Denis Rothman Mixed.mp3

[00:00:00] I like to play with the algorithms, so I play with different clicks to see what's going to happen and at one point you get anad, oh, you're unhappy with your life. You're a data scientist. You studied to do artificial intelligence and you're not doing what you want. And look at me.

[00:00:15] I am now self-employed and I have five employees, so it's smarter than us and it's driving consumption.

[00:00:21] Click bait. It's ten times smarter than us.

[00:00:40] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the artists 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 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 Italy dot com 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.

[00:01:32] Our guest today is an artificial intelligence specialist, designer, author and developer of three cutting edge artificial intelligence solutions.

[00:01:42] He began his career authoring one of the first, a cognitive natural language processing chatbot, applied as a language teacher for Moezzi, Shandon and other companies. He's also authored and a resource optimizer for IBM and apparel producers. And if that isn't impressive enough already. He's also authored an advanced planning and scheduling solution that is used world wide. He's an expert inexplainable A.I. and today he's here to talk to us about how to explore machine learning, model results, review key influencing variables and variable relationships, detect and handle bias and other ethical issues. So please help me in welcoming our guest today, author of several books, including Hands on Explainable A.I. with Python, Dennis Rothman. Dennis, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be on the show today. I really appreciate you being here.

[00:02:38] Thank you for the presentation. I don't know where to hide myself.

[00:02:44] No hiding that. Dennis, you are the artist who designs podcasts. Everything will be exposed.

[00:02:49] So let's talk about just tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what was it like there?

[00:02:55] Ok, so I was born in Berlin, Germany. My father was a Russian Jew. He was born in Russia. Then he immigrated to the United States. Then he became American and then he entered because I'm I'm a lot older than you. He entered the US Army and he landed in Normandy in June. Nineteen forty four. So my father was a World War Two veteran. He was in the 3rd Patton Division and he followed Patton all the way to Berlin. And then after the war, he chased Nazis for around two and a half years and he was in the show trials. OK, so that's that's one path. And then on the other path, my mother is a Sicilian Catholic. She was born in Sicily. So she has nothing to do with the Jewish religion. So she was born in Sicily and her family emigrated to France because of the famine. My father immigrated to the United States because of the persecution. They were literally killing people in his village when he left. So when my father freed the city, a city in the east of Paris, that's where he met my mother, who is a young Italian smiling all the time. And he said, why would I marry a Jewish person? I want to marry someone that's smiling all the time. I like to say Italian Catholics don't speak religion to me anymore.

[00:04:19] I have to think about that. So they after the war and after chasing Nazis for some time, she entered NATO as a lawyer in Berlin. And that's where I was born. So basically, I spent my childhood there and then my father moved up in the chain of command. He was in the army and then he became a civilian. But he he moved up. So we moved up to headquarters and I traveled a bit around and we ended up somewhere in France and northeast of France and the headquarters. So I was still in American school. So I didn't know anything about French people. And then my father said, why don't we retire at exactly the same place where we met? They met in a dance in the ballroom. So they moved and he built a house right across the street from where my grandparents lived. And so I had to learn French when I was around fourteen fifteen and I had to go to French school. But I had this American background and I had these five nationalities turning in my head, you know, Russian, Italian, German, French, so American. So basically my dream was a bit like your map behind you. When I was 15, I was thinking, I want to discover the world.

[00:05:30] I don't want to be I don't want to be part of too much part of one country or believe in one religion. I just want to I want to understand everything that's going on in the world. So I was like you.

[00:05:40] I spent a lot of time looking at maps and I decided by the age of twenty five, that's where I want to go. So I wanted to go to Africa. I wanted to go to India because India for me was one of the hearts of our of our culture. And then I want to go to China. I want to go to Japan. I want to go to Hawaii and surf, because when I was younger, I could surf on waves and then now I can surf in my bathtub. And then after I wanted to go right through the United States. And actually I did all that by the age of twenty five. That is super, super interesting that my dream was to go to the Sorbonne, the University of Sorbonne in Paris, because I was reading these books and there was all these this intellectual life going on at the Sorbonne at the time. There were a lot there was a revolution in nineteen sixty eight. And I went to this university where the president said. Not many people that get master degrees in your generation, so I don't want you to come to my university to just learn a degree. I want you to go learn different degrees. If you go into English, I want you to go see linguistics. I want you to go see history. So we had a musicology here. Let's move around the university. We would major in one field. And then after that, I was one of the first teachers of computer science in at the Sorbonne. At the same time, I was becoming self-employed. So now you have to have about the picture. And I met my wife in France, which is why I'm living in France. Otherwise I'd still be moving around probably somewhere that's super, super interesting.

[00:07:08] And there's so much there that I want to touch on. Where should I start? Let's see. I think the first thing I really found interesting well, the first thing I want to touch on, rather, is this idea that when you went to school, they had you major, not major in of just one thing, but diversified experience across a wide number of domains. How important do you think it is for Data scientist and machine learning practitioners to do this type of, let's call it an apprenticeship for themselves to not focus solely entirely on just math and Data science, but to expose themselves to a number of different topics?

[00:07:39] We'll all be pretty brutal. Someone that doesn't do that doesn't can emerge in artificial intelligence. What are we talking about today? Artificial intelligence algorithms go through billions of pieces of data on social media in every field, every single field. So if you're just stuck in your math, I don't see how you can even understand the data you're processing, because at one point you can do your math. You're going to have to go to the Data on one side. So you have your data here and you have your algorithm, but the other side are going to have to watch your output. What what do you want to output?

[00:08:09] So if you don't understand people, you don't like people you don't like civilizations and you have a problem with people that believe or don't believe or you have a problem with Muslims, we have a problem with Jews or you have a problem Christian, you're not going to go anywhere. You have to understand everything. If you want to match modern A.I., you have to try to match their algorithms. And the algorithms are agnostic. They just go through everything. So if you don't know how your body, what you have to have minimum culture or you can get a job, but it will be creative. You'll just, you know, will just do what you're told you want to emerge. Well, then you have to. You have to you have to open your eyes. You have to open your eyes to everything.

[00:08:49] Yeah. To one hundred percent agree with that like that. That resonates with me so much.

[00:08:53] I've got a network of twenty five hundred something ninety three Data dream job and a lot of these students are or mentees rather are aspiring Data scientists or they're transitioning into Data science and they might think to themselves, like I just got to focus on only this math stuff, I've got to focus on only the python and coding and this, this and that. Once I get into the industry, what I have a job, then I could study all these different topics. Right. But you can't really you're going to set yourself up for a whole world of misery if you do that. And you just won't be as world smart, right. Like you're mentioning, you need to have knowledge of global context in order to make it.

[00:09:27] Yeah, well, let me say something about that, please. Please. The level of math and artificial intelligence is so low, I don't see how someone is going to spend a lot of time in mathematics. We're not talking about field medalists in mathematics. So people are mixing up these very if you have like I would say, let's say two years of college of calculus and math, that's that's enough. We're not doing math research. In fact, these equations live by themselves. So basically, if you can have a small equation, of course, they look for someone that doesn't know math. It looks very complex. It's very simple math. You take this to a mathematician researcher who will say, come on, Dennis, what are you talking about? So it's not about math. Math is the tool is like someone who's trying to build a house with a hammer because I have a hammer and I have a screwdriver and I'm going to build a house. But where are your ideas?

[00:10:14] Where's the blueprints? What are you creating? So in Python, you can learn Python in one day.

[00:10:19] I've developed in C++, Java, whatever it takes, it takes one day to get your code and then you have everything on the Internet to help you. So you need to look at somewhere else.

[00:10:30] Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. One hundred percent agree with your viewpoint. I think that this air of superiority with people out there on LinkedIn posting these oh, you're not a real data scientist if you don't dot, dot, dot. I think that's just so detrimental to the field. And just I'm not I'm not a fan of that type mentality. Right. Yeah. Like you mentioned, you don't need to know the ins and outs of every single thing in order to get something up and running and working to help facilitate a decision. So another thing I want to touch on was you mentioned that you had these five identities swirling around in your head. I think that's really interesting, kind of developing yourself as a big cosmopolitan type of person. What impact do you think that had on your choice to then go into studying artificial intelligence while it was everything?

[00:11:14] Because it seems nice now, but when you're a child, like when I was a child, I was speaking German and English and I was observing German people and Americans because basically that's where I was in Berlin. The German people were I like that woman Will.

[00:11:30] Take care of me after school was the wife of a Nazi, because there I was I was there in the nineteen fifties, so basically my experience there was post German Nazis or people that believed in Hitler, but then were disappointed, obviously. And we're trying to live another life. That was my first contact. When you come from a Jewish Catholic family and a father who fought the war, freed extermination camps and then he says, I'm going to hire a German and she's going to take care of. So that was, I would say to my father, why did you do that? He said, the war is over. People people that fight wars after the war aren't soldiers because once you fight a war, you want to hear about it any more. You want to go dancing and eating. It's over. So that was mind opener. So you take a can you have a lot of cans and you open a can. So that was my can of beans and corn. So and I remember this lady taught me how to draw. So that was one perspective. And she was always drawing these very colorful things because she was trying to forget the war. So an American school then I was learning competition. Americans very competitive. So we had sports compete, compete, compete, get the best grades. Who's the first grade? Who gets the best grade? So here you have these competitive world.

[00:12:41] So I was thinking, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So I would say about age seven or eight, I was already analyzing the way people were thinking to adapt to each one of them. So I was an American school, but I was talking to Germans at the same time. So I had to figure out some abstract model which would enable me to adapt to both and then to fast forward. Otherwise, you're going to fall asleep then? I would go on vacation to my grandparents house, which were Italian, my grandparents on the Russian side.

[00:13:11] We did. A lot of people were killed on the way. We're not going to this victim things.

[00:13:15] So back in my Italian oh, this is always joyful. Like my grandmother would always be happy. And I said, what do you have? And she says, We have nothing. I said, You have nothing. No, no money, nothing. So why are you happy? Because I'm in good health and I'm going to serve you some spaghetti and Grandpa is going to sing you some Italian songs. My grandfather was a bricklayer. He was, but he was always drinking good wine. He was the real Italian singing.

[00:13:41] And I said, How are you so happy? I said, why did I went in World War One? I received a bomb. It bombed all the part of my body. You can see that my leg can't move. I'm alive. I'm alive. We have food. So if you have food on the table and there's good wine, let's sing. Let's have fun. So then I said, whoa, why step back again? And I had to integrate all that. And now to get in a more abstract model where I could adapt again.

[00:14:06] And then sometimes when I got to be when I was a teenager, then I got into French school, French school in the nineteen seventies as well. These are intellectuals. You know, French people like to think a lot. They don't do a lot, but they think a lot and they think so much. Then then what they do is pretty good, like Airbus and stuff like that. You're talking to intellectuals like I never seen. I would read my comic books, I would have my baseball cards. All of a sudden I see these people around me. There are fifteen, sixteen. They're reading this literature like I've never even heard the name. So so I got this incredible perspective of philosophy. And they would study German philosophy, too, in France, because these are countries that are very close, in fact, culturally. So I got into philosophy and then I had to be a bridge builder, even bigger model. So by the time I got to the Sorbonne, where you have like 50 nationalities, you know, when you're around you, I was beginning to be able to change all the time. And in France, there are a lot of Muslims. So I was trying to figure out how I could put the Jewish religion, Catholic, Christian, Muslim all together. And then I had the stuff at the Sorbonne with Buddhism and Hinduism.

[00:15:15] And then I saw Zen Buddhism and I saw Shintoism. I say, how can I create a model where I don't have to think too much? I talk to each of them. So I found these common I found common concepts. And all these religions is like good behavior. Respect something that's above you. I could say even with these two tools, you can make it in any religion you can say or something that's always higher than us that we have to respect. And we should behave pretty well. Otherwise we can't live in society. So if you take these two things, you can go through all the religions. You can also go through all the cultures. So I begin to navigate and you know, little by little, I was very good in linguistics. So immediately, as soon as I saw the first computer processor, I began to try. I didn't there weren't there wasn't even a screen on. I'm talking about nineteen eighty one. There wasn't even a screen. So you had this processor that connects your TV screen. There was no mouse, no nothing, no window. And you had practically no memory. And I began typing mouse and I say, could I make a concept that would generalize, you know, the stuff I'm thinking about. So it's just survival to adapt.

[00:16:21] That is really, really, really fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing that definitely did not put me to sleep. I think it's I can't help, but every time I've done maybe 70 of these interviews so far and it's always fascinating to me, like, here's another person on the other side of the screen with their own set of unique experiences, their own journey into where they are right now.

[00:16:39] And it's just always so fascinating to me just to imagine all the things that you have seen coming up to where you are now.

[00:16:47] So I love hearing these stories. Thank you so much for sharing that. That was really, really fascinating. So you've been in the game for quite some time.

[00:16:55] Oh, I started mobilizing statistics in nineteen seventy eight.

[00:17:01] So how much more hyped has the field become since then. Until now you mean what has changed. Well I guess like how much more widely adopted has it become from the right in nineteen seventy eight.

[00:17:14] I remember I would take like the New York Times, Washington Post and then I would take all the words, the main words and convert them into numbers to vectors and then figure out how could I summarize everything with these numbers because I was confronted with all these cultures and languages. I said, why do I begin write everything in math as a teenager?

[00:17:34] In fact, in fact, when my children go and look at my books because I write in all my books, I translate my books as I go along into mathematical functions.

[00:17:43] So they I remember my son saying, why are you writing mathematical functions in all the books? Every time I borrow a book for you, it's for that scribbling and for that math. And then little by little I said, you know, this is a function and you'll find it again in another book. So I began like that. What has changed? I would say when a disappointment. But Alan Turing summed up machine intelligence in an article in nineteen fifty. I haven't seen anything better since except hype.

[00:18:09] Now what do we have since we have Alan Turing's 1950 article? Believe me, I've seen it all in all of it.

[00:18:17] Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All of these. OK, so but if you take that, what's different is that you have extreme computer power, extreme computer power. You have supercomputers where you can have ten thousand views and tens of thousands of CPU's. OK, that's incredible power. And at the same time, you have the Web, the Internet, which can provide an amount of Data unprecedented in human history. So if you put super computer power here and then you put all that data and in the middle of it you put like Turing machines or stochastic Turing machines, algorithms of which can create all the variations you want.

[00:18:57] You have to know that all these equations are very old, like you have Uluru's used. Logistic regression is 18th century. You take all these equations, you'll go back.

[00:19:07] Like I would say the most recent one is maybe, maybe first half of the 20th century. So what's powerful is you take that math and then you take Internet, take the data, put it in the big machine. I mean, it's fantastic. You get you get super results. We have created an entity that has surpassed us, but of course, not many people know that. That's why it's so good.

[00:19:28] Yeah, that's why social media is so good. Yeah. I mean, definitely. Definitely. You're connecting to a smartphone that's one million times smarter than you. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. And I'm excited to jump into where you think the field is going to be headed in the next couple of years.

[00:19:43] But before we do that, I'm really interested about these functions that you're writing in books. As you mentioned, that as you're reading books, you're coming up with like these functions to describe what's going on. And you noticed that there is similar functions across different bodies of work. Talk to me a little bit about this.

[00:19:59] Well, it goes back. Maybe I could start with one of my basic projects in the 80s where I didn't have much help. There were many books. There was no Internet. And people would say, you know, having this difficult problem, go ask Rathmann to do it.

[00:20:17] He'll figure out and he's cheap. He won't take a lot of money because he likes he likes what he does and he doesn't really care about money. So I started with Aerospace, which is now Airbus and the defense industry, and they said, OK, you're teaching at the Sorbonne. But we spent five years trying to figure out this algorithm on these two eighty six processors. These are these very old processor smartphones. And we need to put this on battleships and on airplanes that we just can't make it fast enough because it has to run in 12 seconds or, you know, the algorithm won't be in use anymore because they won't be there anymore.

[00:20:54] So they said, what do you think?

[00:20:56] Why is it look so easy to me? So how can it look easy to you? We've spent years trying. And I said, I don't know. I don't think like other people, so it's easy for me.

[00:21:04] So they say, how do you do that? Well, I don't know. Just sign a contract, say, OK, you sign it. But when you sign a contract with these corporations, you have to realize that you have penalties. So they say if you get the penalties you don't deliver, then you're going to have to sell your house. So I'm not going to sell my house. I'm going to take the money. So. You're only paid when it's run, it runs. So how does my brain how do I function?

[00:21:26] I sit down and I think I go back 20 thousand years and I say, our brain hasn't changed in twenty thousand. We think we just we're just chimpanzees with laptops at best. And at worst, we're trapped in these chimpanzees with machine guns. OK, so you can choose. Are you going to be or you can take a knife. You can cut your meat or you can cut someone else out. So we haven't evolved that much.

[00:21:50] Ok, so I'd say 20 thousand years ago, these people found incredible solutions to survive. I mean, the hunting group, hunting and networks, you go there, go there, surround the animal, go back. So I would say, listen, the Roman Empire, for example, had boats and ships anywhere. They didn't have computers. They had some way of doing this or look at animals. You look at anthills, you look at cats, dogs. They have all of we're all animals. And then when I go into books, you can see the reasoning of someone like you can say, I don't know, I'm a fan of Kant, the German philosopher. So the German philosopher, I'll give you a very precise example using him. So he spent hundreds and thousands, maybe thousands of pages writing and then his critique of pure reason. So you can say, what is he driving? What is this tools? I need his tools for what I'm doing. So he's saying, well, first of all, the two main things you have to look at is space and time. OK, that's interesting. Now, who can find an exception to space and time? Nobody want to do something in life. You're going to need space and time, even if you're on a cloud server while it's in space. It's it's it's in a server in underground somewhere with heating cooling systems and all that. So I said, OK, what are the basic things?

[00:23:09] So a long, long time ago I created a triangle because I've always been fascinated by geometry that created a triangle. And I said on the top of the triangle, I'll put a task. That's the task we have to do. Like today we have to talk. What is the physical constraint, the physical. So I have the task now.

[00:23:29] I have the physical constraint because you have to be sitting somewhere and I have to be sitting somewhere and we need this Internet connection. OK, that's that's the bottom part of the triangle. And then you have on the other side of the triangle, you have the constraints. There's a time constraint. Seventy five minutes, 90 minutes. We have to have good Internet. We have to be in good health. We don't have to be people attacking us with a gun and trying to shoot us or police trying to arrest us. So we have a whole pile of constraints. Do we have ideas? I might too shy to speak. Are you too shy to ask questions of my natural? Am I trying to give fake impressions? What am I trying to do? I can tell you immediately. I don't know how to put varnish on. People are getting the same conversation I had over the dinner table. So then you get this triangle, you get this triangle, and then in math you can you can calculate the center of gravity. If someone's always focused on tasks, well, I'll be up on top. He's never looking at the constraint. Maybe it's a billionaire. He never needs to think about anything goes in the plane that doesn't know. Or maybe you you're at the bottom, you're struggling, you're in Jamaica or you're in Ghana. You don't have a good Internet connection. So you're not very worried about this interview. You're worried about connecting to the interview.

[00:24:36] Ok, and then maybe if you live in India right now, the guys say these guys have a nice conversation. What am I going to eat? Because, you know, I just lost a job and no one's asking me for a rickshaw anymore. So I've been I haven't eaten in three days. And these guys are talking about the future. What I don't even understand a word of what they're talking about. So is center of gravity will be here and then you have people and constraints. So saying, well, yeah, but I'm sick. So if you put all that together in this triangle, you can and you think about it, think about it, you can fit every single human activity in it. Anything, anything you want will fit in that triangle and it'll create a center of gravity.

[00:25:14] Then you just write the functions and then you convert them into math and then you put them in a program. And then you have one of the first expert systems are of course, there's twelve thousand lines of math to describe a little triangle.

[00:25:29] It took thousands of hours, but I started from there and it's super, super fascinating and I feel like I've had a similar experience with me. I mean, I read a ton just because I have so many wonderful authors that I've had the privilege of interviewing for this show. And I just feel like I find little bits of truth that I see resonated in many different books. And it sounds like you've been able to distill this down into a framework for yourself to help you understand the world and also help intelligent systems understand the world. So let's talk about intelligent systems, actually learning all that stuff. What do you think will be the scariest application of a machine learning in the next two to five years?

[00:26:08] Why are you speaking in the future? How about what's the scariest application of it now and then? How do you see that getting even scarier in the future?

[00:26:17] Yeah, I think we're we're already in. A game over a situation, but I'm not worried about it, so it's just natural evolution. So let me just give you the context, since you're ready to take some time, I'll make it as short as possible.

[00:26:32] Let's say I'm not going to go too far back. Let's say fifty thousand years ago to one hundred thousand years ago, we began to discover what a tool was. From that exact moment, we became something very different from our brothers and sisters. The chimpanzees and the gorillas were rather nice folks. These are nice people. You don't see a chimpanzee trying to strangle or rape and kill and burn a lady and bury it. So we became something else. We want that tool. And then as the tools went on, we we began to create something else. OK, I'll take it. I'll take it slowly so I don't lose you the more tools. So now we can fast forward to maybe twelve thousand years ago. Twelve thousand years ago, there was global warming started because we got out of the ice sheet and we expanded immediately into villages right where I said, I'm not I'm not going to go hunting anymore. I'm going to take these little pigs here and put them there to breed them and eat them. Wow, that's cool. I'm not a I'm not a vegetarian chimpanzee anymore. I'm a meat eater. OK, then we said so I'm not going to go hunting, but why would I have to go looking for a cherry? Let's use the week that I found here somewhere and I'm going to plant these greens so I have to move around anymore. So what happened at that point? Because there is a flaw in the theory of evolution. It's saying we evolved to survive.

[00:27:52] Ok, that's true. But to survive to what? Because chimpanzees and monkeys got all the way to here. In fact, if we didn't kill them and eat them, there would be as many monkeys as us.

[00:28:01] So that's not survival of humanity. It's survival of humanity in a certain environment. So when you reached the village part, we begin to adapt to our own world, not to nature anymore. Of course, we continue to adapt to nature, but now we have had to adapt to you because maybe you want in my house. So I'm going to have to kill you if you want my I'm going to have to kill you. And, you know, in the old days, I might even have to eat you because I was hungry. So at that point we begin.

[00:28:28] Don't worry, we're far away. You're in Canada.

[00:28:31] So at that point, we begin to adapt to what our own world and we we built this intelligence. And since we're pretty intelligent, well, we created fascinating weapons and tools and we kept it. What we were adapting to nature. You're not going to tell me that we built tanks to adapt to nature and bombs.

[00:28:50] And because where we have the most imagination is weapons, we're very we're fantastic in creating weapons. You'll never see that on LinkedIn. That's what surprises. That's one thing that surprises me as you never see how far the weaponry is gone and all the artificial intelligence is in there. But that's another story. So we began to become we developed our own intelligence to adapt ourselves.

[00:29:11] And since we keep we've been racing for twelve thousand years, we reached a point where we can we couldn't adapt alone because when the Internet happened, if you wanted the search engine, you want to search something I'm looking for. I don't know. I'm looking for the definition of crystal. I don't want to see one million pages of something else. I want to have the real I want to get directly to the subject. So in the beginning, artificial intelligence was just an algorithm to help us just to survive in the new environment we created, which was Internet, which is not much different from the villages we created in the twelve thousand years ago, because they're virtual to those villages were virtual.

[00:29:50] They're not real life anymore. It's stuff we invented. So villages are the first virtual thing. And there's nothing new today because one hundred years ago we invented the phone that separated us and all that stuff. So we're just going into this virtual curve. But it's not really virtual. We're creating another world now.

[00:30:08] Why are you going to be scared today? Because, well, I'm not scared.

[00:30:12] But people that don't understand artificial intelligence should be. So what happened now is we have these fantastic algorithms there.

[00:30:20] I mean, mind blowing algorithm. And what has happened is e-business business has taken over, physical and social media has taken over everything. Everyone is looking at this object. This object is the center of everyone's life. I was looking and just before we connected that the Senate hearings in the US Senate for the Supreme Justice nominee. And there was this incredible speech where this person starts. I'm not going to talk about party lines because people go crazy with politics. So there was one guy very interesting says I want to say something different because I've noticed that all the other people that speak after one minute, everyone's looking at the smartphone anymore again. Right. If you go to a conference today and you see someone speak, a speaker is coming up. He's the unique, he's the superintelligent. He comes from the planet Jupiter and he's going to tell you how to be a billionaire. And he has more intelligence than ten aliens together.

[00:31:17] And he starts to speak after one minute. So I went remember a conference I did in Varna, Bulgaria, two years ago, and I said I said, you know, I'm not going to make a conference because no one is going to listen. So I'm just going to speak what I want to say. And when I see one of you board, I'm going to ask you a question. So after one minute, everyone knows there. But after two minutes I say, OK, you there with a smartphone? What do you think about that? And it turned in this to this huge conversation with several hundred people.

[00:31:49] Every time I saw with a smartphone, I talked to him and at the end it was pretty interesting.

[00:31:52] So what has happened is the guy in here, I would say modestly, is a billion times more intelligent than us right now.

[00:32:01] If you go on YouTube and you're going to see how far this goes. No, you go you're on LinkedIn, right. OK, let's take LinkedIn. But it could be anyone. You go on LinkedIn. What do you think you're looking at? You're looking at yourself. You'll never learn something else except what you are because they're going to type.

[00:32:19] I'm going to watch what Dennis Rodman is doing, what happens the next day. You see you see me and your feed. Then the day after you see someone that's close to my feet. Then the day after you see someone else. So you're only seeing what you want to see.

[00:32:32] So you're not doing what I did as a child. You don't have to adapt anymore that the system is adapting to you. So now you're losing. You don't have to adapt. You're not adapting. You're just looking at yourself all the time. OK, so the next day, then you're going to see a job offer. Oh, well, you know, we found something that could fit. And this thing is so powerful, if you take it to YouTube, for example, is that it will show you videos and so smart, much smarter than us because it has it knows more about us than we do. It will tweak it a bit. It'll take you a little step further. But I like to play with the algorithms, so I play with different clicks to see what's going to happen. And at one point you get an ad, oh, you're unhappy with your life, you're a data scientist, you studied to do artificial intelligence and you're not doing what you want. And look at me.

[00:33:19] I am now self-employed and I have five employees, so it's smarter than us and it's driving consumption.

[00:33:25] Click bait. It's ten times smarter than us, which means that after you're what, like twenty five.

[00:33:32] Thirty which I'm thirty seven, you're thirty seven.

[00:33:35] Ok, you're in a generation where you knew something before Internet.

[00:33:40] I would say before Google you're a pre Google person but someone that's fifteen. So let's say you're a pre Google person. So I would say you come twenty years after the first village twelve thousand years ago, that means that you were born as a hunter and then you move to a village. So you remember what a hunter was. So when someone says, oh, those pigs and I said, that's boring. I mean, what kind of life is that? I'm just going to sit here and watch pigs all my life. I want to go out. I want to go chase a lion. I want to get the adrenaline. I want I don't want that. I want to go see what's happening.

[00:34:12] So you have both someone that's 15 is in the village. He doesn't know what it is to be a hunter anymore. He's forgotten that it's lost. He knows social media. So now he's in this world and he's looking at his culture.

[00:34:27] And as you see the origin of hate on social media, it's just a miniature of the wars we did before because we would live in our little village and the guy over there doesn't have the same face color. I'm going to kill him. These people don't have the same God. I'm going to kill them, too. These people don't dress like me. I'm going to kill them. So we fueled the real wars with these differences. So now we're creating these little villages on the social media. We call groups and we live in our group and we see in our group. So and you'll notice I like I'd like to do this. I like to say, like I'm looking at I vote on both sides of the Atlantic.

[00:35:04] So I look at Democrats who look at Republicans. So I go and I look at these Republican YouTube videos. They're extremely well done. I mean, logic, Democrats, they're devils. And then you have all these comments that agree with them.

[00:35:18] I mean, what I'm talking about, one million views. Two hundred thousand views. We're not talking about ten views. And then as I click on them, because I like I like to play around a lot with these algorithms since I know how they work, I get more and more of these Republicans and they get smarter and smarter and smarter. They're not these little stupid people. They're very smart. And I say, let's go now. Let me change my CLECs to Democrats that are saying that Republicans are devils. And little by little, it builds up to more and more intelligent speech because sometimes it sees that I'm clicking on complex video so I get more and more so you can see that it can become if you're not doing what I'm doing, if you don't look at the opposite of what you think, like I had to learn when I was seven or eight, you're going to build in. You're going to be controlled completely and it'll take you to where you're not. Could take you to a protest, a physical protest receipt. Yeah. You see how bad they are. Come to this city. We're going to break them down. Then on the other side says, oh, let's go to the city. Let's try to stop them from breaking it down. And then when they meet, they've been totally conditioned like Paleolithic warriors to fight each other and then you see people die. So you're speaking in the present by my friend.

[00:36:32] Yeah, yeah. It's really, really interesting at something. Pretty much everything he said reminded me of this this Joseph Campbell quote, Now I'm just getting out of my head.

[00:36:40] So Joseph Campbell, huge into mythology, hero's journey and all that. And he talks about how all cultures are founded on myth. And then he talks about the individual and how the individual must be shaped. He must be made to react in the way that the culture wants them to. And here we are now in an age where we can create our own culture, like I am Punjabi, Indian.

[00:37:00] I could be born into this culture. But because of the what is that? Rajasthan and Punjab, Punjab, the north west that is right now just below more Durrow and Harapan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know her out by proposing and I think it's now modern in Punjabi and that's part of the civilization closest to a thousand five hundred years before Jesus Christ.

[00:37:20] Yeah. They had writing and they had sanitation. Water.

[00:37:24] Yeah. Yes. Most sophisticated sanitation. It was the culture I think that was based or really took purification rituals I think to the extreme. And that's.

[00:37:32] Yes, but it's where well they come. In fact they came from somewhere else, which is the basis of the whole Indo European culture. Yeah. Yes. Interesting. OK, so yeah, you can build your own culture on social media.

[00:37:45] Yeah. And then the algorithms are just there shaping you to react in the way that this culture wants you to react. Right. So if you are down the rabbit hole of conservative Republican stuff and that's all you are becoming exposed to, become more radical Democrat or radical Democrats are starting to. Yeah, yeah, that's very true.

[00:38:04] I would just say, if you're talking in my language, it's radical X radical X X is a variable. You can be a radical Republican, radical Democrat, rather radical Muslim, radical Jew, a radical Catholic, just put radical plus the variable. And now you know how I think.

[00:38:21] Yes, we've got to find it within ourselves to square ourselves, though, right. Because if you take the radical, there's not never mind. I'm I'm trying to make you square roots and exponent joke here, but it's not landing because the word radical.

[00:38:37] Yeah. Need back to hate and hate brings me back to survival reactions of people that go back twenty thousand years, which means that we've introduced survival reactions into social media that become physical in real life. That's the problem is as long as you're on social media insulting people, that's OK.

[00:38:57] But once that survival reaction is in real life, then that's that's that's I'm not going to say it's scary because that's that's that's been like this for thousands of years.

[00:39:06] Yeah. To put it in the words of cybersecurity attacks, they call that like a kinetic outcome where it goes from cyberspace into the real world as that kinetic outcome.

[00:39:14] But we had that twenty thousand years ago. You knew you would have a priest saying they are the devils, we need to kill them. And the soldier will say, bless us, bless us. It's the basis, you know, this. And then you have some people that think maybe like we are and you have original original in the Bhagavad Gita. That's how it starts. Yeah. In the middle of a battle, they're going to fight. Right. That's how the Bhagavad Gita starts. And he's thinking, is this right? Where does this fit in the universe? What am I doing here? Yeah, how many? That's maybe that's before Christ. That's maybe two thousand years before. It was probably several thousand years before it came in a written form. So we have soldiers, intelligence soldiers thousands of years ago saying, why am I doing this? And they tried to connect it to some superior force.

[00:40:01] What's up, artists? I would love to hear from you. Feel free to send me an email to the artists of Data Science at Gmail dot com. Let me know what you love about the show. Let me know what you don't love about this show and let me know what you would like to see in the future. I absolutely would love to hear from you. I've also got open office hours that I will be hosting and you can register by going to Whitley dot com forward, slash a d. S o h. I look forward to hearing from you all and look forward to seeing you in the office hours. Let's get back to the episode.

[00:40:46] So how does explainable I fit into this new world that we have, I guess list since we're on the topic of it, let's get into the ethics of artificial intelligence. What do we need to know as practitioners of Data science and machine learning, how do we ensure that we are building systems that are ethical?

[00:41:05] Ok, let's say the nice way and let's say the realistic way. OK, let's say at the nice polished living room with a conference table. Yes, we need to control the Data. We need more regulations. We need. So I'll skip that, OK, because you have maybe 15 conferences where people are going to tell you that every one of us. Yeah, yeah. And beautiful, we'll all go stop Google, Facebook. I just read an interesting interview of Zuckerberg. He's Jewish, OK? Says I'm Jewish, but I don't forbid people from saying that the Holocaust did not exist on Facebook, that the extermination camps did not exist. And the reporter said when I asked him, I was wondering why he would answer that. So I would say, let's take ethics and leave it in a little corner for the moment, because it's so easy to say and so cliche that we're not going to make it in Congress in a real conversation with that. What we have to understand is to go back to what I said, Drew, on social media, if you're on Facebook in real life now is Facebook.

[00:42:04] People look at the news on Facebook in United States, over 50 percent. Look at their news on Facebook.

[00:42:10] They follow people on Twitter, they follow on Instagram. What's the social media is the real life.

[00:42:18] And if you look at kids 15, they're on their bicycle and they're looking at this while they're on their bicycle. Real life is here. And if you say, you know, real life, maybe we should talk. Talk about what? OK, so let's say now you have a supercomputer talking to you that knows everything about you, everything you click, everything you followed, and it has a billion and a half parameters. Now, if you can find someone and all your interviews, that's going to say, you know what? I'm going to tell you why that algorithm decided that he predicted before he knew it that he would click on that video before I know it. They display something that they have the probability that I will click on now who is going to go into the algorithm but say, a Boltzmann restricted Boltzmann machine with millions and you have these people. I just love it when they say I can explain. Usher, just tell me which one of the million parameters and weights that made that decision there. Of course, they can't answer. No one can answer. And you know what?

[00:43:20] The people at Google, Amazon, Facebook can't answer either because it's too complex for anybody. It just does the right thing.

[00:43:27] As long as it's bringing in ads and the people are clicking that it's good. If it if the person is going away, then that's bad. So you have to nudge them again, maybe with his phone or something.

[00:43:37] So at this point, it's useless to say we're going to control it through data and algorithms. You can limit it. I wrote it in my book with regulations. I took racial stuff out of there. OK, that's the basics. You can take the basics, but what people don't realize is, no, we don't care about private Data anymore. What is gender? You can say, Oh, I'm afraid of my private Data. So what is gender? Are you a man or not? Or a woman? When I received my form to vote, it was written male, female, other, as I said, other what can I be so I can be whatever I want. Then I received another official US form saying male, female, transgender, transgender, female, transgender, male, other.

[00:44:22] Wow. That's that's becoming complicated. So actually that's not a real parameter anymore because you can have women that act like men, men that like that. That's that's not interesting age. Who knows. You have twelve year old kids watching porn all day on the Internet.

[00:44:38] So is he adult? He's always clicking. I'm over 18, OK, but he's looking at these videos. He's twelve. He's playing playing Grand Theft Auto at ten years old. OK, or Assassin's Creed's is over. Eighteen is playing at fourteen. So I would say the lines of private Data blurred. So everyone's saying we need to protect private Data we don't care about private Data in artificial intelligence anymore. We're looking at content. So if you're looking at a film on Netflix or a video on YouTube, we just take one hundred one hundred thousand features. We put you in there and we say, oh, he's watching that type of video. So he has that kind of behavior. So I don't need to know. I don't need to even you don't need to tell me where you live. I have your hub. I know that you're from France. I know that you're from this region in France. You don't have to. I'm hiding my location with a VPN. Oh, yeah, sure. You mean that I can't find out your culture by what you're writing in your content is writing.

[00:45:31] I live in a place where there's a religious leader and that the US has imposed an embargo on us and women where we can't always say what we want.

[00:45:44] And there's a religious police. Now, if the guy can't figure that's Iran, he's going to have a problem. Well, I live in a state, but I'm not going to tell you where where there is same sex marriage. And so with content, you can derive anything. And in fact, you can find out that a man is thinking like a woman or a woman is thinking like a man. So you take the content and then you just build a portrait of that person. You create his world. You put him in his bubble. It's a Truman Show. You know that movie. Show me a gigantic Truman Show with billions of Truman shows in your all your inside. You don't know that there's another world, so forget about trying to go into the algorithms and the data because you can filter it all you want will always make deductions with Iot Internet of things. It if that's that, we'll always find a way to know where you come from and all that. So where does inexplainable? I come in. The way I see it as an interesting tool is OK. First thing is I cannot explain it.

[00:46:44] I find excises model agnostic just like I was when I was a child.

[00:46:50] So the Italian model, French model, I don't care. I want to build a common model. So XIII's model agnostic. It's a different set of equations that's going to look at the input and it's going to look at the output. It's going to run the algorithm or it's going to observe all the outputs. And it's to say, you know why he said that that feature is because you said that word. You said that word. And that led to that answer. You're looking at that video because you chose video one, six and 17 and it found a common concept. And that's why you're clicking. That's the future of EXI. That's a fantastic field. Now how do I see it? I see it. So you get all these explanations. My book is full of these explanations and we're just at the beginning of it.

[00:47:31] I think X is going to become as powerful as I now. There's a good news and bad news.

[00:47:38] Xiii is going to be the way I do it already. I can explain almost any algorithm, the output, and I can find the features. And since I like to calculate, I can do it even now when I click on Netflix or anywhere, I know what it's doing because I know the equation. So it's like someone who can count without a calculator. So EXI is going to be exponential people that think, oh, it's this ethical thing that you better watch out. It's going to be an incredible tool. Fantastic. It's going to explain anything without even looking at the model. So at that point, the good let's all start with the good news. The good news is what I see and I'm not going to develop it too lazy.

[00:48:16] Now, I've developed the tens of thousands of hours, but I see it as an add on to a browser nonintrusive like you go on YouTube and it's recor it's going through your history and you have this algorithm that then they say auto portrait, you know, to make it a bit engaging. You want your auto portrait here, click there, it's going to tell you who you are, like who you are. And Bing says, wow, this is these are the features that the machine learning algorithm used and is. And this is your Truman Show. That's where you in. And then at the bottom of it, I see a recommendation. I say, you know what, I can see that you have you're in a group and you never change ideas. You're stuck. You're stuck in a hole. I would suggest even if you don't agree, click on these links and these videos that show contrary views to what you're thinking or other music that you can never listen to or classical music because you're always listening to this music or modern music, because you only use listening to classical music or listen to Democrats, because you're only watching Republicans look at Biden because you're only looking at Trump. I would say it would be a bit educational. And then when you click, you get like your social media IQ has gone up one point because for the moment you're really done. So you started IQ 50. They said up you're up to 60, you're almost one hundred. And then then little by little, it could be like a game, you know, for people and can be engaging. And then little by little, I see I see Google's face.

[00:49:40] I see these platforms. They're not our enemies.

[00:49:43] They don't even realize if you if I talk to Zuckerberg right now and I told them what he said, he said, wow, you know, every day I'm just trying to make billions of dollars. That's a good idea. Why don't I put it in? You know why I want to put it in. I'm going to put it in. That's the bad news. I'm going to put it in two ways. I'm going to put it in the navigator. People are going to come running to my platform and I'll put ads. I'll put advertisements next to the stuff for psychological analysis and I'm going to make billions of dollars. That's a super idea. OK, that's the good news. Now, where's the bad news? The good news business is good news. Bad news is Zuckerberg is going to say on Twitter, hey, that's smart. Why don't I feed this exact exact bad back into a I like a turbo. I'm going to make my change into a super power. So now you can read that you can insert the inside into The Truman Show. And from time to time with your dial, you put something opposite so you can save. My platform is objective. When a person comes, we always show a different idea, but the idea can be slightly his, but just a little different. It'll stay in The Truman Show. So as long as you click your OK.

[00:50:55] Reminds me of a documentary I just recently watched on Netflix. Interestingly enough, not one. It's like a social dilemma.

[00:51:02] Was it that one social dilemma? Yeah, it's an excellent it's an excellent video. I watched it for several days. I took notes that every image I went to, every site, in fact, I'm in the human center thing. I'll be in there. I'll be in a debate tomorrow with them. I looked at the book. And I reach a conclusion, reached several conclusions, one. The idea is good. I mean, it's a good idea for people to explain that. The thing is, they're giving the viewers the illusion that something is going to change by watching that video. I didn't hear them talk. They say, stop, go away from media. Close your Facebook account close. Sure. So I'm going to say a bad word. Go for it. If I really liked these people, it's not going to be a bad word in terms of language. But I'm going to say it's naive, OK? It's like saying that someone's eating hamburgers and soda every day and you say, OK, let's just close McDonald's and no one's going to everyone's going to eat well. So the solution to your diet is to shut down supermarkets and shut down fast. That way you're going to eat less. And you know what? We're going to close all the shops. That way you can go hunting again. So I would say it's naive. OK, that's my nice word for it. It's naive. And that's what disappointed me. And if someone if I'm in the debate tomorrow, I'll tell you, telling them that it's very naive to think that you're going to say, oh, you're you're driving your car. It's naive. I mean, how naive can that be? What I think is that it's excellent in the description, but it offers no realistic solution, because then I went to the sites they were talking about and there was a one called All Site, All Site.

[00:52:46] And it says on this site, it's very objective. When you read this site, you will get the news from social dilemma solved. So you see news and it's written. You have a little thing indicator, left, center, right. So, you know, Fox News, right. Then you have center. I don't know. I don't know a New Yorker or something like that. And then you have left Washington Post, ping, ping, ping. OK, so I looked at it and I looked at several articles and then I said then I looked at the glossary and then it never says if it's the truth or not, what do I care if the earth is flat? The right wing said the earth is flat. The left wing said the earth is flat. The center says the earth is flat. My conclusion is that the earth is flat. Right?

[00:53:29] So all sides is not solving my problem because you're taking free will away from people.

[00:53:37] So I think that the real solution is this extension, this XXXII extension that becomes like, you know, ad blockers or stuff like that. I'm not and I'm not going to block anyone. I'm going to say nonintrusive. You have this extension. If I'm a parent, I would make it compulsory. If you're on the Web, I'm going to activate this parent control, which is automatic control. And it's going to every time you go on the web I'm sorry, my little child, you're going to see a little it's going to be small on the top right of your screen. You spent this much time on this video.

[00:54:09] Your IQ is at 50.

[00:54:11] You're going down and down into The Truman Show. Click here to look at something else. I would I'd use a superintelligent to educate the person that's on the Web. And that's the solution. The solution is not to forbid things like imagine when China was using gunpowder for fireworks. Right. And people were saying, you know, China there was so peaceful, they had gunpowder, but they were just using it for fireworks. Now, I'm not going to say the bad word. How naive could that be? It's just because they didn't have the metal, the cannon that could contain the gunpowder. And every time you put it, it explodes. So once they found it, of course, they have cannons. So we've had cannons for what, like centuries? Have you seen see anyone banned cannons? I mean, how ridiculous can it be so. Or rifles or guns or anything. No. Or food. No, you can't ban it. You have to introduce it. I would say an extension. And I'm pretty sure that one day when people realize what I just said, because I've been here for decades watching all this, it's sometimes I'm ten years ahead. Sometimes I'm twenty years ahead because I've had I'm talking forty years here. Right. So so I'm pretty sure that in the end they're always going to be someone said Glik, you have this chrome extension, just click it in your browser, you get your IQ in real time, time spent and then click and get advice. And this should help people. That's it. You can't do more.

[00:55:31] Really, really fascinating. Thank you so much. And I'm curious, how do you view Data science machine learning? I do think it's an art or purely a hard science.

[00:55:40] That's one of your questions in your questionnaire. And I was saying, gee, how am I going to answer? Because it's a philosophical question and let's take architecture. When a person is building something today, is it art or is just functional? It's that now if you look at a cathedral or a mosque, you know, a beautiful mosque in the Middle East or something like that, you say, wow, that's art. Do you look at a building? Maybe you say that's not art. So first we're going to have to define what art is. What is art now? I have some ideas when I think about it is. Would tell you something may be strange for you, but it's obvious in artificial intelligence now you can use the same algorithm for painting, you can use the same algorithm. So I have coded algorithms. I'm a music player. I got my piano when I was four years old, some music. I play music almost every day around 11:00 or midnight when everything is calm. OK, so I put equation's in music. So at that point I would say it can be ignored. If there is inspiration or something, I would say it's like a rain. It's you take it depends. First, it can be a tool for someone that has no imagination. He's just doing structural artificial intelligence. He's taking K means clustering. He learned math has zero imagination. He goes to a corporation, he implements it and works super fine. The CEO is happy because you know what? He doesn't want creative people around. He said, I want to spend money on nothing. I like this guy. He's down to earth. I told I gave him and it's done. OK, so that's fine.

[00:57:22] This person is more useful than the creative people because if you don't have a plumber, you don't have a house.

[00:57:28] You need an architect to think about all that. But you have the brick layer. You're not going to get a house either. So. So that's fine. Now we can fast forward through the spectrum and at the other end you have the pure, pure, pure, pure, creative, artificial, intelligent person that creates these things that no one understands and no one even knows what they're going to do with it or how it's going to be applied. And if you want to pay your mortgage, you better be somewhere in between. If you want to be the super creative artist and never sell something in your life, go ahead. But if you want to pay your mortgage, you better back down a bit in the spectrum.

[00:58:05] So the idea is to use enough creativity and art to feed into your practical, non imaginative self and generate bills that generate money that pay your mortgages.

[00:58:16] The best way is to be somewhere floating around in the spectrum and not on the extremes. That's a good answer.

[00:58:22] Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much. I mean, this conversation is taking a completely different turn than what I anticipated, and it's been much more interesting and entertaining than what I had planned.

[00:58:33] So just hoping you wouldn't fall asleep, though. Absolutely not. This was fascinating, like I said. Well, as I would like to ask you a question, to be honest, those other Data sanity questions kind of put me to sleep. I like to hear about people and people's experiences like it is just always, always. Like I said, it's so fascinating to me. Like it is. This is another person miles and miles away across the ocean here in Paris. I'm in Canada. You've had an entirely different Winnipeg. Winnipeg. Wow. You're really you're really that's very far away. And it's just always interesting to me to hear people's experiences and their perspectives on things. So it's like nine o'clock. It's 11 a.m. right now. 11 a.m.. Right.

[00:59:12] Ok, so last formal question here before we jump into a quick random round, it is one hundred years in the future. What do you want to be remembered for?

[00:59:22] Not now. Let me give you the bad news. We will both be forgotten. Bill Gates will be forgotten. Elon Musk will be forgotten about every guy that thinks he's important right now will be forgotten. I learned that when I was reading from Mark Aurel. He's a Roman emperor and general, and he said people that will be remembered is more like Socrates, Plato. You'll get Caesar. You really have to do something enormous to be remembered. The only thing I see today is trade in my everyday life to bring the best to my children, to the best to my grandchildren, to the best to people I talk to like you or write to. Maybe somehow it'll work into their genes. And maybe one hundred years from now you'll have one of my great, great, great, great grandchildren. If my lineage goes that far, that will be able to both think and smile, think it's in the genes that I'll go through.

[01:00:20] It's interesting, I think the Roman Empire, speaking of Marcus Aurelius, could that be doing there?

[01:00:25] Yeah. Marcus Aurelius. Yeah. He's definitely 50 books that I've been reading all my life and I keep going back to them.

[01:00:33] Meditations is quite good in Stoicism is my operating system for life. Yes. The philosophy I most adhere to and in the meditations he has is this blur the speed with which all things vanish, the objects in the world.

[01:00:47] And that's right. You just just have your present moment. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[01:00:51] And I spent a lot of time on his present moment and unfortunately, two thousand years later, there's a slight error in his thinking because the present doesn't exist in the sense that by the time my voice gets to you and the signal goes through your brain and you're processing it, you're looking at the past of what you perceive. You can't you're never in real time. We're never in real time. There's a processing. Time, so always lagging, our brain is always lagging on what's going on, so we have the past and that's all we have, in fact, because when we do the future, we're just doing combinations of the past to think of what the future could be based on the tracks we see. So if we see a track going that way, oh, the future is going to go that way. Oh, yeah, the future. I think a more interesting question is what are we going to look like in the thousand years? And people should worry that if the planet is still can is habitable, you can still live on the planet. We might have evolved in another species because we're going to be genetically modified and not too long. So it might be something else. So we'll keep talking about the future, but the future doesn't include us necessarily.

[01:02:03] Interesting the latency of the present moment. I think that is a podcast episode unto itself. That is a very interesting concept. Thank you so much for shedding light on that and so much more to get into. But let's let's go ahead and jump into the random round. What do you currently most excited about or currently exploring?

[01:02:23] Well, there was a question you had put forth in your questionnaire was when you were 15, what did you want to be? Right. And when I was 15, between the age 15 and about twenty twenty one, I set my life goals. I set them in the spiritual field sphere, everything I am today. And I've been careful to check every year that I can talk to my 15 year old self that I haven't become something different from the dreams of a teenager.

[01:02:53] So I would say that every day, every morning, every evening, I spend a lot of time readjusting, said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Or is this going I'm spending too much time on this.

[01:03:03] I have to go back to that. So I'm on this path that I've been on for like 50 years and I'm someone of status every day. My main thought is keep on that path. Now, the main the main idea of this path beyond meditation, which is always personal, no one can speak about meditation because it can be expressed in words. So it's no use wasting our time explaining things that are can be explained. Meditation is unexplainable, worse than. So the other thing I like these models. I just like to observe people like I haven't changed since I was seven. I like like one thing we like to do with my wife is we like to walk around the neighborhood every day. We walk around the neighborhood every day. And I like to look at everyone and look at other people. How do they live? What time do they get up? Do they go shopping? And then sometimes how why is that person always sitting in his chair watching TV?

[01:04:00] That intrigues me. I can worry me like for an hour in the evening. Why? Why is he alone there? So maybe the next day when I say hey, hi, I'll talk to the person and then I'll engage in a little by little. I'll learn about him. He'll learn about me. I think what's fascinating is what you're like. We agree probably as other people what can be more fat and other things than looking at planets and looking at animals. I spend a lot of time observing animals like I've always had a cat and a next door neighbor has a dog.

[01:04:28] But it's not my dog because every time he sees, every time the dog sees me, he wants to play, eat. And you can learn a lot. You can learn a lot about their reasoning and how they reach a decision. I can't tell you how many equations I wrote that I delivered to customers based on what animals do you get? Five lines. Powerful stuff.

[01:04:48] Yeah. I mean, think Alan Watts said it, that people who are interesting or people who are interested. Yes.

[01:04:56] Well, I have another way of putting you can't see the light. You can't understand something unless you explain it to someone else and you can't see the light in yourself. If you don't see the light in others, it's impossible.

[01:05:06] We're a group, we're a collective collective intelligence. What do you believe that other people think is crazy? Yeah, I saw that one, too. I knew I wanted to get these tough questions.

[01:05:16] I mean, well, what always comes to me when I say that and I look at other people's faces and might even surprise you, in fact, is love with a capital L that means that is vertically integrated. It goes from the highest spiritual level to the lowest molecule is love. Not in the sense of naive, because I guess you know by now that I'm not interested in naive thinking.

[01:05:41] But if merging love is merging, love is becoming something bigger than yourself all the time because we're nothing. So as soon as you love, then you grow, you grow, we grow. So I say love is the most fundamental concept that humanity has. I mean, there's nothing above that. Not artificial intelligence, certainly not artificial intelligence, stuff like that. I mean, that's these are tools like a hammer or a screwdriver. I mean, you know, like when I was speaking about how smart an artificial intelligence is, sure. My car can go faster than I can. I'm not scared of cars, but love sight. See, when people when I say that people ask for an explanation and and it's not. For me, my father taught me that, he said, I've been through everything from Russia to United States to Second World War, to extermination camps, to Nazi trials, forget it all, forget about the money, forget about love. If you have someone that loves you and you love that someone, I mean I mean, the rest is a joke.

[01:06:37] And I absolutely agree with you. A natural affection towards all of humanity is something that people should.

[01:06:43] Everything, not only humanity, everything, a star, the moon, an animal. Basically, it's you know, you find this in Buddhism, you find this in Hinduism, you find this in mystical Islam, mystical Catholicism, mystical philosophers, mystical astronomers who will look at the stars even if they don't believe in God. They look at the stars and they say, oh, wow, OK, so it's in everybody. That's our basic human quality, whether we're atheists or believer or whatever, and no one can live without it.

[01:07:13] Yeah, definitely. Contemplate your place in the cosmos. Right. And I don't know my place. Yeah, well, you'd still recognize your interconnectedness in this entire system, right?

[01:07:22] That I don't know where we come from. I don't know where we're going. I don't know what we're doing here. I'm just sitting here trying to figure out that that's another crazy thing is what I find crazy and other people that really bothers me. How can I sit here and I'm eating in a restaurant and people and no one's saying, what are what am I doing here or where am I or am I going? Why am I here? That has troubled me since I've been three or four. That's really troubling. There's no answer to that. And it's really troubling.

[01:07:51] Some heavy, heavy troubles for a toddler. Indeed, that's how I was born, unfortunately, is jumping to random question generator here. Now, pull it up right here. And starting with the first question we've got, who are some of your heroes?

[01:08:06] Well, the first one that comes to my mind, because I see this little duck and it looks like a bit like pop culture is a pastor. When Michael Jackson passed away, I watched the ceremony because I'm a great Michael Jackson fan. I just love the way this guy created music. And I was listening to this pastor. He was, um, smaller. He was smaller than I. And he was he was part of black America and all that. And he he said something. I mean, it stuck in my mind. He says, I don't care if you sweep streets. I don't care if you're a garbage man. I don't care what you do. Be a Mozart and what you're doing and you'll elevate yourself. I mean, that's he's a hero, OK? And then, of course, in my background, people that give their lives for other people like, you know, force. This comes from my cultural past. People on D-Day that were dying by thousands on the beaches full of blood and still trying to fight for an idea. And then I'm going to say something completely surprising. Candice Owens. I don't know if you know Candice Owens.

[01:09:22] No, no.

[01:09:23] She's like thirty, thirty one. She's a black conservative in the United States. I'm not a conservative. I mean, you can guess that listening to me through this conversation, conservative would have more structured thoughts. And she's a black conservative.

[01:09:40] She makes incredible mistakes. He thinks that global warming doesn't exist. I mean, sometimes she say things that she just hears people repeat. But in the core of her, if we take all these mistakes she's making and we just listen, that's we have to listen to people that don't agree with you. She says, stop being victims. You're not a victim. Whoever you are, you're not a victim. Go out and do something. And in fact, Stevie Wonder came out to defend her a bit and he said, stop moving around with your mouth and stop moving with your legs, which means because I could feel like a victim, you know, from where I come from in my culture, I've been rejected by all the cultures I mentioned because I'm not I'm not really any of them.

[01:10:18] So every time I would say, you know, I'm Italian, but you're not Italian. I'm Jewish, but you're not Jewish. You're Catholic, but you're not Catholic. You're American, but you don't live in the States. You're French, but you're American. So you're German.

[01:10:29] No, you're not German, just born in German. So I got rejected by all of this when I was a teenager. And instead of being a victim, you have to find a way in life. So can do so. And I like I like this woman because I don't agree with 90 percent of what she says. But in these ten percent, there are a lot of heroes.

[01:10:47] I could I could name one hundred heroes. I could I could name my next door neighbor. My next door neighbor is like middle class. He just bought his house. And I see him closes shutters around eight thirty in the evening because every morning he gets up at four and five to go work. And when he comes back, I can hear him talk to his children. He's always nice to them. He's nice to his dog. He's nice to his wife. On weekends, he makes these barbecues. In the summer, he has a swimming pool so they can play in the water and. I hear his wife doing the homework outside. There are a lot of everyday heroes, one on one I like. Also in 1980 I was in Rajastan and I was one in this hotel and I saw this guy in a rickshaw and that puzzled me. So that really puzzled me. I said, how can you go on that rickshaw? You're thin enough. I could blow you away. You you don't eat. I mean, obviously you don't have money. So what I did on that day is I had a lot of fun because I did the rickshaw for him. I got on the rickshaw and I drove him around. It was in Agra and I drove and he was the king of the day, you know. But then I was very careful when I was in Varanasi, the sacred city. That's nineteen eighty. And I have the picture in my house. It was in my living room for like 30 years until it began to fade.

[01:12:10] These are heroes. These are the one of the first heroes I saw. It was at the beginning of the rainy season and there was no sewage system, as you know in many. And you can you could smell that was pretty bad. And here you had it in the middle of two puddles, two men sitting down drinking tea in the middle of a place where, you know, where cars would go. And they had their two umbrellas and they were laughing and they were chatting. I see. I mean, I told my wife, I told the car, stop the car. I want to take a picture. I just I didn't want to bother them. I didn't go. I took picture and I thought, wow, these guys are above. I mean, they are top. I'm seeing thousands of heroes and I haven't seen two heroes. I don't I don't think Elon Musk is a hero. I don't think Bill Gates is a hero. I don't admire these people. I admire their business career. I don't. But I don't want to hear anything. I don't admire a guy that sends rockets into space but has tens of thousands of homeless people around his office or the forces. I admire his genius. Elon Musk is a genius, a pure business genius, and the only really industrial genius we have right now. He he got these cars to work, these rockets Hyperloop. He is a pure, traditional 16th century genius. But like most of those guys, the human side is not so good when you look at their personal.

[01:13:34] So he's not my hero. I would admire the homeless person in Los Angeles that found a job, got a house, got a wife, made children and made them happy. Wow. Or or even if the guy got another husband, I'm not sure I'm not. You can even marry another another man and adopt a homeless child on the street. These are the people I admire another one. I'll stop up to this one because I can go on for hours on heroes I like. There's this one lady and French lady called Sister Emmanuel, a Catholic, and she was a sister all her life and traditional sister. And at 60, it was her retirement age as as a sister. And she says, what am I going to do with my retirement? Well, I'm going to Egypt. I'm going to Egypt, and I'm going to live in the dumpster's with the Catholics, the Christians. They're not Catholics, the Christians, the couped that can only live off the garbage in Cairo. And she spent years and the middle that garbage. But she wrote books and she wrote about these people and she made these people happy. Wow. And then she would say, I when I go out, I go for a walk in the forest. And when I pray, I'm sure that some of this goes somewhere and does something good for someone. So, you know, I could go for hours on heroes. There are thousands of heroes on this planet. I would say millions of heroes.

[01:14:53] I appreciate that. That viewpoint. So you've traveled quite a bit. What would you say is your favorite city?

[01:14:59] Well, I can tell you places I like. There's no I can't be a favorite. My favorite city is where there's people I like. I guess you know that by now. My favorite city is this could be my one of my favorite cities right now. The city we just created. We with your map behind you, we just created this other map and we're both very both very happy in our little city. We just created OK, so there's all kinds of cities. But the cities I like I would say in chronological order, I'll just say, like you have traveled lot. Berlin, Berlin was is a very unique city because it's in the middle of all these cultures. And in Germany, they say Berlin is like France because everyone no one listens to anything over there. OK, of course, if I go in order again, I like Paris because as you can see in the image, it's forbidden to build buildings inside Paris. So it's still a very flat city with 19th century, early 20th century buildings. And there's incredible culture. There's a city I spent days observing is O'Gara, because the Taj Mahal so intriguing is Mughal culture that got there and and chargee. And I think that he had these people create the Taj Mahal, but then he could all their hands off so they wouldn't do it somewhere else, which got me working on Uzbekistan and Tamerlan and the way they did things and in the whole Indian culture, which is something fascinating. I mean, I just hope people don't forget it. I mean, it's incredibly fascinating. And then I love Manhattan and Manhattan. I this I have spent days walking in Manhattan. I was lucky enough last September to go there and with my wife, we walked about one hundred and twenty kilometers in Manhattan.

[01:16:46] It was sunny all week, as you have people from all over the world there.

[01:16:50] And then I could go on forever because I like everywhere I go, I like Africa. One of the cities, one of the countries I visited the most is Tunisia because I worked a lot there. I love Arab culture. I like it. I love the meals, the families, because there's not only the cities, there's the people in those cities. And Arab culture is absolutely fascinating. I mean, Morocco Morocco was one of my first trips as a student with my wife. Of course, I travel a lot with my parents because obviously military always worked. So I did many countries before, but my first own trip was with my wife to Morocco and Morocco before it was really touristic. And I would go into the souks. These are these markets. And I went deep into the markets and I felt at home in there and I began to talk to people. I didn't speak Arabic, we spoke some French and all that. And little by little, I was adopted. I mean, they would take me to the back of the shop and we drink tea and joke for four hours discussing. Then they'd go home with my wife. We'd been invited to their family. I'd say the best city in the world, the cities. I can give you a model that since, you know, I like to do representations and we can put up with the heroes, the heroes is what will bring the best out of you. And the best cities are the place where you meet people that take you away from where you live every day because some people travel, but they travel with themselves. They're in their bubble. Oh, I don't like the food here. It's too spicy.

[01:18:27] Why don't we eat it like at home? I said, well, why not go home or that monument's nice, but you know, it's not like in. Yeah, why don't you go back to where you came from. So if you travel the word travel is you're going from A to B, so the best cities in the world is where you go from A to B, and then there's this distance, but then you feel comfortable with that system.

[01:18:49] How can people connect with you when they find you online?

[01:18:52] Linkedin that's the best place because I'm only on LinkedIn I don't go. I only have Bortz on other social media so that I use for development. LinkedIn is the best place. I always answer questions or messages. So they are.

[01:19:06] Thank you so much for taking time out your schedule to be on the show today. Really, you're part of my skin. Oh man. Now I didn't take time off my schedule and my schedule to the right and appreciate that. I think it was interesting conversation and I definitely learned a lot and a lot more interesting than what I originally had planned. So thank you for that. Well, hopefully I didn't bore you. So that's that pretty good. Had it. Not at all.

[01:19:31] Thanks again. And you're welcome back on the show at any time.

[01:19:36] Sure. Anytime you want to talk now that you know I can talk for hours on any subject, you can invite me all the time. The more you communicate with others, the more you express your ideas, your ideas. Even in this conversation, you learn things. But I learned things because I expressed some new ideas in there since on the piano I'm in Improviser. I expressed some details in the ideas I had that I didn't have before this conversation. So thank you.