Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…We should find the right balance between chaos and order, between self-restriction and freedom for creativity. Your father recently celebrated his 80th birthday. You had a conversation with him. He gave you some life advice. I think you mentioned to me one of the things he said was not to just speak of your principles, but to live them, to lead by example. I think this is something you already do well. Maybe can you speak to what you’ve learned about life from your father, maybe some of the lessons he told you in the conversation you’ve had with him on his birthday. I’m incredibly lucky to have my father. He’s a person who wrote countless books on Ancient Rome and Ancient Roman literature, dozens of scientific papers, and I always remember him working. He would be busy typing his books and articles in an old-school typewriter back in the late ’80s, early ’90s. He was relentless. The example he said to myself and my brother was priceless. Some people make this mistake of thinking that you can instill the right principles in the future generation or into your kids by saying things to them, but kids are smart. They discount words, they look at the actions. So observing our father was a big lesson by itself. It wasn’t necessary for him to say anything to us. And then at the same time, he was incredibly patient, emotionally resilient. My mom, great woman, incredibly smart, highly educated, but she would sometimes try to test the patience of my father. It’s a trait rooted in our biology. There’s an evolutionary explanation for that. Women sometimes tend to do that, and he demonstrated incredible patience all the time. He told me recently, “You shouldn’t give the wrong example to the people around you and in particular to your kids, because you can do the right thing nine times out of 10, but you make a mistake once, and they will instantly copy it. If you’re telling your kids not to use a smartphone, but you’re using a smartphone all the time yourself, and coming up with all kinds of sophisticated, brilliant explanations why they shouldn’t be using a smartphone, it won’t land. It’s bound to fail. So you lead by example.” There are other numerous lessons: staying positive, looking at the bright side, never despair, be honest. He told me last time I spoke to him that AI can have consciousness, can be creative, but it cannot have conscience in a way. It cannot be moral. It cannot have deeply rooted principles. It cannot have integrity in the meaning that we understand it as human beings.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.