Kourosh Alizedah Kourosh: [00:00:00] One word that's very commonly used in philosophy is the word substance and in everyday language, it just means like stuff. But in philosophy, it means like, you know, the substrate upon which all the properties change, right? So like, what is the substance of a stone that stays the same even when it changes color or breaks or something like that? Harpreet: [00:00:30] What's up, everybody, welcome to the artist Data Science Podcast, the only self-development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours you can register to attend by going to Bitly.com/adsoh forward slash a d s o h i. Look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode, and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review. Our guest today is a former philosophy lecturer turned Data scientist. His interest in philosophy began in childhood when his dad reprimanded his laziness by quoting poor communities and saying nothing comes from nothing. Since then, he's been trying his best to figure out what Harpreet: [00:01:36] Cryptic Harpreet: [00:01:37] Phrases like that could possibly mean. That quest for understanding led him Harpreet: [00:01:43] To quickly fall in love with the discipline Harpreet: [00:01:46] Of philosophy and its ability to deepen our understanding and Harpreet: [00:01:50] Appreciation of the world. Harpreet: [00:01:52] Nowadays, he uses Data to do the same, Harpreet: [00:01:55] But with more practical Harpreet: [00:01:57] Applications, leveraging his background [00:02:00] as a researcher and Harpreet: [00:02:01] Educator, and combining Harpreet: [00:02:02] That with a strong set of technical skills in analyzing data and producing compelling insights and visualizations. So please help me in welcoming our guest today, the creator of the Philosophy Data Project, a website that uses a set of dashboards to enable users to apply data driven tools to the history of philosophy. Dr Kourosh Elisabet Couchman, so excited to have you here. I know I probably butchered the first name. Tell me one more time, man. Kourosh: [00:02:34] It's all good. Thank you. Harpreet: [00:02:35] Rush rush, right? Oh man. Hey, well, I'm super, super excited to have you here, man. I really enjoyed digging through your website. I thought it was just such a really interesting collision of of disciplines, philosophy and Data and what you set up. I'm really excited to learn more about that. Plus, you know, just that love philosophy. So I always love talking to philosophers, so this should be a cool conversation. But before we get into all that stuff, let's talk a little bit about you. Where did you grow up and what was it like? Kourosh: [00:03:05] There was born in England, but we moved a lot when I was a kid, so probably I really grew up in Colorado was there since third grade. So I mean, I don't know. Colorado is nice. It's got snow and it's got sunshine. Yeah, I don't know what else to say about me. Clearly not a super formative experience. Harpreet: [00:03:23] Yeah, I mean, hey, man, Colorado is awesome, man. It's yeah, yeah. I've been there a couple of times. I was in Denver, I think back in October of twenty nineteen before all this pandemic, shit went down and one of my buddies lived in this neighborhood called the rhino. And it was cool, man, let a cool beer, breweries and stuff out there. Yeah, yeah. And if you find a breweries, but when you're in high school, like worry you up to like, what did you think your feature is going to look like? Kourosh: [00:03:51] Honestly, I read a lot of like crazy books I read like House of Leaves and like this author called Borgias, which is just like all these like wackiest short stories [00:04:00] you might read him. And I was just like, You know what? I like crazy stories like this, so maybe I'll like, write a book, and I was like, I'll probably just like, be 50 and like, answer emails from people who read my books or whatever and read more books. And that would be pretty cool. And that was like my dream back then. Harpreet: [00:04:18] So, so how different is life now than than what you were imagining? I'm pretty different. Kourosh: [00:04:27] Well, obviously I didn't end well. I did write a book, but it wasn't really like that. And I, you know, I fell in love and I have a family and all this. So it's a little different than the solitary author, whatever visions of a high schooler. Harpreet: [00:04:40] And I ended Kourosh: [00:04:41] Up doing tech instead of just doing that philosophy. Harpreet: [00:04:44] Yes. So you studied, you studied all the way up through your PhD in philosophy, but they made the transition to data science. Talk to us about how that happened. Kourosh: [00:04:56] Well, I really like philosophy. I mean, I was reading those crazy books as a high schooler, and then I was like, I want to write a book. And I realized the things I liked about those books were the ideas and not really the plots. I was like, I could just study ideas. That's what philosophy is. And so I got really into it and I was like, just really enjoying it. But at the end of the day, what philosophy does is it like helps you understand stuff. But, you know, understanding isn't really worth a lot unless you can make it do stuff, you know? And what can philosophy help you do? Not really. A lot, you know, whereas the Data science seemed like a way to both get that kind of like interesting insights about the world vibe, but also get practical stuff. You could apply, you know, you could figure out like exactly the numbers on what's going on and how you could change this thing to affect that thing, right? Whereas philosophy was like really cool and abstract, and that's part of its charm. But at the end of the Harpreet: [00:05:53] Day, you can't you don't know what Kourosh: [00:05:54] To do to get something to happen. Harpreet: [00:05:56] I mean, back in those those days, the classical days, right, like a lot of [00:06:00] the the philosophers were also like mathematicians and scientists and things like that like. So it definitely very useful stuff like. So how does that how does that fit into like, you know, the modern day, like our philosophers still like that? Like, do you still have philosophers who study, quote unquote philosophy and ideas? But they're also like, you know, like you doing Data type of stuff? Kourosh: [00:06:21] Yeah, I think there are those people, they're not as recognized as philosophers. Maybe so just as humanity's gone on, we've become more and more specialized, right? And philosophy is part of that. And it's kind of antithetical to the nature of philosophy to become specialized because it's such a holistic discipline like the point of it is to try to understand everything in one big system. I mean, that's like what I think the point of it is, I guess, but that's one way of understanding what's going on. And to do that, you need to like, have a lot of information about a lot of different things. But in today's society, everything gets specialized. So philosophy became its own discipline, its own profession, and those people in the academies are doing philosophy in their own way. But I mean, if you want my real opinion, everyone's doing philosophy. They're just maybe not aware that they're doing it. So you're probably doing it every day. And people who are doing things like responsible tech, that's definitely an intersection of philosophy and technology. Harpreet: [00:07:15] People who are just thinking about environmentalism, Kourosh: [00:07:18] There's a kind of philosophy behind environmentalism and how we should approach it, you know? Harpreet: [00:07:22] So it's kind of just everywhere. Kourosh: [00:07:25] I feel like I'm not totally answering your question, but yeah, no, no, Harpreet: [00:07:28] Yeah, but that's that's an important point. Philosophy definitely, definitely is everywhere. So I was I'm a huge fan of these Harpreet: [00:07:34] Shows on Harpreet: [00:07:36] Amazon Prime. You can order a channel add on called the Great Courses. Kourosh: [00:07:41] I'm not sure. Yeah, I've heard those do. Harpreet: [00:07:43] The great courses are amazing and they've got a whole bunch of philosophy lectures and they all have stuff like, you know, the big questions of philosophy, the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of science. And like all these different types of courses, just phenomenal. Amazing. What would you say? The philosophy [00:08:00] of Data science is if we had to kind of pin that, would there be a philosophy to Data science or of Data science? Kourosh: [00:08:09] Yeah. So usually when you see those things that are like the philosophy of X, they're trying to like, first off, they figure out questions that are sort of fundamental to the science, but probably not explored by the science itself. So Data scientists, you know, they're just like building models and like chugging the numbers and whatever making predictions. But if you did the philosophy of that, you'd be wondering how do predictions even work? Like, can we trust predictions? And if so, why can numbers really model everything? Or are there things that numbers just can't model, right? Is doing data science good? Like is it obviously it gets some kind of result, but are those results we want? Are they results that are good for the human nature? You're morally good or whatever that Harpreet: [00:08:52] Kind of thing? Or in another Kourosh: [00:08:54] Just like super basic question like what is Data right? Is Data numbers? Does it have to be numerical? I mean, there's text data, but when you do NLP, you almost always turn it into Harpreet: [00:09:03] Numbers, right? Kourosh: [00:09:04] So is there something about number ness that is it's essential to Data is Data just like, are my AIs taking in Data every time they open? Does that count right? Like what exactly counts as Data for data science might be different than what counts as data in a casual sense. Harpreet: [00:09:21] Let's break that down a little bit. What is Data? If we think about that? Like what is Data? How is it different from like information or data and information? The same thing? Kourosh: [00:09:32] I don't know. I mean, maybe as the words are used in everyday language, they're probably the same. In the context of Data science, it seems like Data is a lot about relationships between things and it's a lot about. Like a quantity, not just like a single fact, right? Like in Data science, you can't do anything. If I told you it's 25 degrees outside, you wouldn't be like, cool, let me model that you can't model anything, right? You need a [00:10:00] lot of it to make a trend and turn something into something useful, you know? So Data might be like a body of information, a way to say it. Harpreet: [00:10:09] Like if it's twenty five degrees Celsius, I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd get my shorts on put on. I'd start. I start modeling outside. Kourosh: [00:10:16] Yeah, get your partner to get you a photograph, man. You'd be a good model. Harpreet: [00:10:21] So I mean, there's a lot of interesting, interesting things to to kind of dig into there. But but first, let's let's talk about the philosophy Data project, right? So what is this all about? Kourosh: [00:10:34] Well, I just thought I left philosophy, and I'm kind of a sucker for it, and I was like, How can I use data science to work on philosophy stuff? And I just thought, Well, I liked working with texts. Let's get some books and run some numbers on them, right? Harpreet: [00:10:49] And that's what I did in the end. Kourosh: [00:10:51] The site itself has like four different features. I kind of developed and made available to people like these four different Harpreet: [00:10:56] Dashboards working on another Kourosh: [00:10:58] One. And there's all these like ideas in my head and we'll see which ones come to fruition and when. And I try to add texts every week, Harpreet: [00:11:06] But the goal of Kourosh: [00:11:07] It was just to use data science Harpreet: [00:11:09] Tools to enable Kourosh: [00:11:11] The exploration of philosophy, because reading a book of philosophy takes a long time getting the most common words and like core concepts like that, you can do it at the drop of a hat, you know? Harpreet: [00:11:22] And did you kind of take on this project as a way to teach yourself Data science? Like, how did that happen? Because you didn't go to school to study like math or coding or software engineering or anything like that? But you've got this amazing website. I've got this amazing app and you're doing all this data science stuff that you have to teach yourself all that from the ground up. What was that process like? Kourosh: [00:11:41] Well, I went to a flat iron Data science bootcamp. Ok? And this was my capstone project. The capstone was just the classifier. And so then I was like, Well, I already have this Data. I've cleaned the texts I have like this, you know, three hundred thousand lines csv. I may as well like, do more with it. So then I did. Harpreet: [00:12:00] So, [00:12:00] so the idea was just kind of colliding to like, you know, two things that you're really interested in in making something new. And I think that's super, super creative that are like, why analyze philosophy and like have all the different types of Harpreet: [00:12:12] Texts, why Harpreet: [00:12:13] Philosophy was just because that was the thing that you were most interested in. Was there a particular question you're trying Harpreet: [00:12:20] To answer or truth you're Harpreet: [00:12:22] Trying to get to? Kourosh: [00:12:23] Probably for two reasons. So first off, obviously, I was just like into it. But the other reason is. Kind of related to like what is a philosophy which is like super contestable. But here's my take. Basically, everyone has these kind of core beliefs. You know, if I ask you, is capital punishment right? Should people be killed for crimes? Is evil in the world? Does God exist? What happens after we die? Is the world totally physical? Or are there spirits and souls? Those kinds of questions? You probably don't spend all day thinking about it, but you probably have answers to them. And those answers aren't like just fun facts that you think about. They're probably deep parts of how you believe the world works, and they probably have a strong influence on your politics, your relationships, everything you do. And so what a philosophy is, is the answers to those core questions. So when someone says, what's your personal philosophy, the kind of asking you when it comes down to it? Well, how would you answer those basic questions? That's why I liked philosophy as a discipline, because when you're doing philosophy and studying it, you're trying to get all your answers to, like, fit together and make sense and be understood in a detailed way. Kourosh: [00:13:38] Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. And sometimes when you're doing that, you get led to crazy places you like. You think, Well, I think, you know, everything is physical. Well, that means nothing happens after I die, and it means that I don't have a soul. And like all these crazy stuff, starts to break out of it, you know? But anyway, let's leave that aside if that's what a philosophy is. Then if we can understand people's [00:14:00] philosophies, then we can really understand them and help them understand themselves. Right. So the overall goal was to build this classifier so that I could take the texts of philosophy, break down what are their like most relevant features and use them to classify texts from everyday people. So you could read all your Facebook posts or your Twitters tweets and it'll say, Well, you tend to tweet like a plainest, so maybe you are a plainness and then you could do some more research and figure out what is a plate A.. Do I believe these things? What would other people say about these things if I believe them? Harpreet: [00:14:37] You know what I mean? Kourosh: [00:14:38] And I mean, obviously, you could use it for like marketing or whatever other purposes. But yeah, so why would we want to analyze philosophy? Because analyzing philosophy is like analyzing the world and your own worldview at the same time, you know? Harpreet: [00:14:52] And so you mentioned some some the you had was, say, 300000 lines of text that went into this, what was the what was that the Data that that went into this project with the raw data? Kourosh: [00:15:03] Yeah. At this point, probably more than that, but it's all books. So there's Project Gutenberg. I'm sure people have heard of that. That's got a lot of good books on there. Some of them are like a little outdated, but whatever. And then I also just had PDFs of a lot of great texts in the history of philosophy, and I use those. I had to clean a lot of Harpreet: [00:15:19] Stuff, but Kourosh: [00:15:20] We got there in the end. Harpreet: [00:15:22] Yeah. And I think the audience would really love to hear about kind of like the process that you went about doing this Project Gutenberg, you just download a bunch of different text files that are all just philosophical texts and then you just put them all into whatever database. Or maybe you got no SQL database. I don't know. How are you doing this? Like, what's the what's the steps to go from text into, you know, building the model kind of walk us through that? Kourosh: [00:15:48] Yeah, sure. Harpreet: [00:15:48] So a text is like a very long string, right? Kourosh: [00:15:52] So that is really long string. You can't really do a lot with a very long string, so you have to break it down, right? But in order to break it down, I [00:16:00] used to shoot off a couple library. Oh, well, I'm sure it's all on GitHub. You can look out the library anyway, so I broke it down into into sentences. So each line of this csv is a sentence and associated with it is a tokenized sentence so you can get the words out and like the length of it and that kind of thing, you know, things like basic stats. How did I do all that? Ok, so I had like the the book itself, Gutenberg is pretty good because they don't have like page numbers. It's all just one big text file you just have to like. Click the contents table and click the copyright junk at the end. And then you got the book. Harpreet: [00:16:35] You know, that's pretty Kourosh: [00:16:37] Much Harpreet: [00:16:37] Fine, but PDFs Kourosh: [00:16:39] Have, like all kinds of nonsense in them, you know? And I'm sure anyone who's worked with PDFs can relate like you get a PDF. I turned them all into text files because Python can't really read PDFs that well, you mean like PDF Reader only reads them when they are text PDFs, when a lot of PDFs are image Harpreet: [00:16:57] Pdfs of books, Kourosh: [00:16:59] You know? So I had to like clean all that. I had like one big function that would just like, clean out a lot of common nonsense, and then that did pretty decent. But in addition to that, I had a lot of weird, you know, just this word would come out funny in this text. So I had to make like a dictionary, probably like three hundred and four hundred lines long of like when you see this, fix it to that, you know? And that was all like kind of ad hoc as I would see weird stuff come up. I would fix it and go back and like, iterate. So yeah, and in the end, I had just a giant CSV, but then I uploaded it to a SQL server for my Heroku apps that run the site. Harpreet: [00:17:38] And like, when you had all that text and stuff like that, it's ready to to do some analysis. What type of like Harpreet: [00:17:44] Exploratory Harpreet: [00:17:44] Data analysis did you did you do to to help you figure out how to model it? Kourosh: [00:17:49] I did like the word frequency tables and that kind of thing and grab frequencies. It's kind of hard to do exploratory data analysis on text without just like [00:18:00] starting to model in my experience. I mean, maybe I'm probably wrong. I'm not that, not that experience. So maybe someone has better strategies than me, but I just kind of wanted to, like, get started. So I just made some word frequency charts and stuff, and you would see weird stuff, right? You'd be like, Why does this guy use this word? He's not supposed to use that word. And then you'd look back and you'd be like, Well, that's the title of one of his chapters. And in the PDF, it's at the top of every page. So it looks like a sentence. So it's there a thousand times when it shouldn't be. That kind of makes sense. Oh, yeah, yeah. So that was then I had to like, go back and clean it, you know? So a lot of the EDA ended up being more like iterative cleaning. Harpreet: [00:18:38] Yeah. So let's let's talk about some of the interesting findings that you kind of had as you're doing this, like from your perspective, as a philosopher, as somebody who studied all these texts. I mean, I don't know if you studied all those texts, a lot of books. Did you actually read have you read all these books before? Kourosh: [00:18:55] I don't think I've even read like all of Aristotle. So like, yeah, I've read some of it was there. Harpreet: [00:19:01] It was like surprising stuff that you're like, Oh my God, like, this person is being classified like this when they should be like that? Or were you something like, Oh my god, like these two philosophers who are opposed to actually seem like they might actually have some similarities? Was there any interesting stuff like that? Kourosh: [00:19:17] A little bit. Well, of course, there was interesting stuff for me. Yeah, the classifier didn't. The classifier was like organized to help categorize like Twitter and normal people's text, so it didn't really do anything for insights into philosophy. For me, the thing that was most useful for like, how does philosophy work was the word vectors. Because, right, I don't know. Your audience probably knows that a word vector is basically like not to put like two vague accents on it, but it's the computer trying to learn the meaning of the word right? Harpreet: [00:19:48] And it tells you, Oh, Kourosh: [00:19:48] This is all the words I think are similar to that word. It took a little bit of finagling, but in the end, I built word vector models for each of the schools of philosophy, and I was able to also build them for most [00:20:00] of the authors when the author had a meaningful amount of text, you know, like some of them, I just didn't have enough texts to make it say anything interesting. Mm hmm. That was really interesting to me because and you can use to see this on the site. There's just like three columns on that Harpreet: [00:20:14] Dashboard, and you can pick the Kourosh: [00:20:15] Author or give it a word, and you could even Harpreet: [00:20:17] Compare different authors Kourosh: [00:20:18] On different on the same word to see how they think about it. So, for example, one word that's very commonly used in philosophy is the word substance and in everyday language. It just means like stuff. But in philosophy, it means like the substrate upon which all the properties change, right? So like what is the substance of a stone that stays the same even when it changes color or breaks or something like that? That's only one conceptual substance. But anyway, so are you. Aristotle came up with the idea so you can see what he thinks about substance. Spinoza makes substance like a huge big deal in his arguments, so you can see what he says about substance. But there's a big difference. Aristotle will never talk about God. Spinoza talks about God constantly. So for Spinoza, God is substance. And Aristotle, not so much. And you can kind of see that change just using the word and use analysis feature. And then, you know, a hundred years or around the same time. And Spinoza, there's the empiricist and how do they use the word substance? For them, it's all about perception and your senses. And that just shows you kind of like the evolution of this term and how it's used. And I just thought that was like to me, that was one of the interesting insights Harpreet: [00:21:29] That word actors were able Kourosh: [00:21:30] To give. You might have been able to guess that just from knowing the history of philosophy, but it was cool to have it validated by the Data. And you could do it with words that were not as commonly studied by philosophers. So one of my favorite example probably is like I just gave love to the word use analysis feature. And you know, Aristotle says love and you see what words he comes up with, and it's all about like harmony and character and who you are and how and how your relationships are right. Harpreet: [00:21:58] You give love Kourosh: [00:21:59] To Marx, [00:22:00] and Marx is never going to talk about that. He's going to talk about support and helping each other, you know? So for him, it's more about material aid and you give love to the rationalists like Spinoza. They're not even going to talk about people. It's all about God and virtue. You know what I mean? And so philosophers of history is a historians of philosophy. Don't study the history of love, really, but you can get it in a nutshell right there. And I thought that was really cool. Harpreet: [00:22:26] That's pretty cool, man. So talk to us about the so the website is just philosophy Data dot com. How does it work? Like so you get to the Harpreet: [00:22:34] Website, you go to Harpreet: [00:22:36] Philosophy Data dot com slash classifier to HTML, and then you just enter a bit of text. And what kind of happens? What's it? What's it telling us? Because you got two things. You got search for a Twitter user and then enter your own text. What's what's that all about? Kourosh: [00:22:50] Yeah. So I just thought this would be a fun feature. You could enter a Twitter user and it just like scrapes their last 20 tweets or so. Mm hmm. And you can also enter your own text. So if you wanted to like, say, you are writing an article or an essay for your class, that's about an author, right? You could put that author in there and be like, Am I writing in their style? For example, or you could say, say you really Harpreet: [00:23:13] Want to Kourosh: [00:23:15] Make this person like you. Then you should check that look them up on Twitter. Find their philosophy, profile and then you'll be able to speak appropriately to that. Harpreet: [00:23:23] You know what I mean? So let's say Harpreet: [00:23:26] Let's pull this up real quick. So you guys are listening on the podcast and we try to be as descriptive as possible, but this will also be up on YouTube, so. Check that out. So I want to dabble with this because I think it's a super cool man like I really, really Kourosh: [00:23:37] Think we should do is. Sometimes it gives some weird results. But yeah, Harpreet: [00:23:40] So I'm a huge fan of of Naval Ravikant. He's like my my hero, right? So let's go and just look him up here on Twitter. Are you familiar with naval at all? Kourosh: [00:23:50] I don't think so. Harpreet: [00:23:51] He's he's frigging awesome as we love this guy. And you go to, All right, we got him here, and then we can enter the Twitter user. Do we need to put [00:24:00] the at in front of the Twitter user? Or we just put the Kourosh: [00:24:02] I think you can just leave it? Harpreet: [00:24:03] Yeah, OK, cool. So we put naval upright. And what does it do when we go to the Twitter user? You said it scrapes the first. Kourosh: [00:24:12] One in 50 wanted to get Harpreet: [00:24:13] A good, good amount of them, Harpreet: [00:24:15] All right, and then it spits out, it's pretty cool. It spits out a prediction probability. In this case, we got prediction probabilities for and of all looking at his last X number of texts and its prediction probabilities for. We got Plato at zero point four to Continentale at point two for Analytic at zero point one six, Aristotle at point zero seven. So what are all Harpreet: [00:24:35] These Harpreet: [00:24:36] These things? Kourosh: [00:24:37] Yeah. So what it's doing is it's this is a Bayesian classifier. I built a Harpreet: [00:24:42] Stronger neural networks, but Kourosh: [00:24:44] They're way harder to upload. So this is a Bayesian classifier. It's just going through his text. It does some minor cleaning of the Twitter data so that, like the links and stuff, are not moist. And then it says, basically based on that, what's the chance that it belongs to these different schools? Mm hmm. And then on the right hand side, you can see the words that made it push in different directions. So, for example, poetry, that's big Plato thing. He loves poetry, and he talks about it all the time. Apparently, Nepal does, too. There you go. Harpreet: [00:25:13] Cool. That's pretty cool. Harpreet: [00:25:14] And let's talk about these different schools of philosophy just to kind of break it down for us. So Plato, like, I mean, he's kind of famous as a philosopher. He's talking Plato so people know what's what's continental and analytic. Kourosh: [00:25:27] And yeah, those are maybe, you know, schools that you would know if you were big on philosophy or something. But continental philosophy is like European philosophy of the last hundred years, maybe would be a way to describe it. Yeah, it's characterized by like a lot of focus on language, a sense that like knowledge is fleeting. I mean, if you've heard of postmodernism, that's a lot of continental vibes. Mm hmm. Analytic philosophy is like the counterpart to that in in England and America. So that's like English and American philosophy [00:26:00] of the last hundred years. They also care a lot about language, but where the continental people were like language is meaning is very fluid and kind of dynamic and created by social forces, et cetera. And like never really pin Harpreet: [00:26:12] Down a goal. Kourosh: [00:26:13] The analytic people were really just totally into pinning it down. So if you think about developments in logic, a lot of those can be attributed to analytic philosophers. Even developments in math like Cantor wouldn't be an analytic philosopher, but Fraga after him. He's a mathematician. He was one of the earliest analytic philosophers. Harpreet: [00:26:30] So what's kind of your school of philosophy that you kind of subscribe to? Is that the right word to use or how do Harpreet: [00:26:37] We say that? Kourosh: [00:26:38] I mean, no one school is going to be like, Oh yeah, the end. All be all. Most of these schools are hundreds of years old, and if you really went and said, I believe everything this guy said, you'd probably say some crazy stuff. But if you wanted my opinion about what is like the most resonant to me, it would probably be German idealism. That's what I did my dissertation on, and that's kind of spoke to me. It's pretty esoteric discipline. I can tell you about it if you want. Harpreet: [00:27:00] But yeah, definitely, man. I'd love to hear about it because I mean that philosophy, man. So tell me about this. Kourosh: [00:27:06] Yeah, oh, it's basically German philosophy, Harpreet: [00:27:09] And this is the dominant philosophical Kourosh: [00:27:12] Tradition in the western world at this time. But it was in the later seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds. People have heard of the Enlightenment. This is like the end of the Enlightenment. The major figures are content Hegel. And then there's other guys in the middle of the. The themes that speak to me from it are Harpreet: [00:27:28] That these people really Kourosh: [00:27:29] Want philosophy to understand, like Harpreet: [00:27:31] Everything in some sense, Kourosh: [00:27:33] Analytic and continental philosophers, more modern ones. They're content to just be like, Well, I said some stuff about this and like that was cool, and that was interesting and I did something good. But Conte was like, We need to understand how it all fits together, buddy, you know, and Hegel was like that, but like the next level, and they were a lot of interested in knowledge and how like you could know the world where they landed on it was you can't know the world outside of it being perceived. [00:28:00] Now that's the idealism part. It's obviously more nuanced than that. If there's like philosophy people listening to this, they're probably like, Wow, he's butchering it. But that's like the bottom line. And Conte kind of said that. And then he said, Oh yeah, there's some other stuff out there, but we can never know what it's like. And that's totally cool, because who cares about stuff you could never know, like, you can't know it. So why? Why worry you if as soon as it becomes knowable to you, then then it is knowable, you know? So he said that. But then Hegel was like, No, there just isn't stuff out there. Aside from what's perceived and by perceived, he didn't mean like you and me opening our eyes and staring. He meant more like, Harpreet: [00:28:36] Well, not to get like, totally weird Kourosh: [00:28:38] With it, but he basically thought that the world was knowing itself. And so it was not so much like. Physics and atoms bumping into each other and then like creating life, it was more like logical structures, dynamically working with one another and then creating the material world out of that dynamic dialectical pattern and then creating consciousness through further development of that pattern. And basically, that whole thing is just like rationality, creating the universe and then coming to know itself rationally. If that makes sense. Harpreet: [00:29:15] Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting, man. Like, I mean, I just started getting reacquainted with my my love of philosophy, you know, just a couple of years ago and it started with just, you know, me getting Harpreet: [00:29:25] Back into to just Harpreet: [00:29:26] Reading and stuff because I just hadn't for such a long time right? And I started getting getting back into philosophy and stuff within, you know, mostly stoic philosophy. Kourosh: [00:29:35] Yeah, that's good. Harpreet: [00:29:36] Yeah, I mean, it's it's just a feeling, it's just way guidance for how to live my life, right? Because I feel like that's what philosophy means to me. It's just, you know, a way to live your life. Here's some guidelines for living a good life, right? Take them if you want, Harpreet: [00:29:52] You know, and use them, if you will. Harpreet: [00:29:55] But I don't know, man. So so I started, you know, beating stoic philosophy. And it really resonated with me and I really enjoyed [00:30:00] it. But then I got this natural thing that just makes me go back to weird like philosophy. I say we like and I say weird in the sense that I feel like it's not useful philosophy. Like, I'll just be thinking about the, Harpreet: [00:30:12] You know, like the the nature of the mind, like, what is Harpreet: [00:30:14] This or what Harpreet: [00:30:15] Is reality like? Harpreet: [00:30:16] I spend a lot of time thinking about that. Like what? What is actually real? Kourosh: [00:30:20] Are you like the German idealism real? Because they're all just Harpreet: [00:30:23] About like, basically what Kourosh: [00:30:24] Is reality? Is it created by the mind? Is it not created by the mind? How much of it? What's the structure? Yeah, yeah. That's just not useless, OK? Harpreet: [00:30:33] No, I mean, it's really the really important questions, right? Harpreet: [00:30:35] Like, I mean, Harpreet: [00:30:37] I find it deeply meaningful to think about it like, but then I also like the stuff about how I should live Harpreet: [00:30:42] My life, right? Harpreet: [00:30:43] Like how to live Harpreet: [00:30:44] A good life. Kourosh: [00:30:45] Yeah. The nature of reality. It doesn't really matter unless it pays out somewhere on how to live the life. Yeah, yeah. And both have stories about how you should live your life and they build it out of their idea about what reality is like. And the Stoics have a story about where reality is like, but they just don't make that fun at center. It's more about how to live your life. Yeah, they have a great story about it, honestly. The stoicism was another one that really resonated with me, and I just actually added it to the database. Harpreet: [00:31:11] Oh, nice, I'm looking forward to checking that out. Yeah, I've got. I'll just give you a glimpse of what I've recently been into. So, you know, I read some floss every morning, and for some reason, I don't know why. I just been really into Harpreet: [00:31:24] Aphorisms lately, like Harpreet: [00:31:26] The really tafasitamab version. Yeah. So I mean, one of the best philosophers, Harpreet: [00:31:31] Fucking Bruce Lee. Oh yeah. Harpreet: [00:31:33] Have you read striking thoughts? Kourosh: [00:31:35] No, I haven't. But pretty Harpreet: [00:31:37] Striking thoughts. It's amazing. It's just a book of aphorisms, right? And they also got some Heraclitus. The fragments I've been. Yeah, I've been really interested in Heraclitus recently, so I got that Heraclitus book in this other one quotes and facts. But then this one I found really interesting. It's expect the unexpected. And essentially it's just a book about creative thinking, and this guy's just taking [00:32:00] stuff from Heraclitus. Roger Vanek. He's written a couple of other books on creativity. Yeah, he whack. On the side of the head is one of the books that he wrote and kicking the seat of the pants. And this one is just a creativity tool based on the ancient wisdom of Heraclitus. Kourosh: [00:32:16] And what's what is he? What is he saying? That one? That sounds pretty interesting. Harpreet: [00:32:19] Well, I just started reading this one, a movie about 20 or 30 pages in, but it's essentially just he's all like Roger Vanek is all about creative thinking and problem solving, and he's essentially just he's looking through 30 of Heraclitus like fragments or aphorisms and using that as a jumping Harpreet: [00:32:38] Off point to think creatively, Harpreet: [00:32:41] This one, this one I just got recently from Aaron Haspel is just just aphorisms everything because they have a book of aphorisms. I got this one because Nassim Taleb said, Aaron Haspel is good. Very good. All right. Well, if you seem to wipe this guy's good, I Kourosh: [00:32:55] Got a good recommendation. Harpreet: [00:32:56] Yeah, that's a good sign. So just a little bit of the philosophy that I've been interested in the easiest. Yeah, interesting. Weird, kind of. I don't know. Is it weird? Is it weird Harpreet: [00:33:08] To want to Harpreet: [00:33:09] Think about my life and if I live a good life, like what is that? What is what is a good life even mean? Like, what does that mean? Kourosh: [00:33:15] I mean, it was weird to think about that. That's sad. Roche should be normal. Harpreet: [00:33:18] Right, exactly. Right. All right. Is it just me that thinks it's weird or Harpreet: [00:33:23] Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know. I don't know. Kourosh: [00:33:25] I think people are really busy. And it's also like, it's very personal. You know, like I was saying before, your philosophy is like your personal beliefs that a deep level. And like, if you go to someone like, Dude, let's talk about this. You better hope that you all are close friends or something, because you're liable to say some stuff or push some buttons, especially if you're like really going for it a little bit. You might really like hurt people, offend people. And the thing with philosophy, I know Harpreet: [00:33:55] This is a big stereotype. Kourosh: [00:33:56] I got this all the time when I was like teaching. Everyone was like, Oh yeah, you're just saying your [00:34:00] opinion. It's all the Harpreet: [00:34:00] Same, right? You have yours. I have mine Kourosh: [00:34:03] That only works like so far. If you think that people should live like a stoic. You can't go up to someone who lives like Harpreet: [00:34:09] A not a stoic Kourosh: [00:34:10] Or especially if they live very stoic and be like, Yeah, you're doing it right. You've got to be like, No, you're. Maybe I can respect your decision or I don't want to make a fuss, but at the end of the day, I think you're doing it wrong. Know, I mean. Harpreet: [00:34:25] So what's the difference, then, between like philosophy, religion, spirituality, like I feel like I, for one, maybe have conflated those terms previously and they mean different things, I think, right? What's the distinction between between these? Kourosh: [00:34:41] Oh, I would say a religion often is a kind of philosophy. Maybe usually it's not as rationally developed. Harpreet: [00:34:50] It's not like Kourosh: [00:34:51] Designed to be rationally developed at the very least, right, you have religious philosophers, but usually they're taking books of religion like the Bible or on or whatever, and they're using it as a basis to do their rational thinking. And then spirituality is like religion without the organized social element. That's at least how I usually hear the word to use. Does that jive with? Yeah, yeah. Harpreet: [00:35:12] Yeah, it makes. It makes sense, right? So I guess philosophy is just more about our personal interpretation of this thing that we call life, that we're going through, right? Pretty much. So let's talk about some more about, I guess, how you develop this love of philosophy, right? So you Harpreet: [00:35:31] Said that your dad gave this Harpreet: [00:35:34] Obscure quote talking about nothing comes from nothing. Like, what did that quote do to you then that made you want to just study philosophy? Well, my bad about being lazy? Kourosh: [00:35:44] Yeah, basically, right? No, my Harpreet: [00:35:46] Dad used to go. Kourosh: [00:35:47] He was study philosophy in school, and then I think he just like, had kids and had to become a programmer or something. So it didn't work out. But yeah, I don't know those phrases. They just like they point to something more than that reprimand. Like you're saying, [00:36:00] they're not just saying, Hey, you're lazy. There's nothing comes from nothing. And then like, what does that mean? Because I'm like that, the world has to be eternal. Like, that's like one conclusion you could draw. I mean, part entities use it to prove that only one thing exists and nothing else Harpreet: [00:36:15] Exists and Kourosh: [00:36:16] No changes ever happening in reality. That's where he went with it. So and what I think really I enjoyed about philosophy was that Harpreet: [00:36:25] You take things and this is going to sound Kourosh: [00:36:27] Kind of silly, but you take things that are pretty normal and Harpreet: [00:36:30] Everyone agrees on, like nothing comes from nothing like you really want to have a Kourosh: [00:36:33] Debate about. It seems to me that something came from it, you know? And then you go from there. And if you without doing anything nuts because you're just using your rational thinking, you get to places Harpreet: [00:36:45] That are like, utterly insane, Kourosh: [00:36:47] Like he takes this normal Harpreet: [00:36:49] Thing, which is like, yeah, nothing Kourosh: [00:36:50] Comes from nothing. There's always a thing that came before it. And then his conclusion is the world is a static. There's only one thing nothing ever changes, and every change is an illusion. And you're living in a lie like that is crazy. But. Harpreet: [00:37:05] It's on you to deny Kourosh: [00:37:07] Him that you he did the reasoning and he got there, so he must have done something wrong or else he's right and Harpreet: [00:37:13] You really got to think about it. Kourosh: [00:37:16] So I think a lot of people, maybe this is just the weird thing about me and you. Harpreet: [00:37:21] But when I was there and Kourosh: [00:37:23] I read those things, I was like, I can't just shut the book and walk away if he's right, like, everything is different. I got to think about this and see if he's right. Yeah. Harpreet: [00:37:34] Yeah, I remember like that first time I heard Xenos Harpreet: [00:37:36] Paradox when he said Harpreet: [00:37:37] About like motion. Right? So for anybody who doesn't know what this paradox is. Harpreet: [00:37:42] Can you give us Harpreet: [00:37:43] A brief Harpreet: [00:37:43] Primer on that? Kourosh: [00:37:45] Sure. I mean, that's very topical. Zino was a student of almonds, as you probably know. Harpreet: [00:37:49] So this Kourosh: [00:37:50] Paradox is just the Harpreet: [00:37:52] Arrow, right? Kourosh: [00:37:53] Because so, he says, if you Harpreet: [00:37:54] Shoot an arrow and you want to get to Kourosh: [00:37:56] The target first, it's got to go halfway. Sounds pretty normal. Then it's going [00:38:00] to have to go halfway up that halfway. So a quarter of the way Harpreet: [00:38:03] Sounds pretty normal. That's going to go Kourosh: [00:38:05] Half way of that and halfway. So now an eighth of the way, pretty normal. But then if you push this to the next degree, you see that there's an infinite number of steps for it to take. And the arrow has to do them in a finite amount of time because it's going to Harpreet: [00:38:17] Get to the end. Right. Kourosh: [00:38:18] You can't do infinite things in finite time. So therefore the arrow can't have gotten there. It must all be a lie or something weird. Harpreet: [00:38:25] Sounds like what you're thinking does. Yeah, it just Harpreet: [00:38:28] Has some really interesting implications for gradient descent. Kourosh: [00:38:31] And yeah, yeah. When we taught as paradox in school, basically most of the math Harpreet: [00:38:37] People were like, Yeah, but Kourosh: [00:38:39] Calculus, bro, you know? So yeah, but I don't know. That's a good answer. But also, calculus Harpreet: [00:38:45] Is not free of questions either. Kourosh: [00:38:47] Just because it said infinite small things make one normal thing that doesn't make it true. Harpreet: [00:38:53] Anyway, yeah, no. Talk to us about that because I mean, I think a lot of us here are familiar with with calculus being being Data scientists, I guess. Well, let's talk about this then. So the intersection of Data science philosophy, obviously, you've got an intersection here Harpreet: [00:39:08] Just taking the texts and Harpreet: [00:39:11] And making a really cool app and website to to classify texts. But let's go a little bit deeper. Like what is? You know, the the intersection of Data science philosophy, what are some of the important questions that we should be asking ourselves Harpreet: [00:39:26] When we're doing work Harpreet: [00:39:27] As data scientists? Does that make sense that question? Kourosh: [00:39:31] Yeah. I think the easiest place for philosophy to intersect any discipline is at the level of morality. Right. So we've all heard of like responsible tech and things like that. And. Philosophy, you know, there's a whole branch of it, ethical philosophy, philosophy of morality, that kind of vibe and. As a data scientist and as a human being, the first question should be asking yourself is why am I doing this? And am I doing it for good reasons? And is it going to have good results? You [00:40:00] know, not good in the sense that like, I got the result I wanted like good in the sense that you should be wanting that result, you know what I mean? So I won't claim to be an expert on ethical AI and all those. That's a whole field that I'm just getting into. So I'm sure you probably know more about it than me. Maybe you can speak to this. There's a lot of questions in that area. Harpreet: [00:40:21] They have me. I want to study a lot more. Definitely. I think it has important implications, especially Harpreet: [00:40:26] Now more than ever right now that Harpreet: [00:40:28] These Harpreet: [00:40:29] Systems that were that are building Harpreet: [00:40:31] These intelligent systems are pretty much everywhere. Like, we need to consider some of these ethical questions. Just I guess, I just don't know where to start, right? Like, do I just start picking up like Nickel Mathematica Ethics or whatever and just collide that with Data science? Like how does this Kourosh: [00:40:47] Mean you can read books if you want? Yeah, that's not a bad idea. You probably only need to like maybe watch an intro video that comparison ethical theories or something. And then you're a smart dude. Just start thinking. I mean, at the end of the day, that's what it is. And if you start thinking, ideally, maybe start writing some stuff down that you're thinking, you know, compare your ideas and maybe draw some conclusions from them and see if those conclusions make sense to you. Maybe you've got to revisit your ideas or ideas. To me, I'm a big proponent of philosophy. You can just do it in your bedroom, like. You should read because those things really spark a lot of thoughts, and they'll give you context and more to learn. But at the end of the day, if you're not thinking for yourself on it, you're not Harpreet: [00:41:28] Missing the point. Harpreet: [00:41:29] Yeah, like, I love reading philosophy. I absolutely love reading philosophy. Harpreet: [00:41:34] I don't necessarily like Harpreet: [00:41:35] Being in philosophy class where Kourosh: [00:41:39] It's OK, Harpreet: [00:41:40] Right? Like, like, like philosophy class. Or they're talking Harpreet: [00:41:42] About all these like terms Harpreet: [00:41:44] And like definitions and shit. I'm just like, It's like ruining it for me. Kourosh: [00:41:48] Yeah, that kind of killed it for me. I had one really good teacher and he would just always not go to the definitions, Harpreet: [00:41:56] And he would Kourosh: [00:41:57] Force people to ask questions and talk about it. You [00:42:00] know, that was a good approach. But you're right. All the undergrad classes I saw and I had to teach, sometimes it was just like, here's a list of definitions. Write an essay about them next. Yeah, that to me, wasn't really useful as part of the reason I left academia, Harpreet: [00:42:13] But it's like, I don't want to teach Kourosh: [00:42:14] Those classes, you know? Harpreet: [00:42:16] I think one of the classes where that kind of approach makes sense, maybe it's like logic. Yeah, formal logic. Are you? Big fan of of Harpreet: [00:42:24] Formal logic, like, can we use Harpreet: [00:42:26] Some of those lessons in Data science? Like what? What would you say are some key things that we should know from from logic AIs Data, science scientists. Kourosh: [00:42:36] Well, I'll say one key thing that is very useful and one key thing to make Harpreet: [00:42:40] You think, OK. Kourosh: [00:42:41] So one key thing very useful is like formal logic. I mean, you're already using it a ton. If then, statements are formalized. Baz was a magician, Harpreet: [00:42:49] Boolean algebra, also magician. Kourosh: [00:42:52] You know, all those things programing is, in a sense, just logic, you know, applied logic, if you like. So will you learn a lot from studying formal logic? Harpreet: [00:43:03] To some extent, Kourosh: [00:43:04] It might be nice to see what you know in another language. I don't think you'll necessarily need it in any particular sense. It's something you've probably already internalized if you're data science tips. Yeah, yeah. The thing it's like pushing a little further is there are it's not like Harpreet: [00:43:21] Formal logic is decided, Kourosh: [00:43:23] Right? There are many different formal logics. And the one that we use in programing is like totally cool and legit. And that's basically like the baseline. But then there's what's called Dial 2000. So that's like when you Harpreet: [00:43:39] Believe that true and false can Kourosh: [00:43:40] Happen at the same time. You know, obviously computers can't do that, but that is a wonderful form of formal logic. There's relevance logics where you're not just modeling true and false, but you involve relevance in the truth and falsity of things. Right? There's fuzzy logic, all these different kinds of logic, which if you chose to explore those dimensions, [00:44:00] many of them could be modeled by computers. Some of them would be difficult but could be done, and others might just be impossible. But they're all supposed to map. How people think so if if you wanted to your computer to map how people think, it might be useful to look at these different formal logics as models of very rigorous and mathematicians at least formalized ways of making that shown so that you have something to look at when you're using it, trying to model it on your computer, Harpreet: [00:44:30] Does that make sense? Yeah, I was reading the book of Why have you read this book yet today is this Harpreet: [00:44:36] But causal Harpreet: [00:44:38] Inference when that causal inference? Kourosh: [00:44:39] Oh, you know, I heard a lot about that book. I was in my heart. Harpreet: [00:44:43] I'm like, No, I cannot Kourosh: [00:44:44] Be like that. So someone's going to have to convince you. But I believe that I got to read that book to put myself to the test. Harpreet: [00:44:50] Yeah, yeah. I mean, I like it. I'm interviewing the coauthor of the book Data McKenzie next week, so I was just going to check it out. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. He's talking about all these different types of logics, fuzzy logic and just the logic of knowledge and things like that and these causal diagrams. And it's reminds me of what you're just saying. Harpreet: [00:45:10] Yeah, man. There's just Harpreet: [00:45:12] A lot of interesting stuff in Harpreet: [00:45:14] In philosophy. It's a big, beautiful Harpreet: [00:45:15] Subject, and I don't know what it is, but I just keep getting Harpreet: [00:45:18] Down to this weird Harpreet: [00:45:19] Rabbit hole of like trying to understand the nature of reality. Can we use data science and machine learning to help us understand reality that is that possible? How how do you how do you think we do that? Kourosh: [00:45:29] I mean, if you want my answer, no, Harpreet: [00:45:32] You Kourosh: [00:45:32] Ok, because I'll Harpreet: [00:45:34] Explain why you can Kourosh: [00:45:35] Understand a lot about reality, of course. But can you understand what reality is in itself or something like that? No. And the reason is because the science works with Data. What is Data? It's all taken from the world around us. Harpreet: [00:45:51] And this is I'm just like basically parroting Kourosh: [00:45:53] Conte here, but Harpreet: [00:45:55] You're learning Kourosh: [00:45:56] About the world around you and you're learning about issues about it. And you're learning, you're [00:46:00] learning how to work and work, deal with the world. But at the end of the day, you don't know what the world is. You just know that the world has rocks and trees and the Data works like this. Harpreet: [00:46:12] Does that kind of makes sense? Kourosh: [00:46:13] Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like you can see someone's face and you can see there what they're saying. But at the end of the day, you don't know what's in their head. Yeah. So it's kind of like that you could build a really smart model that could predict all your behavior based on your face, in your words. But at the end of the day, it still doesn't know what's in your head. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I don't mean that to be like dismissive of Data, obviously, I went into Data from philosophy, and I really think philosophy can tell you what the world is either, but that's another thing. Harpreet: [00:46:44] But Data is very Kourosh: [00:46:45] Useful tool for living in the world. I wouldn't say that it's not the final answer. Harpreet: [00:46:49] Yeah, because I mean, like, you know, I'm a mentor at that date. I've got a lot of up and coming Data scientists as part of that program. And it's just interesting when they use people who are new to Data science or Harpreet: [00:47:03] Doing some type of, let's just say, Harpreet: [00:47:06] Binary classification, right? Mm-hmm. And the accuracy of the binary classification just isn't Harpreet: [00:47:12] Good, and they're just like, why isn't it like, why isn't it Harpreet: [00:47:14] Good? And it was like, you're just assuming that because you have data and because you can use an algorithm that you will get a answer that is good. Mm hmm. And I'm just like, I mean, philosophically, does that make sense? Like just because you have good data and you're using an algorithm, does it mean Harpreet: [00:47:28] You're going to get a result? Harpreet: [00:47:29] No, not necessarily right. Because you have model the relationship. Kourosh: [00:47:34] Yeah, and you've got to think, where did the algorithms come from? It's not like the algorithms were handed down by God and God said use these to classify people invented the classifier and then they tested it and saw that it worked. So it's all internal to the human way of thinking and that kind of Harpreet: [00:47:48] Vibe, right? Yeah. Kourosh: [00:47:49] If we didn't independently decide the classifier worked, we wouldn't use it and then see if it worked. Harpreet: [00:47:54] Does that make sense? Yeah, because Harpreet: [00:47:56] It's not like probability just exists out there, right? It's not like it's not. It's not like [00:48:00] there's an actual, I don't know, Poisson distribution or gamma Harpreet: [00:48:04] Distribution just out there, Harpreet: [00:48:06] Right? Like these things don't just exist. We're just kind of using these to describe something that we've we've seen, right? Kourosh: [00:48:15] I mean, that's a philosophical question on Plato would disagree with you, but I agree with you again. Harpreet: [00:48:20] So, so talk to me about that. What are your thoughts on that? Kourosh: [00:48:23] Yeah. I mean, I think math and Data and all these things are tools that we use to get around Harpreet: [00:48:28] In the world and we have been Kourosh: [00:48:29] Building thanks to technology, better and better and better tools. You know, like I was just saying earlier, though, at the end of the day, they're tools and it's up to us to decide what to use them for. And so that to me, is an interesting question. And obviously, building better tools is good. That's what makes humanity the dominant species in the planet and maybe the world one day. I don't know. Harpreet: [00:48:49] Yeah, yeah. Plato has his idealized forms, and he just thinks out there, there is a plane of existence where the gamma distribution is dancing around and. Harpreet: [00:48:59] And yeah, he's got like every gamma Kourosh: [00:49:02] Distribution Harpreet: [00:49:02] Up there. So he's got a very Kourosh: [00:49:04] Busy world up there, you know? Harpreet: [00:49:05] Yeah, but it's definitely an important point. It's just they're just tools, right? I. I wouldn't take any. I wouldn't take statistics as truth, I'm a statistician. There's nothing true about statistics, in my opinion. Harpreet: [00:49:17] It's just it's just guesswork. Harpreet: [00:49:19] Yeah. Kourosh: [00:49:20] And it's like verified by gut feelings and then sometimes. Well, I don't know that's probably doing a discredit, it's verified by the Data, yeah, yeah. Harpreet: [00:49:30] It's still, to me just seems like it's fake stuff, and I'm I'll get roasted for this. Like, yes, everything we're doing as data scientist, it's fake. None of it's real. Kourosh: [00:49:40] It's not just because you're using it and it's not like you don't believe it exists up in Plato's heaven. Harpreet: [00:49:47] It doesn't make it fake. Yeah, yeah. Harpreet: [00:49:48] Yeah, they're still useful tools, right? Exactly. Yeah. Please don't send me hate mail for people listening. Kourosh: [00:49:58] You're not going to get classified as the plate for [00:50:00] this one. Harpreet: [00:50:01] I wonder what I would Harpreet: [00:50:02] Get classified as. That's that's interesting. So let's say I wanted to use your text classification tool on myself. Like, would it just be a matter of me uploading my journal into here? Harpreet: [00:50:13] Yeah, you could do that. Kourosh: [00:50:14] Yeah, I was going to suggest a journal that would be pretty good. The more text you have, the better. Obviously, you could just put your twittering if you think it's representative of who you are. But of course, like Twitter and journal, all those things are not like you in the purest form. Like they're all like you talking to yourself, you're talking to the world. So but. I don't know if there is any you in the purest form, so the journal is a good idea, so let's go with that. Harpreet: [00:50:36] Yeah, I mean, that's what I do with my LinkedIn. It's like, I'll just post stuff on LinkedIn, but then I go back and I look at my post to remind myself that, Oh yeah, I'm the guy that said that thing. So I could live. I should live by that. I'm doing this thing on LinkedIn now, or I'm just trying to post aphorisms. So I'm trying to get really good at just distilling my my thoughts down into just a few. Harpreet: [00:50:55] What are you writing your own? I mean, Harpreet: [00:50:57] I just practice writing, and I just post them on on Kourosh: [00:51:01] Things. Harpreet: [00:51:01] Don't do that in my journal as well. Harpreet: [00:51:03] I just I just wanted Harpreet: [00:51:04] I want to be able to write good aphorisms. Harpreet: [00:51:06] That's my that's my thing. I just want to distill Harpreet: [00:51:08] Down my thoughts to as few words as possible. That's all I want. Kourosh: [00:51:13] Yeah. And I mean, it be, it's almost like more forceful because it's so direct Harpreet: [00:51:19] And pithy or Kourosh: [00:51:20] Whatever. You know, like, you read a whole book and the guy says, Do the right thing. I just said to do the right thing and probably had more impact, you know? Yeah, I mean, Nietzsche, I think, said that Harpreet: [00:51:31] Every good Kourosh: [00:51:31] Philosophy should just be written in aphorisms or something. Harpreet: [00:51:34] Yeah, that's I guess that's probably why I'm studying a whole bunch of them just because I want to understand what makes a good aphorism, but just something I just I just want like just people talk about peace of mind, right? Harpreet: [00:51:45] I just want peace from mind. Harpreet: [00:51:46] There's still quietness in my head. Harpreet: [00:51:49] That's like the thing Harpreet: [00:51:51] That I'm Harpreet: [00:51:51] Striving for, right? So to me, business Kourosh: [00:51:53] Man, it's a hard Harpreet: [00:51:54] Goal. It's hard, man. Harpreet: [00:51:56] It's it's really hard to to not. Do not think [00:52:00] so much. Just slow it down. Do you have any tips for us on how we could do that? Kourosh: [00:52:06] I mean, I guess meditate, that's this is like a hobby story, but I like I like, I like meditating. I don't do it as Harpreet: [00:52:14] Much as they should. Kourosh: [00:52:16] I don't know this story, really. But one day I was talking to my aunt and she meditates a lot. Was telling, Oh yeah, I went to this like retreat or whatever. And she's just said, like that meditation is like, it really is the answer. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know. That's just like a silly phrase that hit me right in the moment, you know? And I was like, Yeah, kind of just is all those things that like all the problems of the world you probably could solve if you just like, meditated harder. And obviously, that's like crazy, simplified Harpreet: [00:52:44] And you're starving in the street. Kourosh: [00:52:46] Meditating might not be your first choice, but it kind of like at the end of the day for the human condition. I do think that that's the answer. Maybe this is. You know, just wassup, me going too far with everything but to answer your question, how can we calm it down? Harpreet: [00:53:03] Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do meditate in the morning. A few minutes in the morning. But I I like I really enjoy just writing my thoughts out. It's like doing a brain dump and just getting my thoughts out. And it's it's really helped just with with clarity and and thinking clearly, I guess. Kourosh: [00:53:22] Yeah, they can Shine said that writing is thinking, I mean, Harpreet: [00:53:26] Thinking is just jumbled Kourosh: [00:53:27] Unless you're writing a sense. And I used to when I was in grad school, I would write like a page of just like rewriting every day just to kind of get the juices flowing Harpreet: [00:53:36] And like, get in the habit of just thinking out Kourosh: [00:53:39] Loud like that, you know? Harpreet: [00:53:41] And it really helps. Harpreet: [00:53:44] So, yes, go ahead and listen started to wind down here, man, so let's let's let's jump into the last formal question before we go into a Harpreet: [00:53:53] Fun, random Harpreet: [00:53:54] Round. My favorite part here. So it's 100 years in the future. What do you want to be remembered for? Kourosh: [00:54:00] I [00:54:00] probably just better if I'm not remembered, like I'm fine guy. But like, people should just be living in the now not remembering corruption 100 years old, you know? So I hope that's I hope that's the future that people have. Harpreet: [00:54:13] There are people even living their lives, not even not even thinking about Kourosh: [00:54:17] Thinking about me. I'm contributing what I can to society and my name lives on. That's great. If not, I did my part. You know, that's where I met with it. Harpreet: [00:54:27] I like that man. I like that. I feel like I've been I'm just pushing content, I just flooding it, trying to just flood the internet with my Harpreet: [00:54:36] With my content just in hopes Harpreet: [00:54:38] That maybe in a hundred years somebody be like, Hey, this guy was all right. Interesting kind of guy. Kourosh: [00:54:43] That's that's that's my doubt that you're doing it from a selfish perspective. It's definitely not that they're helping people, man. Everyone I know goes to your office hours is like, this was the dopest thing, you know? Harpreet: [00:54:55] Yeah, but it's out there to to to be consumed, Harpreet: [00:54:58] Hopefully in the Harpreet: [00:54:59] Future by people who need that help. Kourosh: [00:55:01] Exactly. Harpreet: [00:55:01] A lot of fun, man. Kourosh: [00:55:02] It is. I mean, I hope this project helps people in a hundred years. Harpreet: [00:55:06] Yeah. Absolutely. Love that man. So let's go ahead and jump into the real quick random around here. First question Harpreet: [00:55:11] Is, when do you think Harpreet: [00:55:13] The first video to hit $1 trillion views on YouTube will happen and what will it be about? Kourosh: [00:55:20] I mean, you sent me these beforehand, and I was like, I thought, I have to do the research and find out where we're at right now. Harpreet: [00:55:26] So right now we're at like nine billion and it's Baby Shark. Kourosh: [00:55:30] Baby Shark at nine billion, man. Yeah, probably a baby movie Harpreet: [00:55:35] That's smart, that's smart, because Kourosh: [00:55:36] Those babies will watch that stuff just Harpreet: [00:55:38] Over and over. Kourosh: [00:55:40] When will it happen? Can I say never YouTube will die before we get there, can I say that? Harpreet: [00:55:45] Yeah. All right. Kourosh: [00:55:46] All right. One trillion has a big ask if we're only a nine Harpreet: [00:55:48] Billion we make like twenty Kourosh: [00:55:50] Years and Harpreet: [00:55:50] By then we'll be floating Kourosh: [00:55:51] Around the interweb Harpreet: [00:55:53] With our brains plugged in Kourosh: [00:55:55] And there'll be no YouTube or whatever Harpreet: [00:55:56] Will be will be in The Matrix. Kourosh: [00:55:58] Yeah, exactly. There's no [00:56:00] YouTube in The Matrix, though. You live in YouTube and Madison pretty deep. Harpreet: [00:56:05] So in your opinion, what do most people think within the first few Harpreet: [00:56:09] Seconds of meeting you for the Harpreet: [00:56:10] First time? Kourosh: [00:56:11] Probably that I have a weird Harpreet: [00:56:13] Name, or Kourosh: [00:56:14] That I'm dull, Harpreet: [00:56:16] That you're dull or tall. Would you say a tall, tall? How tall are you? Kourosh: [00:56:20] I don't know that tall, six, three Harpreet: [00:56:22] Foot Harpreet: [00:56:23] Tall to me. So what are you currently reading right now? Kourosh: [00:56:26] I mean, I think I just read this book series. It was called the Book of the New. It's a pretty cool like sci fi series. It's like written about this guy in the far future where everything is medieval because they like mind all their resources and like aliens come in and out. But they're not like a big deal. And. And it's just written in an interesting way, a lot of like cool reflections and stuff about time and things like that. Harpreet: [00:56:54] I got to read out what was it called again? Kourosh: [00:56:56] It's the book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Harpreet: [00:56:58] This and a new sound like a and so when a new sun Kourosh: [00:57:03] Book of the new sun. So the idea is that in this distant future, the Sun is like a red giant. It's slowly dying and everyone's thinking, Oh, one day the new sun will come and revitalize Earth, you know, interesting. Harpreet: [00:57:18] What song do you currently have on repeat? Kourosh: [00:57:21] This song is called Oh, Shoot, it's called photo ID by renewables. Harpreet: [00:57:27] I checked that one out Kourosh: [00:57:30] Just the marker, and it was like listening to Harpreet: [00:57:33] The same song endlessly. Yeah. Harpreet: [00:57:36] I mean that that happens to me, to me as well, I've been there's this dude that I really enjoy. I care Harpreet: [00:57:41] That on. I think you Harpreet: [00:57:42] Might might enjoy him as well. He does. He takes essentially Harpreet: [00:57:46] Just like people Harpreet: [00:57:47] Talks and lectures and put beats to them and just make some friggin phenomenal. He's done stuff with like, I mean, he's done stuff and have already gone. Joe Rogan, Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Jordan [00:58:00] Peterson. He then all is good. Harpreet: [00:58:02] This is pretty cool idea. Harpreet: [00:58:04] Akira, the dawn Kourosh: [00:58:06] Of the dawn like the rise of the sun or dawn like Harpreet: [00:58:09] O n d o n Harpreet: [00:58:10] Yeah. He took Marcus Aurelius meditations book one and turned it into a album. Kourosh: [00:58:16] Ok. Yeah, you sold me. Harpreet: [00:58:17] I'll check it out. Harpreet: [00:58:18] Check it out. Yeah. Meditations Vol. one Harpreet: [00:58:20] Here. The Don. Harpreet: [00:58:21] It's amazing. It's it's dope. All right, so let's pull up the random question generator, first question I got here is pet peeves. Kourosh: [00:58:30] Rudeness is another thing I guess is not pet. Harpreet: [00:58:33] Yeah, rudeness is paying the ass. People should not be rude. Harpreet: [00:58:37] Who are some of your heroes? Kourosh: [00:58:39] I guess it's true that you have Harpreet: [00:58:40] Constant Hagel, right? Harpreet: [00:58:43] I don't know, man. Like, I've been trying to get into German philosophy a little bit like just watching. So, so the way I kind of get into stuff is I'll watch like YouTube videos. Maybe somebody who's done like an explainer video on it just to get the high level picture. And then if I find it interesting, then I'll dig deeper. And I've been watching some explainer videos on some German philosophy. I was watching some stuff with. I was learning about Schopenhauer. Harpreet: [00:59:05] Yeah, my gosh, bleak. And then Harpreet: [00:59:07] There's Harpreet: [00:59:09] A Harpreet: [00:59:09] Niche niche. Harpreet: [00:59:10] Whatever I can find Harpreet: [00:59:12] With a man, I don't know what it is. Harpreet: [00:59:13] I like the ancient stuff far better. I don't know what it is. Kourosh: [00:59:15] Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, like those guys, were about 50 years after Google. And yeah, Schopenhauer is basically caught but sad. And then Nietzsche is like Schopenhauer, but angry, you know? Harpreet: [00:59:28] Yeah. So when people come to you for help, what do they usually want help with? Kourosh: [00:59:34] I guess recently the one person who comes to me for help most often is a six year old or a seven year old now, and she wants help with spelling. Harpreet: [00:59:41] So, hey, that's your kid. Kourosh: [00:59:44] Yeah. Harpreet: [00:59:45] So nobody comes to you with help for existential crisis or anything like that? Kourosh: [00:59:52] Not really, man, because I'm pretty bad at helping. Harpreet: [00:59:56] I mean, I Kourosh: [00:59:56] Just like, quote some stuff to them. Like, not cool, man. I guess I'll think [01:00:00] Harpreet: [01:00:00] About that Harpreet: [01:00:01] If you lost all of your possessions, but one, what would you want it to be? Kourosh: [01:00:06] I probably cell phone. How about my own person? Locke said. You own yourself. So I lost that. That would be really bad. Harpreet: [01:00:13] There you go. What fictional place would you most like to go to? Kourosh: [01:00:17] I'd like to go with the planet that dune is set on. Oh yeah, that book in the movie like. Probably a sad place to live, but I love that book and I'd like to check it out. Harpreet: [01:00:28] All right. I remember the one character was more deep. Hmm. So you like a cure to the Don Doon wave? He took a dune and made Dune into an album. Oh dude. Yeah, check that out as well. Harpreet: [01:00:42] All right. Kourosh: [01:00:42] I guess this guy is going to be on the list soon. Harpreet: [01:00:45] So what can people connect with you and how can they find you online? Kourosh: [01:00:49] Linkedin is a crucial AIs day. Twitter. I have a personal one. You can find it on the link for the Philosophy Data project, though if you just search philosophy Data, I think its philosophy underscore Data on Twitter. The Philosophy Data project is just philosophy Data. If you want to support it, there's a patron. Just go to CNN.com slash philosophy Data. There's probably more. Harpreet: [01:01:10] Yeah, well, I'll include links to all of those right there in the show notes. We'll crash. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be on the show. I appreciate having you here. Kourosh: [01:01:18] It's an honor I am very pleased to have been. Harpreet: [01:01:21] Thank you.