Interview with an Industry Leader Featuring Dave Godlove

think that is like it looks like I was a computer science major you know doing something a little bit different and then I got excited about high performance Computing and like I think with me I mean I started off pouring concrete right and so my my Meandering path is a bit more Meandering than most I think I love your path though the stories are awesome um yeah so to to kind of like sum it up as quickly as I can um I attempted College once wasn't really ready for it decided to get out into the real world um my first job paying rent was to

pour concrete and it wasn't just any kind of concrete it was concrete for Burial Vaults that we buried people in so I buried dead people for my first job that paid rent um did that for a few years and decided this is kind of a dead [Laughter] end yeah maybe I should go back to college no pun intended um so at that point in my life I was really turned on by the idea that there are a lot of different people in the world and we all have different motiv motivations and we're all super different and um it was exciting to me that I could

study people and so I uh majored in psychology as an undergrad um did that I went to a community college for a couple years and had a mentor there uh psychology professor and I was I was asking her how can I become more involved in the field and she said you can become um you can work at a children's shelter and that'll that'll get you you know more into the field of psychology and so I did that and at the time I was entertaining um interest like entertaining the idea of being a clinical psychologist and once I work with some kids who had some really

you know difficult uh circumstances I realized I can't do that I don't have the emotional fortitude to be a clinical psychologist so I decided to go into experimental psychology instead and about that time I was transitioning from Community College to a four-year institution at Radford University um and so I got hooked up with a guy by the name of Mark kleene who was a young upand cominging Professor who was a really a feisty guy making a name for himself and um I I kind of started taking biology courses in addition to psychology courses to get more into experimental like neuros sciency kinds of things I

started to do um research with with Mark Klein uh from there um he really developed me quite a quite a great deal as far as like what I needed to to know to enter the grad school World um I applied to Vanderbilt University and got accepted uh into the Neuroscience program there and became a neuroscientist um and I went from there um you know working uh with Jeff Shaw uh and doing some research with him um I went to the NIH as a research scientist working with David Leupold and this is like straight up science fiction kinds of stuff that we were doing we were

you know this is um we're working with monkeys we're doing fmri we're doing inter cranial recordings of single you know of single neurons producing electrical activity uh while the monkeys played video games that we programmed all kinds of like really fun stuff um but I got to the point where it was like this career path is going to lead me essentially to management um I'm gonna become a pi and I don't want thatkey I don't wanna I'm sorry a monkey well yeah I was just trying to you know gonna manage monkeys right yeah where I was going was gonna like if I my next logical

step was to become a professor and to start chasing tenure and to manage a group of people to do the fun stuff while I wrote grants and you know sweated about getting tenure and that didn't seem very attractive to me and I had a new family and stuff and so I decided um you know maybe it's time for a change and I was very interested at the time in high performance Computing because I was using bow wolf at the NIH to analyze my data and it was tons of fun and they were looking for people um but I didn't have like there was you know

the whole list of requirements and I'd met like zero of them so I talked to a few of the folks so I attended some seminars and I talked to a few of the folks after the seminars and and um mat lab came up I was i' had been programming in mat lab for like a decade and I knew it quite well and they were like we don't have anybody on staff who knows mat lab well and we get questions about mat lab all the time and so like you don't really know Linx and you don't really know C or you don't really know any of

the other stuff you need to know but maybe you can learn that stuff while you're answering mat lab questions and so that's what I did um I I came on and I learned a ton at Bow wolf um worked with a really great group of people it's just a really awesome environment in which you can learn a lot and during that period of time uh containers for HPC blew up and you know Greg kurtzer uh started working on Singularity and I had some people point that out to me that wanted to use it and so I became involved in that project and then I ended

up kind of you know going off with Greg and working on that full-time and um then that kind of brought me to ciq as a as an aper you then Singularity now obtainer expert and uh was a Solutions architect here at ciq for a while and now I have recently change gears again and I've become a technical product writer because we need to document some of our stuff and uh I've got some exper experience doing that yeah you're amazing at doing that that's look at the singularity and obtainer documentation it's fantastic ftic because of you well it's not just fantastic because of me there's a

lot of people that there are a lot of people yeah but but I I did contribute a lot that this do your fingerprints are all over that thing it's fantastic so you've had several different careers and I know you learn something and take something away from each one of those it's kind of led to the next but what are the lessons that you've learned from P career yeah that's a tough question for obvious reasons you know um yeah so lessons lessons I've learned along the way um I mean obviously my path has been very Meandering and circuitous um so be flexible I guess you know

be able to change your hats and do do whatever you want you know do different stuff I mean I I feel like I've had a lot of opportunities um but I feel like it's an important thing to like to look at different opportunities and and figure figure out which ones you want to pick and which ones you want to kind of not pick and I've been pretty lucky I've picked pretty good ones so far and made the most out of the ones I've picked um lessons learned I used to I used to uh tell people that um that uh hard work will make up for

a lot of stupid but but smart will never make up for lazy and I and that's because I saw I've seen a lot of people who who kind of thought that you know I'm a smart person I'm just gonna kind of get by on that and it's like that's not going to happen you know you can be as smart as you want but if you're not going to apply yourself you're not really G to get ahead um it's great advice that's deep man also sounds like the whole Ted lasso I mean they know he's not the creator of the the quote but be curious if

you would have been curious you wouldn't have ended up where you are yeah and that's another that's another theme that I've kind of tried to approach my career with is that um I always almost to a fault sometimes sometimes people call me out on this Greg's actually called me out on this but um I try to approach everything as a novice and I try to really think of myself as a novice even when I'm in a field where I've been around for a little while and I've you know I know a few things I still try to to be a novice because once you get

to the point where you're an expert you you can't really learn any more you know at least not Me Maybe other people can but I have trouble if I start to consider myself like an expert I have trouble you know keeping my my mind open and continuing to learn so I try to always um approach everything as a novice and if I do get to the point of like expertise I typically change and do something different from pouring concrete you say that truthfully I mean that I kind of peaked out at that I got to the point where it was like I know the optimal

way to do all the tasks that I need to do in this and I really optimized it and now I'm bored well actually yeah I mean that brings up an interesting topic I mean how are you are you enjoying the technical writing that you're doing right now um I have a I have a complicated relationship with writing um I've done a lot of it um you know it's it can be kind of boring to write but I'm okay at it I'm not bad at it and um so the writing itself uh you know sometimes I have writer block and stuff like that like anybody else

but um the writing itself is maybe not so exciting but the material is exciting so right now um what I'm working on primarily is documenting um and technical writing on fuzzball and fuzzball is a is a is a product and a project that I uh really feel strongly about I think it's a really it's going to be a an industry changing just great idea and um as zann already alluded to a lot of the technical like kind of um documentation type of writing that I've done previously had to do with aper uh one of the great things about being a person who did a lot

of that documentation is that I really learned aper inside and out and um that obviously has been a huge asset in my career and so right now I'm learning fuzzball inside and out not just as a casual user but all the different you know everything in depth and you know I have every expectation that fuzzball is going to take over the industry and it's going to become a a very big deal and it's going to be extremely exciting to be a person who knows it inside and out um when it takes off and when everybody's using it so I really like that um but yeah

the right itself you know sometimes I get on a roll and it feels pretty good but a lot of times it's kind of like yeah writing again and we just have to keep putting features into it so you have something else to learn so you don't get bored I I don't think there's any lack of ideas for fuzzball I think it's more like whoa slow your roll slow down Focus we've got to do the next right thing yeah I don't see myself getting bored here at ciq anytime soon no okay well you know sorry to put you on the spot live here like in front

of everybody but I you know like ha happy Dave is a good Dave Dave's always happy happy Dave's always happy that's awesome okay so where are we where are we at here we're talking about personality traits you already talked about curiosity I am curious as to how how would you how are you like a neuroscientist also in your background and kind of like that Curiosity H how does that play out in somebody's life right like how would you how would you know that somebody that you were talking to or how how does that kind of curiosity and always being a learner and keeping an open

mind like what does that actually mean so I'm interpreting your question as if I'm at a dinner party um and I bump into somebody how do I like what what how am I like oh wow you're a kindred spirit and you have that same kind of curiosity and is that kind of like kinda it yeah because I mean obviously for anyone who's watching I mean this is a a powerful opportunity for learning I believe right it's like how do I know if I'm that type of person how could you how would you know yeah I mean that's a good question I mean um so h

i I think that a lot of people take a lot of stuff for granted and um now I don't mean you know questioning everything as in like sometimes it's sort of counterproductive to like question everything but um at the same point at the same time um there are some things like like base level truths that we take for granted that um you know when you think about them you're like why do you take that for granted why is that the and you know um not so much whether the Earth is round or not I apologize to any flat earthers out there but more along the

lines of like um and this is the thing that really got me interested in Neuroscience like what is consciousness you know um what what is all right so so all of us have this feeling of being us that that we have all the time and it has to do with like our five senses seeing and hearing and movement being able to react to stimuli in the environment yada y y That's is I mean we all know what we mean when we say I'm conscious I have this feeling of Consciousness right well we don't really know what causes that at all like at any kind of

and and this is this is and well people will say well your brain causes that right your brain makes you conscious we kind of think that um we've got some good evidence for that uh because when your brain stops functioning we stop seeing signs that a person is conscious when your brain is injured in in certain ways it affects your Consciousness when you dump chemicals into your brain it Alters your Consciousness so we've got some good sort of like circumstantial evidence but it's really just circumstantial and we don't understand at any kind of real level what the link between your brain you know and all

the like neuro uh like the chemicals and the electricity and all the things that are happening in your brain how that produces Consciousness right and so that's like um a really lowlevel kind of curiosity and it's one that I think a lot of people just kind of Breeze over and don't really think about so um that's the those are the kinds of things that if you get into a conversation with somebody and they're really they've either already kind of thought about that and they're really interested in that topic or they're kind of like wow I hadn't thought about that but you're totally right you know

some people would be kind of like that's weird and just sort of move on so you know and I would I would say and nothing wrong with that but that would be somebody who probably doesn't have the same kind of curiosity about you know natural phenomenon and you know lowlevel kinds of things that that kind of gets me excited I've been very fortunate and I've been able to spend some time with Dave and it's fascinating it's just fascinating truly thanks Z we we've had some fun times together we've had some fun times yeah he's a good guy absolutely I don't know about that but that's

fun with Dave sorry Rose I didn't mean to interrupt you no no totally I I just am so it just to me I find it absolutely fascinating like when you look at your children like do you see that kind of curiosity like when you were even when you were working with those kids that were very troubled like do do you did you still see that like do you do you see that kind of curiosity just like naturally because I I think that we're all kind of born with that like open curiosity of like what is happening and then kind of like as time goes by

I mean I'm sure that there were things that didn't work in your life as well like you give us a cool little like you know synopsis of all the things that went well but like in between there there's things that didn't go so well you figured out you know what I mean how to manage it and get over it or do something different or whatever um so like but sometimes we'll have things that happen that just kind of like squinch us squ squat squash us um so as we're kind of like progressing in in our industry and the industry that we're in with this not

only the high performance Computing but also we in the Enterprise space and you're talking about fuzzball and how it's you know what I mean like your vision for fuzzball as it expands I mean I to me it kind of parallels the way that we kind of understand our human mind as well that like there are things that can keep us down but there are other ideas that can expand us so kind of coming back sorry like what about your kids can do you like when you look at your children like do you see that and how do you how do you nurture that in them

absolutely yeah I think you're totally right I think that that um that uh curiosity is um it it it kind of becomes reduced over time because you are taught to take certain things for granted and you were taught to that we you know maybe we already kind of understand this or maybe it's not really something that we we question and think about too much and so yeah over time it can be um it can be difficult to keep that sort of almost philosophical kind of curiosity um alive and VI and yeah I do see it in uh my kids I do see it in other

kids that I've uh interacted with and I think that like I mean this is it's it's almost like a no-brainer but I think that the best way to kind of interact with with children who are showing that is to just be curious and ask questions you know when they when they when they when you were lucky enough I found that this is something that you are very lucky when it happens but when you are lucky enough that one of your kids comes along and wants to talk to you about um something you know some curiosity that they have or some something in the natural world

or some like something along these lines then it really um is helpful to just ask them more questions about them about that really listen to their answers think about their answers you know just that's how you Foster that kind of curiosity yeah that's really cool I I what my older kid is eight years old right now and that's why I'm saying when you're when you're lucky enough that they come to you because he's getting to the point where he's just like oh Dad's boring dads you know oh he doesn't know yet he'll figure it out he'll figure it out I really lik that though like

asking questions back right like being more curious as to like why they're asking that question what they're thinking and how they even like got to that because I mean you probably know me by now I just go oh well no you don't really son and that's it's tempting to do that it's tempting to just go off and be like oh well you know like yeah recently I had a conversation with my son and like he's asking me about like you know the human body and stuff and we're talking about cells and I start talking about like DNA and like the nucleus of the cell and

the cytoplasm and how all that kind of stuff gets out and is expressed into proteins he's like protein I'm like everything's proteins dude like protein is not a bad word it's a molecule it's a big old macromolecule that does stuff and like you know but yeah it is tempting to just go on a riff and just try to tell them how everything is instead of being like here's some information maybe you can Riff on this information you know I mean I love to hear the interaction with the teacher after this he's teaching the teacher that that would be hilarious yeah yeah I have often and

forgive me if you heard this one rose because I know we or Zane too I mean I know we've we've we've had some dinners out and stuff like that and kind of had some talks but um I think that there's like two aspects to uh really being a good thinker right and it's it's sort of like um I often say it's like if you're like a brick layer or a mason what do you need to be a good brick player or amazing well you need to have aptitude you need to have some skill at it right and that's to me like the ability to think

critically you've got to have some aptitude but you also have to have bricks right you're not g to get very far if you don't have bricks and those are like facts right so to me to be a good thinker you got to have both you got to have critical thinking skills and you also have to have some facts to to take and and manipulate with your critical thinking skills skills so you see a lot of people around who have like really good critical thinking skills but they don't they don't have a lot of facts and maybe sometimes they don't even value facts sometimes it's kind

of like facts are anical you know antithetical to to what I you know want to do and so they they these are kind of people alone I'm thinking yeah these are the kinds of people who like scorn at uh educated idiots you know people who have a lot of book learning all that kind of stuff they think that that's the kind of stuff that makes you dumb then you've got people that have got a big pile of bricks but they don't know what to do with them right and these are people who are kind of locked in their Ivory Towers and read a lot of

the literature and they they have learned a lot about you know what other people have done experiments and figured out but they don't really know what to do with all that knowledge and so to me you got to have both you got to have the critical thinking skills and you also have to have the facts and you have to be able to like you know work with them to make stuff so that's why you know it's a balancing act with like a kid to be like on the one hand I want to supply you some facts on the other hand use your critical thinking skills

to manipulate those facts and let's see what you can do with them you know it's true and I don't think people do that anymore doesn't seem like it's just all facts all the time it's very cool I'm gonna change gears a little bit and pick a career I don't care which one what is a superpower that you would like to have had too oh my a superpower that I would like to have had in a particular career yeah um there um okay I'm gonna I'm gonna resist I'm gonna resist the temptation to be silly um why you don't have to resist come on well there's

there's carpeted man from The Tick who wears a suit made out of carpet and he walks around and and moves his he's like drags his feet while he walks and he zaps people that would have been fun to have but um I don't really think that it would have been useful in any career that I've had um just would have been fun to zap people yeah you know um I don't know I mean maybe like Neo in The Matrix the way he's able to just like plug his brain in and learn new skills um that would be cool I like that too it'd be pretty

cool to just learn stuff I think we're so close to that Dave you just have the chip put in and it's all over anyway as somebody who has introduced um you know uh scientific apparatus into living brains I don't want to chip anytime soon in my head I don't either a scientific apparatus that is a very PC way of saying implanted a whole another webinar and it's fascinating this is the kind of stuff like it's fascinating that's awesome all right Mr God love this is we are having so much fun we're just going to keep going I want to know who so you kind of

actually already mentioned a couple of people but um who's the most influential like professional mentor and then like what what also are the characteristics of a mentor and then who who were these people for you oh yeah man mentors I've had so many great mentors throughout my career um yeah so uh yeah I already mentioned I had a great mentor in um Community College who gave me a lot of uh uh um just life experience kinds of advice and really you know set me on the right track um Patty gooth Dr Patty gooth was her name Patricia but everybody called her Patty um just a

just a great great person um uh yeah Mark Klein was my undergraduate advisor and um he was just really really is just really really all about developing uh his students and preparing them for graduate school or whatever their career is going to be and um like just just uh and and also I just admired so he um had become a professor at Radford University and it was his aspiration to go to a uh a more research oriented University and he had a plan and he knew how to make that happen he had figured out um that uh new neuropeptides these are neurochemicals that um they

like neurotransmitters but there's a whole big family of them there's hundreds of them and he was figuring out that new neuropeptides are being discovered all the time and um you can buy them people synthesize them as soon as they're discovered and then you can use them to uh interrogate and basically figure out like how appetite Works which was his line of research and so it was almost like assembly line science but it was like important science that needed to be done but it was also stuff that he could just churn out papers one it was just like such a great idea for such a great

way to advance professionally very quickly and so it was it was awesome to see how he had just put together this research program that was going to fill in a lot of questions get a lot of like highly cited papers out in a very short period of time and get him you know into a tenure track position um at a at a you know uh R1 University very quickly um you know when I went to Vanderbilt I worked with Jeff Shaw and I mean he taught me so much about how how to be a serious scientist I mean that that was just like he taught

me how to be a serious scientist how to run a lab how to um you know just a great mentor personally and professionally just um I mean I can't say enough about Jeff and then I worked with David Leupold um who taught me not only how to be a really really great scientist but also had to think outside of the way in which we normally think about science um he like he kind of gets away a little bit from the scientif from the scientific method that we all learned about in high school you know and he points out that like for instance when Darwin was

figuring out um how natural selection Works he didn't have a hypothesis that he was testing and going in what he was doing is he was just Gathering observations and Gathering observations and he did that over a long period of time until he built up this entire kind of like Theory and we don't do that as much in science anymore that's not really rewarded so much in science anymore and so David Leopold was really you know kind of taught me to value that a little bit more what do you mean the observational technique yeah yeah and and just like not the cookie cutter scientific method that

we all learn where you create a hypothesis and then you figure out how to test the hypothesis and then you go and you know um that's really where science is at right now and it's good for answering some types of questions and it's not good for answering other types of questions and then at Bow wolf man I had tons of great great mentors at Bow wolf um Susan Cho uh just a terrific terrific um manager who you know really set an entire culture at biow Wolf um Steve felini who was the technical lead at Bow wolf was there and really even though he was just

so knowledgeable still had that kind of like he was very humble about how much he knew and he was always willing to listen to whoever was there and to kind of put them as the expert in the room and just listen to what they had to say he kept that um that that uh humility that I've I've tried to kind of emulate and then Steve Bailey too I mean is just um just a remarkable manager very empathetic very caring of everybody's working with and just really gets the best out of people just you know by just kind of expecting the best out of himself nice

so I I have my answer to this question for you if I were going to pick another career for you but I I'm curious if you were going to go have another career change what do you think it would be into or what do you think it would you can go backwards you can go forward it doesn't matter but if if you were going to change what do you think it would be but you're not allowed to do it yeah you're not you can't do it I'm just saying it's just throw that out there um I'm I'm kind of torn between a couple um I've

often I've kind of daydreamed uh with my wife and kind of talked about if you know if we ever get to the point where um we don't you know we can just do whatever and I can like semi-retire um there's a community college across the street in our neighborhood and I'll probably just walk across the street over there and be like hey I'd like to teach kids you know whatever I can teach and um you know probably some Neuroscience stuff maybe some computer science stuff um just whatever you know here's my background and I'd like to be just whatever you'll let me teach and I

think that that would be fun because um I come from a community college background and the the people who are at Community College really want to learn and I i' love it was a really kind of electric kind of um environment where everybody really wanted to learn and there was all this you know like all these ideas being traded and stuff and I'd like to be in environment like that again where it's just like all these open minds just you know figuring stuff out I might also like to make barbecue for a living I've seen some pictures I've seen some pictures Dave makes some amazing

looking food just amazing I don't think yeah well I'll a food truck oh dude that would be amazing either way I am happy to come you know enjoy the barbue and I will certainly take a class from you as well I have before I love sitting in your classes and having you teach cool that was my choice for his next career was teaching not necessarily Community College just teaching you're an amazing teacher well thank you thank you the the other thing I was also thinking is that like like Daddy Daycare you know what I mean just like running around with the kids yeah I don't

know I'm not as I don't have as much patience with the younger kids anymore I I try but I'm like I'm sorry it's good to know your limits right I can't do everything and that's one of the things I'm not great at I'm trying to get better at it but it's hard yeah I'm not the stay-at-home kind of parent either my son wanted to home school and I was like well that's cool then look it up online figure it out there's no way dude okay we have a question from Dave rush let's bring it up Jess Dave uh regarding your thoughts on Consciousness it is

my belief that lack thereof is one of the reasons that AI cannot fulfill its promise what do you think about the potential to create an AI Consciousness I think you got to Define it first right Dave we got to understand Consciousness is yeah that is yeah um yeah so it's my belief probably this is going to be people are gonna probably write this off as wacky Lan kind of stuff but it's my belief probably that the AIS that we've already um created are probably conscious to some extent um I don't think there's any kind of like special about Consciousness um that requires like wet wear

that requires neurons to to to make it work um I believe it's it's the the collection of neurons that come together and the way in which they organize into um you know like like networks interacting and that's exactly what you've got with AI right so I wouldn't write AI off as not being conscious right now um I believe it's it's probable that it does have its own type of Consciousness um I'm not sure how you know how how it how it is like the kind of Consciousness that we experience it could be very different um but yeah I mean as you start to like so

so I would suggest as a good starting point it's probably pretty outdated at this point in time but if you're interested in topics of consciousness from a neuroscience perspective and from a a research perspective uh there was an excellent book that I I read kind of at the beginning of my journey uh by by um Kristoff kooch and Francis Crick and it's called The Quest for Consciousness uh Francis Crick was um cck of Watson and Crick who discovered the double helical structure of DNA um in his later years he became more interested in things like Consciousness and he worked with Kristoff Koo um who that

you know is the main part of his uh study throughout his Neuroscience career is consciousness um so they wrote a book called The Quest for Consciousness uh which is about how do we study this and unfortunately it's a little bit of a disappointment because they early on in the book they say we can't really study it the best that we can do is we can we can study what they call the NCC which is the neural correlates of Consciousness and so you can find things within the brain that correlate with conscious state but you can't really at least we don't have the tools or the

ways to think right now about answering what they term the hard problem which is how does the brain create Consciousness and so you can't really since we can't really answer that we can't really answer how do neural networks in AI create Consciousness or do they create Consciousness we don't really have the tools to answer those kinds of questions and so I would say it's probable that they do create Consciousness or some type of Consciousness that we don't you know fully really understand right now might be a fish in the water type of problem yeah I've also I've often conceptualized it too as like if you're

trying to understand Consciousness you're trying to fit your brain inside your brain right and maybe maybe we just can't do that maybe we just can't fit our our brains functioning inside of our brains functioning you know yeah well because there's nothing to compare it to right because you're like you're inside of it so they can't separate it to go okay this is what it is because this is what it's not yeah yeah that's deep okay so the rest of the day off to go [Laughter] think exactly home the conversation thanks Dave oh I love it I love it so Dave where where do you go

to like improve and increase your skills like where do you go to learn and seek more education and understanding um also kind of a weird answer but I would say like an art museum oh would be like a good place to go to try to you know expand your um your way of thinking um seeking out and talking to people who are very different than you are these are the kinds of places that I go to learn um uh you know that that that's just what works for me like where would you find someone that's so different from you um that's one of the great

things about Academia I think is that um a lot of times you will be working um with people that have very very different backgrounds from what you have um so that's a good place once again the artistic Community is a good place to find people who are you know very different have very different backgrounds from what you have but um the whole question about like where do you go to meet people as an adult is that's that's that could be its own whole that's a hard that's a hard problem it's very true what about open source do you find that there's very eclectic groups so

what what part of Open Source do you find appealing is that one of them is kind of the rewarding part of it is the People You Meet definitely definitely I mean it's a worldwide network of people with all kinds of different backgrounds some of them from Academia some of them with a lot of you know and and some of them completely self-taught just kind of like I'm doing this stuff in my basement um so yeah open source is a is a uh a place where there's lots of different people lots of different viewpoints um there there's viewpoints sometimes that are missing a little bit from

especially from the uh computer science kind of community um you know it tends to be kind of a male-dominated community unfortunately and that you know from my perspective it can make it a little bit harder to learn because that you're missing some viewpoints that that could be uh helpful and important and could you know clue you into clue you into some stuff absolutely do you see that changing a bit now though I mean I've only really been around the open source Community honestly for about five or six years um so I you know I don't know if if I would say that I see it

changing in in my short period of time here okay well hopefully it's changed a little bit it's it's got a little better I went to a company it was it was very different the entire network team like I think there were 18 of us in the room and of the 18 people on that networking team 16 of them are women which was way unheard of I mean women in it is one thing but women in networking is even smaller group so it was it was very different it was fantastic because they they did they looked at it differently was really cool yeah that was one

of the things uh that was amazing at the bow wolf uh group we had um 25 or 30 people on staff maybe around there probably and it was a it was a pretty even like 5050 split men and women and then once again people of all kinds of different backgrounds um so that was cool very cool to work there that's awesome so I know that I'm going to just do a little another little Shameless plug because you had mentioned it looking forward in your career really excited about fuzzball as we all are so this is our like woo woo to the fuzzball team for all

your good work so thank you thank you we're all very excited for that but looking back on your career what are some of the things that um some of the experiences that really like stand out as memorable um yeah um yeah so I guess like one really memorable experience is when I got accepted to Vanderbilt um that was that was life-changing for me that was like uh you know entering the big leagues um and it it really you know altered the the trajectory of my career um another really formative and life-changing experience was uh getting in touch with Greg and starting to talk to him

and starting to to to work with aper then singularity in its early stages and um kind of getting in on the ground floor of this new community um that was so much fun that and it was like once again there was all these ideas being like thrown out and traded around and and Greg's really fun to work with like that because he's really open to new ideas he's really open to incorporate he doesn't care about just going and totally rewriting the project from scratch if it should have you did yeah which yeah he's done multiple times we've done multiple times with with not just uh

obtainer but multiple different like werewolf has been Rewritten like three or four times now um and so that's kind of cool to just be you know to see somebody who's constantly re-evaluating and and getting input and changing things um and that was fun and it was really fun too Greg's really also great at community building and that's a skill that he's really got and so it was wonderful to watch him slack was kind of new at the time too and uh it was kind of cool to have this this like new tool that we were using slack to like uh start this new community and

you know to to have all these people online who you know you never really met but you still kind of knew and to be working on this kind of SEC like side project sort of thing that was really helping people and was really you know filling a need and um really went to being you know something that's really widely used now and is it kind of considered a a mature like you know tool that everybody relies on so that was a that was a big turning point and a big changing point for sure that's has been really cool it's really cool yeah so are there

other tools that you would recommend people like that you find indispensable for the job that that you were doing or the success that you've had in creating the Titan that you are um what tools do I really rely on I mean I really rely on Linux I mean I I think that um that's going to be kind of like well duh everybody relies on Linux but like I'm on I'm on a rocky l rocky n Linux laptop here doing this interview right now I mean Linux is my daily driver and I just uh I think that a lot of even Linux professionals don't use Linux

like daily and so I really rely on that um I don't know I I so full disclosure I mean I I you guys have kind of a list of questions that we've sort of stuck to and I I looked at the the questions beforehand and kind of thought about this I thought this might be a nice opportunity to start a flame War a little bit um yes um I as a person who used mat lab for many many years and developed a programming strategy within mat lab that relied heavily upon the IDE and upon um the debugger and being able to do stepping debugging and

stop and interrogate variables and stuff like that I really Advocate the use of idees and stepping debugging tools and a lot of times when you say that like real programmers like C programmers and stuff will be like oh that's total garbage what are you talking about you know like I'll just I'll just you know print uh put print statements in different parts and just debug that way and it's like if you're a good programmer and you adopt powerful tools just think how much of a better programmer you could be I I think that um idees and stuff are a lot of times seen as kind

of a crutch that like bad programmers need to get by and like they can be really really powerful tools that can just really speed up your ability to iterate on your code sell out I'm not a good programmer so I need all the help I can get I found that out a long time ago so I'm Mak gonna try Dave I think we always ask this one if you could give one piece of advice to people who are just getting started in this what would it be oh man I saw this question too and I don't have an answer for it um yeah I mean

so I used to like I used to have an answer kind of like for the Neuroscience um because Mark Klein once again my undergraduate Mentor um such a great guy he would come to uh like Society for Neuroscience meetings and he would seek out um students that he had had that had done well and he would bring his current students and he would say talk to them give them advice tell them what they need to succeed and so that's awesome yeah it was he's a great guy is a great guy so I I I knew that I would get put on the spot by him

so I was like well what am I gonna what am I gonna tell these students and one of the things that I would always say is like learn to program you know as an undergraduate grab python or something and just learn the basics of you know conditional like logic and loops and you know just variables and stuff like that just just learn to program because when you get into grad school it's going to be kind of assumed that you know how to program no matter what your field is within Neuroscience um that's kind of a a weird advice to give in computer science though because

it's like we'll learn a program well no duh I mean I've got like 10 different classes on how to program um so I don't know I mean another advice that I this is advice that I can give but it's kind of a skill you can't just tell somebody to have and that is um you know be prepared in your life so that when an opportunity arises you have the ability to do that to take that opportunity um and that's really important I think that a lot of luck is just like being prepared so that when an opportunity comes along you're able to capitalize on it

but at the same time the skill that I don't know if you can necessarily just tell somebody to have is like you know be Discerning about what opportunities you take and what opportunities you pass up you know sometimes something that looks like a great opportunity you know maybe you need to just pass on that for the time being and that's just kind of like a gut feeling thing I don't really you know I don't know if you can teach somebody to do that it's also a maturity thing which comes with experience right you don't just abely wake up and be mature no like you have

things that happen and then you have the willingness to reflect upon them in a way that incorporates your thinking and your feeling right like you do something you go oh well I was thinking this and then I was feeling this and it didn't work out so well yeah so then the next time you know hopefully you do it differently learn from failure don't be afraid to fail there more lessons in Failure than success oh yeah I'm smart then Rose oh my well I you know no joke I was going to say when I started talking about like my my Meandering um route to the position

that I'm at currently I mean you got similar experience right Rose you've you've worn a lot of hats in your life I have definitely been all over the place and I mean for me Cur Curiosity has been the key on some failures as well have brought have been brought into my life CU I was like well I mean what could it hurt or it doesn't really matter I'll get over it or you know what whatever the the the thing is um but yeah just like staying curious and and open I mean my son asked me what I wanted to be when I was younger and

I told him that I wanted to be a doctor but I didn't think I was smart enough I grew up and I met doctors and I realize I am smart enough definitely could have done that but at the time I there like the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was so great that I couldn't I couldn't see a path so I kind of had to do I mean based on my thinking at the time I had to do that Meandering I had to just take the next whatever step it was and kind of figure it out along the way um

and now I'm really glad I did not become a doctor I was going to say Dave Dave's going to go back and teach are you going to go back to med school I mean come on probably not but who knows they they took a weird turn man I'm not even interested in anything that's happening over there but yes I mean je that that reminds me of my mentor Jeff Shaw I mean I I was overwhelmed at some points in grad school where I was just like I've got so much to do like to to get this paper out I mean it's going to take me

like two years of work to do this and um I remember him saying you know you didn't El you eat an elephant one bite at a time B at a time yeah I love that yes we do have time for one more question thanks Jess put it up okay Nano thanks for watching Dave great opinion of AI I uh what would you say do artificial intelligence systems mimic human logic or do they possess a Consciousness that guides their actions do they mimic human logic or do they they possess a Consciousness that guides okay okay think I understand um I think what you might be kind

of talking about is Free Will a little bit to to some extent and um this is another I'm going to get you know uh branded as somebody who belongs in the Looney Bin kind of thing but um I don't believe in Free Will I don't believe there's such a thing as free will I believe that what your brain does what your brain has evolved to do and what Consciousness is is it's a simulation machine right your brain um performs actions you know it it makes your muscles contract and you know makes you speak and do stuff like that so it performs actions and it also

perceives uh that you know through your five senses and so one of the things that you're your brain has evolved to be able to do is to simulate um what's going to happen as a result of a future action to simulate alternative universes right and so that's where the illusion of being able to make decisions comes from is the um the ability of your brain to model an alternate path that could have happened if your actions have been different and I feel like that's a lot of what Consciousness is that's a lot of what our brains do is they're just simulating um you know alternate

realities simulating our current reality because what we perceive is not really what's here um but but simulating that and then simulating alternate realities and stuff like that so that's that's kind of what um that's kind of what AI is doing right is also simulating um you know this is this is what this looks like this is what this could look like this is a simulation of an image based on what you've given me and so I mean from that from that perspective I would say that probably AI is working in in a lot of the same way that our brains are working through just like

simulating realities um we talk a lot about AI hallucinating that means that it got the wrong answer but I mean if that's the if that's what hallucinating is then I mean we hallucinate all the time right because we're always wrong yes all the time all the time what happens when you turn off the system um so from a physical point of view when you turn off the system I mean you stop electricity stops flowing through it but from an AI point of view when you turn off the system I think what you mean to say is that um you're no longer um you know uh

letting information flow through the connections between neurons or within you know layers of your AI system um that's kind of a big fundamental difference I guess between the way that AI a lot of AI currently works and the way that our brains work is that AI is kind of like discreet while our brains are continuous so with AI a l of times you give it an input it flows through all the layers of the neural networks and then it produces an output whereas the way our brains work is that we are streaming input and producing output and a lot of times that output comes back

in it's more input and it's just like a continuous loop that never stops right I think there's AI that works like that too but um so so the question like becomes like what do you mean by turning it off and turning it back on um you know I mean I guess the the the homologue of that in the human brain would be to Cease the the firing of the neurons within the human brain and but you can't really do that um because the whole system is interconnected right and there's neurons in your brain stem that are keeping your heart beating and keeping you breathing and

are keeping like all your digestive processes going and all that kind of stuff so you can't just sort of cease that stuff or else you stop getting blood flow to the brain which stops all the other parts of the brain working um but you can I mean you can like cease the action of certain parts of the brain you can shut down the prefrontal cortex um and that you know that's like how people lose Consciousness how people go into Comas how people um you know that's how anesthetics work so and those are some of like the the neural correlates of Consciousness that we go into

and we think about um you can like figure out what parts of the brain are important for people to be conscious not all parts of the brain are important for that um so yeah cool questions yeah they are I think we could probably go on and on and on but we are out of time with uh Titan God love that's right you're never gonna unfortunately not team titan anymore but nope nope past Teen Titan Titan middle AG Titan Go oh that's awesome well it's an absolute pleasure I am delighted to be working with you at ciq thank you for all the good work that you're

doing on fuzzball we are all very excited about it I love working with you too Rose and and you as well Zan you're okay okay thanks appreciate it so if you guys have uh any questions about fuzzball you can go to our website C iq.com we do all kinds of things we kind of mentioned that a little bit little aper little werewolf little fuzzball we got rocky linnen happy to chat with you about any of that stuff and um do we want to like do a little shout out for bridge sure you're still running you're still running centos7 and you have no plans or haven't

planned and you're looking for a bridge to some Safe Harbor let us know we can help you out with that with doing cves for seven9 that's right forget that you've had four years to figure it out it's okay don't worry about it all right you're not alone we got you you are definitely not alone no true and you may feel like that's a real shock but trust me you're not alone not alone all right well we'd love to chat with you guys go to our website and fill it out there will come to us and we'd love to meet with you thanks again make sure

that you like and subscribe for more we'll be back here next week same time same place Dave God love thank you so much thank you appreciate it bye bye guys [Music]