got to go in this room,
where they had all these panels and everything.
And we would talk at one another.
And he'd lose some panels around.
And then he'd have me step, two steps to the left.
And I couldn't hear a thing he was saying
because nothing was bouncing off the walls.
And then he would shut it all down
and you could hear your heartbeat,
which is deeply disturbing to hear your heartbeat.
You can feel it.
I mean, you can feel it now.
There's just so much other sort of noise around.
Anyway, Bell Labs is about pure research.
It was a university, in some sense,
the purest sense of a university, but without students.
So it was all the faculty working with one another
and students would come in to learn.
They would come in for three or four months during the summer
and they would go away.
But it was just this kind of wonderful experience
that I could walk out my door.
In fact, I would often have to walk out my door
and deal with Rich Sutton and Michael Kearns yelling at each other
about whatever it is they were yelling about,
the proper way to prove something or another.
And I could just do that.
And Dave McAllister and Peter Stone
and all of these other people, including Satinder
and then eventually Michael.
And it was just a place where you could think, thoughts.
And it was okay because so long as once every 25 years or so,
somebody invented a transistor, it paid for everything else.
You could afford to take the risk.
And then when that all went away, it became harder and harder
and harder to justify it as far as the folks
who were very far away were concerned.
And there was such a fast turnaround among middle management
on the AT&T side that you never had a chance
to really build a relationship.
At least people like us didn't have a chance
to build a relationship.
So when the diaspora happened, it was amazing, right?
Everybody left and I think everybody ended up
at a great place and made a huge,
made a continue to do really good work with machine learning.
But it was a wonderful place and people will ask me,
what's the best job you've ever had?
And as a professor, anyway, the answer that I would give is,
well, probably Bell Labs in some very real sense.
And I would never have a job like that again
because Bell Labs doesn't exist anymore.
And Microsoft research is great and Google does good stuff
and you can pick IBM, you can tell if you want to,
but Bell Labs was magical.
It was an important time and it represents a high watermark
in basic research in the US.
Is there something you could say about the physical proximity
and the chance collisions?
Like, we live in this time of the pandemic
where everyone is maybe trying to see the silver lining
and accepting the remote nature of things.
Is there, one of the things that people like faculty
that I talked to miss is the procrastination.
Like the chance to make everything is about meetings
that are supposed to be,
there's not a chance to just talk about a comic book
or whatever, like go into discussion that's totally pointless.
So it's funny you say this because that's how we met, met.
That's exactly that.
So I'll let Michael say that, but I'll just add one thing,
which is just that research is a social process.
And it helps to have random social interactions,
even if they don't feel social at the time.
That's how you get things done.
One of the great things about the ad lab when I was there,
I don't quite know what it looks like now
once they move buildings, but we had entire walls
that were whiteboards and people would just get up there
and they would just write and people would walk up
and you'd have arguments and you'd explain things
to one another and you got so much out of the freedom to do that.
You had to be okay with people challenging every frickin' word
you said, which I would sometimes find deeply irritating,
but most of the time it was quite useful.
But the sort of pointlessness and the interaction
was in some sense the point, at least for me.
Yeah, I think offline yesterday I mentioned Josh Tannenbaum
and he's very much, he's such an inspiration
in the child-like way that he pulls you in on any topic.
It doesn't even have to be about machine learning or the brain.
He'll just pull you into a closest writable surface
which is still, you can find whiteboards in MIT everywhere
and just basically cancel all meetings
and talk for a couple hours about some aimless thing
and it feels like the whole world,
the time space continuum kind of warps
and that becomes the most important thing
and then it's just...
It's so true.
It's definitely something worth missing
in this world where everything's remote.
There's some magic to the physical presence.
Whenever I wonder myself whether MIT really is as great
as I remember it, I just go talk to Josh.
Yeah, you know, that's funny.
There's a few people in this world that carry the best
of what particular institutions stand for, right?
It's Josh.
I mean, my guess is he's unaware of this.
That's the point.
The masters are not aware of their mastery.
So I'll meet...
Yes, but first the tangent, no.
How did you meet me?
So I'm not sure what you were thinking,
but when it started to dawn on me
that maybe we had a longer term bond
was after we all got laid off
and you had decided at that point that we were still paid.
We were given an opportunity to do job search
and kind of make a transition,
but it was clear that we were done
and I would go to my office to work
and you would go to my office to keep me from working.
That was my recollection of it.
You had decided that there was really no point
in working for the company
because our relationship with the company was done.
Yeah, but remember, I felt that way beforehand.
It wasn't about the company.
It was about the set of people there doing really cool things
and it always been that way.
But we were working on something together.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
So at the very end, we all got laid off,
but then our boss came to...
Our boss's boss came to us
because our boss was Michael Kearns
and he had jumped ship brilliantly, like perfect timing.
Right before the ship was about to sink,
he was like, gotta go
and landed perfectly because Michael Kearns
and leaving the rest of us to go like,
this is fine and then it was clear that it wasn't fine
and we were all toast.
So we had this sort of long period of time
but then our boss figured out, okay, wait,
maybe we can save a couple of these people
if we can have them do something really useful.
And the useful thing was we were gonna make
basically an automated assistant
that could help you with your calendar.
You could like tell it things
and it would respond appropriately.
It would just kind of integrate
across all sorts of your personal information.
And so me and Charles and Peter Stone
were set up as the crack team
to actually solve this problem.
Other people maybe were too theoretical
that they thought but we could actually get something done.
So we sat down to get something done
and there wasn't time and it wouldn't have saved us anyway
and so it all kind of went downhill.
But the interesting, I think, coda to that
is that our boss's boss is a guy named Ron Brockman
and when he left AT&T,
because we were all laid off,
he went to DARPA, started up a program there
that became KLO, which is the program from which Siri sprung
which is a digital assistant
that helps you with your calendar
and a bunch of other things.
It really, you know, in some ways got its start
with me and Charles and Peter trying to implement
this vision that Ron Brockman had
that he ultimately got implemented
through his role at DARPA.
So when I'm trying to feel less bad about having been laid off
from what is possibly the greatest job of all time,
I think about, well, we kind of helped birth Siri.
That's something.
And then he did other things too.
But we got to spend a lot of time in his office
and talk about-
We got to spend a lot of time in my office.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so then we went on our merry way.
Everyone went to different places.
Charles landed at Georgia Tech,
which was what he always dreamed he would do.
And so that worked out well.
I came up with a saying at the time,
which is luck favors the Charles.
It's kind of luck favors the prepared.
But Charles, like, he wished something
and then it would basically happen just the way he wanted.
It was inspirational to see things go that way.
Things worked out.
And we stayed in touch.
And then I think it really helped
when you were working on-
I mean, you kept me in the loop for things like threads
and the work that you were doing at Georgia Tech.
But then when they were starting their online master's program,
he knew that I was really excited about MOOCs
and online teaching.
And he's like, I have a plan.
And I'm like, tell me your plan.
He's like, I can't tell you the plan yet
because they were deep in negotiations
between Georgia Tech and Udacity to make this happen.
And they didn't want it to leak.
So Charles would kept teasing me about it,
but wouldn't tell me what was actually going on.
And eventually it was announced and he said,
I would like you to teach the machine learning course with me.
I'm like, that can't possibly work.
But it was a great idea and it was super fun.
It was a lot of work to put together, but it was really great.
Was that the first time you thought about-
first of all, was it the first time you got seriously into teaching?
I mean, you know, I was-
I'm trying to get the professor.
Right.
This was already after you jumped to-
So like, there's a little bit of jumping around in time.
Yeah, sorry about that.
There's a pretty big jump in time.
So like the MOOCs thing-
So Charles got to Georgia Tech and he-
I mean, maybe Charles, maybe this is a Charles story.
I got to Georgia Tech in 2002.
He got to Georgia Tech in 2002.
And worked on things like revamping the curriculum,
the undergraduate curriculum,
so that it had some kind of semblance of modular structure
because computer science was at the time moving from a fairly narrow
specific set of topics to touching a lot of other parts of intellectual life
and the curriculum was supposed to reflect that.
And so Charles played a big role in kind of redesigning that.
And then for my labors, I ended up as associate dean.
Right.
He got to become associate dean of charge of educational stuff.
It should be a valuable lesson.
If you're good at something, they will give you responsibility
to do more of that thing until you-
Don't show competence.
Don't show competence if you don't have responsibility.
Here's what they say.
The reward for good work is more work.
The reward for bad work is less work, which I don't know,
depending on what you're trying to do that week.
One of those is better than the other.
Well, one of the problems with the word work
started to interrupt is that it seems to be an antonym
in this particular language would have the opposite of happiness.
But it seems like they're-
That's one of- we talked about balance.
It's always like work-life balance.
It always rubbed me the wrong way as a terminology.
I know it's just words.
Right.
The opposite of work is play, but ideally work is play.
Oh, I can't tell you how much time I'd spend.
Certainly I was at Bell Labs, except for a few very key moments.
As a professor, I would do this too.
I was just saying, I cannot believe they're paying me to do this.
Because it's fun.
It's something that I would do for a hobby if I could anyway.
So that's what it worked out.
Are you sure you want to be saying that when this is being recorded?
As a dean, that is not true at all.
I need a raise.
But I think here with this, even though a lot of time passed,
Michael and I talked almost every- well, we texted almost every day
during the period.
Charles at one point took me- there was the ICML conference.
The machine learning conference was in Atlanta.
I was the chair, the general chair of the conference.
Charles was my publicity chair or something like that or-
Fundraising chair.
Fundraising chair.
Yeah.
But he decided it would be really funny if he didn't actually show up
for the conference in his own home city.
So he didn't.
But he did at one point pick me up at the conference in his Tesla
and drove me to the Atlanta mall and forced me to buy an iPhone
because he didn't like how it was to text with me
and thought it would be better for him if I had an iPhone.
The text would be somehow smoother.
And it was.
And it was.
And it is.
And his life is better.
And my life is better.
But it was, yeah, Charles forced me to get an iPhone
so that he could text me more efficiently.
I thought that was an interesting moment.
It works for me.
Anyway, so we kept talking the whole time.
And then eventually we did the teaching thing.
And it was great.
And there's a couple of reasons for that, by the way.
One is I really wanted to do something different.
Like you've got this medium here.
People claim it can change things.
What's a thing that you could do in this medium
that you could not do otherwise besides edit?
What could you do?
And being able to do something with another person
is that kind of thing.
It's very hard.
I mean, you can take turns, but teaching together,
having conversations is very hard, right?
So that was a cool thing.
The second thing would be an excuse to do more stuff with him.
Yeah, I always thought he makes it sound brilliant.
And it is, I guess.
But at the time, it really felt like I've got a lot to do,
Charles is saying.
And it would be great if Michael could teach the course
and I could just hang out.
Yeah, just kind of coast on that.
Well, that's what the second class was more like that.
Because the second class was explicit.
But the first class, it was at least half.
Yeah, but I do all the stuff.
So the structure that we came up with.
I think you're once again letting the facts get in the way.
A good story.
A good story.
I should just let Charles talk.
But that's the facts that he saw.
So that was kind of true for 72.
That's your facts.
Yeah, that was sort of true for 7642,
which is the reinforcement learning class,
because that was really his class.
You started with reinforcement learning?
No, we started with machine learning.
I did the intro machine learning, 7641,
which is supervised learning, unsupervised learning,
and reinforcement learning and decision making
and cram all that in there.
The kind of assignments that we talked about earlier.
And then eventually, about a year later,
we did a follow on 7642,
which is reinforcement learning and decision making.
The first class was based on something
I had been teaching at that point for well over a decade.
And the second class was based on something Michael had been teaching.
Actually, I learned quite a bit teaching that class with him.
But he drove most of that.
But the first one I drove most of it was all my material.
Although I had stolen that material originally
from slides I found online from Michael,
who had originally stolen that material
from, I guess, slides he found online,
probably from Andrew Moore,
because the jokes were the same anyway.
At least some of the, at least when I found the slides,
some of the stuff was there.
Yes, every machine learning class
taught an early 2000s stole from Andrew Moore.
A particular joke or two?
At least the structure.
Now, I did, and he did actually a lot more
with reinforcement learning and such
and game theory and those kinds of things.
But, you know, we all sort of...
You mean in the research world?
No, no, no, in that class.
No, I mean in teaching that class.
The coverage was different than what other people started.
Most people were just doing supervised learning
and maybe a little bit of, you know,
clustering and whatnot.
But we took it all the way to...
A lot of it just comes from Tom Mitchell's book.
Oh, no. Yeah, except, well,
half of it comes from Tom Mitchell's book, right?
I mean, the other half doesn't.
This is why it's all readings, right?
Because certain things weren't invented when Tom Mitchell...
Yeah, okay, that's true.
Right?
But it was quite good.
But there's a reason for that besides, you know,
just I wanted to do it.
I wanted to do something new
and I wanted to do something with him,
which is a realization,
which is despite what you might believe,
he's an introvert and I'm an introvert,
or I'm on the edge of being an introvert anyway.
But both of us, I think, enjoy the energy of the crowd, right?
There's something about talking to people
and bringing them into whatever we find interesting
that is empowering, energizing or whatever.
And I found the idea of staring alone
at a computer screen and then talking off of materials
less inspiring than I wanted it to be.
And I had, in fact, done a MOOC for Udacity on algorithms
and it was a week in a dark room talking at the screen,
writing on the little pad,
and I didn't know this was happening,
but they had watched, the crew had watched some of the videos
in the middle of this and they're like,
something's wrong, you're sort of shutting down.
And I think a lot of it was I'll make jokes
and no one would laugh.
And I felt like the crowd hated me.
Now, of course, there was no crowd, so it wasn't rational.
But each time I tried it and I got no reaction,
it just was taking the energy out of my performance,
out of my presentation.
Such a fantastic metaphor for grad school.
Anyway, by working together, we could play off each other
and keep the energy up because you can't let your guard down
for a moment with Charles, he'll just overpower you.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
We would work really well together.
I thought and we knew each other, so I knew that we could
sort of make it work plus I was the associate dean,
so they had to do what I told them to do.
We had to do that, we had to make it work.
And so it worked out very well, I thought.
Well enough that we...
With great power comes great power.
That's right.
And we became smooth and curly,
and that's when we did the overfitting thriller video.
Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.
So can we just like smooth and curly,
where were that coming from?
It happened, it was completely spontaneous.
These are nicknames you go by.
It's what the students call us.
He was lecturing, so the way that we structured the lectures
is one of us is the lecturer,
and one of us is basically the student.
And so he was lecturing on...
The lecturer prepares all the materials,
comes up with the quizzes,
and then the student comes in not knowing anything,
so it was just like being on campus.
And I was doing game theory in particular,
the prisoner's dilemma.
And so he needed to set up a little prisoner's dilemma grid.
So he drew it, and I could see what he was drawing.
And the prisoner's dilemma consists of two players, two parties.
So he decided he would make little cartoons of the two of us.
And so there was two criminals, right,
that were deciding whether or not to rat each other out.
One of them, he drew as a circle with a smiley face
and a kind of goatee thing, smooth head,
and the other one with all sorts of curly hair.
And he said, this is smooth and curly.
I said smooth and curly.
He said, no, smooth with a V.
It's very important that it have V.
And then the students really took to that.
They found that relatable.
He started singing Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And those names stuck.
So we now have a video series,
an episode, our kind of first actual episode
should be coming out today.
Smooth and Curly on Video,
where the two of us discuss
episodes of Westworld.
We watch Westworld and we're like,
huh, what does this say about computer science and AI?
And we've never, we did not watch it.
I mean, I know it's on season three or whatever we have.
As of this recording, it's on season three.
And watch now two episodes total.
Yeah, I think I watched three.
What do you think about Westworld?
Two episodes in.
So I can tell you so far,
I'm just guessing what's going to happen next.
It seems like bad things are going to happen
with the robots uprising.
It's a lot of...
I mean, I vaguely remember a movie existing,
so I assume it's related to that.
That was more my time than your time, Charles.
That's right, because you're much older than I am.
I think the important thing here is that
it's narrative, right?
It's all about telling a story.
That's the whole driving thing.
But the idea that they would give these reveries,
that they would make people...
Let them remember.
...remember the awful things that happened.
Who could possibly think that was a good...
I mean, I don't know.
I've only seen the first two episodes,
or maybe the third one.
You know what it was.
You know what the problem is?
That the robots were actually designed by Hannibal Lecter.
That's true.
They weren't...
So, like, what do you think is going to happen?
Bad things.
It's clear that things are happening
and characters being introduced,
and we don't yet know anything.
But still, I was just struck by how
it's all driven by narrative and story.
And there's all these implied things,
like programming hap...
The programming interface is talking to them
about what's going on in their heads,
which is both...
I mean, artistically, it's probably useful to film it that way.
But think about how it would work in real life.
It just seems very great.
But there was...
We saw on the second episode, there's a screen.
You could see things...
They were wearing like...
...state in the world.
It was quite interesting to just kind of ask this question so far.
I mean, I assume it veers off into never, never land at some point.
But...
So, we don't know.
We can't answer that question.
I'm also a fan of a guy named Alex Garland.
He's a director of Ex Machina.
And he is the first...
I wonder if Kubrick was like this, actually.
Is he studies what would it take to program in AI systems?
He's curious enough to go into that direction.
On the Westworld side, I felt there was more emphasis on the narratives
than actually asking computer science questions.
How would you build this?
How would you...
And how would you debug it?
To me, that's the key issue.
They were terrible debuggers.
Yeah.
Well, they said specifically this.
So, we make a change and we put it out in the world.
And that's bad because something terrible could happen.
If you're putting things out of the world and you're not sure
whether something terrible is going to happen,
your process is probably...
I just feel like there should have been someone who's sole job it was
was to walk around and poke his head at it and say,
what could possibly go wrong?
Just over and over again.
I would have loved if there was...
I did watch a lot more.
I'm not giving anything away.
I would have loved it if there was an episode where the new intern
is debugging a new model or something and it just keeps failing.
And they're like, all right.
And then more turns into episode of Silicon Valley or something like that.
Versus this ominous AI systems that are constantly threatening
the fabric of this world that's been created.
Yeah.
And this reminds me of something that...
So, I agree with that.
That should be very cool.
At least, well, for the small percentage of people who care about debugging systems.
But the other thing is...
Debugging.
The series.
It falls into...
Think of the sequels.
Think of the debugger.
Oh, my gosh.
And anyway, so...
It's a nightmare show.
It's a horror movie.
I think that's where we lose people, by the way, early on is the people who either decide...
Either figure out debugging or think debugging is terrible.
Oh, where we lose people in computer science.
This is part of the struggle versus suffering, right?
You get through it and you kind of get the skills of it.
Or you're just like, this is dumb.
This is a dumb way to do anything.
And I think that's when we lose people.
But, well, I'll leave it at that.
But I think that there's something really, really neat about framing it that way.
But what I don't like about all of these things, and I love Tex Mockingham, by the way.
I love that the ending was very depressing.
One of the things I have to talk to Alex about, he says that the thing that nobody noticed,
he put in is at the end, spoiler alert.
The robot turns and looks at the camera and smiles briefly.
And to him, he thought that his definition of passing the general version of the Turing test,
or the consciousness test, is smiling for no one.
Like, it's like the Chinese room kind of experiment.
It's not always trying to act for others.
But just on your own, being able to have a relationship with the actual experience,
and just take it in.
I don't know.
He said nobody noticed the magic of it.
I have this vague feeling that I remember the smile, but now you've just put the memory
in my head.
So probably not.
But I do think that that's interesting.
Although, by looking at the camera, you are smiling for the audience, right?
You're breaking the fourth wall.
It seems, I mean, well, that's a limitation in the medium.
But I like that idea.
But here's the problem I have with all of those movies, all of them.
But I know why it's this way.
And I enjoy those movies.
And Westworld is, it sets up the problem of AI as succeeding and then having something
we cannot control.
But it's not the bad part of AI.
The bad part of AI is the stuff we're living through now, right?
Using the data to make decisions that are terrible.
It's not the intelligence that's going to go out there and surpass us and take over the
world or lock us into a room to starve to death slowly over multiple days.
It's instead the tools that we're building that are allowing us to make the terrible
decisions we would have less efficiently made before, right?
Computers are very good at making us more efficient, including being more efficient at doing terrible
things.
And that's the part of the AI we have to worry about.
It's not the true intelligence that we're going to build sometime in the future, probably
long after we're around.
But I just, I think that whole framing of it sort of misses the point, even though it
is inspiring.
And I was inspired by those ideas, right?
I got into this in part because I wanted to build something like that.
Philosophical questions are interesting to me, but that's not where the terror comes
from.
The terror comes from the everyday.
And you can construct, situate, it's in the subtlety of the interaction between AI and
the human, like with social networks, all the stuff you're doing with interactive artificial
intelligence.
But, you know, I feel like Hal 9000 came a little bit closer to that when it's in 2001
Space Odyssey, because it felt like a personal assistant, you know, it felt like closer to
the AI systems we have today and the real things we might actually encounter, which
is over-relying in some fundamental way on our, like, dumb assistants or on social networks,
like over-offloading too much of us onto, you know, onto things that require internet
and power and so on, and thereby becoming powerless as a standalone entity.
And then when that thing starts to misbehave in some subtle way, it creates a lot of problems.
And those problems are dramatized when you're in space, because you don't have a way to
walk away.
Well, as the man said, once you, once we started making the decisions for you, it stopped
being your world, right?
That's the matrix, Michael, in case you don't, you don't remember.
But on the other hand, I could say, no, because isn't that what we do with people anyway?
You know, just kind of the shared intelligence that is humanity is relying on other people
constantly.
I mean, we hyper-specialize, right, as individuals.
We're still generally intelligent, we make our own decisions in a lot of ways, but we
leave most of this up to other people, and that's perfectly fine.
And by the way, everyone does necessarily share our goals.
Sometimes they seem to be quite against us.
Sometimes we make decisions that others would see as against our own interests, and yet
we somehow manage it, manage and survive.
I'm not entirely sure why an AI would actually make that worse, or even different, really.
You mentioned the matrix.
Do you think we're living in a simulation?
It does feel like a thought game more than a real scientific question.
Well, I'll tell you why, like, I think it's an interesting thought experiment.
See what you think.
From a computer science perspective, it's a good experiment of how difficult would it
be to create a sufficiently realistic world that us humans would enjoy being in.
That's almost like a competition.
If we're living in a simulation, then I don't believe that we were put in the simulation.
I believe that it's just physics playing out, and we came out of that.
I don't think...
So you think you have to build the universe kind of all the time?
I think that the universe itself, we can think of that as a simulation.
And in fact, sometimes I try to think about, to understand what it's like for a computer
to start to think about the world, I try to think about the world.
Things like quantum mechanics, where it doesn't feel very natural to me at all, and it really
strikes me as, I don't understand this thing that we're living in.
It has...
There's weird things happening in it that don't feel natural to me at all.
Now, if you want to call that as the result of a simulator, okay, I'm fine with that.
But like I don't...
There's the bugs in the simulation.
There's the bugs.
I mean, the interesting thing about the simulation is that it might have bugs.
I mean, that's the thing that I...
But there would be bugs for the people in the simulation.
That's just reality.
Unless you were hard enough to know that there was a bug.
But I think...
Back to the matrix.
Yeah.
The way you put the question...
I don't think that we live in a simulation created for us.
Okay.
I would say that.
I think that's interesting.
I've actually never thought about it that way.
I mean, the way you asked the question though is, could you create a world that is enough
for us humans?
It's an interestingly sort of self-referential question because the beings that created the
simulation probably have not created the simulation that's realistic for them.
But we're in the simulation, and so it's realistic for us.
So we could create a simulation that is fine for the people in the simulation, as it were,
that would not necessarily be fine for us as the creators of the simulation.
But while you can forget, I mean, when you go into the...
If you play video games of virtual reality, you can...
Some suspension of disbelief or whatever.
Yeah.
It becomes a world.
Yeah.
It becomes a world even like in brief moments.
You forget that another world exists.
I mean, that's what good stories do.
They pull you in.
The question is, is it possible to pull...
Our brains are limited.
Is it possible to pull the brain in to where we actually stay in that world longer and
longer and longer and longer?
And not only that, but we don't want to leave.
And so, especially...
This is the key thing about the developing brain is if we journey into that world early
on in life often.
How would you even know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But from a video game design perspective, from a Westworld perspective, it's...
I think it's an important thing for even computer scientists to think about because it's clear
that video games are getting much better.
And virtual reality, although it's been ups and downs just like artificial intelligence,
it feels like virtual reality will be here in a very impressive form if we were to fast
forward 100 years into the future in a way that might change society fundamentally.
Like, if I were to...I'm very limited in predicting the future as all of us are, but if I were
to try to predict in which way I'd be surprised to see the world 100 years from now, it'd
be that...or impressed.
It'd be that we're all no longer living in this physical world, that we're all living
in a virtual world.
You really need to recalculate in God by Sawyer.
It's a...he'll read it in a night.
It's a very easy read, but it's a...assuming you're that kind of reader, but it's a good
story and it's kind of about this, but not in a way that it appears.
And I really enjoyed the thought experiment and I think it's pretty sure it's Robert
Sawyer.
But anyway, he's apparently Canadian's top science fiction writer, which is why the
story mostly takes place in Toronto.
But it's a very good story that sort of imagines this very different kind of simulation hypothesis
sort of thing from, say, the egg, for example, I'm talking about the short story, by the
guy who did the Martian.
Who wrote the Martian?
I'm talking about...
Matt Damon.
No.
The book.
So, we had this whole discussion that Michael doesn't partake in this exercise of reading.
He doesn't seem to like it, which seems very strange to me, considering how much he has
to read.
I read all the time.
I used to read ten books every week when I was in sixth grade or whatever.
I was...a lot of it's science fiction, a lot of it's history, but I love to read.
But anyway, you should recalculate in God.
I think you'll...you'll...it's a very easy read, like I said, and I think you'll enjoy
sort of the ideas that it presents.
Yeah, I think the thought experiment is quite interesting.
One thing I've noticed about people growing up now, I mean, we talked about social media,
but video games is a much bigger, bigger and bigger and bigger part of their lives, and
the video games have become much more realistic.
I think it's possible that the three of us are not...maybe the two of you are not familiar
exactly with the numbers we're talking about here, like the number of people...
It's bigger than movies, right?
It's huge.
I used to do a lot of the computational narrative stuff.
I understand that economists can actually see the impact of video games on the labor
market.
That there are...there's fewer young men of a certain age participating in like paying
jobs than you'd expect, and that they trace it back to video games.
I mean, the problem with Star Trek was not warp drive or teleportation.
It was the holodeck.
If you have the holodeck, that's it.
That's it.
You go in the holodeck, you never come out.
I mean, it just never made...once I saw that, I thought, okay, well, so this is the end
of humanity, right?
They've been in the holodeck.
Because that feels like the singularity, not some AGI or whatever.
It's some possibly to go into another world that can be artificially made better than
this one.
And slowing it down so you live forever or speeding it up so you appear to live forever
or making the decision of when to die.
And then most of us will just be old people on the porch yelling at the kids these days
in their virtual reality worlds.
But they won't hear us because they've got headphones on.
So I mean, rewinding back to MOOCs, is there lessons that you've speaking to kids these
days?
There you go.
That was a transition.
All right.
I'll fix it in post.
That's Charles' favorite phrase.
Fix it in post.
Fix it in post.
Fix it in post.
He said, when we were recording all the time, whenever the editor didn't like something
or whatever, I would say, we'll fix it in post.
He hated that.
He hated that more than anything.
Because it was Charles' way of saying, I'm not going to do it again.
You're on your own for this one.
But it always got fixed in post.
Exactly.
So is there something you've learned about...I mean, it's interesting to talk about MOOCs.
Is there something you've learned about the process of education, about thinking about
the present?
I think there's two lines of conversation to be had here is the future of education
in general that you've learned about.
And more pressurantly is the education in the times of COVID.
The second thing, in some ways, matters more than the first, at least in my head.
Not just because it's happening now, but because I think it's reminded us of a lot of things.
Coincidentally, today, there's an article out by a good friend of mine who's also a
professor at Georgia Tech, but more importantly, a writer and editor at The Atlantic, I named
Ian Bogos.
And the title is something like Americans Will Sacrifice Anything for the College Experience.
And it's about why we went back to college and why people wanted us to go back to college.
And it's not greedy presidents trying to get the last dollar from someone.
It's because they want to go to college.
And what they're paying for is not the classes.
What they're paying for is the college experience.
It's not the education.
It's being there.
I've believed this for a long time that we continually make this mistake of people want
to go back to college as being people want to go back to class.
They don't.
They want to go back to campus.
They want to move away from home.
They want to do all those things that people experience.
It's a rite of passage.
It's an identity if I can steal some of Ian's words here.
And I think that's right.
And I think what we've learned through COVID is the disaggregation was not the disaggregation
of the education from the university place and that you can get the best anywhere you
want to.
In terms of there's lots of reasons why that is not necessarily true.
The disaggregation is having it shoved in our faces that the reason to go again, that
the reason to go to college is not necessarily to learn.
It's to have the college experience.
And that's very difficult for us to accept even though we behave that way, most of us
when we were undergrads.
A lot of us didn't go to every single class.
We learned and we got it and we look back on it and we're happy we had the learning
experience as well.
Obviously, particularly us because this is the kind of thing that we do and my guess
is that's true of the vast majority of your audience.
But that doesn't mean the I'm standing in front of you telling you this is the thing
that people are excited about and that's why they want to be there, primarily why they
want to be there.
So to me, that's what COVID has forced us to deal with even though I think we're still
all in deep denial about it and hoping that it'll go back to that.
And I think about 85% of it will.
We'll be able to pretend that that's really the way it is again and we'll forget the
lessons of this.
But technically what will come out of it or technologically will come out of it is a way
of providing a more dispersed experience through online education and these kinds of
remote things that we've learned and we'll have to come up with new ways to engage them
in the experience of college which includes not just the parties or whatever kids do,
but the learning part of it so that they actually come out four or five or six years
later with having actually learned something.
So I think the world will be radically different afterwards and I think technology will matter
for that just not in the way that the people who were building the technology originally
imagined it would be.
And I think this would have been true even without COVID, but COVID has accelerated that
reality.
So it's happening in two or three years or five years as opposed to 10 or 15.
That was an amazing answer that I did not understand.
So it was passionate and.
Shots fired.
But I don't know.
I just didn't know.
I'm not trying to criticize it.
I think I'm I don't think I'm getting it.
So you mentioned disaggregation.
So what's that?
Well, so, you know, the power, the power of technology that if you go on the West Coast
and hang out long enough is all about we're going to disaggregate these things together,
the books from the bookstore, you know, that kind of a thing.
And then suddenly Amazon controls the universe, right?
And technology is a disruptor, right?
And people have been predicting that for a higher education for a long time, but certainly
in.
So is this is this the sort of idea like students can aggregate on a campus someplace and then
take classes over the network anywhere?
This is what people thought was going to happen, or at least people claimed it was going to
happen, right?
Because my daughter is essentially doing that now.
She's on one campus, but learning in a different campus.
Sure.
And COVID makes that possible, right?
Or COVID makes that legal, all but avoidable, right?
But the idea originally was that, you know, you and I were going to create this machine
learning class and it was going to be great.
And then no one else would be the machine learning class everyone changed, right?
That was never going to happen.
But, you know, something like that you.
But I feel like you didn't address that.
So why, why, why is it that why, why?
I don't think that will be the thing that happens.
So the college experience, maybe I, maybe I missed what the college experience was.
I thought it was peers, like people hanging around.
A large part of it is peers.
Well, it's peers and independence.
Yeah.
But none of that.
You can do classes online for all of that.
No, no, no, no, no.
Because no, definitely.
We're social people, right?
So you want to be in the same room.
So one would take the classes.
That also has to be part of an experience.
It's in a context.
And the context is the university.
And by the way, it actually matters that Georgia Tech really is different from Brown.
I see, because then students can choose the kind of experience they think is going to
be best for them.
Okay.
I think we're giving too much agency to the students and making an informed decision.
Okay.
But the truth, but yes, they will make choices and they will have different experiences.
And some of those choices will be made for them.
Some of them will be choices they're making because they think it's this that or the other.
I just don't want to say that.
I don't want to give the idea.
It's not homogenous.
Yes.
It's certainly not homogenous.
Right.
I mean, Georgia Tech is different from Brown.
Brown is different from pick your favorite state school in Iowa, Iowa State, okay?
Which I guess is my favorite state school in Iowa.
But you know, these are all different.
They have different contexts.
And a lot of those contexts are, they're about history, yes, but they're also about the location
of where you are.
They're about the larger group of people who are around you, whether you're in Athens,
Georgia, and you're basically the only thing that's there as a university.
You're responsible for all the jobs or whether you're at Georgia State University, which is
an urban campus where you're surrounded by, you know, 6 million people in your campus
where it ends and begins in the city, ends and begins.
We don't know.
It actually matters whether it's a small campus or a large campus.
I mean, these things matter.
Why is it that if you go to Georgia Tech, you're like forever proud of that?
And you like say that to people at dinner, like bars and whatever.
And if you, not to, you know, if you get a degree at an online university somewhere,
you don't, that's not a thing that comes up at a bar.
Well, it's funny you say that.
So the students who take our online masters by several measures are more loyal than the
students who come on campus, certainly for the master's degree.
The reason for that, I think, and you'd have to ask them, but based on my conversations
with them, I feel comfortable saying this, is because this didn't exist before.
I mean, we talk about this online masters and that it's reaching, you know, 11,000 students
and that's an amazing thing.
And we're admitting everyone we believe who can succeed at a 60% acceptance rate.
It's amazing, right?
It's also a $6,600 degree.
The entire degree costs $6,600 or $7,000, depending on how long you take, a dollar
degree as opposed to $46,000 that cost you to come on campus.
So that feels, and I can do it while I'm working full time and I've got a family and a mortgage
and all these other things.
So it's an opportunity to do something you wanted to do, but you didn't think was possible
without giving up two years of your life as well as all the money and everything else,
the life that you had built.
So I think we created something that's had an impact, but importantly, we gave a set
of people opportunities they otherwise didn't feel they had.
So I think people feel very loyal about that.
And my biggest piece of evidence for that besides the surveys is that we have somewhere
north of 80 students, might be 100 at this point, who graduated, but come back in TA
for this class for basically minimum wage, even though they're working full time because
they believe they believe in sort of having that opportunity and they want to be a part
of something.
Now, will Generation 3 feel this way 15 years from now, will people have that same sense?
I don't know.
But right now, they kind of do.
And so it's not the online, it's a matter of feeling as if you're a part of something.
Right?
We're all very tribal.
Yeah.
Right?
And I think there's something very tribal about being a part of something like that.
Being on campus makes that easier, going through a shared experience makes that easier.
It's harder to have that shared experience if you're alone looking at a computer screen.
We can create ways to make that.
Is it possible?
It is possible.
The question is, it still is the intuition to me, and it was at the beginning when I
saw something like the online master's program, is that this is going to replace universities.
And I won't replace universities, but it will.
But like, why is it why?
Because it's living in a different part of the ecosystem, right?
The people who are taking it are already adults.
They've gone through their undergrad experience.
I think their goals have shifted from when they were 17.
They have other things that are going.
Right.
But it does do something really important, something very social and very important, right?
You know this whole thing about, you know, don't build the sidewalks, just leave the grass
and the students or the people will walk and you put the sidewalks where they create paths.
This is kind of a thing.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Their architects apparently believe that's the right way to do things.
The metaphor here is that we created this environment.
We didn't quite know how to think about the social aspect, but, you know, we didn't have
time to solve all, do all the social engineering, right?
The students did it themselves.
They created, you know, these groups like on Google Plus, they were like 30-something
groups created in the first year because somebody had these Google Plus.
And they created these groups and they divided up in ways that made sense.
We live in the same state or we're working on the same things or we have the same background
or whatever.
And they created these social things.
We sent them t-shirts and they were, we have all these great pictures of students putting
on their t-shirts as they travel around the world.
I climbed to this mountaintop, I'm putting this t-shirt on, I'm a part of this.
They were part of them.
They created the social environment on top of the social network and the social media
that existed to create this sense of belonging and being a part of something.
They found a way to do it, right?
And I think they had other, it scratched an itch that they had, but they had scratched
some of that itch that might have required to be physically in the same place long before.
Right?
So, I think, yes, it's possible and it's more than possible, it's necessary.
But I don't think it's going to replace the university as we know it.
The university as we know it will change.
But there's just a lot of power in the kind of rite of passage that's kind of going off
to yourself.
Now, maybe there'll be some other rite of passage that'll happen that'll drive us somewhere
else.
So, the university is such a fascinating mess of things.
So just even the faculty position is a fascinating mess.
Like it doesn't make any sense.
It stabilized itself, but like why are the world-class researchers spending a huge amount
of time or their time teaching and service, like you're doing like three jobs.
I mean, it turns out it's maybe an accident of history or human evolution, I don't know.
It seems like the people who are really good at teaching are often really good at research.
There seems to be a parallel there, but like it doesn't make any sense that you should
be doing that.
At the same time, it also doesn't seem to make sense that your place where you party
is the same place where you go to learn calculus or whatever.
But it's a safe space.
Safe space for everything.
Yeah.
Relatively speaking, it's a safe space.
No, by the way, I feel the need, very strongly, to point out that we are living in a very
particular weird bubble, right?
Most people don't go to college.
And by the way, the ones who do go to college, they're not 18 years old, right?
They're like 25 or something.
I forget the numbers.
You know, the places where we've been, where we are, they look like whatever we think the
traditional movie version of universities are, but for most people, it's not that way
at all.
We drop out of college, it's entirely for financial reasons, right?
So you know, we were talking about a particular experience.
And so for that set of people, which is very small, but larger than it was a decade or
two or three or four, certainly, ago, I don't think that will change.
My concern, which I think is kind of implicit in some of these questions, is that somehow
we will divide the world up further into the people who get to have this experience and
get to have the network and they sort of benefit from it and everyone else while increasingly
requiring that they have more and more credentials in order to get a job as a barista, right?
You got to have a master's degree in order to work at Starbucks, and we're going to force
people to do these things, but they're not going to get to have that experience and there'll
be a small group of people who do who continue to, you know, positive feedback, etc., etc.
I worry a lot about that, which is why for me, and by the way, here's an answer to your
question about faculty, which is why to me that you have to focus on access and the mission.
I think the reason, whether it's good, bad, or strange, I mean, I agree it's strange,
but I think it's useful to have the faculty member, particularly at large R1 universities
where we've all had experiences, that you tie what they get to do and with the fundamental
mission of the university and let the mission drive.
What I hear when I talk to faculty is they love their PhD students because they're creating,
they're reproducing basically, right, and it lets them do their research and multiply,
but they understand that the mission is the undergrads and so they will do it without
complaint mostly because it's a part of the mission and why they're here and they have
experiences with it themselves and it was important to get them where they were going.
The people tend to get squeezed in that, by the way, the master students, right, who are
neither the PhDs who are like us nor the undergrads.
We have already bought into the idea that we have to teach, though, that's increasingly
changing.
Anyway, I think tying that mission in really matters and it gives you a way to unify people
around making it an actual higher calling.
Education feels like more of a higher calling to me than even research because education,
you cannot treat it as a hobby if you're going to do it well.
But that's the pushback on this whole system is that you should, education be a full-time
job, right, and almost like research is a distraction from that.
Yes, although I think most of our colleagues, many of our colleagues would say that research
is the job and education is the distraction.
Right.
But that's the beautiful dance.
It seems to be that tension in itself seems to work, seems to bring out the best in the
faculty.
But I will point out two things.
One thing I'm going to point out and the other thing I want Michael to point out because
I think Michael is much closer to the sort of the ideal professor in some sense than
I am.
Well, he is a dean.
You're the platonic sense of a professor.
I don't know what he meant by that, but he is a dean.
So he has a different experience.
I'm giving him time to think of the profound thing he's going to say.
That's good.
But let me point this out, which is that we have lecturers in the college of computing
where I am.
There's 10 or 12 of them, depending on how you count as opposed to the 90 or so tenure
track faculty.
Those 10 lecturers who only teach, well, they don't only teach, they also do service.
Some of them do research as well, but primarily they teach.
They teach 50%, over 50% of our credit hours, and we teach everybody, right?
So they're doing not just, they're doing more than eight times the work of the tenure
track faculty, just if you're closer to nine or 10.
And that's including our grad courses, right?
So they're doing this.
They're teaching more.
They're touching more than anyone.
And they're beloved for it.
So we recently had a survey, we do these, everyone does these alumni surveys.
You hire someone from the outside to do whatever.
And I was really struck by something.
You saw these really cool numbers.
I'm not going to talk about it because it's all internal, confidential stuff.
But one thing I will talk about is there was a single question we asked our alumni.
These are people who graduated, born in the 30s and 40s, all the way up to people who
graduated last week, right?
Well, last semester.
Okay, good.
Time flies.
Yeah, time flies.
And there was a question.
Name a single person who had a strong positive impact on you.
Something like that.
I think it was special impact?
Yeah, special impact on you.
And then so they got all the answers from people and they created a word cloud.
And there was clear word cloud created by people who don't do word clouds for a living
because they had one person whose name like appeared like nine different times, like Phillip,
Phil, Dr. Phil, you know, but whatever.
But they got all this.
And I looked at it and I noticed something really cool.
The five people from the college of computing I recognized were in that cloud.
And four of them were lecturers, the people who teach, two of them relatively modern.
Both were chairs of our division of computing instruction, one retired, one is going to
retire soon.
And the other two were lecturers I remembered from the 1980s.
Two of those four.
Just by the way the fifth person was Charles.
That's not important.
I don't tell people that.
But the two of those people are teaching awards are named after.
Thank you, Michael.
Two of those are teaching awards are named after, right?
So when you ask students, alumni, people who are now 60, 70 years old even, you know,
who touch them?
They say the dean of students.
They say the big teachers who taught the big introductory classes.
They got me into it.
There's a guy named Richard Bark who's on there, who's known as a great teacher.
The Phil Adler guy who, I probably just said his last name wrong, but I know the first
name's Phil because he kept showing up over and over again.
Famous.
Adler is what it said.
Okay, good.
But different people spelled it differently.
So he appeared multiple times.
Right.
So he was a, clearly, he was a professor in the business school.
But when you read about him, I went to read about it, so I was curious who he was, you
know, it's all about his teaching and the students that he touched, right?
So whatever it is that we're doing and we think we're doing that's important or why
we think the university's function, the people who go through it, they remember the people
who were kind to them, the people who taught them something, and they do remember it.
They remember it later.
I think that's important.
That's what the mission matters.
Yeah.
To completely lose track of the fundamental problem of how do we replace the party aspect
of universities before we go to what makes the Platonic professor, do you think, like,
what in your sense is the role of MOOCs in this whole picture during COVID?
Like, should we desperately be clamoring to get back on campus or is this a stable place
to be for a little while?
I don't know.
I know that it's the online teaching experience and learning experience has been really rough.
I think that people find it to be a struggle in a way that's not a happy positive struggle,
that when you've got through it, you just feel like glad that it's over as opposed to
I've achieved something.
So, you know, I worry about that, but, you know, I worry about just even before this
happen, I worry about lecture teaching as how well is that actually really working as
far as a way to do education, as a way to inspire people.
I mean, all the data that I am aware of seems to indicate, and this kind of fits, I think,
with Charles' story, is that people respond to connection, right?
They actually feel, if they feel connected to the person teaching the class, they're
more likely to go along with it, they're more able to retain information, they're
more motivated to be involved in the class in some way, and that really matters, people.
You mean to the human themselves.
Yeah.
So, can't you do that actually perhaps more effectively online, like you mentioned science
communication?
So, I literally, I think, learned linear algebra from Gilbert Strang by watching MIT OpenCourseWare
when I was in drugs.
Like, and he was a personality, he was a bit like a, you know, tiny, in this tiny little
world of math, there's a bit of a rock star, right?
So, you kind of look up to that person.
Can't that replace the in-person education?
It can help.
I will point out something.
I can't share the numbers, but we have surveyed our students, and even though they have feelings
about what I would interpret as connection, I like that word, in the different modes of
classrooms.
There's no difference between how well they think they're learning.
For them, the thing that makes them unhappy is the situation they're in, and I think the
last lack of connection, it's not whether they're learning anything.
They seem to think they're learning something anyway, right?
In fact, they seem to think they're learning it equally well, presumably because the faculty
are putting in, or the instructors, more generally speaking, are putting in the energy and effort
to try to make certain that what they've curated can be expressed to them in a useful way.
But the connection is missing, and so there's huge differences in what they prefer, and as
far as I can tell, what they prefer is more connection, not less.
That connection just doesn't have to be physically in a classroom.
I mean, look, I used to teach 348 students on a machine learning class on campus.
Do you know why?
That was the biggest classroom on campus.
They're sitting in a theater, they're sitting in theater seats.
I'm literally on a stage looking down on them and talking to them, right?
There's no, I mean, we're not sitting down having a one-on-one conversation, reading
each other's body language, trying to communicate, and going, we're not doing any of that.
So if you're past the third row, it might as well be online anyway, is the kind of thing
that people have said.
Daphne has actually said some version of this, that online starts on the third row, or something
like that.
And I think that's not, yeah, I like it, I think it captures something important.
But people still came, by the way, even the people who had access to our material would
still come to class.
I mean, there's a certain element about looking to the person next to you, and just like their
presence there, their boredom, and like when the parts are boring, and their excitement
when the parts are exciting, and sharing in that unspoken kind of, yeah, communication.
In part, the connection is with the other people in the room.
Using the circus on TV alone is not really, they've ever been to a movie theater and been
the only one there in a comedy.
It's not as funny as when you're in a room full of people all laughing.
Well, you need, maybe you need just another person, as opposed to many, maybe there's
some kind of...
Well, there's different kinds of connection, right?
And there's different kinds of comedy.
Well, in the sense that...
As we're learning today.
I wasn't sure if that was going to land, but just the idea that different jokes, I've
now done a little bit of stand-up.
And so different jokes work in different size crowds too, right?
No, that's true.
Where sometimes if it's a big enough crowd, then even a really subtle joke can take root
someplace and then that cues other people, and it kind of...
There's a whole statistics of, I did this terrible thing to my brother.
So when I was really young, I decided that my brother was only laughing at sitcoms when
I laughed, but he was taking cues from me.
So I purposely didn't laugh just to see if I was right.
And did you laugh at non-funny things?
Yes.
You had really wanted to do both sides.
I did both sides.
And at the end of it, I told him what I did.
Oh, that's so funny.
He was very upset about this.
Yeah.
And from that day on...
He lost his sense of humor.
No, no, no, no.
Well, yes.
But from that day on, he laughed on his own.
He stopped taking cues from me.
I see.
And I say that it was a good thing that I did.
Yes, yes.
It was mostly me.
It saved that man's life.
Yes, but it was mostly me.
But it's true, though.
It's true, right?
That people...
I think you're right.
Okay.
So where does that get us?
That gets us the idea that, I mean, certainly movie theaters are a thing, right, where people
like to be watching together, even though the people on the screen aren't really co-present
with the people in the audience.
The audience is co-present with themselves.
By the way, at that point, it's an open question that's being raised by this, whether movies
will no longer be a thing because Netflix's audience is growing.
So that's...
It's a very parallel question for education.
Will movie theaters still be a thing in 2021?
No, but I think the argument is that there is a feeling of being in the crowd that isn't
replicated by being at home, watching it, and that there's value in that.
And then I think just...
But...
But...
It scales better online.
But I feel like we're having a conversation about whether concerts will still exist at
after the invention of the record or the CD or wherever it is, right?
They won't.
You're right.
Concerts are dead.
Well, okay.
I think the joke is only funny if you say it before now.
Right.
Yeah, that's true.
We'll fix it in post.
It's like three years ago.
It's like, well, no, obviously, concerts are still...
I'll wait to publish this until we have a vaccine.
You know, we'll fix it in post.
But I think the important thing is...
Fix the virus.
The virus.
Concerts changed, right?
Concert changed.
First off, movie theaters weren't this way, right?
In the 60s and 70s, they weren't like this.
Blockbusters were basically what...
Jaws and Star Wars created blockbusters, right?
Before then, there weren't.
The whole shared summer experience didn't exist in our lifetimes, right?
Yeah.
Certainly, you were well into adulthood by the time this was true, right?
So it's just a very different...
It's very different.
So what we've been experiencing the last 10 years is not like the majority of human history.
But more importantly, concerts, right?
Concerts mean something different.
People don't go to concerts anymore, like there's an age where you care about it.
You sort of stop doing it, but you keep listening to music or whatever and da, da, da, da, da.
So I think that's a painful way of saying that it will change.
It was not the same thing as it going away.
Replace is too strong of a word, but it will change.
It has to.
I actually...
To push back, I wonder because I think you're probably just throwing that your intuition
out.
Oh, absolutely.
But it's possible that concerts, more people go to concerts now, but obviously much more
people listen to...
Well, that's dumb.
Then before there was records.
It's possible to argue that if you look at the data, that it just expanded the pie of
what music listening means.
So it's possible that universities grow in the parallel or the theaters grow, but also
more people get to watch movies, more people get to be educated.
I hope that.
Yeah.
And to the extent that we can grow the pie and have education be not just something you
do for four years when you're done with your other education, but it'd be a more lifelong
thing, that would have tremendous benefits, especially as the economy and the world change
rapidly.
People need opportunities to stay abreast of these changes.
And so I don't know, that's all part of the ecosystem.
It's all to the good.
I mean, I'm not going to have an argument about whether we lost fidelity when we went
from Laserdist to DVDs or record players to CDs.
I mean, I'm willing to grant that that is true, but convenience matters and the ability
to do something that you couldn't do otherwise because that convenience matters.
And you can tell me I'm only getting 90% of the experience, but I'm getting the experience.
I wasn't getting it before or wasn't lasting as long or it wasn't as easy.
I mean, this just seems, this just seems straightforward to me.
It's going to, it's going to change.
It is for the good that more people get access and it is our job to do two separate things.
One to educate them and make access available.
That's our mission.
But also for very simple selfish reasons, we need to figure out how to do it better so
that we individually stay in business.
We can do both of those things at the same time.
They are not in, they may be intention, but they are not mutually exclusive.
So you've educated some scary number of people.
So you've seen a lot of people succeed, find their path through life.
Is there a device that you can give to a young person today about computer science education,
about education in general, about life, about whatever the journey that one takes in there,
maybe in their teens, in their early 20s, sort of in those underground years as you
try to go through the essential process of partying and not go into classes and yet somehow
try to get a degree.
If you get to the point where you're far enough up in the hierarchy of needs that you can
actually make decisions like this, then find the thing that you're passionate about and
pursue it.
And sometimes it's the thing that drives your life and sometimes it's secondary.
And you'll do other things because you've got to eat.
You've got to family, you've got to feed, you've got people you have to help or whatever.
And I understand that and it's not easy for everyone, but always take a moment or two
to pursue the things that you love, the things that bring passion and happiness to your life.
And if you don't, I know that sounds corny, but I genuinely believe it.
And if you don't have such a thing, then you're lying to yourself.
You have such a thing.
You just have to find it and it's okay if it takes you a long time to get there.
Rodney Dangerfield became a comedian in his 50s, I think, certainly wasn't his 20s.
And lots of people failed for a very long time before getting to where they were going.
You know, I try to have hope and it wasn't obvious.
I mean, you and I talked about the experience that I had a long time ago with a particular
police officer.
It wasn't my first one.
It wasn't my last one.
But you know, in my view, I wasn't supposed to be here after that and I'm here.
So it's all gravy.
So you might as well go ahead and grab life as you can because of that.
That's sort of how I see it.
All recognizing, again, the delusion matters, right, allow yourself to be deluded, allow
yourself to believe that it's all going to work out.
Just don't be so deluded that you miss the obvious and you're going to be fine.
It's going to be there.
It's going to be there.
It's going to work out.
What do you think?
I like to say, choose your parents wisely because that has a big impact on your life.
Different.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a whole lot of things that you don't get to pick and whether you get
to have one kind of life or a different kind of life can depend a lot on things out of
your control.
But I really do believe in the passion and excitement thing.
I was talking to my mom on the phone the other day and essentially what came out is that
computer science is really popular right now and I get to be a professor teaching something
that's very attractive to people and she was trying to give me some appreciation for how
foresightful I was for choosing this line of work as if somehow I knew that this is
what was going to happen in 2020.
But that's not how it went for me at all.
I studied computer science because I was just interested.
It was just so interesting to me.
I didn't think it would be particularly lucrative.
When I've done everything I can to keep it as lucrative as possible, some of my friends
and colleagues have not done that and I pride myself on my ability to remain un-rich.
But I do believe that I'm glad that it worked out for me.
It could have been like, oh, what I was really fascinated by is this particular kind of engraving
that nobody cares about.
But so I got lucky and the thing that I cared about happened to be a thing that other people
eventually cared about.
But I don't think I would have had a fun time choosing anything else.
This was the thing that kept me interested and engaged.
One thing that people tell me especially around early undergraduate and the internet
is part of the problem here is they say they're passionate about so many things.
How do I choose a thing?
Which is a harder thing for me to know what to do with.
I mean, a long time ago, I walked down a hallway and I took a left turn.
I could have taken a right turn and my world could be better or it could be worse.
I have no idea.
I have no way of knowing.
Is there anything about this particular hallway that's relevant or you're just in general
choices?
Yeah, you were on the left.
It sounds like you regret not taking the right turn.
Oh, no, not at all.
You brought it up.
Well, because there was a turn there.
On the left was Michael Liman's office.
These sorts of things happen.
But here's the thing.
On the right, by the way, it was just a blank wall.
It wasn't a huge choice.
It would have really hurt.
He tried first.
No, but it's true.
I think about Ron Brockman.
I took a trip I wasn't supposed to take and I ended up talking to Ron about this and I
ended up going down this entire path that allowed me to, I think, get tenure.
But by the way, I decided to say yes to something that didn't make any sense and I went down
this educational path.
But it would have been, you know, who knows, right?
Maybe if I hadn't done that, I would be a billionaire right now.
I'd be Elon Musk.
My life could be so much better.
My life could also be so much worse.
You know, you just got to feel that sometimes you have decisions you're going to make.
You cannot know what's going to do.
You should think about it, right?
Some things are clearly smarter than other things.
You got to play the odds a little bit.
But in the end, if you've got multiple choices or lots of things you think you might love,
go with the thing that you actually love, the thing that jumps out at you and sort of pursue
it for a little while.
The first thing that will happen is you took a left turn instead of a right turn and you
ended up merely happy.
Beautiful.
So, so accepting, so taking the step and just accepting, accepting that that don't like
question, question the choice.
I like to think that life is long and there's time to actually pursue.
Every once in a while, you have to put on a leather suit and make a thriller video.
Every once in a while.
Every once in a while.
If I ever get a chance to put on a leather suit.
I'm doing it.
Yeah.
I was told that you actually danced, but that part was edited out.
I don't dance.
There was a thing where we did do the zombie thing.
We did do the zombie thing.
Yeah.
That wasn't edited out.
It just wasn't put into the final thing.
I'm quite happy.
There was a reason for that too, right?
Like I wasn't wearing something right.
There was a reason for that.
I can't remember what it was.
No leather suit.
Is that what it was?
I can't remember.
Anyway, the right thing happened.
Yeah.
Exactly.
You took the left turn and ended up being the right thing.
A lot of people ask me that are a little bit tangential to the programming, the computing
world, and they're interested to learn programming, like all kinds of disciplines that are outside
of the particular discipline of computer science.
What advice do you have for people that want to learn how to program or want to either
taste this little skill set or discipline or try to see if it can be used somehow in
their own life?
What stage of life are they in?
One of the magic things about the internet of the people that write me is I don't know.
Because my answer is different.
My daughter is taking AP computer science right now.
Hi, Johnny.
She's amazing and doing amazing things.
My son's beginning to get interested and I'll be really curious where he takes it.
I think his mind actually works very well for this sort of thing and she's doing great.
But one of the things I have to tell her all the time is she points, well, I want to make
a rhythm game.
I want to go for two weeks and then build a rhythm game, show me how to build a rhythm
game.
Start small, learn the building blocks and however you take the time.
Have patience.
Eventually, you'll build a rhythm game.
I was in grad school when I suddenly woke up one day over the Royal East and I thought,
wait a minute, I'm a computer scientist.
I should be able to write Pac-Man in an afternoon.
And I did.
Not with great graphics.
It was actually a very cool game.
I had to figure out how the ghost moved and everything and I did it in an afternoon and
Pascal on an old Apple 2GS.
But if I had started out trying to build Pac-Man, I think it probably would have ended very
poorly for me.
Luckily back then, there weren't these magical devices we call phones and software everywhere
to give me this illusion that I could create something by myself from the basics inside
of a weekend like that.
I mean, that was a culmination of years and years and years right before I decided I should
be able to write this and I could.
So my advice if you're early on is you've got the internet.
There are lots of people there to give you the information.
Find someone who cares about this.
Remember they've been doing it for a very long time.
Take it slow.
Learn the little pieces.
Get excited about it and then keep the big projects you want to build in mind.
You'll get there soon enough because as a wise man once said, life is long.
Sometimes it doesn't seem that long.
But it is long and you'll have enough time to build it all out.
All the information is out there, but start small.
Generate fibonautic numbers.
That's not exciting, but it'll get you programming language.
Well, there's only one programming language, it's Lisp.
But if you have to pick a programming language, I guess in today's, what would I do?
I guess I'd do.
Python is basically Lisp, but with better syntax.
Blast with me.
Yeah.
With C syntax.
How about that?
And C syntax is better than anything?
Anyway, also, I'm going to answer Python despite what you said.
Tell me your story about somebody's dissertation that had a Lisp program in it.
It was so funny.
This is Dave's.
Dave's dissertation.
Dave McAllister, who was a professor at MIT for a while, and then he came to our lab.
And now he's at Technology Technical Institute in Chicago.
A brilliant guy.
Such an interesting guy.
Anyway, his thesis, it was a theorem prover, and he decided to have, as an appendix, his
actual code, which of course was all written in Lisp, because of course it was, and like
the last 20 pages are just right parentheses.
It's wonderful.
It's like, that's programming right there.
Pages are pages of right parentheses.
Anyway, Lisp is the only real language, but I understand that that's not necessarily the
place where you start.
Python is just fine.
Python is good.
If you're of a certain age, if you're really young and trying to figure out graphical languages
that let you kind of see how the thing works, then that's fine too.
They're all fine.
It almost doesn't matter.
But there are people who spend a lot of time thinking about how to build languages that
get people in.
The question is, are you trying to get in and figure out what it is, or do you already know
what you want?
And that's why I asked you what stage of life people are in, because if you're different
stages of life, you would attack it differently.
The answer to that question of which language keeps changing.
I mean, there's some value to exploring a lot of people write to me about Julia.
There's these like more modern languages that keep being invented, Rust and Kotlin.
There's stuff that for people who love functional languages like Lisp, apparently there's echoes
of that, but much better in the modern languages.
It's worthwhile to, especially when you're learning languages, it feels like it's okay
to try one that's not like the popular one.
Oh yeah.
But you want some simple.
And I think you get that way of thinking almost no matter what language.
And if you push far enough, like it can be assembly language, but you need to push pretty
far before you start to hit the really deep concepts that you would get sooner in other
languages.
But like, I don't know, computation is kind of computation is kind of touring equivalent,
is kind of computation.
And so, it matters how you express things, but you have to build out that mental structure
in your mind.
And I don't think it's super matters which language.
I mean, it matters a little because some things are just at the wrong level of abstraction.
I think assembly is at the wrong level of abstraction for someone coming in new.
I think that if you start- For someone coming in new.
Yes.
For frameworks, big frameworks are quite a bit.
You've got to get to the point where I want to learn a new language, which means I just
pick up a reference book and I think of a project and I go through it in a weekend.
You've got to get there.
You're right, though.
The languages that are designed for that are- It almost doesn't matter.
Pick the ones that people have built tutorials and infrastructure around to help you get
kind of ease into it.
Because it's hard.
I mean, I did this little experiment once.
I was teaching intro to CS in the summer as a favor.
Which is- Anyway.
I was teaching intro to CS as a favor.
And it was very funny because I'd go in every single time and I would think to myself, how
am I possibly going to fill up an hour and a half talking about for loops, right?
And there wasn't enough time.
It took me a while to realize this, right?
There are only three things, right?
There's reading from a variable, writing to a variable, and conditional branching.
Everything else is syntactic sugar, right?
The syntactic sugar matters.
But that's it.
And when I say that's it, I don't mean it's simple.
I mean, it's hard.
Like conditional branching, loops, variable, those are really hard concepts.
So you shouldn't be discouraged by this.
Here's the simple experiment.
I'm going to ask you a question now.
You ready?
Uh-oh.
X equals three.
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Y equals four.
Okay.
What is X?
Three.
What is Y?
Four.
Y equals S.
I'm going to mess this up.
No?
Oh, it's easy.
Y equals X.
Y equals X.
What is Y?
Three.
That's right.
X equals seven.
What is Y?
That's one of the trickiest things to get for programmers that there's a memory and the
variables are pointing to a particular thing in memory.
And sometimes the languages hide that from you and they bring it closer to the way you
think mathematics works.
Right.
So in fact, Mark Guzdal, who worries about these sorts of things or used to worry about
these sorts of things anyway, had this kind of belief that actually people, when they
see these statements, X equals something Y equals something Y equals X, that you have
now made a mathematical statement that Y and X are the same.
But you can if you just put like an anchor in front of it.
Yes, but people, that's not what you're doing, right?
I thought, and I kind of asked the question and I think had some evidence for this, I'm
sorry, they study, is that most of the people who didn't know the answer, weren't sure about
the answer, they had used spreadsheets.
And so it's by reference or by name really, right?
And so depending upon what you think they are, you get completely different answers.
The fact that I could go or one could go two thirds of the way through a semester and people
still hadn't figured out in their heads, when you say Y equals X, what that meant, tells
you it's actually hard because all those answers are possible and in fact, when you said, oh,
if you just put an ampersand in front of it, I mean, that doesn't make any sense for an
intro class.
And of course a lot of language don't even give you the ability to think about it in terms
of ampersand.
Do we want to have a 45 minute discussion about the difference between equal EQ and
equal in Lisp, I know you do, but you know, you could do that, this is actually really
hard stuff.
So you shouldn't be, it's not too hard, we all do it, but you shouldn't be discouraged.
It's why you should start small so that you can figure out these things so you have the
right model in your head so that when you write the language, you can execute it and
build the machine that you want to build, right?
Yeah, the funny thing about programming on those very basic things is the very basics
are not often made explicit, which is actually what drives everybody away from basically
any discipline, but programming is just another one, like even a simpler version of the equal
sign that I kind of forget is in mathematics, equals is not assignment.
Yeah.
Like, I think basically every single programming language with just a few handful of exceptions
equals is assignment.
And you have some other operator for equality.
And even that, everyone kind of knows it once you started doing it, but you need to say
that explicitly or you need to realize it yourself.
Otherwise, you might be stuck for, you said like half a semester, you could be stuck for
quite a long time.
And I think also part of the programming is being okay in that state of confusion for
a while.
So the debugging point is like, I just wrote two lines of code, why doesn't this work?
And staring at that for like hours and trying to figure out, and then every once in a while
you just have to restart your computer and everything works again.
And then you just kind of stare into the void with the tear slowly rolling down your
eye.
By the way, the fact that they didn't get this actually had no impact on, I mean, they
were still able to do their assignments.
Right.
But their misunderstanding wasn't being revealed to them by the problems that we were giving
them.
It's a bit profound actually, yeah.
I wrote a program a long time ago, actually for my master's thesis, and in C++ I think,
or C, I guess it was C. And it was all memory management and terrible.
And it wouldn't work for a while.
And it was some kind of, it was clear to me that it was overwriting memory.
And I just couldn't.
I was like, look, I got a paper done, time for this.
So I basically declared a variable at the front in the main that was like 400K, just
an array.
And it worked because wherever I was scribbling over memory, it would scribble into that space
and it didn't matter.
And so I never figured out what the bug was, but I did create something to sort of deal
with it.
To work around it.
And it, you know, that's crazy.
That's crazy.
It was okay.
Because that's what I wanted.
It was about memory management to go, you know, management to go, you know, I'm just
going to create an empty array here and hope that that deals with the scribbling memory
problem.
And it did.
That takes a long time to figure out.
And by the way, the language you first learned probably is garbage collection anyway.
So you're not even going to come across, you're not going to come across that problem.
So we talked about the Minsky idea of hating everything you do and hating yourself.
So let's end on a question that's going to make both of you very uncomfortable.
Which is what is your, Charles, what's your favorite thing that you're grateful for about
Michael and Michael?
What is your favorite thing that you're grateful for about Charles?
Well, that answer is actually quite easy, his friendship.
He stole the easy answer.
I did.
Yeah.
I can tell you what I hate about Charles.
He steals my good answers.
The thing I like most about Charles, he sees the world in it in a similar enough but different
way that it's sort of like having another life.
It's sort of like I get to experience things that I wouldn't otherwise get to experience
because I would not naturally gravitate to them that way.
And so he just shows me a whole other world.
It's awesome.
Yeah.
The inner product is not zero for sure.
It's not quite one, 0.7 maybe.
Just enough that you can learn.
Just enough that you can learn.
That's the definition of friendship.
The inner product is 0.7.
Yeah.
I think so.
That's the answer to life really.
Charles sometimes believes in me when I have not believed in me.
He also sometimes works as an outboard confidence that he has so much confidence and self,
I don't know, comfortableness that I feel better a little bit.
If he thinks I'm okay, then maybe I'm not as bad as I think I am.
At the end of the day, luck favors the Charles.
It's a huge honor to talk with you.
Thank you so much for taking this time, wasting your time with me.
It was an awesome conversation.
You guys are an inspiration to a huge number of people and to me.
So really enjoyed this.
Thanks for talking to me.
I enjoyed it as well.
Thank you so much.
Thanks.
And by the way, if luck favors the Charles, then it's certainly the case that I've been
very lucky to tell you.
I'm going to add that part out.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Charles Isbell and Michael Littman.
And thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, Super Nutritional Drink, Eight Sleep, Self-Cooling
Mattress, Masterclass Online Courses from some of the most amazing humans in history,
and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends.
Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars Napa Podcast, follow
on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Desmond Tutu.
Don't raise your voice, improve your argument.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.