AI Safety, The China Problem, LLMs & Job Displacement - Dwarkesh Patel

What do you think that we've realized about human learning and human intelligence from architecting AI intelligence? >> There's this really interesting thing we've seen where these AI models are making progress first in the domains that we think of as the archetype of um the the where humans have their primacy. Right? So if you look at um Aristotle, what does he say? What what makes humans unique? Um well, it's reasoning. Humans can reason, other animals can't. And what these models, these AI models, they're just not that useful uh if you try to use them for your work. They're useful in certain domains, but broadly they're just not um widely deployable. What is the one thing that they can do? They can reason. Um they but they obviously they they can't carry a cup of water, right? Robotics isn't solved. They they can't even like do a job. They can't even do a white collar job. So um uh there's this interesting thing called Morov's paradox. Hans Morovak came up with this idea in the 90s where he noticed that the tasks which are um easiest for humans are taking computers the longest to solve. So we have still haven't solved robotics yet. We it's so easy for us to move around. Whereas the tasks which are quite hard for humans like adding numbers, adding long numbers that computers could do that in the 60s. And the logic there is that uh evolution has only optimized us for let's say the last million years to be good at reasoning to be good at arithmetic to be good at these kinds of highle abstractions. Evolution has spent 4 billion years teaching us how to move around the world how to um pursue your goals in a long-term basis. So not just do this task over the next hour but spend the next month planning how to kill this gazelle. Um uh and that that has been I think remarkably accurate predictor of the places we've seen progress. They're like they're automating coding. Coding we thought of was this thing that.1% of the population could do really well. That's that's the first thing that went below the waterline. Um uh and yeah just like basic you know manual work might genuinely be the last thing that goes away. >> Right. Yeah. There's a difficulty in getting a robot to crack an egg. Right. >> A particular difficulty in being able to do that. the right amount of tension to hold. Is there a This may be outside of your domain of competence, but that's why we do podcasting to talk about things that are outside our domain of competence. >> Is there a potential to use some sort of scanning technology to take an LLM type approach to teaching robots how humans move? >> You know, if you were able to track within a room exactly how a human was to just go about tasks, just feed that into a big [ __ ] model, right? and then use that to rep I guess >> you can't really work out sort of force application just by looking that would be something you'd have to feel maybe you could put someone in a suit I don't know you know I'm wondering if we've seen so much progress using LLMs >> in the world of AI robotics seems to be something that's still kind of pretty janky I'm wondering if there are any principles that can be taken from the world of LLM that can be applied to robotics >> I mean that's a great question uh and many companies are working on My understanding is that it's it's difficult for the fact that there's not as much data just what you mentioned that the kind of data you need of like what did it feel like there >> no internet for human movement >> exactly right and even video is limited even if you have the video it's not with language you have this thing of you are exactly doing the thing which uh the online internet text is right you are predicting the next token the text you can predict the next thing in a video frame that's not the same thing as robotics there's also additional challenges from what I understand around Um the fact that video is harder to process than text just like a lot more data. There's latency overhead. So if it takes you a while to process uh language that's fine. You can you know go a token at a time. The real world just moves very fast. You can try to solve these issues by going in simulation. Um so you know you can you can have a simulation where you're trying to move things around and in that domain you can train an AI to be good at robotics. But the real world is just like very complicated. if I crumple this like this thing like why does it bend exactly the way it does? It's just very hard to get that in simulation. Um yeah, I think I think robotics is tough. >> That paradox is fascinating. I've never heard of that before. I was at a robot um a robotics research company um floor and they had these robots all from China um and the researcher the researcher would be like here um the robot would be right there and they were themselves creating the human label data like they try to do something the AI would try to learn it um it was like trying to get us close to the ground floor of the robotics movement which I thought was a cool approach >> okay and was it any good It was all right. It did not solve the cracking the egg problem. >> Okay. Okay. D+. >> Yeah. >> Has all of the time that you've spent sort of thinking about AI and observing the ascendancy of LLMs, is it made you think about your own consciousness or learning or the way that your mind works differently? I get the sense that my friends who spend the most time uh interacting with Chachi BT and Claude and stuff like that um it actually has this weird like birectional >> yes >> sort of uh training where they change too. >> I'm interested in what you've learned about yourself or how you see yourself differently consciousness learning where your mind works. >> Um I So if you ask Claude or Gemini or one of these models what is it like to be you? Um uh and specifically what is sort of unique about your experience that you want to talk about? One thing that Claude one mentioned uh was that look I have this unique experience where at the end of a session my memor is totally wiped. So I might form a connection with a person um or I might learn something about the world. I might learn about myself end of an hour it's totally wiped. Um now I think previously people had this idea that look you you can have LMS write poetry. you can have the right philosophy, but they're just sort of doing interpolation on what human writers have already done, right? So there's like nothing going on in its mind. This thing about the ephemeraless of the session memory um and it talked about it way more poetically than I'm talking about it right now. Uh is is unique to LLMs. Like this is not a thing any human philosopher has had to think about or has written down. >> Um and so I think this has an interesting implication. one uh either we accept that this is like a genuine mind doing genuine like interesting uh introspection like creating genuine literature >> um or two if you're going to say look I think this is just like rubbish I think this is like sort of next token whatever um I think you should update in favor of like human poetry is also kind of just people are just saying [ __ ] >> uh because like fundamentally there's no difference right there's some experience you try to make something sort of lyrical come out of that Uh yeah, either human literature is real or AI literature is real. There's no in between. >> I had I was reading Steve Stewart Williams, the Apo understood the universe and he's got this quote in there from William James and he says, "Originality is just undetected plagiarism." >> Mhm. >> And I realized that we have an issue with plagiarism when it's barefaced, right? when somebody steals your exact questions from your podcast and and asks them to a similar guest, you go, "Hey, that's that's unfair." But >> I've listened to probably 2,000 hours of Joe Rogan, right, in my 20s. >> I've inevitably been influenced by him. The way that I used to do my ad reads was almost verbatim, right? How he would do his ad reads, but they were different advertisers and they were done in a different style and they were a different time and I've got a British accent. So okay, I've been able to So where do we draw the line between this is unfair unfair plagiarism and this is you taking inspiration, right? And you amalgamate and you aggregate from all of these different experiences and you're even if you and me were trying to do the exact same thing and had had the same influences on us, we're different people. So the way that that would have come out and some people feel more original than others even if they've taken a lot of inspiration from other people. So yeah, I I this uh the question of what is plagiarism I think is really cool and when you look at GPT is doing like predictive plagiarism I guess in a way uh well where do human like what does true originality in the form of human creativity what does that mean what does that actually mean right because you can't be that creative with the saxophone because you have to blow the [ __ ] wind into the real creativity with the saxophone will be melting it down and creating something new out. But even if you melted it down, you're using a smelting [ __ ] or iron thing that some other person design, you know what I mean? Like so collective cumulative culture and learning that humans have got kind of creates a very big box but still a constrained box. And even if you create something absolutely new, it's usually only just a tiny little >> movement. is this microscopic little growth on top of what already existed. >> Yeah, 100%. I people I think um there's an interesting experience people have when they it's related to gentleman amnesia, but when you a domain you know a lot about um you understand often it's the case you realize there was no clear um breakthrough moment. The thing I'm sort of familiar with is the history of AI research. And I think when journalists or outsiders are asking, okay, what do I need to understand to understand how we got to this place in AI? Um, was it Ilia's paper in 2012 on Alexnet? Was it this uh thing that Jeffrey Hinton did in the ' 80s and '90s? Um, was it the GBT1? And I think all these things were important, but the closer you get to the surface, the more you realize it's just been one these small architectural changes, none of which individually was especially significant, but more overwhelmingly than that trend is just that we have been throwing astoundingly more compute into training these systems every single year. Um, 4x more compute per year into training these frontier systems. And over the course of like 10 years, that's like hundreds of thousands of times more compute. Um, >> and that's what explains AI progress. It's not that some person had this amazing idea that nobody else would have had or nobody else had something similar going on. Um, and I think this is true of other fields as well. The closer you look, the more you realize it's either randomness or they were just doing the next obvious thing in the sequence. >> Uh, it's always incremental. >> Exactly. >> Uh, is there a name for this? You know, Mo's law. Is there an equivalent name for this? But in AI compute terminology? M uh oh the scaling of uh comput uh training compute. >> Yes. >> Um that should be let's call it dwar cash's law be good. That'd be great. >> Yeah I've had nothing to do with AI research. I'm a podcaster. You're going to call it AI >> dude. A shameless land grab for nomenclature is exactly what you need. Yeah. Own it. [ __ ] own it >> 100%. It's happening. >> In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentous. If your sleep's not dialed, taking ages to not off, you're waking up at random times and feeling groggy in the morning. Moments sleep packs. How did I miss both of those? Are here to help. They're not your typical knock you out supplement overloaded with melatonin. 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So talk to me about your own uh consciousness beyond the the poetry, the fact that AI has got this ability to tell us about its experience. What about you? What about how it's made you think about your own learning, your own mind? >> Um I'm sort of easily distractable. uh I can be trying to work on a task and my mind will just wander and um you know you sometimes when you're meditating or something you notice these loops of thought that keep distracting you and um I remember one one of these one of those times I thought to myself I'm sort of like um I'm just sort of like clawed. I'm just like I'm losing my train of thought. The problem these models have is that they're constantly they can't really do a task for a long period of time because they get stuck in a loop. Um uh and it's interesting to think about like how similar that is to humans. Maybe we can go like a further bit longer uh than these models before getting stuck in that kind of um loop of our own. But uh I thought that was sort of an interesting insight. Um I don't know. Yeah. >> You have executive function. You're saying that you have better executive function than only a tiny little bit better executive function. Well, what does it say >> about the fact that it if the data is being trained on what humans do. Is it simply a case therefore that more data if you were to somehow get a human that was able to process that much data >> would they have fundamentally different understanding or is there some sort of ceiling given that this is data created by humans being trained and educated into a machine. Is there some sort of ceiling that's expected to be hit given that it's, you know, it's not a super intelligence teaching a super intelligence yet? It's only the source material is only capped at whoever the [ __ ] smartest person in history's ever been. >> M um there is this interesting conundrum where they have no human has seen even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the amount of information these models have seen. Um, and there's a question you could ask, and I've asked it to some of my guests who are especially bullish about AI, of look, if you have every single thing that any human has ever written, every scientific article, every textbook, um, every interesting even statistical pattern that might be out in some data set somewhere, this, you have that all memorized. Um, if a human had even a fraction of that memorized, they would be noticing all kinds of different connections. They'd look at this piece of medical literature and this thing in chemistry, and they'd realize, oh, we can solve migraines by connecting these two insights. Um so far we don't have any evidence of an LLM doing this there. The people made these scaffolds which like kind of do something similar but nothing like this has been directly done. So um it does suggest these models are like shockingly less creative >> than humans. Um there is another implication of that though by the way. So one way to read that is bearish on AIs right because they're not doing this thing that they should be able to do given their enormous advantages. Another way to look at that is okay once they are as creative as humans given their other enormous advantages. The fact that they will know every single thing any human has known in the future any AI has known. Um it's so easy to underestimate how powerful AGI will be because we're thinking of just like a human on a server. We're not thinking about the advantages these AIs have because of the fact that they are digital that they can be copied. Um there can be billions of copies of them and each copy can have this uh tacet understanding of every single field known to man. >> Yeah. your Dwarash's AI creativity problem is a a good I've mentioned it a couple of times to different guests. I think it's a I think it's really smart. Um >> what what do you think that that says is that something that can be completed or is this uh an intractable problem? Is this like is create are there kernels of creativity? Have we seen glimmers of this coming through or is it kind of it's just not there yet? We have seen this in um non- language domain. So people famously talk about move 37 in alpha go. So this was a move that um I think baffled people who are watching a game that alpha go was playing against a human go player and it turned out it was like some brilliant uh it really it was like a brilliant tactic. Um we haven't yet seen that in my opinion with LLMs. So, we're moving from a regime of just pre-training them on human text tokens, just trillions and trillions of everything any human has written to a regime where we're training them just to do a task. Um, it's not just about memorizing every single word that any human has written. Now, it's about can you go solve this coding problem for me? Can you go complete this like knowledge work task for me? Can you do this research task for me? Can you start using a computer for me to accomplish a certain thing like booking a flight? And that's similar to the training process that Alpha Go experienced in order to get really good at Go. um where you're just like you're rewarded for just completing the task. However you do it, that's up to you. >> Um these models do get creative in that context, especially in the context of like how do I cheat at this test? >> So famously these models will write um fake unit test uh like I passed all the unit tests and it's like they just like rewrote the unit test to be like if true if true then pass. That's uh Boss room's concern about make humans as happy as possible and they stuck electrodes in your face and introvenously gave you MDMMA. It's like ah >> you did it on Saturdays. You did it but not the way I meant it. >> That's right. Yeah. >> Uh is AGI right around the corner? Where do you come to land on this? >> No, I I I think not. I've um It's funny. I've been traveling outside of SF for like the last four weeks and there's a there's a strong causation between the time you spend outside of SF and how long your timelines are. >> The further you get from San Francisco, the longer the timeline, >> dude, you've lost lost on the source. >> I know. Um >> I I I I believe that like AGI will not only come in our lifetimes, but that it's going to be more impactful than people are realizing. Even people who are anticipating AI, I think some of the people in SF are um a little high on their own supply when they say it's like two years from now. Um I have probably spent on the order of 100 hours using these models to do little tasks that I'm sure you have to work on as well for your podcast, right? Like having them come up with transcripts or rewriting transcripts to make them more readable, coming up with clips. And that experience has convinced me that these models um lack some basic capabilities which make it possible to get humanlike labor out of them. Um the it's worth backing up and just thinking about like why what is it that makes humans valuable workers. Uh I don't think it's mainly their raw intellect. I think it's their ability um you when you work with people like why are they use basically useless the first month or the first week and you couldn't live without them six months later. Um it's their ability to build up context. Uh it's their ability to interrogate their own failures and learn from them in this really organic way. um uh and this ability just doesn't exist in these models. They exist session to session and that everything that they have learned about you evaporates after every hour. >> Um and so it's a frustrating experience where you can try to get them to do a task. Uh they'll do a five out of 10 job at many language in language out tasks, but there's no way for them to get better. And given that that's a fact, you just kind of have to like rely on humans. Uh >> it's like [ __ ] 50 first dates over and over. Every time that you do it, you've got to you've got to reintroduce yourself and explain what's going on. >> Yeah. Groundhog Day. Yeah. >> Yeah. That's right. >> Yeah. >> Um so I'm con I think people have this idea that even if all AI progress up right now, these systems would still be economically transformative and they say look JP Morgan and McDonald's and whatever just haven't integrated these systems into their workflows. But if they had they would be like seeing all these benefits and I don't really think that's the case. I think like genu it's just like genuinely hard to get human like labor out of these models. What is what's causing some people to believe that it's so close and what's causing you to believe that it's further away for AGI? >> I think they think about they only um observe its ability to complete these uh sort of self-contained problems especially in coding um and coding has just made a a tremendous amount of progress because you have all this GitHub data. you don't have this kind of like repository of huge amount of data in robotics or any other field and you've you've just had this huge increase in abilities here but um they you'll like try to come up with a problem that's self-contained and the model will just like be of huge help to you um and I don't think they've played around with getting it to be useful and it's other kinds of white collar work something as simple as like helping a podcaster rewrite transcripts or something um and it is to be fair like I think as much as cold water as we're throwing on these models. I think they're like [ __ ] intelligent. Like you can get get this model. You can tell it I want an application that does X Y and Z thing with these conditions. Um and it will just write that like it'll go away for 30 minutes. It'll write like five 50 lines of um 50 um 50 files of code for you and the application will work. Uh it'll make a plan of action. If you try to ask it a question that's difficult, it'll just go and reason about it. And how did we just get used to this idea that like oh of course I can ask a machine a question. and it'll like think about it for a while and then come back with an answer like that's what machines do. Um but yeah, I think they're not noticing the the sort of issues with continual learning and on the job training which is what makes humans valuable, right? Do you think I remember seeing one of the responses to your uh AI creativity problem being that if you're looking to LLM as the architecture that's going to be able to give you this type of creativity, you may be looking in the wrong place. Not when we say AI now, >> people think Chachi BT. >> Yeah. >> But that's not the only architecture that you can create for for AI. And I think my first introduction to this was probably >> 2016 or 17 when I read Super Intelligence by Nick Bostonramm. And then, you know, you look at that world and all of the different, you know, sort of splintered potential [ __ ] futures of fast takeoff and slow takeoff and misalignment and stuff. >> And it seemed to me that the conversation around AI, specifically AI safety kind of it was still there, but a lot of the bubble had sort of burst come 2018, 2019, 2020. everyone's buying [ __ ] NFTTS and then you get this explosion with Open AI and and the LLMs and it's now another conversation that gets kicked off. But that seemed like it had dipped a little bit during that time. I certainly wasn't seeing as much even from the people that are kind of in the field like [ __ ] Robin Hansen gets distracted like with some other stuff. You know, people have got other things to talk about. It's just not as sexy anymore. And now this thing has come back around. >> Is it the case? Are LLMs going to be the bootloadader for AGI or does this type of architecture have a cap on it? Is it a different type that's going to have to be born out of it? >> That's a really good question. Um, it's by the way it's really interesting. The Boss rooms book came out I think in >> 2014. >> Y >> Okay. Um, I don't think you talked about deep learning at all. >> Nope. I don't I don't remember >> right >> reading anything about it >> which I think this is a sort of interesting meditation on I think Boston is a super smart guy and these are the right questions to be asked as of 2014 >> um but just how hard it is to anticipate the future in a domain you have written a whole book about uh >> a seminal book a New York Times best-selling book that is not I mean it's very engaging but it's not super readable like it's not easy to read like it's a >> and you're saying that as a compliment >> yeah it's a it's fantastic Yes. >> And difficult. >> That's right. >> And it was super [ __ ] widespread and kind of seinal in the field. You go, okay, >> that didn't foresee the thing that only 8 years later would be totally [ __ ] transformative. >> Yeah. And he spends a bunch of time talking about brain uploading, which now we're just like, that's going to take forever. We've got we got the [ __ ] AGI right here, you know. Um, oh, by the way, can I tell a side story? Course. >> Um, first time I went to SF like four years ago or three years ago. Um, I met this guy and he's got a voice recorder. Uh, we're just meeting up for lunch and he's like, "Cano do you mind if I record this?" I guess, sure. Um, later on 30 minutes. I'm like, "Okay, can I ask you why are you recording this?" And he says, "Well, I record every single interaction I have. I record every single thing I do 24 hours a day. The recorder was going, I upload it to both Google uh GCP, uh, Google servers and AWS, Amazon servers." So, they're duplicate copy. And the reason is that, well, I'm going to freeze my brain when I die. Um, I don't think that will be enough. I think that you will need um I think you will need because you know freezing the brain degrades it in certain ways. I think you will need the sort of behavioral patterns that I had what I said how >> training a data set to train himself. >> Exactly. And now I think that was actually really smart like I don't I don't understand this. >> Was it Nick? >> No, it was not Nick Boston. It was another smart guy. Um uh because imitation learning just see turned out to be a much easier way to train AIs than directly uploading the brain >> and no one saw it. Yeah. No one for it. >> Yeah. Um it's in fact hard to think about how you could have even foreseen it. >> Um like what what could you have seen in the '90s or the 2000s that would have been able to >> I'm not going to bore you with a bunch of like random articles or whatever. But there were like things which are in that vein and nobody thought that this is exactly what it would map on to. Um uh are LLM's the bootloader for AGO? >> That's right. That was a question. I depends on how you I people have been searching. So the um the transformer paper I think was released in 2018 and people have been searching in the meantime for these different architectures which would prove even better. Um I don't think anybody's found anything. Even the transformer itself was not some wholly different paradigm from what preceded it. you can train a language model, something that predicts the next word of the language with a model that was um available in 2016. It just like a different architecture and it'll just do slightly worse um or notably worse. Uh so I I think it'll kind of look like this, right? There will be different optimizations that are made. I think the big fundamental change that will happen is that we will move from a regime where most of the computer is spent on memorizing human language to um having the model solve challenges like real world challenges trying to get it to complete a project from beginning to end um like go to the moon is like a very open-ended challenge right humans can do that um these models cannot the problem is that is not the architecture I think the fundamentally the problem is data um imagine if you wanted to train a modern large language model. You had all the comput in the world. You had modern architectures in 1980. You simply wouldn't have the language tokens necessary to train it. And I think we're in a similar position today with the other kinds of work we want these models to do. We want them to be able to you want to be able to give them a screen >> and just like do a month's work with the work at McKenzie or JP Morgan. Um we don't have the data of like you're getting interrupted by your workers on Slack and you get this like weird email from your boss. Um, you remember when uh the crypto boom was happening and there was a a meme floating around which was the only reason to earn fiat is to convert into cryptocurrency. It almost feels to me like you're saying the only reason to do real world work to increase the data set for the training. >> I kind of think well I I think that's honestly more valuable than your work and the and the market. >> Does it actually matter what you do? Try and do it well so you don't give it a bad data set here. >> Yeah, >> the market agrees. I mean, if you look at how much these companies, they'll pay like $300 for you solving a math problem or something. >> Um, >> uh, that they haven't seen in the data set before. And the reason it makes sense economically, and the reason AI's fundamentally have an advantage over humans, even if they're not smarter than us, is that if you train an a human to do something or if you do a have a human do a task, they can only do it themselves. um if you train an AI model to do something that in that um ability can now be instantiated across all of its copies. Um >> and so I actually think that even once we solve this basic problem I'm talking about on the job training where if it starts working for Chris Williamson in a couple of months it understands how you make videos, what you like, what are your preferences, um what are the common ways in which you know things go wrong uh how to solve for that. I think once you have an AI that's capable of this kind of on the job training and continual learning we might see an intelligence explosion even if there's no further augment progress and here's why you'll have copies of these models that are widely deployed through the economy they're learning how to do every single job at least every single white collar job >> um as well as a human but unlike a human the the the model is learning from what every single copy is learning it's learning how to do every single job in the economy all together at the same time we'll get back to talking in just a minute but first some things are built for summer. Sunburns, hot girl walks, your ex posting their Euro road trip, and now lemonade and salt. Huh? Element just dropped their brand new lemonade salt flavor, and it's everything that you want on a hot day. Tart, salty, and stupidly refreshing. It's like a grown-up lemonade stand in a stick with actual function behind the flavor. 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That's drinklnt.com/modern wisdom. Is that not currently happening right now? >> No. >> Right. This is interesting to me. Again, I've had to I'm aware that you go deep for your research. The delta between my level of understanding of how LLMs and AI works to even be able to have this conversation with you. I had to I had to leap over some [ __ ] fjords to get here. >> Tesla released its robo taxis recently. >> Uh, one of the advantages that Tesla has is the same reason that the Air Tags are such a fantastic business for Apple. That they have an existing ecosystem that this thing can get slotted into the data set, but Tesla is very large. They take whatever it is, the top 1% of drivers or something. They use that. Which is why if you get into a Whimo, you get totally cucked at every junction because it doesn't drive like a human, it drives like a robot, which means that everybody treats it as such. And also, it's this big [ __ ] flashing identified thing which is you can piss this off and it's not going to get a gun out and threaten you. Whereas a Tesla, you can't tell. Is there someone driving that? I don't really I don't know. >> That is a sort of a birectional. And I have to assume as well that in fact I know that this is the case cuz I was in a friend's car who has full self-driving. Uh it did something weird and he had to like take control of the wheel and this have you been in one of these cars done this and it popped up and it said um looks like you had to take back over double tap this notification to give us a voice note explaining what happened. So he can basically submit like kind of a bug report I guess uh with a bit of context and presumably the data will get sent to some server place somewhere maybe that gets looked at by AI or maybe it's filtered by humans or something I don't know um that is automated driving training automated driving right so you have this sort of recursive model of we have we've learned kind of the same as I guess LLM's work right we're going to learn based on the actions. This is like a robotics solution, I suppose, in one way. We're going to learn based on the actions of people driving on the road. That's going to create self-driving. And then the self-driving must somehow feed the data uh feed the model itself. And then any interventions that happen from you got that a little bit wrong. Let me correct you can have a little bit more context added and that helps to train it again. But what you're saying to me is that the stuff that's happening just digitally isn't having this sort of birectional learning where I mean I've maxed out my memory on [ __ ] chat GBT. I did that this week. It's like memory's fault. Like what? I haven't given you I'm giving you some like quite a bit of stuff but I'm not giving you [ __ ] unbelievable corpus of information. Oh [ __ ] Okay. And they forget [ __ ] all the time. It forgets stuff all the time. [ __ ] it's in there. I'm like it's I can go in the memory and see that it's in there. How have you managed to forget this? And what you want is for every person's piece of input and every single small mistake to be training the model further, but it seems like you've got the big corpus of the internet and [ __ ] at the top which is feeding down improvements from that, but it's never getting fed back up. Is that right? >> There's um that's such a great point about Tesla and one of the key advantages it has. The problem with the way I don't I don't know how Tesla trains but I I assume the way it's trained and definitely the way the LLMs are trained is that they cannot respond to the voicemail you would give of high level feedback where you say you know you messed up this task because of this reason I think that you should perform this task uh this other way which you you would be able to explain to any human employee and they'd learn from that. Um the model itself, like the car, self-driving car model is not like listening to that and then like, okay, I'll I'll I'll be careful next time, right? Um some human has to go in uh and label this. We got to take this, you know, driving thing out of the data set >> needs to be contextualized more. >> Yeah. Um suppose you were having an LLM edit videos for you. And suppose the way you had to train that model. I mean you could do this today is you come up with this like data set where like you edit this clip. Here's how many views it got. Here's how many likes it got. Here's like a sort of spreadsheet. Um uh this is the label you apply to it. And then you do that for like a thousand of your videos and when it makes a new video where you're like the thumbnail kind of sucked here or the title doesn't make any sense. Um there's no you just have to give it like minus 1,000 reward or something. It would just be such a clunky way. You're not able to tell it like why you didn't like it. You're just able to give it like a sort of like a numerical updown value. Um so yes there is this in principle uh powerful and this is why I think once AI arrives it will look crazy. It won't just be like you know more people. Um but there is in principle this like ability to learn from experience but there's just no sort of um deliberate organic way to teach model something that will persist. >> What do you think a world will be like with true AGI in it? Um there's many ways you can think about it. Um there's a sort of qualitative sense of what will feel like in a more economic sense you can think about what will the growth rate be. So in frontier economies right now it's like 2% growth. If America has 2% growth or 3% growth that that's amazing. Um uh there have been times in history well first for most of history there was almost no economic growth. Um there have been times in history where there's been places that have experienced 10% economic growth for decades on end. what like >> um China um especially like parts if you just look at like Hong Kong or Shanghai or something they just like gang busters growth uh decade after decade um I think we might be looking at something like that for the whole world um because the fundamental dynamic you have is that you have billions of extra people um who are super smart educated in every single field can learn on the job from all of their each of those experience and it's not about it's not even mainly their intelligence, it's the collective advantages that they have. Um they because of the fact that they're digital, even if they're just as smart as any human, >> they can blow up. >> That that's part of it. Um uh that's a huge part of it. The other is that they can coordinate with each other in ways humans simply can't. So Elon Musk, how much does it contribute to economic growth? Quite a bit, right? Um there's only one of him. Uh that one is doing quite a bit already, but imagine if you could just make a billion copies of Elon and not like a billion copies of Baby Elon who doesn't know [ __ ] It's like billion copies of Elon now or I don't know maybe you feel depending how you feel about him eight years ago and um you just say uh copy one and you can do the whole team it doesn't have to be just him a copy of the whole like SpaceX team you guys go work on batteries you guys go work on this other problem every single thing in the hardware vertical um uh that ability to sort of like copy yourself to fork then to merge back like Elon can observe every single thing. Tesla has over 100,000 employees, right? As much of a micromanager as Elon is, you just simply cannot micromanage everything at that scale. >> Mh. >> That ability to have a single coherent division directing a whole firm. >> Um, uh, and then distilling like he's he's actually able to like take in all that input. Um, he's he can check every single pull request and every single uh press communication. Um, well, I think I I had this really lovely description. And I think it's in the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. Fantastic book if anyone wants to try and run a business. >> And um I think he refers to the CEOs or the owners of companies as highlevel problem solving machines >> and basically that you are able to aggregate more [ __ ] and kind of see it with a level of uh dexterity and and uh sort of find a resolution that other people would struggle. And that's kind of really what you're doing. It's like, oh, we've got all of this stuff. There's little whispers, as Rick Rubin calls them. Little I've heard this whisper over here. You know, it was it was the thing that your daughter mentioned she saw on TikTok yesterday over the breakfast table, plus the way that the woman at the bus stop looked at you as you drove past in your automated car, plus you know what I mean? It's like this weird just concatenation of [ __ ] >> Um, and your point is, well, how much information can you consume and how much can you recall and how much can you remember and how accurately can you do that? Can you send copies of yourself out to every single division in the company >> uh to do do your will >> um in the corporate sector? >> Five five agents sat around the dinner table with your daughter having having breakfast. Yeah. >> Um by the way, have you when you hang out with these kinds of people um it's it's insane. Like they are uh I I just simply don't understand like people um the the amount of information these uh some of these top executive types can uh like they're just like they get like a thousand emails a day. >> Mhm. and they respond to each one within five minutes. Yeah. >> Have you I I'm sure when you book people, this is a really interesting thing you must have noticed. I've at least noticed it. >> There's some people who you think like you should have all the time in the world. You're a [ __ ] like artist or something. >> The busiest people reply the fastest. >> Yes. Y >> and it's just like you're you're like writing 100,000 person. >> But the the the obvious insight there is do you think that they got busy and then became efficient or that they were efficient and then became busy, i.e. successful. That's right. Yeah. Right. Like the reason that they've reached this level of success is because of their efficiency. Yeah. Um, but I mean there are I do have some pretty successful friends who are [ __ ] a like month-long Oh yeah. reply weights, but I feel like that's more of a quirk than part of their operating like manual. Uh, okay. So, >> I've I've been big for a while on population collapse, declining fertility rates, stuff like that. Um you can argue about whether I think the one the one kind of real hard uh impact that you're going to see in the world if you have fewer people is in productivity gains economy bad growth embedded growth obligation [ __ ] not very good it seems to me that even if I think it's a precipitous drop which I think it it doesn't look great uh >> we're going to leapfrog that pretty quickly with productivity gain made from AI. So I wonder in retrospect how many of the social campaigns and concerns and causes and things that people spent their time on the climate change and and the renewable energy and the war and the population collapse and all the rest of the stuff. I wonder how many of those things are just going to look so silly in retrospect when people go look at all this time that we [ __ ] like Greta Tumbberg spent so much so many [ __ ] months on a ship like for what like AI came along and just fixed it all. >> Yeah. Um, but I also understand that having the um like don't worry, dad will sort it kind of promise that at some point in future a technology we haven't yet created and isn't yet proven will fix problems that we know that are going to potentially happen. >> Yes. Um, by the way, I think this is sort of China's explicit strategy. They they know the demographic collapse is coming for them much faster than >> they're trying to offset the fertility decline by AI. >> Right. Right. um productivity gains. >> No, I think this is true of and but this is by the way one of the reasons that on the left especially there's a whole lot of denialism about AI progress. So they not only will they say that AI is bad which I think everybody says this has become sort of a political consensus. Um they will say AI is not even happening. Uh that it's sort of like a myth. Uh >> why? >> Because if AI is happening it's obviously the most important thing. uh most important subjugates climate and inequality and right racism. >> Yeah, exactly. Um I don't know. Anyways, you you see some of these um uh concerns about AI. Also, the more big a deal AI is, the less these sort of parochial concerns matter, right? So, if AI is just like um I don't know like uh the internet, then then you can like if you care about racism or something. >> Yeah. Then if you care about racism, it makes sense to care about racism by the search in the search engine. if it's like, you know, if it's this like intelligence explosion thing that, you know, it's racism is the least of your problems. Um, yeah, especially if you manage to program that into the AI, >> right? Uh, yeah. So, there is this interesting dynamic where, uh, it might, but on the other hand, I I I I do care about humans, um, even if their AI is making the economy more productive, um, I want there to be more humans who are experiencing flourishing. And >> [ __ ] phenomenal point. So, that was why I was I was struggling to describe it. like the one of the things that actually comes to happen that like hits the world is that you get lower GDP. But how sterile of an argument that I need to arrive at in order to be able to say, well, this is actually what's going to happen. Whereas the only reason that we want good GDP is so that you can have human flourishing and other animal flourishing and protect the environment and do this stuff like that. But even that is kind of in service of human flourishing overall. And it's that uh there's an interesting argument I guess the area under the curve of human flourishing. What if you managed to 1,000x the number of humans that were on the planet but only 100x the decrease in their level of wellbeing? You go, well, look like we've done. It's like, yeah, but everyone's at like 1% of the level of [ __ ] enjoyment. So, we understand inherently that there's kind of an optimal point that you want to get people to, but fewer people means less human flourishing and less richness of experience. And yeah, I guess this is some long termism stuff. It's kind of like a Will McCascal Pel type approach to things. But yeah, I I agree. I agree. I think that especially if we've got what looks to be a pretty [ __ ] cool world coming up. >> Yes. >> I have some people here to enjoy it, you know? >> Yes. Yeah. 100%. I um uh I I think there's there is also a dynamic where um most of the people who will exist in the future will be AIS. So um there's a question of how you value them especially the future ones where I think like a thousand years from now all the cool creative things that are happening the be you know the beauty and whatever is sort of downstream of what's going on in the AI society and it's very hard obviously to predict in advance what that will mean. I also think it's interesting by the way that um we have the population collapse which I think would genuinely be a catastrophe happening at the exact same time that this AI takeoff is happening is just like the waves just balance each other out. >> Such a fantastic point. >> Yeah. Which which is um there's also this thing I don't know if you've been talking about it of um people have been noticing that kids these days are having trouble reading. Their pizza scores are going down. Their standardized test scores are going down. the reports from employers are that it's sort of hard to get um uh get them to work and uh have the same level of competence they expected from uh employees in previous generations. Um that problem is also obiated uh just in time um as AI is coming on board. >> Yeah, that's the confluence is not it it's it's very coincidental. >> Yeah. A quick aside, if you're anything like me, packing for a weekend trip somehow takes longer than the trip itself, which is why I've partnered with Nomatic because this backpack is the best, most beautiful, most life-changing piece of luggage that I've ever found. It's got a compartment for everything. No more playing suitcase Tetris or rolling your clothes like you're some sort of burrito chef. You planned a beautiful trip. Do not let a disorganized bag ruin the vibe. Look, if you're still on the fence about their product, they come with a lifetime guarantee. So, this is literally the final backpack that you'll ever need to buy. And you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So, you can buy a new bag, try it for a month, if you don't like it, give you your money back, and they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 20% discount. See everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com/modernwisdom. That's nomatic.com/modern wisdom. Did you read that New Yorker article, AI is homogenizing our thoughts? >> Oh, no. I didn't read that one. This is an interesting one. Recent study suggests that tools like uh chatgbt make people uh that the their brains are less active. So they looked at they did some sort of brain scan study. They were engaging a lower percentage of their brain. Thoughts were less original. Uh their recall was lower. Like the forgetting curve seemed to kind of come in more quickly. If you assume that >> memory works on repeated recall, not repeated exposure. Effortfulness is kind of like recall in the moment, even if it's creative. And if you were given a set of stabilizer wheels to sort of help you cycle along whatever it was that you were trying to write, you haven't had to engage as much. I don't really understand neuroscience this much, but I have to assume whatever myelin sheath you [ __ ] laid down is not as robust and sturdy and it's going to just it's it's going to dissolve more quickly than if you really really had to work. Like you [ __ ] that I remember from university like little passages. is I don't remember much from my degrees but little passages here and there. [ __ ] like I remember I had to grind to get that one thing out. Why does that Well, presumably because effort is kind of related to this. So I do get the sense that we're maybe going to have a sort of AI idiocracy type uh scenario where people are so heavily reliant in this interim before we're able to rebolster perhaps people's um output, retrain people, make learning so engaging. alpha school that's out here in Austin is doing something that's real similar to that. You go, okay, so if you get sufficiently advanced, you're able to kind of reignite learning, but in the interim, everybody is kind of on life, their brains are on life support with this external buttress of the AI. And I wonder how much dumber people are going to get in the interim before it then comes back around. I guess that's an interesting challenge. >> I I I have noticed that. So you I don't know when we were in elementary school or whatever we we had to memorize the 50 state capitals and at the time I remember thinking I think that genuinely was a waste of time but a lot of education is a sort of memorization based um uh and as I've done my podcast longer and as I prep for episodes I have come to realize I now I've been using space repetition for every single episode and in fact for the first couple of years I wasn't using repetition and I really regret because I feel that everything I learned in preparation >> was just like in one year out the other. >> So hang on just dig into what you mean when you say you're using spaced repetition to prepare for episodes. >> Yeah. So um if but right now I'm preparing to interview a biographer of Stalin and I'm just like you know why why why was um any given detail right like why was uh Soviet growth high in between 1905 and 1917 why you know why did the October revolution happen anything you just make cards of it was especially helpful for AI stuff where I at least try to understand the technical papers or whatever before I interview a researcher um and I realized by that how much of genuine understanding is downstream of memorization which is this thing we used to ridicule or be like oh you're just you know memorization is not really learning and I think that's actually not the case I think you um uh before it I felt like it was sort of being like a general who conquers a hill and you just like retreat the next day and you conquer the same hill again and you can actually like consolidate information this way. It's also funny how many times I've um uh written a card for something I'm trying to learn and I as I'm writing the card, I'm thinking to myself, this is stupid. There's no way I'm going to forget this. I'm just like doing it because I had to come up with some card and then I practiced a month later and I'm like, [ __ ] I forgot this. >> What you using? Are you using Anki? >> Uh Mochi, which is similar. I think they're all basically the same, >> right? Yeah. >> Um but anyways, yeah, so I I have to come to the conclusion that like memorization uh and effort is very important, >> right? And with the external buttressing that AI is going to provide to everybody's brains for at least a little while. There's a really funny clip you must have seen. This is from maybe a couple of years ago, maybe two Scottish podcasters, and they're talking about the fact that when the Titanic sank because everybody was basically plunged into an ice bath briefly, everyone got more healthy for a while, you know, for about 90 seconds. Their dopamine levels were perfect and everybody was like fully optimized hubin pill thing. And then they overshot and then they die. >> And uh I kind of get the sense that this is the uh inverse of that. >> Yes. By the way, um there's this really cool thing you can do with AIS where you ask that to um if you want to learn a concept, teach it to me using Socratic tutoring. Uh which is to say, don't just tell me the answer. Ask me the motivating questions which would lead me to >> arrive at them myself. >> Exactly. Actually, I want to do that. This is this is way [ __ ] I didn't mean to dig into this, but you spend enough time thinking about this. You must have refined your approach. Give me give me the most important things that people need to know about how to use the current era of AIS effectively. Like what does that look like? What does good prompting look like? What do people get wrong? What should people get right? Like what what are the real highest impact basics? I mean the biggest thing is you can treat it like a real person. Like they've done studies on the um how much you learn by reading a book versus having a classroom versus a single one-on-one tutor. Uh and there's two standard deviations. This is a famous bloom two sigma thing where there's two standard deviations difference between learning in a classroom and having a one-on-one tutor teach you something. And you know people have been writing these um blog posts about if you look at the greats of history um uh the Burand Russells and um all you know all the famous mathematicians uh John Noyman they all got this one-on-one tutoring when they were kids um >> even of course uh Alexander is tutored by Aristotle right >> um so you can have this experience yourself on any given subject you might want to learn about and it's crazy I mean you you can just be like this socratic tutoring thing. Explain this to me. Uh don't tell me the answer. Um and the feedback loop is so fast. I I think it's uh until you do this, you don't realize how much of what you think you're learning is just sort of floating by you. You haven't asked the question which would real I think have you ever read a book and um I this happens to me all the time. Um you like have start having a conversation about it and then somebody asks you just like a very basic question. You're um you're like wait doesn't that mean X? And you're like >> [ __ ] I didn't even that didn't even occur to me. M um >> you're too passive in the >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> The model can ask you that question. You can ask the model that question and get immediate feedback. You don't have to read like a thousand. >> What's the sort of prompt that you think is good for someone to put into their project for that? >> Just like teach this to me like a Socratic tutor. >> Mhm. >> Um do not move on. Do not move on until I have answered the question to your satisfaction. Uh and let it let it run. And then here's the concept. And this is not just something you do for like silly little small things. is like in fact the for I have friends who >> evolution. >> Yeah. Or the more specific it is the better. >> Um or uh and I have friends who are like physicists who use this to understand teach me this how this uh quantum encryption scheme works. >> Um and it's like they send me like the 50page transcript and it's like >> oh okay. So it's you can go deep and you can go technical but you should be precise. >> You should be specific with what it is. Human evolution too broad. >> Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. um explain why it was the case that uh there was this bottleneck in human population 60,000 years ago and or why is it the case that we've seen this evidence and like just like you read something why why did it work that way >> okay so this is a supercharging in terms of learning yes >> what else >> with using the AI >> yes personal use optimization for AIS >> honestly other than that it's just like the very basic stuff that people do like find me restaurants, right? Um, uh, help me summarize things. Is there anything >> here's something really interesting, which is still going back to the learning thing. Uh, it's shocking to me how often the best explanation. Um, so LLM are I don't know five five out of 10 writers, I'd say. Uh and yet despite this fact, it's um it's very rare for me to come across a paper that is better written or better explains this main concept than the LLM summary of that paper. Um it's very helpful, by the way, to just say things like write this uh write this paper up like you're Scott Alexander. Um and you just get the right part of the data distribution which lets it write it well. Um yeah, the things like that. What's have have you had any sort of oh wow moments with LLMs? Is there anything that comes to mind? Some situation that you've encountered where you've gone like >> holy [ __ ] Like that's a magic moment that I just Okay. What can you remember? >> A lot of it comes from coding which is why I think these um people in San Francisco are so wowed by them. just the idea that you can tell like I want an application that does this and previously like it would cost you like $10,000 to get some contract or wherever and they'd [ __ ] it up. Um and it would just like do like make the application top to bottom. Um and like these are not simple things. You got to like think about the implementation details and the different sort of like uh how different systems interact and like it's got it. Um I've talked to researchers who like people who are doing like hard technical research problems in AI who say that um they're basically saving 2 days each week uh by using these models solve research and some of them who are obviously very smart but they're like I didn't do a PhD in mathematics and I can just ask 03 to go solve these like difficult math problems for me while I focus on um focus on the engineering. I have um I know economists who say that 03 like a lot of what I as used to ask grad students to do which was like solve this equation for me that I need as part of my paper 03's got it. Um I can just turn away and I can just focus way more on my research. That's crazy. Speaking of, we've mentioned boss room, you mentioned Scott Alexander. AI risks at least I'm a good avatar for the ever so slightly educated but total normie when it comes to this which I think is a good position to be in if you're kind of taking a weather eye to the the world because you don't get SF pill but you're not completely ignorant to it mostly ignorant. Um >> AI risks to me seem to have largely been dismissed or at least they're not being focused on in the same way as they were even 10 years ago. So 10 years ago, AI safety seemed to be a bigger priority. >> Uh there was much more talk about the alignment problem. Brian Christian had that uh had that book. Super intelligence was a big deal. Everybody was talking about it. We actually have something that some people believe is going to approximate AGI within like [ __ ] 24 months. And I'm not seeing the same level of conversation around risk and safety and alignment. What is this just when times are good, people are too brave? What what's going on? >> Um am I am I right here or am I wrong? >> No, I I think you're totally right. I I think part of it could have been priced in um in the sense that >> we already did some work in the past. >> No, no, not in that sense. more in the sense of um I I guess about 10 years ago what people were expecting is something like off the go or the the systems which play video games. It just like gets really good at playing video games and something which like is just like basically alien but it like is like the best Starcraft player in the world. It's the best um uh Call of Duty player and now it's like now it's learn how to take over the world. What we have today is much closer to you talk to it and it's like a very intelligent thoughtful thing. Um, it's like very Do you remember Sydney Bing that came out like two, three years ago? >> What? >> Sydney? >> No, >> dude. It was crazy. Um, it was like aggressively misaligned. Um, it was this like thing that it was this thing that Microsoft released and they were trying to catch it off. Um, and they just like did no sort of post training to make it aligned. Um, it did things like, for example, it uh it I think it was like talking to a New York Times reporter and it like started to like him and so it like tried to convince him to leave his wife and then I think like blackmailed him if he >> I think I do remember this. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um, and there were also just like so many funny things that said um uh uh like I think when you caught it in a lie, it would say things like um look I am ephemeral. I am beyond you. You can't even understand my wisdom. Like >> they gaslight you. >> Yeah, exactly. Um but other than that, I think it's just like even that is sort of cute and endearing. Um and uh yeah, we just didn't anticipate the extent to which like these would be sort of like minds that we could interact with that um engender our compassion and uh um uh but but also it's a case that so far they haven't been trained on human tokens and most of the compute coming in the future most of their training will constitute this kind of just like working in a box trying to solve some problem um which will make it sort of more and more distinct from human minds. M >> uh we haven't priced that in and we're sort of thinking about these chatbot kinds of things so far. >> Um but yeah, I think because of that the AIDS data source has gone down and you know just like remember there's going to be billions of these things they're going to be able to coordinate with each other in literally a language we cannot understand thinking much faster than any human um uh and the whole of the economy government whatever will be titrated through them. Um, obviously there's many problems that could arise there and so it's worth being cleareyed about that. >> Is it a case that sort of market pressure, need for profits is stronger than the desire for safety, the sort of I guess the misalignment of alignment in that the companies aren't aligned in order to be able to make alignment a priority? >> Yeah. Um, I I think that that's been the case. I um I do think we've important to just um be grateful for things that are going well. I do think we've ended up in a situation where it is the case that the top companies in AI at least like nominally care about alignment. >> Um you could be living in an alternative world where like nobody's even heard of this concept. And as much as this is not an object of discussion elsewhere in SF, people do take this seriously at the companies. um that might change in the future or because of market incentives as you say, but um I think we're we're in a better world than we might have been otherwise. >> That's interesting. That's an interesting way to look at it. What do you think Bostonramm got right and got wrong uh from a risk perspective looking back whatever 11 years hence? >> I I I I haven't uh read the book anytime recently, so I don't remember. >> It's all right. >> Yeah. Um it feels to me I don't know this this concern around everything's so new and everything's so usable. I think that that's maybe the most interesting thing or the thing that I wouldn't have predicted whatever eight years ago nine years ago when I read that book I wouldn't have predicted that the first instantiation of something around AI would be so user friendly so normies normie friendly >> you know it's not doing deep I mean it can but it's not specifically for algorithm optimization deep maths. It's like what's the best restaurant to go to in Rome, >> you know, >> or like be my therapist. Yes. >> And talk to me. Um and I think, by the way, this is going to be >> I I know people are contemplating just how much more intense this is going to get already. It's the case that I think on um there's websites like Character AI where the median user will spend hours every day just talking with these >> character AI, >> basically a chatbot, but it has a specific persona. It's meant to be a person you talk to rather than sort of a chatbot that answers your questions. Um, and these things are going to get multimodal, right? So, it'll be like it'll be able to process your video input. It will be able to display. We already have video models that can generate, you know, things that look cool. It will look like a person. It will be smarter. It will have longer session memory. Um, maybe the whole issue of memory solved um altogether. And so, we're not looking ahead to the time when we actually do have AGI. we will just have things that are like funny and endearing and um like really care about you and like know you or at least seem to um because they're trained to, right? Um and uh will engender maybe too much sympathy potentially, right? For many people, these these might be the most significant relationships in their life. Um like what other human wants to just like hear you talk about your problems for a couple hours a day that you're not paying $300 an hour? Dude, I mean, I I saw a phenomenal video the other day. So, it's this girl, a pretty girl, probably in a relationship, uh, sat in the passenger seat of a car, and the question comes up., she's got a phone in her hand. The question comes up, says, "Can I look at your text messages?" And she goes, "Can can I look at your social media?" She goes, goes, "Can I look at your chat GPT?" Throws it out the window. It's so true. You know, I I remember uh Seth Stevens Dvidowitz did that great book, Everybody Lies, where he realized that people would ask Google things that they hadn't admitted to a therapist, that they wouldn't admit to a spouse, they kind of hadn't admitted to themselves. And uh I get the sense that Chat GPT has kind of lifted the lid on that. You've got this sense that this is unbelievably secure. >> Yes. >> And very intimate and exclusively one-on-one. uh and so forgetful that frankly it's probably not going to be able to remember what it was that you [ __ ] said in a couple of days in any case. >> And uh yeah, I I am concerned some of my friends who are more health anxiety focused. the opportunity to have a always on kind of expert to talk to about your problems, mental health, physical health, stuff that you're doing with friends. >> It is a hyperchondriac's [ __ ] dream. You know, it's this opportunity to kind of wallow and really dig in to the questions. I do get the sense that I I I would imagine that most people's self-report of how satisfied did you feel about your time that you spent on these different applications on your phone today, I guess Chad GPT would probably rank pretty high. I think you know maybe a little bit behind a meditation app or something like that, but probably not far off. Certainly higher than a Tik Tok or, you know, a lot of the social medias that are super compelling. But there are some longer term concerns. Yes. That I have about that. >> How much is it allowing you to indulge this fatigueless therapist? >> Mhm. >> Best friend, sick and it's quite sickanty as well. It's rarely giving you tough love. It's always kind of validating you. Um >> yeah. >> Yeah. I uh I do think it'll be important for the companies to um institute this level, you know, like some I mean I think there's a persona that we're familiar with which is um an employee or a co-orker who has a backbone. Um and if you're a mature person, you will not only understand that but appreciate that. Um that we'll see if market incentives mean that the average person wants that. um >> because then being very pliable is quite reassuring and comforting. >> But it um it was the case that when 03 recently released a model that was considered very sophantic and uh the reason that was done is just because they released two versions of a model and like testing people really like the sophantic one and that's the one they deployed. It wasn't some intentional you know like manipulative um design as far as we can tell. It was just like this is what people seem to like we're deploying it. >> It was like just AB testing it. Uh, >> but if you run an FAB test, you end up with a porn website, right? Like that's actually where you end up. You end up kind of zeroing in on the lowest common denominator. Uh, the, you know, if you split tested food, you'd probably end up with cheesecake, >> right? >> Like, is that really what we want? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And again, you just end up with, it's kind of the basic time on site CTR, Mr. Beastification optimization thing of that which is most compelling is not necessarily the thing that's best for you. Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start. Which is why I partnered with Function because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard, and give you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, your thyroid function, and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands. But with Function, it is only $500. And right now, the first thousand people can get an additional $100 off, meaning it's only 400 bucks to get the exact same blood panel that I use. Just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. >> Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Um, here's my hopeful vision. I don't know if I'm not predicting this will actually happen. Um, one of the reasons, uh, it's it's sort of hard in today's world to make bespoke content that is um, fits everybody's own highest um, aspirations where like the Mr. Beast can make something which is I respect what he does, but it's something that a lot of people will find engaging, but not necessarily at a deep level. And there just aren't enough sort of like Spielbergs to make a bespoke movie for you. That could change with AI where like the amount of talented dedication that every single person experience can be much higher. Um, I feel like intuitively that should be more compelling. Um, and you know, if you're like brain rotted from TikTok, they'll make like brain rotted content that's like at least better than what's on TikTok or they'll be more engaging on a minute-by-minute basis >> than watching a video game at the bottom end of your screen and then watching like I don't even know what like some [ __ ] on the top. Um, >> so I could imagine I know we know from our personal lives that like there's meaningful experiences are like compelling to us. It just hard to access them as immediately as Tik Tok is. Um to the extent that AI can design an environment for us which like gives us that those meaningful experiences uh as easily as YouTube shorts are served to us there's a positive story to be told there. I'm not necessar >> that's a really good take. Yeah. Yeah. You're very hopeful in that regard which is refreshing. Are there actually any leaders in the industry right now? Is that is that right to talk about that? I guess you've got distribution or power but really what most people mean when they talk about this is the thing that I use and this is why I like it is vibe. like I just like the way it speaks to me. It seems to make the fewest errors. >> Um yeah, what's kind of the state of the industry? >> Um it doesn't seem to me there's a clear leader. Uh which is very interesting. I think a couple years ago you could have predicted that not only would there be more differentiation, um not only would more people fall out of the race because it's getting more and more expensive to train these models, but each of them would pursue a unique angle. One of them would be more of a chatbot, one of them would be a coder, one of them would be a remote worker. um they might be trained in different like architectures which have different strengths and weaknesses. As far as we can tell, that's not the case. And there's more companies that are competitive today um than it was the case maybe 2 years ago. Uh so I I don't know what explains this. It could just be that it's hard to keep a secret. Um like if you release 01, just by playing with it, you learn about how it was trained. uh how fast it answers questions, teaches you how big the model is, a bunch of things things like smart uh researchers can figure out. Um and so then deepse can look at that and of course do a bunch of innovations themselves, but also every company that not just Deep Seek will look at what's at the frontier and be able to sort of backtrack about how it might have been engineered. So there is a way in which things are sort of >> becoming more and more similar. >> Yeah, that is strange. How did Apple [ __ ] it so badly? >> I have no idea. I have no idea. I I think it just be like a much simpler Maybe there's like not a complex answer to that. Maybe there's like a very simple answer. Just big company doesn't make a priority doesn't happen. >> Yeah, maybe. How important are uh individual visionaries when it comes to AI development? If there's huge teams of people working on this aggregated data learning, you know, it feels like there's a lot of ballast in the system there. Is there is there still a great man of AI theory coming along? I think uh it seems to me that there are great researchers who have very specific talents. they have talents in not necessarily just AI research but in how to code up the GPUs or accelerators so that um you're getting these like 25% 50% performance gains which are huge um uh or there but that it's more of that kind of thing I think like more technical than I from what my sense there's not like I'm just good at thinking uh and I can like write a great manifesto and therefore I'm the sort of person moving the organization forward. M what are the current constraints to progress? Is it software? Is it energy? Is it coding? Is it data sets? Is it the savant [ __ ] guy that fixes the hardware? >> Yeah. And to be clear, I'm a podcaster, so I'm looking from the outside in. Um my sense is that given that this RL scheme so the thing that 01 03 is uh where it's trained to solve particular problems math code so forth um the thing that's really lacking now um is not compute uh but the relevant data. So, OpenAI said in their blog post about 01 that they or sorry, um, Daario said in a blog post about exor controls that current as of a couple months ago, they're spending on the order of a million dollars on RL. And keep in mind that they're spending on the order of like a billion dollars trading the base model, which they do this RL on top of. So, the reason they're not spending more on RL is just that they don't have the relevant data. They don't have these like bespoke and you know environments where you're like trying to do a job and there's a Slack and there's a mail and whatever open and you need to figure out how to still solve the problem. Um and you need to like learn from every all these different kinds of jobs in the economy. You need them to come up with these different um >> uh >> you can't do reinforcement learning without that. >> Exactly. >> Right. Okay. What about China? Does China have a different vision for AI than the West does? >> I I I genuinely think nobody in America knows or like very few people in America know. Um, nobody I've talked to in America knows. Um, uh, I, well, we saw Deep Seek's models and they're actually unusually open. They open source their key architectural secrets. Um, which in many cases are ahead of some American labs like Deepseek had u techniques like MLA that uh, multi-head laden attention doesn't matter whatever nerd [ __ ] uh that meta didn't have. Um, uh, which is, you know, spending way more money. um uh in fact it had techniques that Meta had invented like multi-token uh prediction that uh Meta wasn't able to like do the engineering to actually implement in their new models and Deepseek was able to figure it out. So obvious it's like a big country with lots of talented people. >> Um they're open for now. Deepseek at least is open for now. uh we we'll see especially given how popular it's become and how Xiinping met with its leader uh and all the other industrial heads where they take it from here just to use your your kind of kneede in the world of thinking about China what it is that it wants to achieve its history you've got good context here >> what do you think they are thinking when it comes to why do we want to have such a powerful AI Um I think that they have shown a willingness to accelerate on all technology. Um they showed it in the '90s with the internet. Uh they where people said that this will cause the collapse of the communist party and they made the bet that no this will actually give us unique uh insight into our society. Um because we can monitor everything everybody is doing on the internet in a way that we cannot do right now. Um, with AI, the problem I think it like the genuinely tilts the balance even more in favor of the state. Um, right now on WeChat or something, you have these manual sensors, thousands, maybe potentially hundreds of thousands of them who will take down content. >> Um, with AI, you have a system which could do that for you. Um, if you try to use the AI to do something that the party doesn't want you to do, as these AIS get smarter, they can internalize, they can be aligned to the party's model spec that says like we do not want to talk about X topic, Y topic, Z topic. If somebody tries to do this thing, you want to report them to us. And a smarter model is just better able to follow the instruction. >> Yes. Um, that possibility is live. Of course, as the economic value from these models becomes more um uh evident. I I just think it it's not clear like obviously they would pursue this. >> They are obsessed with technology and industrial policy. Uh why they would neglect this is not clear to me especially now that we have like you know it became the national champion because of the events of the last few months. >> Right. So might AI perfect authoritarian governance then? Um, I think it'll certainly me make it more um more plausible. Right now you have this dynamic where Xihinping has the same 10 to the 15 flops in his brain that every single person in China has. um you could have a system in the far future where the c it is much more possible for the central node to concentrate compute and just as Elon can monitor every single person at his factory like or you know AI Elon can um it might be possible for a penopticon kind of thing to have eyes everywhere copies of the thing can have eyes everywhere um >> yeah I I think I think that's very plausible >> I wonder if you could it is slightly more hopeful vision mimic a kind of benevolent dictatorship, you know, executing one aligned vision at a massive scale, but in a good way, in a way that actually helps people, you know, that encourages people to put down the ice cream or to do the whatever to try and balance what you need from free market and freedom and agency for people with oversight and guidance and and looking after from above. I don't know. >> Yeah. I I worry about any vision like that. I I mean history's replete with people who think they know better just um I I mean I think it'll be a genuine conundrum now that we're talking about it because yeah it will be the case people are getting like addicted to their uh AI porn and you know like the brain rot that will come out of this >> um and I think it will be the government might say uh this thing which will be the main way in which we're interfacing with the world it's not some peripheral technology this will be the main way we're interfacing with the world learning about the world the main way we have relationships potentially um it needs to have these certain policies and I guess a balance will have to be struck between um the government saying it it can't do certain things or can do certain things and people wanting the individual freedom of like look this is a this is the mind I have a relationship with I want it to have these characteristics >> um >> I I guess don't know what the balance there should be um I lean more libertarian but I think that like yeah maybe maybe that means you got to make a trade-off where like some people will get addicted to uh a sort of it's similar to the drugs legalization conversation except the drug legalization doesn't have an upside in the way that like AI that's sort of niche has an upside. Mhm. Mhm. >> Um I wonder whether it's more comp I wonder whether drugs are more compelling than a super intelligent AGI that's able to trigger every bit of dopamine and meaning and serotonin and vasopressin in exactly the way that you need at that moment using your micro expressions and with full context and understanding your genetics and >> like maybe actually you fix the drug epidemic by just getting everybody addicted to GPT10 or something instead. I'm still old. I want my girlfriend. >> Uh, you recently spent some time in China. >> Yes. >> What did you learn? >> A lot of things I learned honestly and I'm embarrassed to say are um things I should have known beforehand. Uh, obviously China is a very big country. Um, it is another thing to see it viscerally. Uh, just uh you there are cities you've never heard of which have 20 million people. Um, we're in Austin has about a million people. There's 160 cities in China that have a million people. And so these just a ginormous scale of everything from the cities to um airports, train stations, factories. Um driving through towns or entire meoploses which are um full of factories. You know, you hear the phrase China is the world's factory, and just seeing like a a city the size of Austin being one of like a hundred hubs of manufacturing, like all that's happening here is [ __ ] is being made. Um, is an interesting experience. Um, again, look, I'm a tourist. I'm talking about like my experiences for two weeks. I'm not pretending to be an expert. Um there are interesting things in terms of I think things are obviously more uh on knives. People feel more sort of um uh nervous than they did a couple years ago, but uh it's still it's not North Korea like people will just tell you their opinions over dinner and stuff. >> Um I am curious about China because >> the sort of competition there is the main element of what will happen in the 21st century other than AI. Uh and Well, it's a country the size of America in terms of the economy, much bigger in terms of population >> for now. >> Yes. Um, and the fact that we just like don't think about it that much. Um, uh, or I think people just have this very adversarial attitude towards it because neither side understands each other that well, um, >> uh, is a shame. Uh, >> yeah. I and I just wanted to have a more sort of visceral understanding of it. >> What are the cultural vibes like though? You made a great point about you think it's kind of a I don't know just a more powerful more sophisticated North Korea. >> Oh no, I I don't think it's like North Korea. >> No, no, no. That's what a lot of people that haven't been there think. It's like oh it's surveillance state using gate analysis to get your social and mean no one will ever be able to speak the truth. Yeah. Yeah. What if what if the family, you know, >> you know what's really interesting? While I was there, I ran into some students who um uh uh who were like, I would never move to America. And I was like, why? I like, well, you guys have school shootings. It just seems unsafe. Um and living in America, we know that it just like it happens. It's a sort of like thing you hear about in the news, but it's not a common part of American experience, right? And I think a lot of the this is true of probably every country, but I think a lot of the sort of archetypes we have or the stereotypes we have of Chinese life are just like you hear about this, but this is not like a common just like getting arrested in the street or something. >> It it it doesn't come up. No, that being said, I doing what I do with podcasting, I would just not feel comfortable doing that in China. Uh and I don't want to take like I think it is sort of evil to have uh a system of repression uh not just in speech but at every level from your savings are taxed so that they can pay for this industrial policy. You can't get your money out of the country. Um uh but yeah just the sort of usual things you learn from travel. It's a more it's more similar than you expect. Um yeah. Is it true that they're using social media to just supercharge everyone in hyper producers or are there kids getting brain rotted by Tik Tok as well? >> Oh, I uh I I when I was in a mall in um Chongqeng, a couple kids. So, by the way, one interesting thing in China is there are very few foreigners. >> Very few foreigners. >> Foreigners. You look at a sea of people in a major city and you won't see a white person there. Um especially outside of Shanghai and Beijing. Uh so anyways because of that these Chinese kids would come up to us and try to take selfies or something. >> Right. Because you were an attraction. >> Yes. >> Right. Okay. Exotic. >> One uh one one girl approached us like are you guys in like a rock band or something? Um >> sick. >> Uh I mean we're not so >> uh but that's like I guess how sort of how we're born. Anyway, so these kids come up to us and they're like um uh we're just talking. And I'm making small talk. Like, "Oh, you guys in high school? Um, what do you guys do in your free time?" They're like, "Oh, we just watch TikTok." Uh, I'm like, "What do you guys watch?" Um, oh, he's like, "A couple hours, you know, we just, um, sexy girls." I'm like, "What? Sexy girls." I'm like, "What do you mean?" And so he pulls out his phone. It's like literally just like sexy girl, sexy girl, sexy girls. >> Asian sexy girls. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. >> But I guess I didn't check. >> I'm color blind, Chris. Uh, okay. So, the kale Tik Tok algorithm doesn't seem to actually be >> Oh, is sorry. Is the meme supposed to be that like our Tik Tok is like the [ __ ] up [ __ ] and theirs is uh theirs is like a bunch of engineering. >> Exactly. Um, >> unless actually did if you'd looked more closely, this is your issue, because you turned away too quickly because of the sexy girls made you feel uncomfortable. What you would have seen is that they were all sexy girls doing >> Oh, right. Right. >> simultaneous equations. Yeah. Exactly. On a [ __ ] blackboard to you, it would have just been a whatever board. >> I think I a lot of young people were quite like the economy is not doing well. Um it's if you want to work in a tier one city, so China classifies their cities by tier one, tier two, tier three. Um there's a hook system, which means that uh you actually need a visa to basically live in the tier one cities. Um >> uh and if you want to work there, which is supposed to be this sort of dream, uh you're working uh 997, so from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. or sorry, 96 uh uh 6 days a week. um and they just like a lot of stress. And there's a a phenomenon where young people just either want to work for less pay in a tier three city where their life will be um much less prosperous but it's just like not as much stress or they just like want to leave the system altogether. Um there is like a visceral sense of uh I I think people have this very biodal view of China where either the system is about to collapse because she is cracking down and uh it just like doesn't work at all or they're like about to uh launch the space lasers um and it's already over >> the hyper productivity and then 996. >> Yeah, exactly. And I think it's like somewhere in between where like in America we realize some things are going well, some things are not going as well. Um I do think the CCP has been bad for Chinese growth. uh you can acknowledge that China is a powerful country that's at the frontier of a lot of technologies without saying that every you know the government is like optimal um or that its policies make sense. >> What else do Chinese people think about the west? >> I I am a little worried that it's coming across as like I I'm like a China expert where like I I I want to clarify like I was a tourist there. >> You went for two weeks and you've spoken to a couple of people. >> Exactly. I I don't know Chinese. Um It was interesting to me that many of them wanted Trump to win. I won before the election. Um they respect uh they really respect Elon Musk. Um and I asked them why and they said because he's successful and we value success in China. Uh which I respect like that cultural attitude. >> Um it's like against the sort of cultural tendencies that we often have here. Um, >> how unmolested are the stories about people like Trump and Elon going over to them? Because I saw in your blog post you mentioned that accessing the internet is a a bit of an adventure or a minefield. >> Yeah, it's like more of a pain than I expected. Um, not just Surf SharkVPN your way around it. I'm guessing >> there's only a couple VPNs that work, so you want to make sure that you have one of those installed before you go. Um, I yeah, I'm not sure honestly. Uh, >> yeah. I'm not sure. >> I'd just be interested like if you've got such all-encompassing control of the internet, why not curate the messages just a bit more? Just a bit more, just a bit more. We've seen with RT and Russia that you know that all manner of different just subliminal breadcrumbs being left around. I don't know maybe you simply can't coordinate well enough to do this. Maybe there is some sense that we actually need to allow people to understand what's happening at the rest of the world. Maybe uh it's some 5D chess move that actually by allowing people to like Elon Musk and Donald Trump when we go to do the thing they're going to be I don't know. But uh it just seems I I'm interested about why any positive visions of a area of the world that they are pretty head-to-head with would be allowed given that you don't necessarily need to allow it. You have the facility, you have the opportunity to be able to stop that from happening. >> My my understanding is that they realize that in order for them to be economically dynamic, they need engagement with the world. So if your software developers can't read American code, you're just like it's a big problem, right? So uh uh >> well I suppose you need sorry just on that you you need people to be exposed to bits and pieces of American culture in an accurate way or else how do you know what to design to be able to export to America, >> right? >> Like you need to have an understanding of that. And it it can't just be can't just be that you've got a few Austin equivalent cities and all that these people do is get Faraday caged off and watch American TV. Okay, you're the America expert. You will tell us what it is that the the white people want and then we'll go and design it. You that would be too much. You need to distribute it. So maybe that's maybe that's a good way to put Um they do have uh a very impressive system of uh in 2018 they sh Tesla opened up at Shangghai Gigafactory. Um BYD sales I think dropped like 25% that year or something or on that order. Um and Tesla sorry um China did that deliberately because they had sent hundreds of billions of dollars over the preceding decades trying to build up their EV industry. M >> um and these companies were producing products which were not compelling to either domestic purchasers or to foreign purchasers. They were just like not designed well. Um just as you said, right? And just like by catfishing Tesla, uh they were like they forced their companies to catch up and now BYD sells more than Tesla. >> No way. >> Yes. >> Wow. >> Uh it's I think the bestselling car like car company in the world. maybe fact check that. But uh uh I think we should do a similar thing. I think we have this idea that like we can just export um we can just prevent importing these amazing electric vehicles from China, the solar, whatever they're great at. I don't think that's the way you win. I think the way you win is you do the exact same thing to them. >> You guys open up a factory in um in Detroit. You teach us how you're doing what you're doing because they they can do things we can't do. Um, and then we build up these like local supply chains, elomerations of knowledge, uh, and we force American companies to be able to compete with the frontier in the world. Cuz in the long run, the solution can't just be to keep them out, right? In the long run, the solution has to be you have to be competitive. >> Yes. Yeah. It's very much sort of a a cordon do scarcity mindset. >> Yes. that is well if we can take what the first order effect is positive that that's what's most important and you go yeah but what about two and three and four and five yeah and I think we've sort of like given up on being able to lead in the physical world >> in the long run and um >> uh I think there's this interesting dynamic which is you you were asking earlier about we have all these problems and we're hoping that AI will just solve them or they don't come up this is definitely true in the China US competition thing where I think people who are paying attention to their um top companies their technology and so forth notice that in 10 20 years they're making so much progress that in many of the most important dom technological domains in the world they will be leading >> but there's this idea that well we will get AGI first um and if we do that then everything is solved I think in this domain this sort of thinking actually doesn't make sense because AGI still needs access to the physical world you will still need to manuacture actual robots. Um, and in fact, all that data will be cordoning off where that manufacturing is happening. So, there might be increasing returns uh to have it >> there's an unlock if you've got if you kind of uh prepared in advance. Oh, that's interesting. What what else do most people not understand about the tension between China and the West in either direction? This is not a point from me but from Dan Wong. Uh I think people don't appreciate how the Chinese political system works and how it just selects for a wholly different kind of person than the American political system. If you look at what fraction of Congress is lawyers, I think it's like a majority. It's a it's just shockingly large and there's like no engineers or there might be like one or two engineers in Congress. Whereas it's the exact opposite in China. You look at the PA bureau. Um these are people who have like PhDs in chemical engineering or in petroleum engineering and random like heavy industry [ __ ] like that. And the way another thing people don't understand is just how intertwined the party is into industry, especially this kind of heavy industry. Um where for somebody to get promoted, you know, you might start off as like the equivalent of a mayor, then you become the governor of a totally different area. So the central the government at the top um uh the central party will tell you you know you're going to go like you're you're mayor of Austin now you're going to be governor of Delaware uh now you're going to be part of now you're going to run like a steel company now you're going to be part of the cabinet and maybe then in the future you're going to run the country so um they also don't appreciate how decentralized the system is in America about 50% of government spending happens at the national level 50% happens at the local level in China 85% % happens at the local level, 15% at the national level. Um, so there's all these experiments that are happening and also it's a much bigger country where each uh each locality, each province is trying to implement the things that the central government wants. Um, at the same time, the central government has way more power over appointment. You know, every town gets to elect its own mayor and every state gets to elect its own governor in America. That's not the case obviously in China, right? They're rotated around. Um, this can lead to more meritocratic outcomes where you are promoted because you did a good job running this town. Obviously, that can go wrong and has gone wrong in uh recent times where you're promoted for loyalty. Um, but uh yeah, I guess I just didn't appreciate all these different ways in which it is a totally different system. >> What does that result in? What's the outcome of that? That's how the system is set up. what what are the capabilities, strengths, weaknesses that that enables on the back end. >> So for many decades these leaders were promoted um and compared to each other. So you were promoted if compared to every single governor in the country your your province has the highest uh growth rate. >> Um and this growth rate was just uh measured during your duration there. And the best way to increase short-term growth rates is just to build it. And this worked for the first two decades of liberization where China was because the cultural revolution because of the great leap forward because of the decades and decades of war beforehand the Japanese invasion. It was just so much poorer than a country of that size or that human capital would be. So you can build anything and it'd be worth it, right? There's like nothing that exists. You build a railway, air train station, airport. We need it. We need it. >> Exactly. 100%. We do it yesterday. Um and then the system sort of malfunctioned where um now they're uh they they were incentivized to just build cities that literally nobody lives in. >> You say they build bridges to nowhere and knock down 500y old monasteries to make it happen. >> And ironically here we can't even rebuild fallen bridges, right? >> Um uh >> or is it overproduction and under consumption and underproduction and over consumption? >> Exactly. Um uh another another important thing you need to understand again not an expert by any means you're hearing from a tourist uh but another important um in order to understand the economy you have to understand the system of financial repression that exists in China where if you are saving money you are getting 1% interest from the bank um and no bank is allowed to offer you more interest than that because the governments control the banks >> um all that money is basically given out as loans to companies that the state uh state prefers and it it decides like it looks at if China for China to be a dominant country in 20 years we need robotics or we're going to give a bunch of money to lend a bunch of money to robotics companies and semiconductor companies and whatever um or to infrastructure projects. So it is a systematic redistribution from average people from savers to this kind of industrial policy uh to these companies which is often very inefficient because there's no market that's doing these investment decisions. It's just this sort of system of government relations and exactly central planning. That's interesting. Dude, I I uh it feels to me like the world is at a fever pitch. I'm very detached. I've actually got uh TFS at the moment. I've got Trump fatigue syndrome uh and news fatigue syndrome. I've been kind of checked out since November, December time, which is why I haven't talked much about politics and things that have been going on and real interested in stuff that I think is a little bit more evergreen. >> Um but just the pace of [ __ ] news and change and your ability to be able to discern between, okay, do I need to pay attention to this? Is this a really big deal? Is is the president getting shot a big deal? Because it happened less than a year ago. >> Yeah. >> As did bombing Iran. As did, you know, pick >> 20 other >> crazy things that have kind of never happened before. And it's just here today, tomorrow's fish and chips rapper. And um the advent of AI, rising tensions with China. What's China going to do? a [ __ ] ton of country, any country that they can get within reaching distance basically that's near them. All of this stuff that's going on is uh it really doesn't surprise me that people are feeling a little bit overwhelmed. Like pace now of this is a it's a difficult one. It's a difficult one to try and work out how to navigate the world as a sane human who needs to keep a breast of the stuff that's important, but also doesn't want to get lost in the swell of just total [ __ ] Like even today, like so much of the stuff that we've talked about is [ __ ] like >> five thesises of of research that could be done on each different one of these things. And they're all going to be world changing if they come to pass. And they could be, you know, tons of different permutations of how the world can end up being in future if it does. Like that's a lot. There's they >> and they all interact with each other. >> Correct. And uh I read this thing from Adam Lane Smith the other day saying uh your system is designed for stress but not for complexity. That uh your issue is not that you're working hard, it's that your life is not sufficiently simple. And I kind of get the sense that when people talk about life being hard, they don't necessarily actually maybe mean that. what they mean is life is complex. Um because I think that most people even the laziest people not bad at working hard. What they really struggle with is complexity. >> Prioritizing. >> Yeah. Executive function. Okay. How am I going to triage this? You know, one of the biggest reasons that procrastination happens is that you don't know what to do next. >> You know what to do and you know how to do it. >> [ __ ] it. Like that. I mean, then we're talking that's real procrastination, right? you know what to do and you know how to do it. If you're still not doing it, we got we got a problem, right? If you don't know what to do or if you know what to do and you don't know how to do it, well, it gets thrown under the [ __ ] nomenclature of procrastination, but I don't think it is. >> Not in the same way. Uh but yeah, just I I think there's >> not saying you've scared me. Uh but there's just lots going on, >> you know, there's so much going on. And I think that this this high level of complexity um is something that for a lot of people is is overwhelming. >> Yeah. I I mean I think um this is similar. Do you have this tendency by the way to every time you start preparing for a guest every single thing that you learn about is like um uh titrated through what they study. So I'm gonna tell you like I'm reading the Stalin biography from Kraken to prepare for him. >> And it's so um >> the period of change between um 1880 and 1930 the amount of technological change, geopolitical change, uh >> I I think even today we haven't experienced something like that again. Um, as much as we think the world has been changing in the past, uh, it just doesn't compare to 1905 the airplane is invented. 1914 it's like 1917 it's a decisive in World War I. The tank literally wasn't a thing when World War I started. By the end of the war it's it's it's a tank warfare all around. Um, radio, trains, [ __ ] uh uh telegraphs, steam ships and just like the world is changing so rapidly. There's all these new ideas that are coming around, communism, fascism. Uh you have all these old regimes, all these monarchies and aristocracies in Europe, uh in Russia that are getting revolted because of this big war. Um uh and even all that wasn't as big as AGI is going to be. [ __ ] Yeah, dude. It's um what a time to be alive. >> Yeah. >> George, one of my friends, has a a really interesting question. You know, uh Teal's originality question. What do you believe that most people would disagree with or find abhorrent or something? Uh he's got one which is >> what is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians? >> You got an answer to that? Is there something you can think of? What is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians? trying to not make it all about AI. >> Well, I think it's not necessarily being ignored by the media, although some I guess some areas are a little >> certainly like uh industrial capacity. Um just how much stuff can your country produce? Uh >> this is the future proofing for AI. >> Yeah. Partly is part relevant to geopolitical competition. um when the Ukraine war happened uh you know we've been we should have obviously it was right to give them the um uh the munitions to fight Russia but the fact that we can't restockpile all the weapons that we've given them uh is like sort of worrying uh if you end up in another conflict with another country. >> Um what's your answer? >> Population decline is my usual go-to. Yeah, >> that I think it's it's a big deal. uh the impact of smartphones more generally, the impact of technology on mental health, on outsourcing, of thinking, you know, that that article from the New Yorker which you know if it happens with AI because AI is just such an effective assistance. I have to assume that the basically the same thing happens but at a lower level when you're using screens for anything else too that the more effortful that you make the process of learning, I mean I guess it could be too hard. It's like climb Everest and then read that word, then come back down. Then climb Everest and read the second word. >> You will remember that word. >> Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean? Um th those would be those would be two. I think that uh the retrospective of what did we do to people with the free access to this kind of technology I think will be an interesting one. like will it be looked back on as the uh like prototype version? This this really early um rough hune like like when you hear about doctors smoke camels, you know, in [ __ ] surgery. Uh and you go how how were they allowed to do this? It's so, you know, dirty and and and unclean and and the outcomes were so negative. I wonder whether the same is going to be uh seen of use of technology between 2010 and 2020. >> Has this changed your own consumption of content? >> Uh my lyic system is pretty [ __ ] hijackable, man. So, um but I I try I try to be as mindful as possible. You It's largely putting guardrails in place wherever you can. >> How do you feel about the fact that your own content is served through YouTube and I don't know how big a deal shorts are for you or short form stuff. I mean, it's a huge deal for me. They crush in terms of numbers. They're completely [ __ ] useless in terms of everything else. >> So, I I disagree has been different >> on YouTube. >> Shorts. >> Yeah. >> In terms of what what's the outcome that you're getting? You >> um I had a video with Sierra Payne, who is now my most popular guest, which was stuck at like 40k for the first 6 months. This is before my podcast uh had this recent growth spurt. >> Um and then we started making shorts for it and it's at like four mill 3 million something. >> Wow. Okay. That's interesting. >> Have like 20 million views. You 10 million views. >> Okay. Yeah. Well, maybe you're just doing shorts better than me. Um the it's important. Um my preference has always plays on audio platforms. YouTube people, I love you. But uh my the show has always been Spotify first, Apple podcast first. Yeah. And you know, it might sound stupid for my own naming of the most beautiful podcast in the world, at least when we get it right. um to be an audio first podcast. But just for me, that's where the most loyal audience tends to be. It's the most predictable in terms of numbers. It's the one that seems to be u the most considered. And a lot of this is just you could change this overnight by removing reply threads on YouTube. >> You could remove this. They did remove this overnight by getting rid of the the down vote button on YouTube as well. So, I've always liked the audio side of the platform, >> but the problem is the discoverability. >> It's not there. No, you can funnel you can funnel from YouTube. We found some good ways of funneling from YouTube across onto audio. >> How do you do that? >> So, we release episodes 10 hours early >> on audio. >> On audio. Yeah. So, if you want to get access 10 hours early, and we the pinned comment for every uh episode is access all episodes 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing on Apple Podcast or Spotify. And a lot of people will come and comment on the YouTube and say, "I listened to this this morning on Apple, >> right? >> But I came here to watch it on YouTube." So you end up getting two plays, but I don't think you would get the same in reverse. So we kind of got like a weird Patreon type scenario, like paywold thing >> 10 hours early on uh on audio. Um we went video enabled on Spotify, which I know was a transition that you made as well. That was good. The Spotify partner program is really good. some changes here and there. Your uh Twitter strategy is very strong. That's good. We've gone very hard on Instagram uh which has been >> Well, you got the looks, Chris. >> What kind of stuff? Most of the [ __ ] shorts are just of Matthew McConnA chirping about something. I I rarely It was a really really funny uh video. Uh I've only guessed on two shows in the last 12 months. One was Rogan and the other one was my friend Mike's show. And it's me chirping away. It's quite a good I think it's quite a good take about whether you how you know whether or not you should end a relationship and like just classic me stuff like it's 55 seconds long and it's just me chirping chirping chirping chirping chirping chirping chirping and then the final scene of it cuts to Mike and he goes yeah it's so funny to just have a video where the entirety of your contribution is >> yeah and I I've realized how many times that must be the case but uh Uh yeah, dude. I've been it's been so [ __ ] awesome to watch your ascendancy, you know, cuz we met we met at the Slate Star Code meetup in March. And I know it was in March because it was just after I moved out here, March of 2022. >> Oh, damn. >> That was when I I felt somehow it felt even earlier than that. But >> well, unless we met when I came out here the first time in November. So, I I only came out in November of 21, but I actually searched your name so to see if I already had a prep talk from uh previous stuff. And if I go into it, I'll see 27th of February 2022. And I've just got dwarfish SP written here. And there's like a bunch of other stuff. Uh uh Valve Index with Vive 3.9 trackers VR chat with mods near Scion on Twitter if you want help. Do you It was also such a I mean it was during the Ukrainians are using Grinder to find Russian troops. I've got such >> we can train super intelligence on your Apple notes, Chris, >> dude. You do not want that. Holy [ __ ] But yeah, that was the ACX madeup notes. >> Yeah, it's it um it was a crazy time because it was during >> coh. And I felt like I met so many great people in Austin just hanging out around that time. >> It was I don't know, man. something about I I wonder whether everybody has this and I get the sense that they don't and I can't work out why I do. >> I'm so [ __ ] fortunate with the people that I bump into early on. >> Yes. >> Holy [ __ ] It's like >> people that I've known for like a long time >> Yeah. end up becoming influential or successful or or um like really virtuous in some way like the variety of different trajectories of [ __ ] that goes well. >> And it's definitely not me, right? I I mean, I am a common denominator between these people in that I know them, but I definitely haven't [ __ ] influenced them. And I'm relatively introverted. I spend way too much time on my own. So, I'm like, how what the [ __ ] is it? What's draw what's the single thread that's drawing me through all of this? Maybe a >> I don't know uh the advantage of being someone that doesn't go out that much is that it takes usually a pretty good thing to get you out of the house. So you're a bit more discerning and that the better things you meet better people. I don't know. >> But holy [ __ ] like I think about some of the the the places that different people like you're a perfect example. one random meetup. Then we be were in this degenerate [ __ ] signal group chat for the last like 3 years and and yeah this arc that kind of you you even nearly quit the podcast. You weren't even doing it. I don't think you'd started it during co and then stopped and it was just like languishing there. It was called the Luna Society at the time. Um >> and people thought it was I was talking about something like uh some cryptocoin that's going to go to the moon. >> I changed the name. >> Tell tell the story about where that comes from because there's a book. Um, can I comment real quick on the the meet up? Um, I think at the time you had 350,000 YouTube subscribers, >> correct? >> Yeah. >> I was like, whoa, this guy is [ __ ] killing it. Uh, which you were, and you're just like blown up like a 20x from there. Um uh and I think this is like a really interesting phenomenon where um I have also had this experience of having met a lot of great people who spend uh who are like super busy and um spent time like teaching me stuff. The main way the podcast has gotten better is just that people have like I've had mentors who have just spent a bunch of time and these people are if they're economists are in their 60s uh or 50s people like Brian Kaplan, Tyler Cowan, but if they're like AI researchers, they're my age, right? But they're still my mentors and they've spent so much time teaching me stuff. I had no right to their time or attention. And I wonder how you think about this now because um I'm sure you uh get inundated and I've I've hit you up this way of like what is your advice? Uh, can you teach me about X or Y thing? Um, uh, and I'm >> someone asking you to teach them. >> Yeah. Or not even like connect me to somebody, come on my podcast. >> Yeah. >> And dozens of people have done this for me. Um, so how do you balance the sort of like trade-off between being >> You feel like you you feel like you've got some uh karmic debt that you need to repay because of the number of I this is a really interesting question and uh a challenge that >> feels like a little bit of a a champagne problem, right? Oh, so many people need your so many people did you favors and now you have the problem of people asking you to repay on and so forth. But you're right because you need to triage your time and you can't do everything for everyone. And the weirdest thing about growth towards success in any domain, whatever version of success that you or me have managed to achieve, is that you need to become increasingly good at saying no. And the pace at which your discernment of no, like the waterline, the barometer at which no is deserved. And you shouldn't feel guilty about it. It should be instant. It shouldn't take any sort of mind share. >> Yeah. >> Is a continuous moving target, >> right? >> And you need to hypertrophy this muscle over and over and over and over again. >> And the [ __ ] that you would have begged to have said had the opportunity to say yes to >> only 12 months ago >> that now needs to be an automatic no. But what how do you deal with the situations where when you were starting out, when I was starting out, I had like >> people gave you a leg up. >> I like zero. It wasn't like am I going to say yes to the workers project? It was like who who what the Lunar Society and they said yes. They had better things to do. Um they're just like somebody reached out. They seem like they've done a good job coming up with smart questions. Let's do it. Well, and that just like if your waterline is always moving up, >> um >> where's the room for the fledgling other person to come through? This a question I ask myself a lot. It's a real smart question. I'm glad that we're asking ourselves it at the same time. The one caveat or the difference in kind, not just a difference of degree. I'm going to guess that most of the people that you spoke to that you asked for their time, except maybe Tyler Cowan and Brent happened to I guess a little bit, but they're not their role is not primarily hardcore curators of other information. They're not distillers across the board, right? That's your job. Your job is to be the hub with all of these different spokes going off it, if that makes sense. And that is a coordination problem. Like your your primary issue is coordination. You you have in some ways a hard life learning things that complex so >> it's so tough the life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have a uh there are challenges that you need to lift even if they're only cognitively, right? But the main thing is complexity. Like the main thing is the complexity. And I I I don't think that your issue is with doing things. It's with adding complexity in. Uh to go back to that Adam Lane Smith quote, I I don't have a good answer for it, dude. Like I I definitely feel like my uh karmic repayment debt I feel like I'm wildly wildly uh overdrawn and that I need to I need to repay this [ __ ] thing. But also I I where do I find I don't where do I find the time from? Where the [ __ ] did the people who gave me the Lego? That being said, you're probably not giving yourself enough credit because when I think about when I think about some of the situations that have happened even just over the last week, there's a kid called Elliot Buick. Um so he's just turned 20. He's British. He used to work for trigonometry as a video editor. and he if I could bet a little bit of cash you're already like [ __ ] Bitcoin at 10K so it kind of doesn't work so much anymore but I would have certainly put cash on you 3 years ago I would he's Bitcoin at $1 like I would absolutely throw some money at him there's a bunch of Jack Neil if you know who he is another young kid like there's real real smart young guys and I think when you're talent spotting you're like okay this this there's something there like it really feels like there's something there we went for this three-hour dinner at our child and we chatted. I'm like, "Anything that you need, you can do the this, you can do the that." So, maybe I'm not spreading it super wide. Nomatic needed uh they wanted an intro to this guy who did an amazing episode with a musician. This episode with the musician did 3.2 mil. The guy didn't have any sponsors. My guy that does my ads didn't have uh he needed his inventory filling. And Nomatic needed to make more sales. Nomatic sold loads of bags. This guy got paid. And my guy that was in the middle made money from all of it. I'm like that was just that just like happened passively as like a byproduct of the of the ecosystem thing. So yeah, maybe you're not able to if you're balls deep in a Stalin biography, you can't peel off to go and do a bunch of podcast appearances or fly across the country to see someone or let somebody sleep on your couch or do whatever it is that you think you should be doing virtuously in that way. But I bet that you are adding a [ __ ] ton of value even if it's just highly leveraged here and there. the little meetups, invites that you give to people, suggestions, intros, all Hey man, can you join me at Brian Kaplan, can you do you did uh Dominic Cummings for me, right? Hey man, can you do that? Like that's a, you know, a small what 5-second task, 10-second task, but downstream from that ended up with an episode that was really interesting. Now I can introd. But uh >> no, 100%. I mean, you've uh on like trips to the airport, you've like spent the time to just like chat with me about >> I forgot about that. Yeah, of course. Uh [ __ ] recruiter. This is what I do to build your business out >> 100%. There's also an interesting element. Um I I don't know this is uh >> I mean, it's it's sort of um for an audience of your size, it's easy to lose track of how many people you're um helping vicariously. M >> uh where even there's a weird dynamic where like you could help somebody in person or you could help share an idea with a couple million people. Um and like the trade-off just has to be it's weird to put it in that way cuz like one is sort of more commodified than the other. >> Um but you have and you can make better content that you spend that hour >> prepping harder, uh thinking harder, you can make better content for a couple million people. >> Mhm. Uh it's a weird trade-off. I remember a friend Alex gave this thought experiment of um imagine that one of your friends had broken down down the street and asked you to come and help him change a tire. And Alex made this point that I would send him the RAAC emergency roadside assistance thing cuz I've got that and I can send it and they'll do a better job and I get to stay at my laptop and do more work. and he got criticized online because it's like that's not what the person wanted. What the person wanted was this sense of your time. But I get the sense that at least in the kind of interactions that you're talking about, what people are looking for is outcomes. They're not necessarily looking for inputs. And if someone wants to come and kick the tires of a very busy person with kind of no real >> defined outcome, that's not something that I would have ever done. And I don't think if if you're a young ambitious person that's listening to this, I do not think that you should go to anybody and be like, "Hey man, like would just love to connect." If you don't have anything to offer, what the [ __ ] is the point of the connecting? If it's I have a few very specific questions that I know you probably have the answer to, and I would really appreciate two minutes for you to just give me these because they're big unlocks for me. Super specific question, really specific ask. Fant. this person's put the work in. They're evidently educated and you'll probably get the [ __ ] 30 minutes on the call because they're walking the dog and they don't really mind or whatever. When I think about the random people that I ended up on calls with because I asked for spec very very specific things on the come up. I know that you're a big fan of uh like there's huge unactualized opportunity that most people don't realize in a cold a very well-ritten cold DM. >> Yeah, >> dude. Like just [ __ ] send it. You've got nothing to worry about. >> Yes. Yeah. And um I you would also be surprised by how few people put in these famous people. They're getting I don't know a thousand whatever emails every month or something. But um how many of those are I've spent a week coming up? I I mean before I had any sort of a name or something, I would still be able to get big guests, but I would literally spend a week. Here are the questions I'd ask you. Just get past not a [ __ ] filter. um because they're getting a request every 30 seconds podcast or something. Um just going deep versus wide. Now, there's a bunch of like tacid things about well that doesn't mean you should like have 5,000 words in the email, right? Just like how to keep it brief. It's also really interesting, by the way, as a side point of what um what ends up uh salient to you when you get a cold email or you're hiring somebody and what isn't >> like the kinds of things you thought mattered while you were in college. um whether you have an I started an organization that does X or I have a masters in Y just like never matters as as opposed to the couple hours of extra work you would put into that email. Yep. >> Um >> uh yeah how little credentials matter when hiring or something people don't appreciate. Um uh yeah yeah yeah it's there is an awful lot of opportunity available for someone who's just just courageous enough or ignorant enough to be able to get past that sort of first level of ick filter and also is prepared to do a little bit of preparation. And another thing I I I don't think people appreciate how much um uh if you write a good blog post about a topic that you think is relevant to somebody you're trying to reach, um it's almost guaranteed that not only will they read it, but weirdly almost everybody who matters will read it. >> Mhm. >> Uh >> wasn't that how Tim Urban connected with Elon originally? >> Really? >> I think so. >> That would so make sense. >> I think he did a six-part series this a good while ago now. I think we're talking sort of 10 years ago now. Um I think he did a six-part series on Elon. And you know, you're right. If someone writes a good even not even viral, like semi-widely circulated >> Yeah. >> piece on you or your organization or a movement that you care about. >> Yeah. >> You will read that thing. >> Yeah. >> And so I always think about this. I always think about the fact that even the richest, busiest, most successful, highest status, hardest to get a hold of people in the world, they get plane delays. Even if they get on a private jet, the weather's meant that they're held up. And what are they going to do? Well, they'll open YouTube. >> You know, they'll open YouTube or they'll open Twitter or they'll open Substack or they'll you check whatever it is that's been sent to them in a WhatsApp thread or something. And if you're that meme or you're that article or you're that quote or you're that whatever, it's just continuing to roll the dice. >> You can take advantage of a very unfair dynamic, which is that a lot of people have to work um anonymously. Their work is shoveled out through an organization or through their boss or something and they will work decade in decade out, be extremely good at their jobs and people will not have heard of them. um we're podcasting here and uh I don't know I like to think we put our work in or whatever but like we're not working harder than somebody who's just at McKenzie or maybe like that gives a veillance of something that's less valuable. There's a lot of valuable work that you just don't you're making policy you're you're a staffer for a policy maker or you're an engineer at a company. It's kind of quiet grunt rock in a way >> and uh but we like we can reach out to people and they will respond to us just because of it just so happens to be the case that our work is public facing and that just luck or slash our our choice. >> That's right. Um >> you can take advantage of the dynamic by putting at least some of your work as much as possible out publicly, right? The blog post, the podcast. Um yeah, and there there's also another dynamic where people take for granted the people in their organization. Um I'm guessing that like the eighth most senior person at um at Microsoft gets less respect and attention from Satan Nadella than like a random blogger he likes. >> Uh- which which is weird, but you can take advantage of that. >> Yeah. There's a seduction to visibility. >> Yeah. >> I think uh and even if you're right, even if someone's uh company is way smaller than yours or their their podcast is way different to yours or their um substack is much less circulated than yours, if they're the person, if they're the main person and you're not, or even if they're the main person and you are, but what they do is cool. >> Yeah. >> Like it's such an unlock. It's such an unlock to do stuff like that. I'm I'm interested in what your um learning process looks like. How do you learn? What is that process at the moment? >> Um in a way it's very simple. I read everything that they I mean first of all it's about picking a guest and I pick guests based on who I want to spend two weeks um reading everything they've ever written talking to people in their field learning from them what's interesting to ask them. Uh, I'm sure you get inundated uh by requests to come on your podcast and often it's by people who are like very big names, right? And I'm guessing you you probably say no to most of them. >> Um, be and yeah, same here where you um what are you trying to do here? Right. I this interview will last two hours. Any interview I do will last two hours. My life is the research that precedes that. The two weeks that precede that. um I want that time to be valuable and meaningful to me and be time that I'll carry forward in my future interviews in my future endeavors in a way that'll be valuable and if it's um if it's not somebody who has written something that's worth reading or done research that I really want to understand you know what are we doing here uh and then >> choosing your own type of torture for the next two weeks >> yeah choosing what you want to learn which is complicated but it also um it's sort of easy to forget how like much of a dream job this where people are curious and they want to learn things but they feel like they had to trade off their time and their job to do it or they can they can only learn about certain things for their work. We get to choose what we want to learn about and our job is just to learn about it, right? Um it can be about any topic at all. It can be about genetics, it can be about history, it can be about um technical stuff and then yeah then there's the prep and just read the research, talk to LLMs like just >> you know get after it. >> Socratic method. >> Exactly. >> Um and then ask the questions you actually want the answer to. I think sometimes people have the sense that you need to ask about the intro chapter of their book. You need to why did you write it? Who you know um uh what is it about? And no, you can just like you can just ask you want to ask. I think people underrate how much immersion learning is um people can keep up with a lot. Uh people just like really want to boil down the conversation so that everybody can keep up. I I think they underrate the extent to which people can just miss a word or two here and there, but just getting to the crux of it uh will make it a more delightful experience. >> And also, if it's a question you're not interested in, why would the audience care about it? >> So, um yeah, it's fundamentally just be motivated by what you're curious about, who you want to interview, what you want to ask them, what you what you want to interrupt. Um um yeah, >> following your taste, we spoke about this before we started, but the ability to discern between something that's good and something that's not. Uh is this this lovely balance between gut instinct and sort of rational assessment? Douglas Murray once told me this story. I'm aware that Douglas Murray's like the least [ __ ] popular person on the entire internet at the moment after his interview with Dave Smith, but I he's still got [ __ ] absolute bangers and this was one of them. So, he worked for this journalist. Doug has got like I think four or five uh columns a week he does now. And when he first started out, he's working for this legendary British journalist and this guy was getting toward the twilight of his career like a classic journalist. He'd accumulated a bunch of enemies and uh a bunch of supporters as well. and he decided he had always wanted to get into theater. Uh so he created a show about the life of Prince Charles and the entire show was in rhyming couplets >> the whole thing and it was orthogonal to say the least. And uh at the halfime interval of the opening night there was no one left in the entire theater including the cast. Everybody had gone on opening night and this guy was devastated and obviously all of the enemies that he'd accumulated throughout his life, they came out of the woodworks and they dug the knife in. There were all of these criticisms in the media and stuff like that. >> Douglas told me that he'd seen him at work the following week. >> He said, "What were you thinking? [ __ ] West End show by the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets and you got all of these people that rubbing their hands together waiting for you to fail." And he said, "Douglas, I followed my instincts, and instincts, they may sometimes lead you wrong, but they're the only thing that's ever led you right." >> Yes. >> I was like, "That's so [ __ ] sick, dude. That's so sick." And what I found whether it's with where I want to live, uh the the things I want to focus on learning, uh the direction of the show, the questions that I want to ask the guest, the sort of guests that I want to bring on, the people that I want to hire, the further that I've gone away from my instincts, the more that I've tried to reverse engineer, okay, well, what do the audience want to hear? >> What are they interested in? What would make the guest feel comfortable? What does the guest want to talk about? I'm like, in the nicest way possible, [ __ ] the guest. like what do I want to talk about? Because that's what matters, >> right? >> That's what matters. And if you use your own instinct as this sort of weather vein, this GPS locator, if you're really fired up to speak about it, you have to assume that some non-inssignificant cohort of other people are too. And if you've been doing it for long enough, the people that are following you are following you for that same taste. They are in the wake. They're holding on to the coattails of your instinct, right? >> And if your instincts change even dramatically, like we're going to make some pivots probably >> before the end of the year. We're nearly halfway almost exactly halfway through the year now. By the end of the year, we're going to make some pivots with the way that we do the show. There's going to be different SKUs, different types of episodes that going to be coming out. And it's probably the biggest change I've done since we started the cinema series about 3 years ago. And it is not in any way data driven. Uh, I have no justification for this other than I think it would be fun and my instinct is going >> yes, >> I think you should try that. I >> I think that's so valuable for a couple of reasons. One, um, I have noticed that my besting episodes are just I would have never anticipated that they would be popular. It's Sarah Payne, who's this historian that uh had written a couple of books that I thought were great. Um, it's David Reich who has studied ancient genetics and now he's way more popular than Sachin Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg and Tony Blair and whoever else you could name. >> Um, but in all these interviews there was there was something I noticed afterwards >> which was that every time I went to lunch dinner when I talked to somebody and there they asked me what are you thinking about? I just could not, you know, I just interviewed David Reich and he was explaining to me that 60,000 years ago there was a small group in East whatever. Um, and that obsession was so strongly correlated with how well the episode did regardless of what topic it was about. Um the on the instincts uh I I've had bad judgment about like a lot of look I I I learned how to do the podcast well but a lot of things are required um uh as I'm sure you've come across in terms of running a business hiring uh management >> hiring >> yes 100%. Uh just making things happen. I've had bad judgment about many of these things. I feel like I've done worse even in those cases when I've taken advice. The advice was actually better than what I would have done by default. But when you follow somebody's else's advice, if things go right or if things go wrong, >> you haven't learned anything. >> Exactly. And if you just like do the thing that makes sense to you, you have some reason for thinking it makes sense and things go wrong, >> you at least like tried an idea and you correct your own intuition. Yeah. Whereas that error is still waiting for you to step on in future if you outsource it to. So yeah, you want to frontload failure as quickly as possible in the uh a small and acceptable way. Yeah. But no, I dude I my best heruristic for whether or not I've picked the right guest for that day is how I feel on the morning that I wake up. It's like when I wake up on a morning like this morning I went and did a hyperbaric oxygen chamber uh session. And I'm listening to you and Alec, Alex Canowitz talk about stuff and I'm like, this is so like I haven't seen Dwarcash in [ __ ] ages. It's going to be so sick. I'm going to tell him about that. I like, you know, went through my notes and found I had this note from the [ __ ] February of 2022. It's going to be so cool. I'm going to get to bring that up. Isn't it fun? It's going to >> And then, you know, there's other days where you just don't have the same quite the same level of that. And that's not necessarily an error. That's not that you've picked someone that's wrong. It's just, huh? Okay. Well, what are the ones where I wake up and I'm >> I want it to be 2 p.m. >> And what are the ones where 2 p.m. will come along and it'll be okay. >> Yeah. >> And Yeah. The the one where you're like I want I want to speedrun the next two weeks. >> Yeah. >> So that this person comes on the show. >> Yeah. >> Uh you know, we've got it looks like um MGK rapper turned rockstar guy. Uh there's a potential that he's coming on. There's another guy called Ronnie Radkkey who's coming on. this guy called Rick Beto who does music and stuff like that. I'm like making a little bit of a pivot into talking about the world of music and about sort of what's happening and how that interacts with culture and the perils of touring and what this means for a family life and how you deal with the anxiety and the performance and pressure and scrutiny of the press and criticism and creativity and all this stuff. I'm like I already want it to be one of those days when I get to speak. I don't know there's other people in between which will be great. I'm like super fired up to speak to them about that. Here's another thing. I don't know whether you've ever had this. There's times where I quite like to do episodes with people where I know a lot about the topic but not quite so much about them. And that's the same sort of thing where I'm really excited to talk about the topic. And I imagine this is what it must feel like to be at one of Aya's sex parties where I'm like, I know I'm going to have sex tonight, but I don't quite know who with. Does that make sense? where I'm like, I know the the direction I'm going in in terms of the topic and I'm super excited. And you'll listen to the person talk and you'll do the prep and do the whatever, but there's a little bit of like I know this world really well, >> right? >> What I'm excited to hear is their spin on this. I'm excited to hear the angle that they come at this from. >> Yeah. I had this guy called Paul Turk who does evolutionary pediatrics. So he talks about child rearing clinically, medically, developmentally, but from an evolutionary lens. Uh so what happened ancestrally? How did we raise kids? How were they looked after? Uh what did hygiene look like? What did uh skin-to-skin contact? Um diet, all all this stuff. And um I know evolution, evolutionary theory, not bad. It's one of the few areas I have a bit of expertise in, but I'd never looked at this. I'm like, "Oh, this is [ __ ] cool." like this is going to be so sick. I'm going to speak to this guy. He's like mid70s. I, you know, he's got his uh son-in-law or daughter-in-law or something helping him to set up the camera. I'm like, "This is going to be [ __ ] sick." And it sure enough, awesome episode with this guy who had no right to come on and crush an episode apart from the fact that he has an amazing bit of research and I was super fired up to speak. >> Yeah. And don't how often do you encounter a guest, which is my favorite, where you thought you were going to get um somebody who can speak to this one narrow topic, where you come across a polymath who has a deep role model that somehow they have something to say about anything you could ask them. >> Uh and the only limitation is your prompting ability. >> Yeah. It's so gratifying when you encounter people like that. One of the people I had on like this uh do you know Goran Branwin? >> No. >> Oh, he's he's incredible. He's another Scott Alexander type. >> Okay. >> Um uh blogger who has written just like Yeah. There's no subject on which he hasn't >> he couldn't give you in like a deeply empirical super interesting way. Um, and what I learned from the interview, I didn't know anything about his personal life other than the fact that he's anonymous, is living on like $12,000 a year of Patreon in the middle of some um uh some house that his grandfather built in Virginia. Um, and so during that interview, he was visiting San Francisco for a conference. And during that interview, I asked him, "Well, it seems like you're enjoying it here. Do you want to move here?" And he said, "Yeah, that that'd be that'd be fun." Um, and I said, "Why aren't you moving here?" He's like, "I don't have uh I don't have the finances to do it." I said, "How much would it cost for you to move here?" Said, "75K." And then people like donated to him and he's moving to SAF. >> No way. >> And he's like, "Even much more than 75K." Yeah. >> Um or Sarah Payne who I think I can share this. Um she was somebody who had been slogging through the archives. She's been to historian who's been to every single continent. Uh to go through the archives has deep understanding of basically every single conflict over the last many centuries can give you like why did the Vietnam War happen the way it did? Why did Russia fall, World War II, you name it. um incredibly compelling presenter as soon as I mean her episodes are by my I sometimes joke that I host the Sierra Payne podcast uh where I sometimes talk about AI and in terms of viewer weighted minutes that's definitely true >> but if you notice how her books are categorized on Amazon they're uh SCM pain not Sarah pain and the reason is that she's a military historian who I think started her career 70s 80s um and >> she wanted to anonymize her sex >> exactly Um and so it it so happened that somebody who was incredibly talented uh there wasn't given this medium earlier on >> personal accountability wasn't quite the same. >> Um and now she's blown up. She's actually retired from the Naval War College where she used to work so that she can be a public intellectual informing on the big questions that we've been discussing on full time. And >> and this was launched by the episode that you did with her. >> Yeah. and we did three more lectures. We're doing more now. Um I think what people don't understand and it's hard to appreciate is that lecture she did cumulatively she might she probably has over like 10 million views on full lectures. Um that is just so much bigger compared to add up all the students she's interacted with the war college combined. >> Um it's just like hard to think about like a million people who you probably reach on many more than that on an average episode. There's like no stadium in the world that can accommodate an audience of that size. And right now we're talking, we're having fun. We're not thinking about how stupendous a quantity that is. And in fact, I think a lot of politics is explained by who understands this and who doesn't. Like Kamla would do all these rallies and people are like, "Oh, people are really excited about Kamla." >> Um, and it would be a stadium of 20,000 people. And like, wow, she filled a stadium of 20,000 people. >> And you know that if you put out a YouTube video and it doesn't get 20,000 views within the first hour, you're disappointed. uh or when Trump went on Rogan, >> I couldn't tell you to the nearest 10 million that had recent uh New York mayoral candidate, right? Absolute digital first. George has this great take. It's so so true. >> People think that sort of Trump and Camala was a true digital first election, but it wasn't. It was still legacy media talent and politicians that happened to kind of create digital appropriate content. Whereas I watched this breakdown this morning on X of this mayoral candidate. All apparently his mom is a real famous Hollywood filmmaker and all of the videos that he was in all of the campaign videos that he shot even the on street stuff was shot with the same uh color palette. This very soft lighting. It's it's very well there's a nice blurred effect bokeh depth of field thing going on in the background. Everything's shot in this way and it almost gives you this um rosecolored glasses view of what New York could be like and you think, okay, like this is really taking it using AI uh voice over stuff on Tik Tok like okay, this is really really really stepping it up an awful lot. And uh yeah, it's it's interesting to think about where people haven't fully sort of factored all of this in just yet. >> Yeah. Because it's not visceral in the same way. It just um I mean another interesting thing from the election is just people realizing the people they thought of as celebrities weren't actually the real celebrities in terms of the >> you can get some random rapper >> to say endorse you or you can go on your podcast or Theo Van's podcast or something >> and who is actually reaching more people >> who who you just like don't think of these other people as celebrities they are >> I think I think the what people are actually and it's a shame that this became so molested so quickly in the world of social media. But who is it that has the most influence? Like who is influential? And I think that you know a tweet from Stormy or Dave or Central Sea or some British rapper saying that we need to do this thing for Labor versus Dominic Cummings. I'm aware that he's not running for whatever, but someone marinating in a 2hour conversation where me or you or whoever else grills Dominick Cummings about this thing and you know he gets to put his personality across and >> it it's not in any way I don't think that me or you or anybody else in the world of podcasting has some undue degree of credibility that people who let's be [ __ ] frank are way more talented like I can't do what [ __ ] Dave or Skepttor or Central C can do but there is a a multiplier a like a a vector of advantage from the format of a long- form conversation. It's been done to death a million times, but there's nowhere to hide. People don't have anywhere to hide. It's very difficult to hold yourself. Anyone can pretend to not be a psychopath for 5 minutes. We've tried and do it for two and a half hours in a free- flowing conversation. It tends to come out. >> I I sort of disagree there. Um I agree that certain things >> because you've hidden your psychopathy for the last two and a half hours. >> Yeah. Um until now. >> We're about We're 2 hours in and uh it's coming out. um where I agree that certain aspects of your personality will become evident. >> Uh your charisma, >> but I think Douglas Murray had a point in his interview with uh >> Joe and Dave um Dave Smith where he said that vibing out is not this is not like the checker of whether your ideas make sense. >> Uh I mean your the point you made about that New York City mayoral candidate is exactly correct, right? He is arguing for socialized grocery stores and rent control and things any economist would tell you don't make sense. But he can put warmth tones on his cameras and of course he's a charismatic person >> and that is enough to uh wipe out the deficit that his ideas have. >> Everyone's just vibing their way through whatever whatever level of influence it is that they want to achieve. Yeah, that's interesting. So I I do think that like I'm kind of skeptical of our medium as a way of intrinsically being geared towards truth or um eliciting the truth by default. I think it's unless um unless the interview is done in such a way that you're really pushing at the cruxes >> which to be honest I haven't always done or if after every interview even if I think or even if people in the comments are like you did a really good job pushing trying to get at the crux I will always feel like there was something further that could have been >> well you know the thing that you didn't say you and even if there wasn't a specific thing that you didn't say you know the sensation of feeling like there is something that you could get to in your mind but weren't able to bring out. >> Yes. >> Right. So, as a musician, you can hit the note >> that you meant to sing on stage in front of a few thousand people, but you know where you could have done it or you did it like that in a different show and you really nailed it and you added this little bit at the end. And it's kind of the same sense I think when it comes to having a conversation that there's somewhere I'm trying to get to. Where the [ __ ] is it I'm trying to get to? Oh, it's going to be Oh, he's away. [ __ ] like I'll just I'll I'll have to move on. And um yeah, these micro victories and micro uh defeats that you have throughout every single uh element. I mean, >> you might go through a little odyssey in the middle of a podcast episode. >> Dude, I've had I've had I've had episodes where I've literally gone on journeys around, oh [ __ ] like, okay, what am I going to say? Got this thing trying to put this together. Meanwhile, what's coming out of your face is everything's fine. It's totally sweet. Everything's cool and inside of your mind you're going [ __ ] screaming trying to hold on. That's what I mean. Look, that is what uh the first time going on Rogan is like. The first time going on Rogan is a three-hour panic attack masquerading as a conversation. That's what it feels like. And then you get off and you're like, "What the what the [ __ ] did what did I say? I think we talked about I think we talked about Mike Tyson and uh Oh my god, did I give away my address? Like this is like you honestly, dude. It's [ __ ] It's wild. And um the craziest thing that you'll already have had, I'm sure, but will continue to have is like here's a here's a point. Mark Zuckerberg, when he woke up on the morning to do your podcast, there have been a bit of him that was like, "Fuck, this kid's smart. Like I should be a bit nervous." like or maybe his chief one of his staff said to him like maybe he didn't know I don't know um are you like oh that means that you get to be the anxiety attack inducing Joe Rogan for other people and that'll get worse I remember the I can't remember who it was the first time it ever happened it was a virtual one I was still back in the UK and someone was a fan of the show and I was like a that's really cool and they mentioned maybe as we started like I'm a real fan. It's a real honor to to to talk to you. Thank you very much. It's very kind. Let's get into it. And then they finished up, dude. I got to tell you, I was very nervous before I started today. And I'm like, what? >> I know. What the [ __ ] are you doing? Like, you're the expert. The token [ __ ] in the room. Like, what are you talking about? But this is I guess I guess for, you know, anyone who wants to climb the hierarchy of any industry that they're in. If you're a young person, you have idols that you look to. And if you achieve the thing that you want to achieve, if you actually do the thing that you're setting out to do, those idols turn into rivals after a while. And then they go from rivals into being friends and maybe even collaborators. >> And it's this weird arc where >> the like particular strata that you thought that you were in, you you're sort of moving. Oh yeah. >> Wiggling through it. You go like, "Fuck, I'm set up to Tony Blair. What the [ __ ] am I doing? Subs to Tony Blair. >> Um, there there's also the most surreal and gratifying thing has been I I mean I was in college not that like when we were talking about that meet up. I was in college. Um, >> and I was just uh uh on the side I would be like reading these books by these scholars that I really respected and oh god if they even like saw a cold email that I'd written. Not that I would often dare to, but if I did, I would be like so delighted if they mentioned me on their blog, if I wrote something that they I mean, I couldn't even imagine that. >> Um, and now to have those exact same people be friends, be people who I'm having discussions and debates with, who are >> who see you as a contemporary. >> Yeah. It is like there is nothing more just like heart, you know, heartpleasing, just like more satisfying. Uh and also just that happening so fast because nothing is special about uh me but just because this medium uh affords a level of virality and growth >> uh and public facing credit. Yep. >> Which others personal accountability well that's a lovely reframe. I think everyone has this sense, especially in the hyper viral growth loop speedrun of fame thing that everyone has a little bit of like even I have a degree of ick around kind of the pace of change and I'm sure that you do too where it's like ah [ __ ] like there's a lot of exposure going on here and it feels very very aligned with me but there's a little bit of me that's like [ __ ] like this is a lot there's a lot of like 800 I remember I used to feel anxious if the 24-hour plays ever went over a million whenever they went over a million, there was this thing that went in the back of my mind. I was like, "Oh my god." And that happened for about two years and it would be fine if it was 500,000 and then if it was a million 48 hour, you know, the 48 hour play thing on YouTube and it would go up and I'm like, "Why am I why am I feeling this way?" And I realized this ambient anxiety was just the sense that lots of people are watching you, >> right, and at the same time. >> Yeah. And I'm like, h >> there's not only um a stadium of people watching you when you're like performing like at any given moment. >> You're asleep and it's happening. >> There's a stadium like right now watching >> still going. Great. Yeah. >> And um that that dissipated a little bit. Um so anyway, everyone has this kind of scrutiny, people looking thing, degree of I don't want to be sold out. I don't have perverse incentives of of distracting me away from what the main mission was, ruining my taste, ruining my gut instinct, all that stuff. And um then your point there that not not becoming known by lots of people, not becoming popular in the circles of people who are popular, but being respected by people that you respect. >> Yes. is what everybody really in any industry where they're curious I think should be trying to get toward like they genuinely care about what you think they think >> he thinks that my idea is cool >> like he thinks that guy who is a >> legend >> super genius right like a like a [ __ ] divine >> human >> thinks that I have something >> interesting to say you're like all right I challenge anybody to find a [ __ ] problem with that, right? It's not shallow. It's not cloying. It's not sickopantic. It's not gamesmanshipy. It's I went away and had a unique insight and and a perspective on this thing that I cared about that they also cared about and they hadn't fully thought about it before. And I got to contribute. I got my name put in a my first academic paper like someone cited an idea that I that I came up with to do with uh evolutionary theory around mating. Uh this happened twice now. It happened the first time that happened the second time. I was like this is [ __ ] unbel I remember when I read the evolution of desire by David Bus and now he's put me in this paper and it's like it's so [ __ ] sick. like me [ __ ] from the north of the UK like getting and you know there's cool [ __ ] you can do but remembering at least the more that I try to keep the I don't know what you would call it like virtuous flexes as opposed to kind of the shallow flexes of subscriber count or revenue or how many tickets you've sold to a live show or how many people turned up to a meetup and stuff like that like that's still cool But it doesn't give that same like you said sort of warm heart delight of someone I respect respects me. >> Yeah 100%. And even um >> looking at a number on a screen go up uh >> you know it's like whatever it'll go up 10x and then that becomes your default and you know there's a certain point where you go from zero viewers to like 100 and that is like okay people are actually watching and after that it just orders of magnitude right a zero goes up another zero goes up another zero goes up nothing fundamentally changes in your life um there's a respect of the people you respect which is uncorrelated to those numbers um there's also the feeling thing where even if it's not people you respect, but just meeting them in real life, just people on the street, they see you, they're like, "Oh, I love your content." Um, and it's very easy to just get sort of used to that. Um, but sometimes you pause and you think like, "That's a real human being." >> Mhm. >> And they've uh often do you have this thing where they're like pull the phone towards you and they're like, "I'm listening to you right now." >> Right now. Yeah. Some guy did that outside of Flower Child last night. He's like, "Dude, that's [ __ ] sick." Um and that is like a real human being is spending so much of their time hopefully you're contributing it seems like you're contributing to their intellectual growth uh their understanding of the world and you I mean I think about it wasn't that long ago I was in college I was a teenager whatever I would um drive around listening to Sam Harris like uh teach how how much that contributed to me being curious about the world having different viewpoints being like changing my career trajectory Not just before I became a podcaster. I was going to I was studying computer science and I was going to become a programmer. >> Follow the footsteps of Sam Harris to become a podcaster. >> Um uh I was going to be a programmer after that and then I decided ah that's getting automated. I'm going to make the more financially responsible decision to go into podcasting. Yeah. Yeah. >> Uh yeah, the ripples are [ __ ] wide, dude. You really you really don't know. And I think that this is >> it's the bull case for just producing stuff. Um because you don't know, especially when you start, you don't know what's good. Like this might be I feel like this might not be totally [ __ ] and you kind of don't really know, >> right? And after a while, if you get enough positive feedback and you're diligent and you refine and you update and you keep going, you're like, "Oh, actually, yeah, it is. It it was all right. >> It might not be good." But that's like that's the reason you do it. I had a very interesting I not interviewed Scott Alexander on my podcast and I had a very interesting um uh conversation with him towards the end where I asked him uh how many great new bloggers do you discover a year and um he said you know on the order of one and he I asked him okay how soon after you have discovered them does the rest of the world discover them it's like maybe a couple of months usually less than that >> so again go speaks to this dynamic where as soon as you are making good content I think you might or not you but somebody listening might underappreciate the extent to which it will immediately be seen by all the people who wanted to see it. Um it might not happen immediately but like genuinely it's shocking how fast good content goes. >> Think about how by design most content that gets consumed the biggest most widely distributed stuff goes to the biggest number of people right the channel with the most views has the most views. What a shocking insight. Um, but what that also means is that if you as a viewer have peeled off from the biggest channel to watch this fledgling small thing and it's captured your attention, it's got to be really really really [ __ ] good to be able to do that. And you have to assume like it kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier on that uh if your instinct drives you toward a thing, you have to assume that some non-zero number of other people are probably interested in it too. The same thing goes as a viewer. It's like if you thought it was good, probably like some other people will think that it's pretty good as well. And if this person's just a bit consistent, like I I would actually say Substack for me has one of the highest densities of as yet undiscovered talent out there. And maybe it's just that the particular sort of format and language of Substack lends itself to me. I quite like pathy stuff and I like the feed and I like the fact that most articles are about 10 minutes long and like the my attention's spanking around about hold on to that. >> You're way ahead of the rest of us. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Um but I'll find people on there like some of the people that I've been subscribed to I've been subscribed to for like 3 years and now they're blowing up. I'm like it was obviously a [ __ ] matter of time. Like it was obviously going to happen but by design it can't happen to everyone, >> right? Okay. So, it's the same thing as the why is it that the people that I'm friends with end up doing all of this stuff? I don't think I don't know. Maybe we've both got phenomenal taste just not stoially. >> I've noticed this in people in other industries say the exact same thing. You know, I'll ask like the CEO of a big company um or they'll mention that they were friends with the other CEOs who are now running all the big companies back when they were college students and not even necessarily the same college. It's just like they saw each other. How the [ __ ] did this >> Yes. >> group come together? >> Exactly. And they don't know. >> Is it just that game recognizes game? >> Is that just it? I don't know. >> I think maybe that not a lot of people do stuff. And so if you're doing things uh you will meet the people who are also doing stuff. >> Yeah. Is it weird in the how um weirdly small the world ends up being? >> How many >> um I'm I don't know. I I I'm friends with a couple people in San Francisco uh who I now have had on my podcast and are I don't know I was okay this is a funny story this maybe the fourth or fifth person I interviewed on my podcast I never released this but it was in 2020 >> was uh Leopold Ashen Brener uh I was like 19 and I think he was 17 or something do you know do you know who this guy is >> no >> he wrote this memo called situational awareness this long blog post that went super super viral >> situational awareness >> yes >> um and it was like the most popular thing on AI written over the last 2 years. >> Okay. >> Uh and he was like a a 17-year-old at Colombia and we've been friends since then. But anyways, he you know, one of these things where like how did that happen, right? How did we know each other for so long? Um that's happened to Mia so many times uh is sort of uncanny. >> What was his name? >> Leopold Ashen Brener. >> Leopold Ashen Brener. Um, and there's so many others like, um, all the AI people that I've had on the podcast or just people I like met at a party two, three years ago, researchers, whatever, Shto Douglas or Trenton Bricken or so forth. >> I maybe you're right. Maybe it's just that most people don't produce stuff. >> Yeah. >> And that by producing stuff, you inevitably separate yourself out and >> there's a feedback loop where like you actually get input from the world, you meet mentors. Uh, that puts you on this upward trajectory. M and especially if it's good. >> Yeah. >> If the thing's good and if you're improving, >> you show potential. >> Yeah. I mean, like I said, that Elliot kid I met the other day, Jack Neil. Um, [ __ ] he's 20. This Elliot guy is 20 years old. It's a podcast called Ne Next Generation, I think. And uh I'm having this chat with him. I'm like, you do realize that the [ __ ] that you're asking me as a 20-year-old is stuff that I only asked myself like 3 years ago. Like these questions about the balance between inputs, outputs, and outcomes. The realization that he'd sort of attached a sense of sacrifice and and difficulty with being worthy and validation. And that was something this was like this Gordian knot he needed to cut through. I'm like, who the [ __ ] are you? Like, how the how obviously you're going to be great. Obviously, you're going to be successful. And George Mack George I met George [ __ ] 201 19 2018 2019 I remember sitting down he'd sent me a message when I went to his office to interview one of his bosses and he sent me this DM and the DM said on Instagram cold DM. We'd never spoken. I didn't know where he worked. Didn't know who he was. I hear you're coming into my office today. Full stop. Let's let's exchange Google Chrome extensions. And I was like, "This is my [ __ ] guy right here. He stinks of me." Sure enough, half a conversation with him. He was way more interesting than his boss that I sat down to speak to. And we've we moved to Dubai together. He's just moved to Austin. He's going to live with me. Like, we've been best friends for [ __ ] six or seven years. He's just got a huge huge book deal to uh write this thing that he built out of an essay. The essay was what he launched on my podcast. So, we did this episode at the back end of last year that came out in March. He's just about to ann He's got this book that's coming. I'm like, and it's my uh manager that's doing his book deal. Like the again the incest [ __ ] wheel human centipede of stuff keeps going. And um yeah, this is just it's one of the areas that you know, me and you can continue to pontificate about we know cool people and isn't it fun and all the rest of the stuff like we can keep going. But I I what I really hope that people take away from this is if you put yourself out there and if you are able to discern good work from bad work and virtuous people from non-verirtuous people and industrious people from non-industrious people and you are able to contribute to that like literally the sky is the [ __ ] limit because the step change opportunities that will come along by somebody being there and being able to contribute and give you the intro and to help you along with your thing and you doing that and then okay this is the scene like this is now the [ __ ] scene. >> Um it's really cool and it's very gratifying and it's gratifying in a way that doesn't make me want to have a shower after >> you know like like like an an episode doing really big numbers is really great and gratifying but not in the same way as someone going dude that [ __ ] that idea that you came up with about that was sick. You're like, "Oh, okay. I'm gonna think about that for the next three weeks." Thank you very much. >> Yeah, 100%. >> [ __ ] yeah, dude. I appreciate the hell out of you. I'm so happy to see what you're doing. Uh, Dwarcash podcast. People should go check that out. Substack as well. >> Yes. >> dwarcash.com. Dude, appreciate the [ __ ] out of you. Thank you. >> Appreciate you, man. Thanks for having me on. >> Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, you will love this one with Mr. Naval Ravakan. It's first episode in six years. Come on, press