I really enjoyed this conversation with Judea. Here's the outline: 0:00 - Introduction 3:18 - Descartes and analytic geometry 6:25 - Good way to teach math 7:10 - From math to engineering 9:14 - Does God play dice? 10:47 - Free will 11:59 - Probability 22:21 - Machine learning 23:13 - Causal Networks 27:48 - Intelligent systems that reason with causation 29:29 - Do(x) operator 36:57 - Counterfactuals 44:12 - Reasoning by Metaphor 51:15 - Machine learning and causal reasoning 53:28 - Temporal aspect of causation 56:21 - Machine learning (continued) 59:15 - Human-level artificial intelligence 1:04:08 - Consciousness 1:04:31 - Concerns about AGI 1:09:53 - Religion and robotics 1:12:07 - Daniel Pearl 1:19:09 - Advice for students 1:21:00 - Legacy

In a world of AI sharlatans and sales gurus, its so refreshing to have such a non BS podcast.

Thank you for being very respectful while chatting with your guests, even when you are discussing a sensitive topic. It is an amazing quality that every host should have.

This has to be one of the best interviews I have ever seen. Both Judea and Lex are continuously challenging their point with enormous respect. Judea is also an amazing communicator of complex ideas. thanks Lex for providing us with this content!!

This podcast is what got me interested again in mathematics. I owe you deeply Lex.

Not just an interview. This is a classic, a legacy for 100s of years. The gospel according to Judea Pearl God bless you sir

What a great scientist. Not losing his hope and humour despite such a heartbreaking loss makes him a great human being, too.

thanks for not doing adds in the middle

Beautiful. Life is short, but you make my life so much richer with interviews like this one. I will watch this again with affection. Point of personal history. I was at UCLA in 1968 and 1969. The internet began on October 29, 1969 when Leonard Kleinrock and his team at UCLA sent a message to Stanford (only the first two letters made it through). At that time I was interested in film, art, music, parties, political demonstrations, and working to save money to go to Europe, and I knew nothing about computers. I traveled to Europe, and lived in Paris, working as a construction worker. I returned to UCLA, switched majors, and graduated from the UCLA School of Engineering in Computer Science. Judea Pearl’s office reminds me of the offices in the school where my friends and I would hang out with professors drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes (times have changed) and talking about self-aware robots, Boolean algebra, transfer phenomena, and multi-dimensional spaces. So many wonderful professors then, and now, who were so kind to us students. Watching these videos of so many extraordinary people makes me wonder about the many paths that I did not take, but if I had taken any of those paths then I would not exist to say--thank you. William L. Ramseyer

Huge intellect, clearly expressed - your questions were excellent in teasing out more of the understanding. Pearl is a fascinating guest.

I love how Prof Pearl seems to keep Lex a bit off balance, not in a bad way, but by continually questioning and challenging various points as they're made.

Amazing interview. Beautiful exploration of what basic concepts in causality actually mean, complete with examples. I've watched several speeches by Pearl, but never anything as clear this, Lex Fridman very craftily structures the conversation.

Lex, your talent for extracting knowledge from your interviewees is amazing, inspirational, and very much appreciated by this armchair aficionado of the sciences.

Mr. Judea Pearl is so amazing! My hart is bleeding for him and his late son. But he is so full of joy and life! I wish I could ever become at least half a person he is...

Yourself and Joe Rogan are the only podcast I make sure not to miss.

I just started watching all your interviews, wow, such a good combination of intelligent questions and answers!

Thanks Lex! One of the most interesting interviews so far! (and I've watched them all!!!)

[11:30] “Faking it, is having it. …Faking intelligence, is intelligence, because it’s not easy to fake. It’s very hard to fake…and you can only fake it if you have it.”

I admire the financial independence of people, But you can live better if you work a little more. After watching this I think there are people out there, on the extreme, who plan to die early just to be able to retire early. To each their own but to me, retirement isn't just about not having to work, it's about having the freedom to do whatever you might reasonably want, such as travel, buying things, enjoying life, etc. I don't think I could retire with less than $3m in income-generating investments, maybe $2m at the very minimum. I plan to work until I'm at least 45

I wasn't convinced by mr. Pearl at the beggining of the interview, but it really grew on me ! Yet another awesome one, thank you both.

I definitely need to watch this 2-3 times. It is great, and each time I am learning more from it. I enjoyed it so much.

It feels like Lex is trying to ask very cautiously how to build an AGI and Judea politely declines to break our hopes about it happening any time soon :D Great podcast, refreshing to see people that actually know what they are discussing

I was just reading his book and wondered if Lex has already interviewed him... This channel is amazing.

How did you cover such a magnificent span of topics and range of intellectuality and emotion. Can't believe you asked that deep and perfect pair of questions about his son.

Such a beautiful and moving interview. A display of humility, intelligence and compassion by this man.

Oh wow I've used a bunch of his textbooks before. Bless up Lex for these awesome guests and free content.

Such a brilliant and empathetic person, Dr. Pearl...thank you!

"Free will is an illusion that we, AI people, are gonna solve." - Judea Pearl

lex we really appreciate content from such a high level, your are going down as one of the best to every do it

Thank you Lex, I really enjoy the work you put into making these great podcasts. I'm learning new concepts in each episode.

He has to be one of the wisest people I’ve ever seen.

Great talk! Another good one lex. Interviewing skills are improving and progressing after each successive one.

One of the best conversations, thank you!

A beautiful episode, loved it. I had a feeling I'm drinking a cup of coffee with the 2 of you - that's a good sign that the podcast was a success. Thank you.

My favorite podcast yet! What a fascinating and interesting conversation!

What an amazing interview again! Thank you for interviewing the geniuses of our modern times.

Great interview full of key ideas. Worth a careful study and sharing around.

Thanks for this beautiful interview!

Excellent excellent interview - got more out of this than some of his lectures

Thanks for all of this amazing, insightful content Lex! Much appreciated, cheers from India

Mr. Pearl changed my life, most inspiring Person I have ever seen...

Awesome talk, love Prof. Pearl. Please invite Doug Hofstadter next.

What an amazing interview!? Thank you Dr. Pearl.

What a beautiful conversation!! Couldn’t skip anything.

Thanks again for inspiring us again with an amazing interview Lex

I have true appreciation for your work, Mr Fridman

Currently working on same topic. Thanks for providing material for literature review.

One of the best interviews I saw in a long time! Judea Pearl is a genius with a wonderful sense of humor and a big heart!!👏👏 A rare breed in today’s world!!

Absolutely fabulous work! Love it.

I had hard time to agree with many things that he said. However, I was in awe at the end of the discussion. Ended up buying his book. Great talk! Gave me many fruitful insights!

Very moving at the end , and overall very deep talk about causal reasoning.

Man, that is absolutely horrible what happened to his son. He's a strong man being able to talk about it without falling to pieces. Or maybe that's just time dulling the pain. I love my children and I don't want to think about how I would grapple with such a tragedy. Love of ones offspring is a powerful emotion. Sorry for your loss sir.

Hes 83. He doesn't look a day older than 60. Incredible

Lex, it was a really great conversation. Appreciate it a lot.

Thank you so much Lex! Could we please get automatic captions?

What Pearl says about intervention is much the same as what LeCunn says about infants. Infants observe the world (mostly) and occasionally intervene. Infants (and kittens batting a ball of yarn) are building a causal model from the data -- from some initial architecture and set of conditions -- and resolving ambiguities with interventions. Intervention is a way of pruning the causal graph to make it less "bushy", as Pearl puts it. The other lesson to draw from this interview is the importance of historical and cultural grounding in math and science education. We typically interact with disembodied knowledge about abstract structures. But Pearl is firmly situated in time and place. He knows who he is, who Descartes was, and who his people (the Jews) are. He knows how to relate to Archimedes and Daniel and the king of Babylon. All these connections mean that his personal knowledge graph is very bushy. He can approach a topic from multiple vantages and evaluate the merits of many different paths through his personal graph. But if all he knew about a subject was what he learned in textbooks, then the sparseness of his understanding would preclude insights and wisdom.

An excellent interview, Lex! Bravo :)

I was waiting for this one!

This is the kind is Academic pop culture we need on Facebook and in general. :)

Thanks @Lex. It was an interesting conversation that tried to align a mental model of reality, that is very human and uses terms like causation, and structure, to some of the mental models that a pure pattern recognition algorithm can build from raw observation of the world (eg a baby of another specie of being for example). Can we 'learn' how to build mental models, is the topic that you kept coming back to.

Lex, can you get Ben Goertzel from SingularityNET on if possible? Thanks

Thank you for respecting the artistic integrity of your podcast and putting ads at the beginning! Sean Carrol has degraded his podcast significantly by having interruptions for unrelated things in the middle of a deep conversation.

Again a great conversation. Keep it going :)

Please do Josh Tenenbaum

Great interview, I really like the greate spirit in Prof Pearl.

What a brilliant man! I love that he said the best way to teach math is chronologically! I always believed so. I need to know who, when, and why first! He is so funny, I don't know why Lex isn't laughing harder. As a roboticist, this is undoubtedly my favorite episode!

Hell yeah!!!! Read my mind with that guest!

The role of the equation sign in physics and what is implied by the causal relations from 20:00 to 22:22 is mind blowing

what a wonderful exchange tyg

Who the fuck is disliking these podcasts? Honestly, it blows my mind. I understand you might not like the topic at hand or the guest but to take the time to go on and dislike such high quality of content is absurd.

Beautiful conversation

Not on Spotify?

The important thing to understand is that when we *do not* add arrows to the causal diagram it is an explicit assumption that there is no causality in between two variables. And that is essentially the default in many observational studies. What causal inference does is allow one to explore and better understand how those implicit or explicit assumptions actually influence the analysis of the data and conclusions that can or can't be made logically. At least, that's the important takeaway for me.

This might be Inconvenient but it looks like the *Turing Award* behind him! Thanks for the Podcast BTW!

this one is my favorite !

excellent talk, a real giant

I wish I could be 10% as intuitively intelligent as prof. Pearl - great video.

Great talk. Could you speak with Michael Jordan.

Great talk ..

Only through min 11, but it's already obvious this must be a like

"You can't fake free will if you don't have it" -Judea Pearl

I see Lex Fridman AI Podcast im just spaming like button

44:30 - "Metaphor is an expert system ..." great comment by Pearl.

Why on earth does this video not have billion of views?

Gosh Judea is amazingly sharp despite his age. A real genius.

Hey Lex. Your are awesome!!! Keep being so dope!!!!!!

Very interesting...I shall follow up

wow... tear in my eye from 1:09:53 "Today is father's day"

2 of the biggest dangers imo is the fact that generals are going to get their hands on it for war. Secondly the creation of A.I could start a war itself if leaders realize the power advantage because someone is going to create it first.

Has the topic of cerebral organoids been discussed in any episode of the podcast?

Really good conversation

I'm from China, recently I bought the Chinese version of 《The Book of Why》, I want to read the book firstly and review this video later.

"...the strings behind the facts." Awesome!

When is the Grant Sanderson one?

Saw the Teal book in the background "De Re Metallica" . After looking the book up I'm somewhat disheartened that Judea Pearl isn't a heavy metal fan

@1:21:25 "Put a counterfactual in terms of a model surgery" ?? what does this mean? I get the counterfactual, I don't get the "in terms of model surgery" part.

Thank you!

There is a textbook on current ideas of learning causal relationships from data. It's Elements of Causal inference by Jonas Peters. Let's look at the firing squad example. Let o,a,b,d be boolean variables representing wether by the end of the trial an order was issued, rifleman 1 shot, rifleman 2 shot, and the prisoner was killed. If you ignore the time precedence like that (that during the trial a and b always change after o, and d always changes after a or b) it's impossible to infer the causal graph without making additional assumptions. A lot of current methods work by making assumptions. If you do take into account the time precedence it becomes much easier. One way to learn the graph in the firing squad would be to collect time series information o_i, a_i, b_i, d_i for every trial where i is in milliseconds (assuming it takes at least a millisecond for the bullet to reach the prisoner). We would know that the series o_i precedes a_i and b_i, which in turn precede d_i. We still know that a change in o_i causes a change in d_i, but we can find out that it does so only indirectly through a_i and b_i by testing for conditional independence (d_i -||- o_{i-1,i-2...} | a_{i-1,i-2,...}, b_{i-1,i-2,...} ).

I love Judea Pearl!

interview Geoffrey Hinton